“If the West felt so guilty, why didn’t it create a Jewish state in Bavaria?”

I’ve been discussing the role of the British, the League of Nations, and the United Nations in assigning parts of Palestine to a Jewish state, in fulfillment of the dreams of the Zionists:

And as people of the twentieth century, they [the Palestinian Arabs] were less inclined, per­haps, than ancient people were to admit that a ruler, any ruler, has a right to transfer populations around and to grant and bestow whole countries without the consent of their inhabitants.

There were serious clashes between Arabs and Jewish settlers throughout the 1920s and 1930s, until the point in 1939 when, hop­ing to gain Arab support against the Axis powers in World War II, the British began to restrict Jewish immigration to the Holy Land. This, in turn, brought an angry and often violent response from the Jews of Palestine. Fed up with the situation, Great Britain submitted the problem to the United Nations after the close of the war, and, on 29 November 1947, that international organization decided to relieve the British of responsibility for Palestine and to approve par­tition of the area into two states; one for the Jews and the other for the Palestinian Arabs.

The Zionists accepted the United Nations plan, although they did so with some reluctance since it failed to grant them control over many of the areas of Palestine that were most important to them and to Jewish history. Their reasoning, clearly, was that it was better to get half a loaf of bread than to get no loaf at all. With the two-thousand-year-old dream of a Jewish state so nearly within reach, they seized the opportunity that the U.N. plan offered them. The Arabs, on the other hand, rejected the partition plan. They con­sidered all of Palestine to be theirs and could not see why they should agree to demands from outsiders that they give up part of their land. Even today, some Palestinians like to point to the indis­putable fact that it was partly European horror and revulsion at what had been done to the Jews by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s that finally led the United Nations to set up a Jewish home­land in the Middle East. “If the West felt so guilty,” these Arabs ask, “why didn’t it create a Jewish state in Bavaria? After all, it was the Germans who carried out the Holocaust, not the Arabs.” The Arab nations around Palestine began to prepare for military intervention to thwart the partition plan.

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Some of you will find this of interest:

“In spite of their differences, Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God”

I touched briefly on a related matter here:

“‘Allah’ is not pagan term — it means ‘God'”

Posted from the floor of today’s Book of Mormon Central conference