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[JDPriestly]

15. What was the context of the formation of Palestine?

Last edited Mon Jul 21, 2014, 02:22 AM - Edit history (1)

Combat operations, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and general fear resulted in millions of people being uprooted from their original homes in the course of World War II. Between 11 million and 20 million people were displaced according to estimates. The majority were inmates of Nazi concentration camps, Labor camps and prisoner-of-war camps that were freed by the Allied armies. In portions of Eastern Europe, both civilians and military personnel fled their home countries in fear of advancing Soviet armies, who were preceded by widespread reports of mass rape, pillaging, looting, and murder.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displaced_persons_camp#cite_note-Beevor.2C_Downfall-3

Here is a listing of the incredible number of expulsions mostly by the NAZIS of the citizens of various countries in Eastern Europe during and after the War:

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

At the end of World War II, 12 million people had been driven from their homes. In 1946 there was 200,000 inquiries for lost children. There were more than 7 million men and women living in Germany who had been moved to the German Reich as slave laborers or prisoners. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) took care of these people. UNRRA was essentially a temporary organization which expired in June 1947. Afterward, the International Refugee Organization (IRO) took care of Displaced Persons. Almost 6 million DPs were repatriated in the 5 months from May to Sept. 1945. Three years after the war, there were 370 camps in the English, French and American Zones in Germany, 120 camps in Austria and 25 camps in Italy with well over 800,000 DPs. Of this 800,000:

55% Roman Catholics
27% Protestant and other Eastern orthodox faiths
18% Jews
(Statistics provided by Scholars in the DP Camps by Edward B. Rooney, SJ):
http://www.dpcamps.org/migration.html

Near the end of 1947, a US emigration bill required every DP emigrant to have a sponsor in the US. When not enough sponsors were found, in June 25, 1948, Congress passed Public Law 774, the Displaced Persons Act which provided for more than 200,000 DPs to enter the US over the next two years. 85,000 were Ukrainians.

. . . .

http://www.dpcamps.org/migration.html

Between June 1946 and 1957, the United States received over 2.6 million refugees.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1031581?uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21104509347173

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Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies
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Displaced Persons, Jewish
At the end of World War II, between seven and nine million people had been uprooted from their homes by the Nazis. By the end of 1945, more than six million had returned home to begin life anew. However, many Jews who had survived forced labor camps, extermination camps, concentration camps, and death marches did not want to go home. After experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust, they wanted to leave Europe altogether and rebuild their broken
lives elsewhere. Some did return home, only to leave again after finding their homes and property stolen by their former neighbors. None of these Jews had anywhere to go. Thus, they congregated in Displaced Persons' (DP) camps located within the central European areas controlled by the Allies. They organized themselves under the Hebrew name, She'erit ha-Pletah,
a biblical term meaning "surviving remnant." The She'erit ha-Pletah organization existed from the end of the war until December 1950.

Those Western European Jews who survived generally returned to their countries of origin, while those from Eastern Europe flocked to DP camps in the Allied zones of Europe. Soon, thousands more Polish, Soviet, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, and Romanian Jews who had tried to go home
began to flee westward to the DP camps when they realized that nothing was left for them in Eastern Europe. By the end of 1946, there were approximately 250,000 Jewish DPs–185,000 in Germany, 45,000 in Austria, and 20,000 in Italy.

A year and a half earlier, in the summer of 1945, public interest in the DP camps had influenced President Harry S. Truman to send Earl G. Harrison as his personal emissary to check into the conditions of the Jewish DPs in the camps of the American zone in Germany. Harrison reported that the conditions in the DP camps were terrible. He accused the Americans of being responsible for the awful situation, and declared that the only solution was to let the Jewish DPs immigrate to Palestine. Harrison advised that the Americans work to improve the conditions in their camps, and that the British allow 100,000 DPs to move to Palestine. . . . .

http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206273.pdf

Why couldn't the Jews of Western Europe simply move back into their former homes in Western Europe?

Based on my experience in living in Western Europe, it is clear that

a) the hatred of Jews which was prevalent all over Europe especially following the Inquisition made life there dangerous for Jews. The last of the anti-Jewish Catholic shrines in Austria was disavowed and closed in the late 1970s or early 1980s. (I was there but don't remember the year.)

b) the NAZIs had confiscated the homes and property of the Jews, at least those things that the Jews had been unable to entrust to their friends. The properties had been sold or were being lived in and used by non-Jews. In most cases, the properties could not have been simply handed back to the previous Jewish owners. This included not just homes but businesses. The losses were terrible and could not be made right.

The US was barely out of the Great Depression when WWII began. During WWII, Americans sacrificed. I still have pages of ration stamps for sugar that were erroneously made out in my name (I was a baby) with the wrong year. Pristine condition and a reminder of the relative poverty of the time.

After WWII, there was a severe housing shortage not only in the US but in Europe as the baby boomers arrived. Schools were overcrowded. The crisis was very difficult to deal with.

Israel was just one country that made room for displaced persons. The Ottoman Empire of which the area that Palestinians claim as their country was actually a British Protectorate beginning in the aftermath of World War I.

The allies fought against the Germans in the Middle East during WWII.

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


Many Jews had fought for the Allies during World War Two and had developed their military skills as a result. After the war ended in 1945, these skills were used in acts of terrorism. The new Labour Government of Britain had given the Jews hope that they would be given more rights in the area. Also in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe, many throughout the world were sympathetic to the plight of the Jews at the expense of the Arabs in Palestine.

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/palestine_1918_to_1948.htm

In contrast,

Al-Husseini was the scion of a family of Jerusalemite notables. After receiving an education in Islamic, Ottoman and Catholic schools, he went on to serve in the Ottoman army in World War I. At war's end, he positioned himself in Damascus as a supporter of the Arab Kingdom of Syria. Following the fiasco of the Franco-Syrian War and the collapse of the Arab Hashemite rule in Damascus, his early position on pan-Arabism shifted to a form of local nationalism for Palestinian Arabs and he moved back to Jerusalem. From as early as 1920, in order to secure the independence of Palestine as an Arab state he actively opposed Zionism, and was implicated as a leader of a violent riot that broke out over the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Al-Husseini was sentenced to ten years imprisonment, but was pardoned by the British. Starting in 1921, al-Husseini was appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, using the position to promote Islam, while rallying a non-confessional Arab nationalism against Zionism.

His opposition to the British peaked during the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine. In 1937, evading an arrest warrant, he fled Palestine and took refuge in, successively, the French Mandate of Lebanon and the Kingdom of Iraq, until he established himself in Italy and Germany. During World War II he collaborated with both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy by making propagandistic radio broadcasts and by helping Germans recruit Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen-SS. On meeting Adolf Hitler he requested backing for Arab independence and support in opposing the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home. At war's end, he came under French protection, and then sought refuge in Cairo to avoid prosecution.

In the lead-up to the 1948 Palestine war, Husseini opposed both the 1947 UN Partition Plan and King Abdullah's designs to annex the Arab part of British Mandatory Palestine to Jordan, and, failing to gain command of the 'Arab rescue army' (jaysh al-inqadh al-'arabi) formed under the aegis of the Arab League, formed his own militia, al-jihad al-muqaddas. In September 1948, he participated in establishment of All-Palestine Government. Seated in Egyptian-ruled Gaza, this government won a limited recognition of Arab states, but was eventually dissolved by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1959. After the war and subsequent Palestinian exodus, his claims to leadership, wholly discredited, left him eventually sidelined by the Palestine Liberation Organization, and he lost most of his residual political influence. He died in Beirut, Lebanon, in July 1974. Husseini was and remains a highly controversial figure. Historians dispute whether his fierce opposition to Zionism was grounded in nationalism or antisemitism or a combination of both.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haj_Amin_al-Husseini

Remember, at the time, there was a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment in the US so just receiving all of the Jewish refugees here was not an alternative.

It is so easy to judge decisions made in times of historic upheaval.

But if you had lived in the years between 1946 - 1956, what would you have done?

Remember, the Allies had just won WWII with the help of Jewish soldiers. Some of the Americans who built our atomic bomb and split the atom were Jewish. Because of the actions of Al-Husseini, they viewed Palestinians as German supporters and allies. Palestine had never been an independent country in modern times.

We all love to second-guess history. But what would you have done had you been faced with the task of setting new national boundaries in all the areas in which the war had taken place.

Strasbourg, France and the Alsace-Lorraine became as it had been off and on through history, a part of France. (Its population was divided German and French.) Yugoslavia was formed. The Iron Curtain fell.

Peace came at a price, and that price was paid by many people across Europe and the world.

Israel was in my view a necessary part of the compromises that finally ended WWII.

To try to do away with Israel would probably mean more war. It is time that the Palestinians make a peace. They should try to exchange peace for land and live as friends with all their neighbors. They are wasting their lives and those of their children in constant war.

I posted this as an OP in a thread under Israel/Palestine. It was locked because it was not a recent event. I remember this history. I predicted the Yom Kippur War way back when based on my understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The brutality of the fighting, the absurdity of the fighting does not speak well of the Palestinian leadership. They are the worst enemy of the Palestinian people. Israel is a democracy (in which Palestinian residents vote by the way). If Israelis feel safe living next to Palestinians, they will vote for leaders who will make peace with Palestine. The Israelis have proved in the past that they are capable and willing to destroy settlements and trade land for peace. It is up to the Palestinians and up to Hamas in particular. Peace or the suffering of war. It's up to the Palestinians.

Life is not fair. Peace is to be preferred over so many decades of war. Getting justice means getting the right to be yourself and to live in peace with the world, not just getting back at those who have hurt you. It is not easy to "get over it," but sometimes "getting over it" is a huge victory.

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