Alternative history thread

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File: 1766880795703.png (1.73 KB, 800x400, Flag_of_Palestine.svg.png)

Alternative history thread Anonymous 28-12-25 00:13:16 No.2615437

I think we live in a timeline where Palestine was lost from the very beginning.
What needed to happen in the past, to prevent the Zionist entity from coming into being?

I came up with a few theories:
1. Forced assimilation of Jews of in eastern Europe by the Soviets.
2. Alternative Jewish homeland in Crimea.

Option 1 is the preferable option because option 2 still creates a potentially ethnic strife with the native ethnic Crimeans.

Share your alternative history theories where Zionism is prevented.

Anonymous 28-12-25 00:14:37 No.2615440

GO TO SIBERIA

Anonymous 28-12-25 00:16:46 No.2615442

>>2615440
What?

Anonymous 28-12-25 00:17:27 No.2615444

>>2615442
https://leftypol.org/siberia/index.html

Anonymous 28-12-25 00:20:10 No.2615446

>>2615444
It's not off topic

Anonymous 28-12-25 00:23:23 No.2615449

>>2615446
It is wrongly on topic

General Niggnin!7MGHd/e/GM 28-12-25 00:37:05 No.2615455

Probably if thr palestinian resistance remained socialist and rid palestine of ethnic nationalism and zionism using class struggle as a force of unity.

Anonymous 28-12-25 00:42:42 No.2615457

File: 1766882561986.png (90.82 KB, 453x204, ClipboardImage.png)

>German Revolution succeeds
>Holocaust never happens
>pretext for resettlement doesn't exist

General Niggnin!7MGHd/e/GM 28-12-25 00:45:09 No.2615458

>>2615457
The holocaust isnt the whole reason for the creation of israel, infact mass immigration of eastern european jews had been happening decades eariler. Zionism wouldve still existed just lacked the international support it had right after WW2.

Anonymous 28-12-25 00:57:20 No.2615466

If WW1 didn't start Britain wouldn't have to go to Rothschild for a bailout.

Anonymous 28-12-25 00:58:19 No.2615468

>>2615455
Israel worked hard to elevate the Islamists over the secular forces.

Anonymous 28-12-25 01:17:43 No.2615481

>>2615437
>2. Alternative Jewish homeland in Crimea.
make it in germany

Anonymous 28-12-25 01:33:25 No.2615494

>>2615481
East Prussia was the obvious choice.

Anonymous 28-12-25 01:56:15 No.2615518

File: 1766886975390.jpg (41.15 KB, 612x404, gettyimages-493902181-612x….jpg)

This is Chomsky talking about the PLO in the early 90s. (Yeah, I know, but still.)

>Well, you know, I’ve always thought that the P.L.O. is the most corrupt and incompetent Third World movement I’ve ever seen. I mean, they’ve presented themselves all these years as, you know, revolutionaries waving around guns, Marx, etc.—but they’re basically conservative nationalists, and they always were conservative nationalists: the rest was all pretense.

>In fact, part of the reason for the failure of the whole Palestinian cause is that the P.L.O. is the only Third World leadership I’ve ever seen that didn’t try to stimulate or support—or even help—any kind of international solidarity group. Even the North Koreans, crazy as they are, have made efforts to try to get popular support in the United States. But the Palestinian lead- ership never did. And it’s not because they weren’t told that it would be a good idea—I mean, there were people like, say, Ed Said [Palestinian- American professor], who were trying to get them to do that for years, and I was even involved in it myself. But they just couldn’t hear it. Their conception of the way politics works is that it’s arranged by rich guys sitting in back rooms who work out deals together, and the population’s irrelevant. They haven’t the slightest conception of the way a democratic system functions. So while it’s true we don’t have like a stellar democracy in the United States, what the population thinks and does makes a difference here—a big difference—and there are mechanisms to influence things. But the P.L.O. leadership has just never understood that.

>The extent of this is really astonishing, actually. Just to give you one example of it, back in the early 1980s…

>Well, there was an approach to the P.L.O. about all of this—and incidentally, the P.L.O. had tons of money. I mean, part of their problem was that they were way too rich for their own good: they had a ton of money because the rich Arab states were trying to buy them off so they wouldn’t cause them any trouble. So you know, Arafat was able to broker billion-dollar loans to Hungary, and all this kind of crazy business. But anyway, the P.L.O. had tons of money, and there was a proposal to try to get them just to purchase books—like, say, Yermiya’s book—and send them to libraries so the book would be in American public libraries: it was nothing more than that.

>….And in fact, that’s just symbolic: they would do nothing that would help to build up support for the really suffering people who they were supposed to represent—just because they were playing a different game. Their game was, “We’re going to make a deal with Kissinger or Nixon, or some rich guy in a back room, and then our problems will be over.” Well, of course that will never work.

>Actually, the corruption of the P.L.O. has just infuriated Palestinians in the Territories, I should say. I was in the Territories back in 1988 or so, and when you went into, say, the old city of Nablus, or villages, and talked to organizers or activists, their hatred and contempt of the P.L.O. was just extraordinary. They were very bitter about it—about the robbery and the corruption and everything else—but they just said: look, it’s the best we’ve got, that’s our international image, you want to talk diplomacy you’ve got to talk to them.

>However, by about 1992 or ’93 even that kind of grudging acceptance had begun to collapse. There was a lot of opposition to the Arafat leadership in the Territories—and in the refugee camps in Lebanon, there were open calls for his resignation, calls for democratizing the P.L.O., and so on. The Israeli press knew all about it—they cover the Territories pretty well—and certainly Israeli intelligence knew about it, because they’ve got the place honeycombed. So there were articles by doves in the Israeli press around the summer of 1993 or so, saying: now’s a good time to deal with the P.L.O., because they’re going to give away everything—since their support is so weak inside the Occupied Territories, the last chance the P.L.O. leadership has to hang on to power is to be our agents, Israeli agents. Israeli doves wrote articles about that, and of course the Israeli government knew it.

>Well, okay, that whole phenomenon led to the Oslo Agreements—and now where the P.L.O. leadership fits in is just as part of the standard Third World model: they are the ruling Third World elite. So take a classic case, look at the history of India for a couple hundred years under the British Empire: the country was run by Indians, not by British—the bureaucrats who actually ran things were Indians, the soldiers who beat people up and smashed their heads were Indians. There was an Indian leadership which became very rich and privileged by being the agents of the British imperial system—and it’s the same thing everywhere else. So for example, if you look at Southern Africa in the more recent period, the most brutal atrocities were carried out by black soldiers, who were basically mercenaries for the white racist South African regime. And every Third World country is like that. Whatever you want to call it, the whole American sort of “neocolonial system”—El Salvador, Brazil, the Philippines, and so on—is not run by Americans. The U.S. may be in the background, and when things get out of hand you may send in the American army or something—but basically it’s all being run by local agents of the imperial power, whose internal power depends on their support from the outside, but who very much enrich themselves by their client ruler status. Alright, that’s the standard colonial relationship, and the P.L.O. is intending to play that role.

>So they have a huge security force—nobody really knows how big it is, because it’s secret, but they may have thirty or forty thousand men enlisted. They surely have one of the highest densities of police per capita in the world, if not the highest. They work very closely with the Israeli secret services and the Israeli army. They’re very brutal. And they’re making a ton of money. So you go to places like Gaza which are just collapsing, there are people starving in the streets—and there’s also a ton of construction, new fancy restaurants, hotels, a lot of Palestinian investors going in and making plenty of money: it’s the standard Third World pattern, that’s the way the whole Third World is organized. And you see it everywhere these days— Eastern Europe is becoming that way too right now. I mean, about a year ago the per capita purchasing rate of Mercedes-Benzes in Moscow was higher than it was in New York, because there is tremendous wealth. Mean- while, half a million more people are dying every year in Russia than in the 1980s; mortality for men has gone down seven or eight years on average in the last few years; and on and on.

>Okay, that’s the Third World. And that’s the way the P.L.O. leadership sees its future—and with some justice too, you know, because otherwise they probably would have been kicked out. So now that’s their role, to oversee all of this, and they’ll put up with any humiliation, it doesn’t matter what. I mean, you look at the terms of the peace treaty, it was just gratuitous humiliation. But the P.L.O. is perfectly happy to take it. And they’ll get rich, they’ll have the guns, and they’ll be the equivalent of the elite in India, or Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, or any other place that you see in the Third World.
https://www.reddit.com/r/arabs/comments/65j4ik/epic_chomsky_rant_about_the_plo_from_the_early_90s/

Anonymous 28-12-25 02:00:17 No.2615530

>>2615518
<During the 1970s, in the U.S., you had close relationships with Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad.

>Yes, we were very close friends. With Edward the relationship was mostly personal, but also Middle East–related. With Eqbal there were many other things, too, since he was very active on many issues: Vietnam, Central America, issues of imperial oppression and domination. It was through them, especially Edward, that I came to have some direct experience of the PLO.

<I understand that you were involved in attempts to explain to high-level PLO officials what might be more effective ways of conveying their message in the U.S.

>Yes, well, I've never actually written or talked about that, except privately . . .

<I thought these encounters might be revealing in terms of the movement and how it operated.

>Well, yes, I do think they were quite telling. But they had so many problems that I didn't want to embarrass them further. Ed [Said] would set up these meetings in New York when senior PLO types would be in town for the UN. This was roughly in the late 1970s, 1980. Ed's idea was to get them to listen to people who were sympathetic to the Palestinians but critical of their policies. So I was there, Ed, and Alex Erlich, a friend who taught Russian history at Columbia who was a real old-fashioned Bundist, a Marxist, anti-Zionist, a very honest guy. The meetings were pretty pointless. We would go up to their suite at the Plaza, one of the fanciest hotels in New York, and basically just sit there listening to their speeches about how they were leading the world revolutionary movement, and so on and so forth.

>Let me tell you an anecdote that says it all. During the 1982 Lebanon war there was an Israeli, a very honorable man named Dov Yermiya, who wrote a terrific war diary in Hebrew. He was a civilian who had been one of the founders of the Haganah, had a very distinguished military record, and was a war hero in Israel. He had been sent to Lebanon to deal with the captured population. The diary was very revealing, searing. I thought it would be good for it to be available in English, and I got South End Press to have it translated and to publish it. But they didn't have any money, and it was never going to be reviewed and nobody would see it. So I asked Ed, who was close to the PLO leadership at the time, if he could convince the PLO to fund purchases and put the books in libraries so at least some people would see it. He came back pretty upset. He said they would only make the purchases if across the front page was written, “Sponsored by the PLO!”

>What was striking was that these people had no idea that in a more or less democratic society it is possible to reach people. I mean, even the North Koreans in a crazy way tried to help solidarity groups. So I was extremely surprised by the PLO leadership's incapacity to understand what every revolutionary nationalist movement understands, which is that you must do something to get the support of the American people. There was a fundamental misunderstanding of how a democratic society works. Now, the United States is far from a magnificent democracy, but it's more or less democratic. Public opinion matters. The antiwar movement made a difference and solidarity movements with Central America made a difference, sharply limiting U.S. military intervention and so on. But the Palestinian leadership simply failed to comprehend this. If they had been honest and said, “Look, we are fundamentally nationalists, we would like to run our own affairs, elect our own mayors, get the occupation off our backs,” it would have been easy to organize and they could have had enormous public support. But if you come to the United States holding your Kalashnikov and saying we are organizing a worldwide revolutionary movement, well, that's not the way to get public support here, and of course this was exploited and exaggerated.

>There were many specific incidents where things could have been done that would have helped organize public support for the Palestinians, but instead their actions and manner undermined such efforts. But what the leadership clearly wanted all along was invitations to visit the White House. A different conception of politics, a very antidemocratic conception, not recognizing that a deal in a smoke-filled back room is not politics. If there is going to be a change in U.S. policy, it will have to come from public pressure, and the public pressure will only come if you gain popular sympathy.

<What do you see as the explanation for all this?

>You would know better than I. My sense was that they were coming out of a quasi-feudal background in which this is not the way things happen. Things happen because of deals among leaders. Which is to a large extent true, but the public cannot be ignored.

[…]

<But let me ask the question more broadly. Leaving aside how the PLO dealt with the United States, how would you assess them as a national liberation movement, in terms of leadership and mobilization?

>I don't like Abba Eban, but he did say something that was unfortunately accurate: “The Palestinian leadership never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” They were, in a sense, doing the right things, but doing them in a way that enabled their enemies, Israel and the United States, to undermine them at every turn. I think there were alternatives. This is one of the reasons that Edward Said dropped out and became bitterly critical of the PLO. Eqbal Ahmad as well, I should say.

>But on the other hand, they did a lot of good things. They did succeed in keeping Palestinian nationalism alive under very harsh conditions, which is quite an achievement. They kept the spirit alive. There were periods, especially in 1988, when it really flourished, though without too much PLO initiative. It was mostly local, as I understood it. I can tell you that, traveling around the West Bank in spring 1988 (mostly with Azmi Bishara, sometimes with anti-Zionist Israeli friends), I was constantly surprised to hear activists, for example in Nablus, who were really doing good things, and when I would ask them what their political objectives were, they'd say, “You'll have to ask the PLO.” At the same time, the expression of contempt for the PLO was unmistakable. They'd say, “We want to run our own affairs. Those guys are off in Tunis playing their games. But we're stuck with them; they are our national spokesmen, so go to them for formal statements.”

>What it looked like to me at the time was that Arafat was being sidelined by the local movements: there were protests in the refugee camps, and many dissidents in the occupied territories. A few years later, when negotiations got underway after the 1990–91 Gulf war, the leading figure seemed to be Haydar ‘Abd al-Shafi, who was heading the Palestinian negotiating committee. He was very firm that there could be no agreement unless it stopped settlements. Meanwhile, the outsiders, the Tunis people, were essentially making an end run around the Palestinian negotiations through Norway. They made a deal with the Israelis that brought the outsiders back in to leadership positions, but without Abd al-Shafi's conditions. There is nothing in the Declaration of Principles [DoP], the famous handshake on the White House lawn, which says anything about settlement expansion. Worse, it says nothing about Palestinian rights. All it says is UN 242, which does not even mention Palestinians. It makes 242 the end process of the Oslo agreement.

>But when the DoP was signed, there was a feeling in Palestine that Oslo was the great hope for the future, that something wonderful had happened. Edward Said and I were among the very few people who disagreed strongly with what appeared to be the main feeling among Palestinians at the time. Both Ed and I immediately thought it was a catastrophe that would undermine Palestinian national rights. I wrote about it extensively at the time. I didn't know enough about the internal dynamics to know what the reasons were, but you could just see it from the documents, and then from what was happening at the ground.
https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/42599

https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/42599

Anonymous 28-12-25 13:02:46 No.2615824

>>2615437
To what end?
For fucks sake you have a whole board for this. >>>/siberia/

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