i love saying that germany should have been turned into israel, but ultimately ethnostates shouldn’t exist. if the USSR won the nuclear weapon race, Stalin wouldn’t have had to stop at berlin and we’d have a multiethnic germany and Palestine and Jewish ppl would thrive in both

but in reality germany should have given reparations to Jewish people in the form of massive tracts of land and have full equality with all other ppl there, becoming full members of german society for the first time in history. Jewish ppl had a unique position in europe as an oppressed people and giving them a state outside of europe and basically telling them to gtfo kind of shows how they were seen as “not authentically european”

[–] OprahsedCreature@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 months ago

i love saying that germany should have been turned into israel, but ultimately ethnostates shouldn’t exist.

While this is true, I can also understand why Jews after WW2 might think "Maybe what we need is our own state with its own military."

That being said, my limited understanding was that South Germany voted strongly against the Nazis, so a new Israel should have been carved out of Northern Germany, connecting from the Netherlands to Poland, the 2 countries with the highest concentrations of Jews in pre-WW2 Europe. This would have opened things up logistically, culturally, and diplomatically for Jews who wanted to return to places they had been removed from due to the Nazis. Making Germans dependent on this new Israel for access to the sea might also have taught them a valuable lesson in humility.