Result of Israeli defeat in various wars.

[Elfwine]

It might be demoralizing to those Jews who for whatever reason/s felt that Israel meant something, but not for those who were comfortable being Jews within (for instance) Canada.

Not all Jews were Zionists, although it seems Europe's nonZionists took a disproportionate beating in the Holocaust.

 

[ColeMercury]

No, rather because I think it would kill the spirit of the Jews if their last resort was destroyed and noone cared.

Even in our world, many American Jews intermarry and don't care much for either their culture or religion. I think this would be even worse if Israel was destroyed.

While the Orthodox Jews may well continue (their birth rate is quite high), they'd be a small minority, and we can't exclude the possibility that somewhen in the future something happened to them.

Hang on a second... are you seriously saying "If Israel goes then Jews worldwide will despairingly enter mixed marriages rather than do their duty in keeping their race pure"?

Um... right.

Besides, even if somehow every Jew everywhere married a Gentile and the entire next generation was composed of half-Gentile babies, that doesn't mean Jewish people would disappear. It's the same sort of argument that claims that Aboriginal Tasmanians are "extinct", because all of them who are alive today are part-European.

 

[jaybird]

Anytime before Israel has nuclear weapons: either Israel is wiped out or greater powers intervene.

Anytime after Israel has nuclear weapons: the whole region goes up in flames.

 

[Snake Featherston]

In pre-enlightenment times, the Jews formed separate societies within Christian and Muslim states. They weren't safe from pogroms, but they could keep their culture. What would happen with the diaspora in the long run? As I said, more intermarriages, less Jews caring about their culture and religion, not to mention falling birthrates.

I think the same happened to the "lost Jewish tribes" who were forcibly resettled in Babylon.

Besides, I can't believe how you are neglecting the shock factor. I am not Jewish myself, but I think they would have been deeply shocked if shortly after the horros of WWII and the holocaust the young state of Israel was destroyed. Don't you think they'd lose hope?

And comparing Jews and Palestinensians is simply ridicilous. Especially since I was talking about a time interval several times the time the Palestinensians have been displaced.

Vast over-simplification. In Muslim lands Jews were able to go so far as to produce great scholars (Medieval Christendom could not have led Moses Ben Maimon to be a scholar, he would have been a moneylender in some ghetto somewhere), as well as to be outright warlords. In different parts of Medieval Christendom Jews were excluded to different degrees.

The comparison with the expellees from the Kingdom of Israel is nonsense, not least because of the minor issue of the Babylonian Talmud and the reality that in Diaspora Judaism in the ancient world the Diaspora in Babylon was a center that in several ways outmatched Jerusalem at all points (with Palestinian Jews being as contemptuous of their Diaspora counterparts as Israelis can be of modern Jews). Also it's nonsense because the state of Israel was not necessary for Jewish identity before the 1940s, while the Yishuv was hardly an enthusiastic getter-alonger with global Jews before or to some extent during that time (which is a really nasty element of the Holocaust as they were some of the few Jews outside Europe who tried to get in there to bushwhack Nazis, for instance).

And no, actually, I can't see the carving out of a Jewish state from the Mandate of Palestine by terrorism failing producing the sudden collapse after 2,000 years of Judaism. Diaspora Jews would probably paint Israel's founders as terrorist scum and incompetent terrorist scum at that. In fact I could see the Lehi's attempts to negotiate with the Nazis being distorted by propaganda in said ATLs as a tar on all ATL equivalents of the founders of Israel (it'd be a gross lie of course, but propaganda and truth are almost always very different things).

I disagree with the assertion that comparing Jews and Palestinians is ridiculous: the Palestinians have adopted the whole diaspora stateless people that bitterly feuds amongst itself quite well. They do, however, tend to be more lethal with such disagreements than Jews have tended to be.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Hang on a second... are you seriously saying "If Israel goes then Jews worldwide will despairingly enter mixed marriages rather than do their duty in keeping their race pure"?

Um... right.

Besides, even if somehow every Jew everywhere married a Gentile and the entire next generation was composed of half-Gentile babies, that doesn't mean Jewish people would disappear. It's the same sort of argument that claims that Aboriginal Tasmanians are "extinct", because all of them who are alive today are part-European.

In particular there will probably be a lot more intact Jewish communities in places like Ethiopia, communities bereft of the kind of racist douchebaggery Israel itself regularly engages in against them. I fail to see the benefit the state of Israel has brought to Ethiopian Jews in particular. How, precisely, does being on the receving end of "Fake Jew N******" bigotry benefit them?

 

[black angel]

put most basically with out RADICALLY changing the nations in question there really isn't a way for the Arab states to win in 1948, 1956, 1967 or 1973, the Arab armies where highly political, loyalty to political figures was the means by which officers moved up the ranks, the Arab armies always fought believing in quick easy victory, 1973 was the closest they came, Egypt had clear and smart war aims, and Syria really did win on the Golan Heights, but the flaws of a political military showed when the Syrians where unwilling to press froward to a true victory because field Commanders where scared to over step their orders even a little, not crossing into Israel it's self because they had no orders to do so (they had no orders not to)

basically Yom Kippur War is the only I think they could win, because it was the only one with logical war aims, 1948 and the Six-Day War the goals where unclear but basically were "Wipe out Israel" no world power is willing to let that happen and the Israelis would fight to the death to stop it from happening, 1973 the goal was to take back the Sinai and Golan, which is doable, in a way Egypt did just that, if Syria had been willing they likely would have gotten the Golan back.

 

[Isot the Terrible]

1948 and the Six-Day War the goals where unclear but basically were "Wipe out Israel" no world power is willing to let that happen

I think you are wrong there. Assuming the Arabs didnt go crazy and start killing all the Jews what would the great powers have done? In 1948 defeat was a distinct possibility for the Israelis.

 

[black angel]

I think you are wrong there. Assuming the Arabs didnt go crazy and start killing all the Jews what would the great powers have done? In 1948 defeat was a distinct possibility for the Israelis.

why are we assuming that? both sides wiped out whole villages, and the Arab Armies tried to starve Jerusalem into submission, but again the Arab armies (other the Arab Legion) would need wholly different officers to win against the Israelis

 

[Snake Featherston]

I think you are wrong there. Assuming the Arabs didnt go crazy and start killing all the Jews what would the great powers have done? In 1948 defeat was a distinct possibility for the Israelis.

Not really, no. The Arabs had no unified coalition and both superpowers were in agreement that an Israeli state was a desirable outcome. In 1948-9 if BOTH superpowers agreed then that something pretty much would be done. While Palestinians had inflicted a great weakening of their own leadership in the 1936-9 revolt which Hajj Amin-Al Husseini compounded with that blend of murderous thuggery and ineffectual incompetence that made him a......unique....leader in his own right.

 

[Snake Featherston]

why are we assuming that? both sides wiped out whole villages, and the Arab Armies tried to starve Jerusalem into submission, but again the Arab armies (other the Arab Legion) would need wholly different officers to win against the Israelis

Not to mention a unified plan for *how* to win against Israel, which they IIRC very much did not have even in a remote sense. They were too busy intending to carve out their pieces of "postwar" Israel to bother with planning to fight *wartime* Israel. While none of them were particularly trustful of each other, either, and the Palestinian leadership hated all the Arab states' leaders, to boot. Alter this and the war will be almost entirely unrecognizable from OTL, to say nothing of the political situation preceding it.

 

[OS fan]

Vast over-simplification. In Muslim lands Jews were able to go so far as to produce great scholars (Medieval Christendom could not have led Moses Ben Maimon to be a scholar, he would have been a moneylender in some ghetto somewhere), as well as to be outright warlords. In different parts of Medieval Christendom Jews were excluded to different degrees.

The comparison with the expellees from the Kingdom of Israel is nonsense, not least because of the minor issue of the Babylonian Talmud and the reality that in Diaspora Judaism in the ancient world the Diaspora in Babylon was a center that in several ways outmatched Jerusalem at all points (with Palestinian Jews being as contemptuous of their Diaspora counterparts as Israelis can be of modern Jews).

And no, actually, I can't see the carving out of a Jewish state from the Mandate of Palestine by terrorism failing producing the sudden collapse after 2,000 years of Judaism. Diaspora Jews would probably paint Israel's founders as terrorist scum and incompetent terrorist scum at that. In fact I could see the Lehi's attempts to negotiate with the Nazis being distorted by propaganda in said ATLs as a tar on all ATL equivalents of the founders of Israel (it'd be a gross lie of course, but propaganda and truth are almost always very different things).

I disagree with the assertion that comparing Jews and Palestinians is ridiculous: the Palestinians have adopted the whole diaspora stateless people that bitterly feuds amongst itself quite well. They do, however, tend to be more lethal with such disagreements than Jews have tended to be.

1. Maimonides lived towards the end of the Golden Age of Islamic civilization. Nowadays we barely can imagine it, but there were times when Muslims, Christians, Jews and atheists(!) were discussing together and didn't care much for religions. And there were Jewish thinkers in Ashkenaz, as they call it, too.

2. While the contempt of the Babylonian Jews for those in Israel did indeed exist, there's still the question: What happened to the Babylonian Jews in the long run, even if things were that great in Babylon?

3. I repeat: You have to consider the fact that this happened shortly after the holocaust. There were two million Jews living in Israel in 1948, a destruction of the state would have had consequences.

4. Jews and Muslims both have a Middle Eastern background, one has to expect that they will have a few things in common. I'd still say that the Jewish achievements put those of the Palestinensians to shame, and this is why your comparison was insulting.

 

[Snake Featherston]

1) In the Islamic states, yes. Christendom was rather too busy butchering Jews whenever it needed a sufficient distraction from its failures at the time.

2) Well, you see there's an interesting question. I don't know the answer to it, but suffice to say that this community did not, as you put it, disappear or suffer very much. Its disappearance no more means the failure of Judaism than that of the Khazar state or the Kaifeng Jews.

3) How many of that 2 million had lived there in 1945? If the improbable amount of changes required to lead to its defeat were there, how many would have even bothered to go?

4) I wouldn't. Jews in the Middle East have primarily after the codification of the Babylonian Talmud been the ass end of Judaism. Palestinian Jews and Arabs both have been very prickly about foreign rule, at least when Crusaders weren't indiscriminately slaughtering everyone in the region. Judaism's actual accomplishments, just like those of Islam, almost invariably occurred outside, not in, the Middle East.

 

[BlondieBC]

1. Maimonides lived towards the end of the Golden Age of Islamic civilization. Nowadays we barely can imagine it, but there were times when Muslims, Christians, Jews and atheists(!) were discussing together and didn't care much for religions. And there were Jewish thinkers in Ashkenaz, as they call it, too.

..

4. Jews and Muslims both have a Middle Eastern background, one has to expect that they will have a few things in common. I'd still say that the Jewish achievements put those of the Palestinensians to shame, and this is why your comparison was insulting.

1) Yes, there are periods of time the Islamic world was a much better place for a common man to live in.

2) Yes, there were Jews who had a lot of contact with the Muslims, the Jews who were expelled from Spain. Many of them were opposed to the German Jews moving to Palestine, as were many Arab Christians under the Ottoman empire. At the time of the founding of Israel, the two Jewish groups were separated by both 700+ years of history and language.