infestør

i understand that jews settled to today's lands called palestine/israel for they believed it was the promised land to them. didnt they consider an alternative? i mean, why not buy a land from an african country or some other region that is not this explosive. i'm sure they knew that their settlement would cause a lot of trouble, but they did it anyways?

antocya

I heard some people considered Uganda and maybe some place in South America but I don't know how seriously that was considered.

astafjevs

Hitler wanted to send them to Madagascar at one stage, I think.

Jhangora

I guess there were Jews living in the present day Israel at the time Israel was created and they considered it a convenient location. I think they could have purchased land in other continents at that time but many of the Holy sites of Judaism are located in present day Israel.

sylla1

The Soviet nationality policy of the 1930s actually established an still extant "Jewish Autonomous Oblast" (Евре́йская автоно́мная о́бласть) in the Siberian Far East (red in the map below) a most bizarre crazy idea if there has ever been any.


Its flag:

Its coat of arms:


Official website: State Symbols

astafjevs

But it's not very Jewish anymore, I believe.

Also, doesn't it's location make you feel what they were actually thinking was 'as far away as we can get them...'? Thats what it looks like to me.

sylla1

AFAIK it has never been "Jewish" at all.

Any potential rationale behind the location and frankly the whole idea is well, well beyond my wildest imagination.

infestør

thanks for sharing this. i had no idea. however i disagree that it is a bizarre idea. i mean russians gave them an autonomous oblast. though it failed (only 1% of it is inhabited by jews today)

my question is, are those holy sites in israel really that important to have continuous bloodshed over it?

sylla1

Analogous to let say the Gypsies, the Jewish people was an to a large extent still is a nation without a territory.

Acquiring any territory anywhere all around this Planet (maybe aside of some remote desert islands) inevitably implies taking it by force from an already established population.

(Yup, because pretending to buy any country couldn't be any more evidently deliriously Utopian)

Of course there were always options, some of them already mentioned in this thread; that doesn't mean that any of them may have been any better, any easier or even just any feasible option.

Sankari

They settled there because it's where they came from. The Jews have lived in that region for thousands of years. Zionism was a secular movement, not a religious one. In fact, the religious Jews were opposed to Zionism and many still are.

Several alternatives were suggested and considered, but ultimately the civilised world realised it would make the most sense to restore the Jews' homeland to its rightful owners, considering they'd already spent several thousand years living there in the first place and many Jews were actually still there.

Please note: Israel was not 'created.' That implies Israel had never existed previously, which is false. Israel was reborn.

You mean put them in a foreign country with which they have no historic connection? Seriously?

It was known that the resettlement of the Jews in their historic homeland would cause a lot of trouble with people who wanted to steal it off them, but this was not considered a valid reason for denying their right to return.

You should ask the Muslims. They're the ones who built a mosque on top of the Temple Mount.