Israel’s war in Gaza is chipping away at so much of what we – in the United States but also internationally – had agreed upon as acceptable, from the rules governing our freedom of speech to the very laws of armed conflict. It seems no exaggeration to say that the foundation of the international order of the last 77 years is threatened by this change in the obligations governing our legal and political responsibilities to each other.
This may be a stupid question, but why did we need to create Israel in the first place? If my memory from my shitty American education serves me, they had all these survivors of the Holocaust with nowhere to go, so they created Israel for them to live peacefully, fuck whoever was already living there.
But why couldn’t they all just go back home? I know everyone was shipped off across Europe to the camps but like… surely they remembered where they lived before? Everything was bombed to hell but that’s the same for whoever lived there, Jewish or not. Am I missing a piece that makes the need for their own country to make sense?
It’s actually a good question. We didn’t.
The desire to create a country Israel came about in the 1800s, when Theodor Herzl looked at anti-semitism in Europe and concluded that Jews would never be accepted by countries or have any political power so the only way to get ahead in such a nationalistic world would be to make their own country. It was built on an anachronistic set of ideas; religion was tied to your citizenship of a country. Turkey represented European Muslims and UK/France/Germany represented Christians, and he concluded there was no way Jews could be considered equal citizens in Europe.
Originally the plan was to buy land in Africa or South America and declare a new country there. It was a purely secular plan to build an ethnostate. The World Zionist Congress had a vote and they narrowly approved to build the country in British mandate Palestine, not for religious reasons but because the connection to Jerusalem would help motivate immigration and tourism. They almost had it in Uganda or Argentina or Madagascar.
The holocaust merely accelerated the plan and gave a justification after the fact to build the country. Initially Israeli society didn’t like having holocaust survivors and they weren’t treated well, only today are they out on a pedestal and used as justification for their colonialism.
Did he thought that they would be accepted by the local population?
British Palestine (and other Mid-East / North Africa states) were notable in that they were far more accommodating to Jewish peoples than the European continent had been. They were colonial territories with large international trading hubs that were already pluralistic and accommodating to foreigners. And they weren’t carrying the baggage of a few centuries of Inquisitions and Pogroms.
Until the Shah was installed in '53, Iran had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. Ethiopia and Sudan had hundreds of thousands of Jewish people living contentedly in its borders until the '70s, when civil war and famine ripped the country apart. And prior to the Holocaust, there was an enormous flight of Jewish residents to the Americas.
Now, primarily white militant European settler colonialists might have trouble setting up an intentional community of Zionist radicals anywhere. But there’s no reason to believe Argentina or Madagascar would have been materially worse for them than British Palestine.
As best as we can tell, he truly didn’t care what locals thought. He wanted to buy the land and make everyone else leave so an all Jewish state could be created.
Unfortunately this plan didn’t sit well with the locals who eventually stopped selling land to these newcomers, and the rising illegal immigration caused conflicts. Eventually an actual war erupted and new militias massacred and forcibly expelled the local Arab communities, creating the Israel we have today.
Herzl’s concept wasn’t as terrible on paper as it actually was in practice. (It just wouldn’t work in modern society where countries aren’t governed under ethnic supremacy) But likely if the World Zionist Congress had voted a different way, we’d be talking about how awful Israel was for mistreating Ugandans and forcing them off their land.
It was more “given up” rather than “freely given” to the Zionists. They were resolute invaders and ferocious terrorists. And once they tuned their sights from the local population to the British, the British fucked off real fast. Then did the paperwork.
I’m no less ignorant than you are, but “returning home” isn’t as easy as it sounds when your leaders and neighbors were at best complicit and at worst eager conspirators (excepting those who rebelled either openly or secretly) in your extermination. Jews have a rather long history of being…mistreated, for lack of a more appropriate term within reach, so the abstract idea of having a self-governed homeland where you can feel safe as a Jew seems to make some degree of sense in context.
But because Zionism is generally practiced by nationalists and religious zealots, and because colonialism was (and evidently is) still considered a-ok by the global power brokers when all this started, the tone of the occupation became “we’re taking your space because we deserve it and you don’t” rather than “may we please share your space in mutual benefit for our safe refuge.”
Right… Like why TF wouldn’t you want to leave