Implausible Counterfactual of the Day: Creating a Jewish State in the United States instead of Israel. Really?
Strictly speaking, the
following example is not a historical counterfactual, but rather, a future
history scenario. Nevertheless, it
has many implications for counterfactual history. As reported in a recent Jewish
Telegraphic Agency article,
former Dutch minister of economic
affairs Herman Heinsbroek, declared in the financial monthly Quote:
“It was an historical error to give the Jews their own country
in the middle of Islam….You’ve had nothing but war ever since and you’ve had
anti-Semitism resurging, too. My idea: Give the Jews their own state somewhere
in the United States and 25 years to move their state over there.”
Heinsbroek is also quoted as saying that if implemented, his
solution “will finally create, perhaps, peace in the world.”
The claim is patently ludicrous and
nakedly political. I won’t bother to affix a label to the claim (anyone
up for parsing the differences between antizionism and antisemitism?), but it’s
been disproved by a variety of other counterfactual assertions.
For example, Josef Joffe’s essay, “A World
Without Israel,” (2009) and Amir Tahiri’s essay, “Is
Israel the Problem?”, (2007) clearly show that if Israel did not exist,
there would hardly be peace in the Middle East, let alone the world.
Friction between different sects and ethnic groups (mostly Arab and Muslim, but
not only) would merely intensify without Israel to focus internal and external
grievances upon.
Moreover, counterfactual works of
literature – dystopian future histories, mostly – have also identified the
irrationality of expecting a mass exodus of Jews to solve anything. Take,
for example, Hugo Bettauer’s chillingly prophetic Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City
without Jews), written in 1922, which portrays ordinary life in Vienna coming
to a grinding halt without its Jewish population.
Furthermore, non-Jews typically end up
regretting the departure of Jews from their lands and wish they would return.
See Bernt Engelmann’s Germany Without Jews (1984), which is a
mournful survey of everything German life lost in the Holocaust.
As for the United States as an ideal
destination? Michael Chabon dramatically pointed out that shipping Europe’s
Jews to the U. S. – specifically Alaska, in The
Yiddish Policemen’s Union – would hardly be a panacea. This is further shown by the failure of
attempts to create a Jewish state in the United States – specifically the
experimental community of Ararat in upper New York State – which essentially
went nowhere in the early 19th century. (For more on Ararat, click HERE).
None of this is to deny that Israel’s
presence in the Middle East has been a source of conflict. But Heinsbroek’s
remarks express an entirely unrealistic and naïve (not to mention
discriminatory) fantasy.
Counterfactually speaking, I contend that Mr.
Heinsbroek’s misguided
recommendation could have easily been avoided had he been more of a student of
counterfactual history, which helps us grasp the possibilities (and
impossibilities) of how historical events come to pass.
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