chang50 wrote:Gillipig wrote:JCR wrote:@Gillipig, who repopulated Israel with Jews and when?
This is a straightforward question, not sarcasm or biased.
Fixed.
The answer is Great Britain. It started with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, where Great Britain stated it's support of Sionism. Between 1922-1948, Great Britain, (which Israel was a colony of) aided the Jews in "coming back" to Israel. Israel became a nation of it's own in 1948 and after that it has continued to pursue Sionism.
Without Great Britains support and approval, there would be no Israel like we know it today.
My homeland has a lot to answer for..
It was the right thing to do. The dominant trend of thought at the time was that every nationality needs a homeland. A lot of nations that had lost their land to invaders and completely ceased to exist were re-created -- Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were all ripped out of the German and Russian empires, while Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordania and Cyrenaica were taken from the Ottoman empire.
The theory was that every nationality needs a homeland. Nobody should have to wander the earth as a beggar, wondering when the next local ordinance will throw him out and force him back on the road. I don't see how anyone can argue with that.
Of course there were some injustices created. There were quite a few unhappy Germans in the new Poland, for instance, and they were used with great effect as pawns in WW II. Still, overall the effect was to give 100 million conquered people a nation of their own for the the first time in centuries. On balance, there were fewer oppressed people than before, by a long shot.
In the division of the former Ottoman lands, the vast majority of the land was to be given to the Arabs -- Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Cyrenaica -- while the traditional Christian enclave of Lebanon was to be preserved as such, and Palestine was to be restored to the Jews. You can see that the Arabs got by far the best part of the deal. The fertile fields of Egypt's delta are easily worth a hundred times as much as Isreal or Lebanon, while the vast oil wealth of Iraq is even greater.
The mistake made was in not performing the division immediately. If the Jews had been given Palestine right away in 1919, the chance is that everyone would have accepted it, but because another 30 years went by before the transfer was made, there was time for hearts to harden. In Europe, Finland, Czechoslovakia, etc., already had prototype Parliaments-in-waiting, and so the new European nations were created effective immediately. In the Middle East, however, there was no recent role-model of self-government nor any proto-governments (except in Egypt) so with unfortunate paternalistic hubris the European powers decided to administer these territories under League of Nations mandate until they could teach democracy to the Arabs. With the passing of 30 years, the Arabs forgot that they had been serfs of the Ottoman Empire, whose freedom was bought for them by the largesse of the British taxpayer and the blood of the British soldier. Unsatisfied with getting 99% of the value of the region (in the form of Iraq and Egypt and many other lands) they began to believe they could get all of it.