Palestine and Israel, what might have been

[slon]

Going back to the start of the last century 

At that time the majority of Jewish people in the world lived in Russia. Numbering about 5 million they made up about 10% of the Russian population.
About 4 million Jewish people lived in other countries of the world, about 30,000 in Palestine 

Conditions for most Jews in Russia were terrible,  they were not allowed to own land and discriminated against in many other ways.

Then came WW1

[slon]

The allies fully expected Russia to end the war as they had begun it and the Tzar to continue persecution of the the Jewish community with perhaps mass expulsions.

This would have caused problems for the Western European nations and America. Antisemitism was already a factor in France, the UK, and USA. The last thing politicians (and influential Jewish figures) wanted were millions of destitute Jewish Russians turning up on their shores

Enter the Balfour declaration ..... the idea to shuffle these refugees to a new/old country which had just been liberated from the Ottoman empire.

[slon]

Now this did not happen as planned, there were no mass expulsions, there was a revolution and the Jewish community were an important part of the winning side.

But what would have happened if the expected had actually happened?

[sanders]

Get rid of Sykes-Picot quite honestly.

[Davıd Boothroyd]

Honestly the biggest problem with Israel/Palestine discourse is that people keep being tempted to go propose solutions that involve going back in time and taking certain key decisions differently. Until someone invents a time machine this is not going to happen, and it's actively preventing people thinking of how to go forward from where we actually are.

[gwynthegriff]

Aug 17, 2024 18:04:27 GMT sanders said:

Get rid of Sykes-Picot quite honestly.

Bit late to do that really.

[mrpastelito]

Aug 17, 2024 18:29:47 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

Honestly the biggest problem with Israel/Palestine discourse is that people keep being tempted to go propose solutions that involve going back in time and taking certain key decisions differently. Until someone invents a time machine this is not going to happen, and it's actively preventing people thinking of how to go forward from where we actually are.

Well tbf it's the alternate political history section.

[slon]

Aug 17, 2024 18:29:47 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

Honestly the biggest problem with Israel/Palestine discourse is that people keep being tempted to go propose solutions that involve going back in time and taking certain key decisions differently. Until someone invents a time machine this is not going to happen, and it's actively preventing people thinking of how to go forward from where we actually are.

It isn't the biggest problem 

But to continue 

In the aftermath of WW1 the world was in a mess. The redrawing of maps was for the most part well meaning but the mixture of arrogance and ignorance caused all sorts of problems.

But to focus on Palestine, what would have happened if refugees from Russia had arrived in numbers in 1919?

I think it could have worked quite well

[greenchristian]

Aug 18, 2024 17:31:02 GMT slon said:

Aug 17, 2024 18:29:47 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

Honestly the biggest problem with Israel/Palestine discourse is that people keep being tempted to go propose solutions that involve going back in time and taking certain key decisions differently. Until someone invents a time machine this is not going to happen, and it's actively preventing people thinking of how to go forward from where we actually are.

It isn't the biggest problem 

But to continue 

In the aftermath of WW1 the world was in a mess. The redrawing of maps was for the most part well meaning but the mixture of arrogance and ignorance caused all sorts of problems.

But to focus on Palestine, what would have happened if refugees from Russia had arrived in numbers in 1919?

I think it could have worked quite well

There was substantial Jewish migration to the British Mandate both before and after 1919. What makes you think that a timeline where it was substantially increased would have turned out any differently?

[nyx]

Aug 18, 2024 20:38:45 GMT greenchristian said:

Aug 18, 2024 17:31:02 GMT slon said:

It isn't the biggest problem 

But to continue 

In the aftermath of WW1 the world was in a mess. The redrawing of maps was for the most part well meaning but the mixture of arrogance and ignorance caused all sorts of problems.

But to focus on Palestine, what would have happened if refugees from Russia had arrived in numbers in 1919?

I think it could have worked quite well

There was substantial Jewish migration to the British Mandate both before and after 1919. What makes you think that a timeline where it was substantially increased would have turned out any differently?

So, in reality in the 1922 census there were 590k Muslims, 73k Christians, and 83k Jews in Mandatory Palestine. The Third Aliyah (1919-23) consisted of about 40k European Jews arriving in the region. The Fifth Aliyah (1930s) would end up consisting of 300k Jews arriving, with the increased persecution in Europe at the time.

If the Third Aliyah had instead seen 300k Jews arrive thanks to more persecution back then, then it likely wouldn't take too long before Jews make up the majority of the population of the region or close to it. Some sort of Arab revolt would inevitably take place much sooner than 1936 but rather in the early 1920s. It would also mean a far stronger Haganah being developed more quickly.

In the early 1920s in reality the British attempts to establish self-government in the Mandate were complicated by the level of Arab boycott of any governance structure that would include Jews, which would doubtless still be the case here- but if Jews were to make up at least a third of the population of the Mandate, the British authorities, which were relatively pro-Zionist, would be in a much stronger position to work with the Jewish population and feel somewhat less of a need to collaborate with the Arab leadership too. All of this put together and I suspect that the British would hand over power to the local Jewish leadership much sooner and that by 1930 Mandatory Palestine would effectively be functioning as an independent Israeli state or well on the path to it, with some local Arabs working with the new status quo and accepting being a minority whilst others leave for Egypt/Transjordan. The concept of partition probably wouldn't ever come about.

[slon]

Aug 18, 2024 20:38:45 GMT greenchristian said:

Aug 18, 2024 17:31:02 GMT slon said:

It isn't the biggest problem 

But to continue 

In the aftermath of WW1 the world was in a mess. The redrawing of maps was for the most part well meaning but the mixture of arrogance and ignorance caused all sorts of problems.

But to focus on Palestine, what would have happened if refugees from Russia had arrived in numbers in 1919?

I think it could have worked quite well

There was substantial Jewish migration to the British Mandate both before and after 1919. What makes you think that a timeline where it was substantially increased would have turned out any differently?

I don't think that is correct.
There was an influx of Jewish immigrants between the late 1800s and 1914, the Jewish population rising from 24,000 to 94,000. 
It can be assumed that most of those people were fleeing from Russia 
The Jewish population then declined to about 83,000 by 1922 with some estimates of a decline to 60,000 by 1918,  the non Jewish population stayed fairly constant during that period.
Perhaps we could assume a proportion of the Russian Jewish immigrants returned to Russia as the old Tzarist regime had been overthrown.

The next influx of Jewish immigrants to Palestine happened later in the 1920s and through the 1930s but these were not from Russia rather from other parts of Europe.

So, does this make a difference?

I think it does, the Russian immigrants were mostly uneducated and from rural communities (Jews were not permitted to live in many Russian cities). They were more likely to have some feelings of fellowship with the mostly Arab rural communities.

The later immigrants were educated and from the great cities of Europe, they had little in common with the rural Arab population or indeed fellow Jews resident in Palestine 

[slon]

An other factor was the rule of the Ottorman empire.
Some suggest it was 400 years of peace and happy coexistence of multiple religions and ethnicities. I think that is a rose coloured simplification of things.

One aspect of Ottorman rule was private ownership. People were allowed to own property, but not land. Might have been similar to England before the land enclosure acts.
This meant communities had to work together and police their own patch.
The Russian immigrants would have been somewhat familiar with this

[finsobruce]

Aug 20, 2024 9:26:01 GMT slon said:

An other factor was the rule of the Otterman empire.
Some suggest it was 400 years of peace and happy coexistence of multiple religions and ethnicities. I think that is a rose coloured simplification of things.

One aspect of Otterman rule was private ownership. People were allowed to own property, but not land. Might have been similar to England before the land enclosure acts.
This meant communities had to work together and police their own patch.
The Russian immigrants would have been somewhat familiar with this

The Otterman Empire is a minor video game where the universe is ruled by Otters.

[slon]

Aug 20, 2024 9:36:37 GMT finsobruce said:

Aug 20, 2024 9:26:01 GMT slon said:

An other factor was the rule of the Otterman empire.
Some suggest it was 400 years of peace and happy coexistence of multiple religions and ethnicities. I think that is a rose coloured simplification of things.

One aspect of Otterman rule was private ownership. People were allowed to own property, but not land. Might have been similar to England before the land enclosure acts.
This meant communities had to work together and police their own patch.
The Russian immigrants would have been somewhat familiar with this

The Otterman Empire is a minor video game where the universe is ruled by Otters.

Well spotted

[pl]

Aug 20, 2024 9:36:37 GMT finsobruce said:

Aug 20, 2024 9:26:01 GMT slon said:

An other factor was the rule of the Otterman empire.
Some suggest it was 400 years of peace and happy coexistence of multiple religions and ethnicities. I think that is a rose coloured simplification of things.

One aspect of Otterman rule was private ownership. People were allowed to own property, but not land. Might have been similar to England before the land enclosure acts.
This meant communities had to work together and police their own patch.
The Russian immigrants would have been somewhat familiar with this

The Otterman Empire is a minor video game where the universe is ruled by Otters.

I for one welcome our new otter overlords!

(Not too keen on the newly imposed all fish diet though)

[slon]

Anyway, back to the otters

The people of Palestine, Muslim, Christian, or Jewish had been frozen into an almost medieval form of governance for hundreds of years.
The Jewish population of Russia had experienced similar with government antisemitism thrown in.

My proposition is that if at the end of 1917 there had been a mass movement of Jews from Russia to Palestine they and the other residents may have got along quite well .... they were getting rid of one sort of restrictive rule and moving towards a somewhat more liberal and democratic system offering greater prosperity.

Am I just being naive?

[Strontium Dog]

Yes, you're being extremely naive.

medium.com/@ksantini/the-list-of-crimes-committed-by-muslims-against-jews-since-the-7th-century-0ff1a8eb0ad0

If you're wondering why you rarely hear of any of these, it's because the majority occurred before the reestablishment of Israel, and therefore do not fit the accepted narrative that the existence of Israel is the proximate cause of the violence we see today.

[uthacalthing]

Entropy. The universe is decaying to a given point of total decay.

Any changes that you make to this or any other aspect of creation will in time divert or revert towards the direction of travel.

Rational Arabs will seek to live in peace alongside their Jewish neighbours. Idiot Arabs, or Palestinians as they are also known, will reject any offer of peace, initiate a war, which they will lose, then demand the peace that they rejected and which is no longer on offer.

[slon]

Aug 20, 2024 19:12:08 GMT Strontium Dog said:

Yes, you're being extremely naive.

medium.com/@ksantini/the-list-of-crimes-committed-by-muslims-against-jews-since-the-7th-century-0ff1a8eb0ad0

If you're wondering why you rarely hear of any of these, it's because the majority occurred before the reestablishment of Israel, and therefore do not fit the accepted narrative that the existence of Israel is the proximate cause of the violence we see today.

You might find that the treatment of Jewish minorities in Christian nations has not been good over the ages

[slon]

If we venture too far down this paranoid rabbit hole we might decide that it is impossible for multiple religions of ethnicities to ever reside in one country, that obviously is not the case.

So how can different groups of people end up tolerating each other as more or less equals?
For a start there has to be some similarity in thought and technological development.

I think that had a chance of working with the Palestinian Muslims and Russian Jews particulally in the aftermath of WW! and the departure of the Ottoman military forces.