Wrong side won World War I?
In the America mind, World War I was a war for democracy. But I’ve been thinking about alternative histories while writing my zionist sci-fi novel and I realized that as far as Jews and Palestinians are concerned, the wrong side won World War I.
If Germany and the Central Powers had triumphed there wouldn’t be a Nazi Party, no Hitler, no Holocaust, no destruction of such a rich Jewish European culture, no war with the Soviet Union, none of the death and destruction that spread across Eurasia. I guess the U.S. and Japan would’ve still fought it out…but that’s a different story.
If the Central Powers hadn’t lost, the Ottoman Empire wouldn’t have been dismantled and the French and British wouldn’t have been strutting up and down the Levant, dividing things up and drawing lines on maps. There would have been no Israel, either. The Ottomans wouldn’t stand for that kind of business — not under the sultan nor the genocidal reformist nationalist types.
Jews would have still lived in Palestine, like they always had. And they’d probably live there in much greater numbers than before. Even under Ottoman rule, before the British took over, zionist outfits were snapping up land and building communities. Tens of thousands of Jews had moved to Palestine in the first decade of the 20th century when it was under Ottoman control. But this community, this yishuv, wouldn’t have been allowed to grow into a state.
It’s not every well known but before World War I the zionist movement sought to ally with the Turks, both under the sultan and the nationalist Young Turks, and wanted to convince them it would be beneficial to have the Jews on their side keeping things in order down there. David Ben-Gurion, the future founder of the Israeli state, even moved to Constantinople in 1912 to learn Turkish and pursue a law degree because he believed he’d need this knowledge to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire on behalf of the Jewish community in Palestine.
Zio boys in their fez and moustache getup. There’s Ben-Gurion on the left. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, another zionist politician who’d go on to be president of Israel, on the right.
There’s a great bit in Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi’s The Israeli Connection that sums up zionism’s hopes for the Ottoman Empire:1
The Zionist movement always sought to ally itself with the imperial power in control of the Middle East, be it Turkey or Britain. This was the whole point of the Zionist political strategy of Herzl, who said in 1896, "If his majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we would undertake to regulate Turkey's finances. For Europe, we would constitute a bulwark against Asia down there, we would be the advance post of civilization against barbarism.” The design of offering Zionism as a useful ally in the Middle East was expressed again by Max Nordau in 1905: "The Turkish government may feel itself compelled to defend its reign in Palestine, in Syria, against its subjects by armed force. ... In such a position, Turkey might become convinced that it may be important for her to have, in Palestine and Syria, a strong and well-organized people which, with all respect to the rights of the inhabitants living there, will resist any attack on the authority of the Sultan and defend this authority with all its might.”
The policy was to form an alliance with the major power in the Middle East; the problem was only to determine which power was dominant. The Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany in World War I, was dismantled after the war, so Turkey was out of the running.
Notice how zionist leaders suck up to an imperial power here, bending over backwards to figure out how they can be useful as local enforcers or moneymen or whatever. This attempt to be a servant to empire is a constant that runs through the entirety of the zionist project — from the 19th century to today. But this is something I want to write about at a later point…
After the Central Powers were defeated, all zionist focus turned to the British and then to United Staes after Britain lost its steam after World War II.
I’m being very optimistic and grossly simplifying things here. No doubt all sorts of horrible things would have happened in the world if Britain and France had lost and Germany and the Ottomans won. Inside these empires there’d be lots of ethnic groups to repress and to genocide and lots of colonial subjects to abuse and exploit. One thing we’re good at as a species is surprising ourselves with our own barbarity. And who knows what kind of movements would have risen up in Britain and France if they had fallen. Maybe they would have turned communist or more likely went their own fascist way like Germany and Italy and a different destructive war would have engulfed the continent.
Still I’d like to think that as far as Palestine and Jews are concerned, things would have been better if they did lose. There would be no Holocaust, no destruction of yiddish European culture, and no possibility to fully realize the biblical zionist curse that has lurked within Judaism…
I also wonder about the path the Soviet Union would have taken if it didn’t have to defend itself against Germany’s genocidal war. So much was destroyed, so many lives were lost and so much pain and paranoia generated and passed on through the generations…all that energy could have be directed into something more creative. And then there’s the Armenian genocide…maybe it would have not happened on the scale it did if Ottoman Empire didn’t feel like it was losing its grip on power? But that might be a little too bullish.
Lots of strands to think about here. I’m sure someone out there has written an alternative history novel about some of this stuff…and if they haven’t, someone should.
What do you think?
—Yasha
Notes for subscribers.