Like carve out a place between Russia, Belarus and Ukraine in the former Pale of Settlement. Establish a bunch of Yiddish language schools there. Have it become a center of Jewish culture. Sure, there are already Ukrainians, Russians and Belorussians there but there were already people in the far east too.
IMO they should have done that to East Prussia or some other part of Germany after WWII.
Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad. They deported all the Germans from there as it is but just moved regular Russians in
Honestly the idea of forcibly relocating Ukrainians from a relatively small part of their country and giving that land to Jews seems like a terrifying idea for how the former group would retaliate. Fascism was already popular in Ukraine and they manage to go on chanting "Jews will not replace us" today, despite their country having a relatively small Jewish population.
Supposedly the South Ukraine and Crimea were the original plan.
The location that was initially considered in the early 1920s was Crimea, which already had a significant Jewish population.[18] Two Jewish districts (raiony) were formed in Crimea and three in south Ukraine.[22][24] However, an alternative scheme, perceived as more advantageous, was put into practice.[18]
The settlement of The eastern frontier was always paramount. The JAO was an extremely underpopulated area right on the borders of China and where many royalist a had run to before. Not the right time or right place to designate for survivors of genocide nonetheless.
However, if Bessarabia and Odessa had been designated for the already considerable Jewish populations, in tandem with the deportations of multi-national populations derived from Catherine’s colonization efforts (inviting Scandinavians, Germans, Greeks, Poles, etc to displace Tatars), I think it would have been more successful. Odessa was one of the most Jewish metropolises in the world alongside New York, and only when they could in the 80s did they leave Ukraine for Israel or the US, largely because of economic stagnation and the weird anti-Semitic messaging Brezhnev seemed to be propping up when pushing against Ukrainian nationalists.
today, despite their country having a relatively small Jewish population.
I wonder how it got so small
Of course, but the sentence was already in danger of being cluttered.
idk about Ukraine but the Jewish population in Germany was always pretty small, which is one of the key reasons they were able to do the holocaust.
Ukraine had a fairly large Jewish population before the holocaust. I think out of the 6 million Jews murdered during the shoa, 800,000 were Ukrainian, which is the second largest contingent after the Polish (2 million) IIRC.
Supporting the creation of Israel was one of Stalin’s cringe moves
I don’t buy the premise there needs to be a Jewish ethnostate for their protection. Integrate Jewish populations and crush anti-semitism and have them be represented within the state like all other minorities.
I don’t buy the premise there needs to be a Jewish ethnostate for their protection.
:this:
The solution to western anti semitism is not to kick people out of their own country and give it to the Jews. The solution is to kill all the Nazis in the west. If the allies had taken denazification seriously after WW2 Israel as a concept would have been completely unnecessary
Death to America
Ironically America is the best evidence that it is not necessary. There has historically been nowhere safer for Jewish communities than the US.
I don’t buy the premise there needs to be a Jewish ethnostate for their protection.
I would def. have given Jewish people weapons in the 1930s and 1940s.
I think that the underlying assumptions of Zionism are the same as the underlying assumptions of Nazism with a slightly different bent: Nazism sees Judaism as an immutable characteristic that corrupts a human being, while Zionism sees anti-semitism the same way. Both of them believe that Jewish people and anti-semites are ontologically incapable of coexisting.
Zionism is just greedy settlerism mixed with that word I forgot which means "conquering back lost land"
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It's apparently not enough that Jewish people get land for their own ethnostate (I agree with this for the record), but for some reason it HAS to be explicitly the land in Israel and nowhere else
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Even if you accept this premise and view the Arab Muslims as oppressors who shouldn't be there, neither should the Ashkenazi Jews. In fact even the Muslims would be closer to the original inhabitants, with the ladder of priority going something like Mizrahi Jews > Palestinians > Ashkenazi Jews
Yeah definitely, and honestly I wouldn't even go as far as trying to do an analysis of who "really" should own the land (not that you're trying to do that, I know it's just to make a point). I think as leftists we should really be focused more on who is currently being oppressed rather than trying to figure out who is technically allowed to claim the land.
Like, I don't support land back because native peoples technically own the land via treaties, I support land back because there are currently native peoples who are being oppressed and fighting to have those treaties recognized. Same can be said for Palestine.
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while Zionism sees anti-semitism the same way
That's being incredibly generous to Zionism.
While of course there's more to it that that including a colonial mindset and straight racism, I think it's fair to say it was a large part of the desire for a Jewish state. At the very least it was a driving factor for Theodore Herzl, the father of modern Zionism.
Comparing antisemitism to natural disasters such as floods and saying that the only way to combat it is through fighting (presumably to create a "homeland"):
In Paris, then, I gained a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism which I now began to understand historically and make allowances for.
Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of efforts to “combat anti-Semitism.” Declamations made in writing or in closed circles do no good whatever; they even have a comical effect. It is true that in addition to careerists and simpletons there may be very stalwart people serving on such “relief committees.” These resemble the “relief committees” formed after—and before!—floods, and they accomplish about as much. The noble Bertha von Suttner is in error—an error, to be sure, which does her great honor—when she believes that such a committee can be of help. Exactly the case of the peace societies. A man who invents a terrible explosive does more for peace than a thousand gentle apostles.
Saying that the "Jewish Question" will exist due to innate characteristics of Jewish people:
The Jewish question exists wherever the Jews live, however small their number. Where it does not exist it is imported by Jew immigrants. We naturally go where we are not persecuted, and, still persecution is the result of our appearance...By persecution we cannot be exterminated...the strong Jews turn proudly to their race when persecution bursts out. Entire branches of Judaism may disappear, break away; the tree lives.
And just for good measure, Jews as a sort of Ubermensch who would enlighten the entire world:
The Jews who will it shall achieve their State. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and in our own homes peacefully die. The world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind.
So while I would say it's being reductive to say that the belief in antisemitism as an immutable characteristic was the driving force behind Zionism, I don't think it's necessarily being generous.
Finkelstein talks about this a lot, the zionist idea of the uniqueness of the Jew and that genocide against them is an innate characteristic of the gentile
Treat them the same you would treat any other minority group, ie allow them to be equal members of the same society. Casting them out into an ethnostate ain’t it, and if that logic was followed for all minorities we would have to fracture and balkanize the world into ethnic microstates
Okay, Jewish Integration does have some negative ring to it in Germany, cause of the antisemitic tradition of this country. Often integration in that sense meant stuff which is more like assimilation or giving away everything that would make you look or act different. Just like the Kurds can attest to you not being allowed to speak your own language, to dress in the way you like etc. discrimination.
I am with you with full legal protection for Jewish people, but honestly don't think that is enough. There has to be - as you imply with other minority groups - more than equal treatment, the law has to be anti racist as it has to be against anti-semitism.
Is the law enough? I don't think so. In the case of a cultural tradition of antisemitism, pogroms over hundreds of years with little or no repercussion, the Shoa and a continuity to practices from the Shoa, thus continuity in factual law and continuity of persons in power, there has to be more than law. There has to be a practice or praxis and that has to be an antifascist and one against anti-semitism. Similar how it ought to be with other groups (ie Ovaherero and Nama).
However I don't think that drawing a line from pure theory ("if that logic was followed for all minorities") is the way forward in politics in general. Besides the council communalists in Rojava do actually have something which isn't micro states, but which highlights the main culture of very small regions and yet enshrines protections in law and communal social practices for others.
Furthermore I do believe that hate against other groups works easily only if there is a limited number that can be othered easily.Of course since I don't follow your line of thought and have that rift, doesn't mean I do support:
to fracture and balkanize the world into ethnic microstates
Do what Napoleon did and stop legally disenfranchising them. Jews in Europe often still had dubious legal protections if any, even just ensuring they have citizenship and protection would be integration on a radical scale
Any liberal state will take away their rights as soon as there are capitalist crisis and shift the blame towards "the other" and that means if election leads to right wing leaders of state sooner or later rights might be taken away (as we could see quite often even after 1945 in Europe).
Since liberal parliamentary states don't seem to be able to stop antisemitism and the reaction.
I'm answering what they meant. Napoleon is the example of integrating Jews. No one here is arguing thats best or that can work in liberal societies without all the drawbacks
It would have been a massive dunk if after one of Ukranian Fascist revolts Stalin had just said "Jews Land Now."
The downside is if it happened before WW2 that would not have worked out well.
I'm pretty sure it was to populate a less densely populated area. The Sino-Soviet relationship wasn't as strong as we all would like to believe. The Soviet position required shoring up their power and presence in relation to China as well as post war Japan which was a staging ground for US in Korea and Vietnam later on.
You're right.
From wikipedia:
The establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Birobidzhan in 1928 was ordered by Stalin only as an effort to strengthen the Far Eastern border region with an outpost, not as a favour to the Jews. The area was constantly penetrated by Chinese and White Russian resistance groups, and the idea was to shield the territory by establishing a settlement whose inhabitants would be hostile to white Russian émigrés, especially the Cossacks. The status of this region was defined shrewdly as an autonomous district, not an autonomous republic, which meant that no local legislature, high court, or government post of ministerial rank was permitted. It was an autonomous area, but a bare frontier, not a political center.
jesus christ that is blatant. Like its an unfalsifiable blanket statement about the intentions of a singular person used as "the truth" of an entire project. no source, no reason to say "only", but they just do. These fuckers are so worthless
This is my fault. In wikipedia it goes.
The Soviet government wanted to increase settlement in the remote Soviet Far East, especially along the vulnerable border with China. General Pavel Sudoplatov writes about the government's rationale behind picking the area in the Far East: [then the whole thing]
geez he seems like a super complicated figure. Guess its expected from the top spy of the USSR
Giving Jews a place where they could be fairly autonomous within the union while not having the authority to create an ethnostate would be pretty dope, but the location of the Oblast was very silly. They could have had a Jewish SSR within regions that already had a significant Jewish population.
They totally should have given East Prussia to the Jewish state instead of settling it with ethnic Russians while supporting the creation of Israel and making the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.
The totally should have made eastern Germany a Jewish state instead of settling it with Poles who had very little prior presence there. Prussia too ofc.
I think I remember learning that the government moved a lot of ethnic groups around in the early ussr. this was in a public school like 5 years ago so IDK, hopefully someone here is informed and can give us some further reading
There was, for various reasons, forced relocation of Tatars, Chechens, Germans in what would later be designated Poland, (I think) Polish in what would later be designated Ukraine, and I think a few others.
The deaths from these events get wildly overstated (the German one in particular, in my experience), but they weren't fantastic. At least some of them might have been necessary and all of them that I know of had some real level of justification, but there were still issues.
No, sorry, I'd probably have more to say about it if I actually read about them to any meaningful degree. When I talk about the German one being "wildly overstated" I'm referring to times I've seen it brought up somewhere like :reddit-logo: and in a conversation with a very reactant historian who said "some" estimates of the death toll are six-figures.
Regarding that last part, the estimate he was referring to turned out to be one that came from the West German government, literally the most negatively-biased source you could get on the topic. [I believe it was prior to reunification, West] Germany even later produced another study that lowered the estimate by an entire order of magnitude. Obviously that's still not exactly the lowest estimate, but it shows how hysterical the six-figure one is that it was abandoned even by motivated sources.
Most of the Germans literally still live in Central Asia or their children do iirc
Very biased given its the Stalin Society, and it mostly exists to talk about Khrushchev selectively talking about the crimes of resettlement yet funnily forgetting to mention the ones he was involved in
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bland/1993/07/enforced-resettlements.pdf
The Kalmyks also got moved around a lot. Ostensibly for support of the White Army and later the Nazis, but Stalin seemed to really not like pastoral nomads generally.
It is sort of an axiom of anarchist historiography that state projects, especially ambitious ones, really don't like nomads and itinerant people.
There was a movement for just that and a lot of Jews at the time thought the eastern oblast was a stupid ploy to just populate a region that had just OK farming land. Most stayed in Ukraine, which, in hindsight...
In fact didn't most of the Jews who went to the Oblast come from Canada?
