Israel Should Be in Germany

[mota bhai 2,675]

Israel and Palestine are warring again. Civilians are dying again. Families are losing their homes, and chaos persists. Again. This would not be happening if Israel were located somewhere that makes more sense: in Germany.

No matter where you stand in the "Israelis vs. Palestinians" political arguments—in which both sides are hopelessly entrenched and unmoving—it seems fair to acknowledge that there are some fundamental problems with the location of the nation of Israel. For one thing, it was carved out of land already occupied by someone else ... It caused a lot of resentment, and anger. Emotions that still exist today. And which have fueled a more or less constant state of war against Israel since Israel was created.

...

So the establishment of Israel, regarded by many as a towering achievement of historic justice, will forever be tainted by the fact that it was established by taking land from people who had done nothing wrong.

...

What if, when it was time to establish Israel, the land had instead been taken from people who did do something wrong? From people who had, in fact, just got finished perpetrating one of history's greatest crimes, against the Jewish people? The Nazis! The Holocaust! At the time Israel was being established, the Nazis had just been defeated. Germany was at the mercy of the Allies. What if—instead of snatching land in the Middle East and setting the stage for perpetual war and hatred—the Jewish people had just been awarded, say, half of Germany? It's not like the Germans would have had a good case against it, after what they just did. Hell, give the Jews the best half of Germany. Give them Berlin. Give them the nice picturesque country villages and the thick forests. It's the least that Germany could do.

An Israel established in Germany would have had several advantages to its current location. It would have been much larger. It would have been richer in natural resources. It would have a strong moral justification for its existence in that place. And, to top it all off, it would not be surrounded by Muslims committed to destroying it. It just makes sense. Half of Germany is certainly worth much more, in an economic sense, than the land of modern Israel. It would have been a better prize. And it would have set the stage not for seven decades of hatred and war, but for a nation of Israel located squarely in the midst of Western Europe, the most stable and economically developed place on earth.

Some will say that Israel had to be located where it is now, because of the "Holy Land" and all that. Well, sorry—a mystical and empirically unjustified belief in the "holiness" of some particular place is not a reason to march in and take it from someone else, by force. Grow up.

http://gawker.com/israel-should-be-in-germany-1609576782

[OriZ 3,157]

Uganda would have been even better

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda_Scheme

[OriZ 3,157]

Now seriously, the attempt to portray the establishing of Israel as stealing land from other people could not be further from the truth. Jews have lived on the land for thousands of years. All the countries in the region were basically created by the forces that occupied them till that point. The French created lebanon and syria, the Brits created Pakistan etc etc. There was never a Palestine, and when the partition plan took effect, the area allocated to Jews had more Jews in it than Arabs.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/middle_east/israel_and_the_palestinians/key_documents/1681322.stm

The creation of new countries back then was nothing new, but yet again, when it comes to Israel, it is singled out every time.

http://unitedwithisrael.org/why-only-israel-can-be-the-jewish-homeland/

[mota bhai 2,675]

... when the partition plan took effect, the area allocated to Jews had more Jews in it than Arabs.

It was a new majority, enabled by the British occupying force which encouraged European Jews to go settle in the region. Hardly grounds for a legitimate claim to nationhood.

Uganda would have been even better

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda_Scheme

But it was the Germans who tried to exterminate the Jews. The logic that those who did the crime should do the time is quite compelling.

[OriZ 3,157]

Over the centuries, through the pressures of Persecution -- of social and economic discrimination, of periodic death and destruction -- the area of exile widened. Hounded and oppressed, the Jews moved from country to country. They carried Eretz Israel with them wherever they went. Jewish festivals remained tuned to the circumstances and conditions of the Jewish homeland. Whether they remained in warm Italy or Spain, whether they found homes in cold Eastern Europe, whether they found their way to North America or came to live in the southern hemisphere where the seasons are reversed, the Jews celebrated the Palestinian spring and its autumn and winter. They prayed for dew in May and for rain in October. On Passover they ceremonially celebrated the liberation from Egyptian bondage, the original national establishment in the Promised Land-and they conjured up the vision of a new liberation.

Never in the periods of greatest persecution did the Jews as a people renounce that faith. Never in the periods of greatest peril to their very existence physically, and the seeming impossibility of their ever regaining the land of Israel, did they seek a substitute for the homeland. Time after time throughout the centuries, there arose bold spirits who believed, or claimed, they had a plan, or a divine vision, for the restoration of the Jewish people to Palestine. Time after time a wave of hope surged through the ghettos of Europe at the news of some new would-be Messiah. The Jews' hopes were dashed and the dream faded, but never for a day did they relinquish their bond with their country.

There were Jews who fell by the wayside. Given a choice under torture, or during periods of civic equality and material prosperity, they forsook their religion or turned their backs on their historic country. But the people, the land -- as it was called for all those centuries: simplyHa’aretz, the Land -- remained the one and only homeland, unchanging and irreplaceable. If ever a right has been maintained by unrelenting insistence on the claim, it was the Jewish right to Palestine.

Widely unknown, its significance certainly long ungrasped, is the no less awesome fact that throughout the eighteen centuries between the fall of the Second Jewish Commonwealth and the beginnings of the Third, in our time, the tenacity of Jewish attachment to the land of Israel found continuous expression in the country itself. It was long believed -- and still is -- even in some presumably knowledgeable quarters, that throughout those centuries there were no Jews in Palestine. The popular conception has been that all the Jews who survived the Destruction of 70 C.E. went into exile and that their descendants began coming back only 1,800 years later. This is not a fact.¹ One of the most astonishing elements in the history of the Jewish people -- and of Palestine -- is the continuity, in the face of the circumstances, of Jewish life in the country.

More here:

http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/presence.html

A common misperception is that the Jews were forced into the diaspora by the Romans after the destruction of the Second Templein Jerusalem in the year 70 A.D. and then, 1,800 years later, suddenly returned to Palestine demanding their country back. In reality, the Jewish people have maintained ties to their historic homeland for more than 3,700 years. A national language and a distinct civilization have been maintained.

The Jewish people base their claim to the land of Israel on at least four premises: 1) God promised the land to the patriarch Abraham; 2) the Jewish people settled and developed the land; 3) the international community granted political sovereignty in Palestine to the Jewish people and 4) the territory was captured in defensive wars.

The term "Palestine" is believed to be derived from the Philistines, an Aegean people who, in the 12th Century B.C., settled along the Mediterranean coastal plain of what is now Israel and the Gaza Strip. In the second century A.D., after crushing the last Jewish revolt, the Romans first applied the name Palaestina to Judea (the southern portion of what is now called the West Bank) in an attempt to minimize Jewish identification with the land of Israel. The Arabic word "Filastin" is derived from this Latin name.

The Twelve Tribes of Israel formed the first constitutional monarchy in Palestine about 1000 B.C. The second king, David, first made Jerusalem the nation's capital. Although eventually Palestine was split into two separate kingdoms, Jewish independence there lasted for 212 years. This is almost as long as Americans have enjoyed independence in what has become known as the United States.

Even after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the beginning of the exile, Jewish life in Palestine continued and often flourished. Large communities were reestablished in Jerusalem and Tiberias by the ninth century. In the 11th century, Jewish communities grew in Rafah, Gaza, Ashkelon, Jaffa and Caesarea.

Many Jews were massacred by the Crusaders during the 12th century, but the community rebounded in the next two centuries as large numbers of rabbis and Jewish pilgrims immigrated to Jerusalem and the Galilee. Prominent rabbis established communities in Safed, Jerusalem and elsewhere during the next 300 years. By the early 19th century-years before the birth of the modern Zionistmovement-more than 10,000 Jews lived throughout what is today Israel.

When Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there, and the majority of them had arrived in recent decades. Palestine was never an exclusively Arab country, although Arabic gradually became the language of most the population after the Muslim invasions of the seventh century. No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine. When the distinguished Arab-American historian, Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, testified against partition before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he said: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history, absolutely not." In fact, Palestine is never explicitly mentioned in the Koran, rather it is called "the holy land" (al-Arad al-Muqaddash).

Prior to partition, Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having a separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted:

We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.

In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: "There is no such country [as Palestine]! 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria."

The representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations submitted a statement to the General Assembly in May 1947 that said "Palestine was part of the Province of Syria" and that, "politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity." A few years later, Ahmed Shuqeiri, later the chairman of the PLO, told the Security Council: "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria."

Palestinian Arab nationalism is largely a post-World War I phenomenon that did not become a significant political movement until after the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel's capture of the West Bank.

Israel's international "birth certificate" was validated by the promise of the Bible; uninterrupted Jewish settlement from the time of Joshua onward; the Balfour Declaration of 1917; the League of Nations Mandate, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration; the United Nations partition resolution of 1947; Israel's admission to the UN in 1949; the recognition of Israel by most other states; and, most of all, the society created by Israel's people in decades of thriving, dynamic national existence.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/The_Jewish_Claim_To_The_Land_Of_Israel.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_Judaism_in_the_Land_of_Israel

Jews have every right to the land.

[mota bhai 2,675]

No, not really.

[GandD 5,966]

The Jews just need to hang in for another couple hundred years, then their claim will be more accepted. Its not like the world looked like this in the beginning

[mota bhai 2,675]

Truth.

If I was Netanyanhu, I'd be going 18th century on the Arabs in Gaza right now. Not because it's the moral thing to do (of course, it's not) but because in time people will forget but those land gains will last a lot longer.

[unsmiley 111]

Now seriously, the attempt to portray the establishing of Israel as stealing land from other people could not be further from the truth. Jews have lived on the land for thousands of years. All the countries in the region were basically created by the forces that occupied them till that point. The French created lebanon and syria, the Brits created Pakistan etc etc. There was never a Palestine, and when the partition plan took effect, the area allocated to Jews had more Jews in it than Arabs.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/middle_east/israel_and_the_palestinians/key_documents/1681322.stm

The creation of new countries back then was nothing new, but yet again, when it comes to Israel, it is singled out every time.

http://unitedwithisrael.org/why-only-israel-can-be-the-jewish-homeland/

That you for eloquently bringing sanity (and countering the sometimes hateful propaganda) in the discussions on Israel here.

No, not really.

Yes really.

[OnMyWayID 1,489]

Israel and Palestine are warring again. Civilians are dying again. Families are losing their homes, and chaos persists. Again. This would not be happening if Israel were located somewhere that makes more sense: in Germany.

I don't think many of them wanted to be in Germany after the war... If any old place will do and we are talking of the 1940's then my vote would be for Baja California. Back then it had a very sparse population (under 200,000), it would not become a Mexican state until the 1950's (just a territory at the time) so it probably could have been purchased from Mexico at a fairly steep price that could be put on the German shoulders to pay when they recovered.

They would have no hateful neighbors to worry about and we have another western-style economy right on the border - They currently create 300 billion a year out of 22,000 square kilometers and 8+ million people. How good would that be for the US and Mexico? We would have new Bethlehem instead of Tijuana so maybe not the greatest for weekend hedonistic excursions.

[mota bhai 2,675]

I would be on board with a total relocation of Israel to this country. They have turned a slice of useless desert into an economic powerhouse so hell yes those are the kind of people I want to share a continent with!

But they don't get to have a military, that's all. They can have land in Nevada (they are good at desert living, after all) but they don't get to have a military.

Edited July 24, 2014 by mota bhai

[GandD 5,966]

I would be on board with a total relocation of Israel to this country. They have turned a slice of useless desert into an economic powerhouse so hell yes those are the kind of people I want to share a continent with!

But they don't get to have a military, that's all. They can have land in Nevada (they are good at desert living, after all) but they don't get to have a military.

They need this:

[mota bhai 2,675]

What the hell is it with you white people and taking other peoples land? That is Mexico. If you want to give the people of Israel land, give them some of your land!

[GandD 5,966]

What the hell is it with you white people and taking other peoples land? That is Mexico. If you want to give the people of Israel land, give them some of your land!

I know its Mexico. They're not doing it right.

[mota bhai 2,675]

smh