Reply #18: Ben-Gurion should have placed saving Jews from Hitler first, before the fixation with establishing

[Ken Burch]

A "Jewish state".

(BTW, since Hitler would simply have carpet bombed such a state if it had existed during World War II, and since we can assume that no one at all would have stopped him from doing so, such a state could never have protected Jews from Nazism.)

And working to get Jewish refugees to safety in the U.S. and Canada(where they could easily have been absorbed)would not have either harmed the Zionist cause nor interfered with the ability of those Jewish people who wished to settle in what became Israel if they wished to do so. And after the war, a lot of Jewish refugees were essentially forced to become Israelis, whether they had actually wanted to be or not. Having narrowly survived one war, they were forced to take up arms in another, whether or not they had even supported Zionism or not.

And the U.S. should and could have been pressed to relent and take those refugees in. It was not impossible to have changed the U.S. position. Ben-Gurion, however, was far more interested in forcing the European Jewish community to be partisans of the Zionist cause, whether they wished to be or not. There were good people within the Diaspora who backed Zionism and equally good people who
opposed it.

And the fact that the Israeli government has chosen to put recent immigrants into those settlements does not mean that was the only place in Israel they could have been sent to live. There was and is plenty of room in Israel proper.

The settlements serve no truly positive or necessary purpose. They are there for one reason: to make it impossible for Palestinians to form a viable state. And continuing to expand those settlements in the Nineties sabotaged the peace process, making it impossible for Palestinians to trust the Israeli government or to have any confidence that they'd actually get self-determination. And as the events of the post-1967 era have shown, Palestinians have no hope of a decent life unless they get a state.