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After the Second World War, there was a colossal refugee problem. This is often forgotten now, but millions of people had been displaced during the war, most of them non-Jewish. At the end of the war there were perhaps 11 million displaced persons in Europe, of whom maybe one million were Jewish. Many countries in Europe accepted large numbers of displaced persons, and the United States also accepted a large number. The British dominions, French colonies and South American nations also eventually took some. It's not clear that the creation of Israel was a necessary or logical response to the problem of people displaced by war and persecution. The total nuymber of Jewish refugees accepted by Israel in the first years of its existence was quite low - about 130,000. That's comparable to the number who arrived in the United States, and much fewer than those settled in the Soviet Union. So I don't agree that it was the indifference of the world to Jewish refugees that led to the creation of the Jewish state, though that is a popular story in some quarters. I also don't think that I am retreating to "ethnonationalist apologetics," but I am perhaps less consistently anti-imperial than you are. I don't think empires are always intrinsically evil, and I most certainly don't think that ethnic nation states are always good. The British Empire was, like most empires, a mixed bag and it was experienced very differently by different people at different places and times. I don't find it very enlightening to assume that empires are the universal villains of history and their opponents are always plucky heroes (the 'Star Wars' historiography), not least because there are some modern empires I greatly admire (the Habsburgs, the Ottomans and the Soviet Union among them). There were some places where British administration was callously or incompetently cruel, and India is the most famous example. But there were plenty of other places where the imperial administration was broadly well-meaning, and the local settlers were viciously genocidal. I think the colonial United States may be one example: it is an open question whether the Native Americans would have fared better had the colonists' uprising failed, but it is hard to imagine that the Britiush state would have dealt with them less favourably than the American settler state did. One could indeed add the loss of the 13 colonies to those other tragic falures of the British Empire that you mention - the exploitation and hasty division of India and the botched creation of Israel from Mandate Palestine. It is at least arguable that empires are better at embracing difference than nation states are. America's constant vacilation over whether it is a nation or an empire can be clearly seen in its fraught relationship with its internal minorities - white Christian nationalism, like all kinds of nationalism, is fundamentally foreign to the imperial spirit. In China, the CCP is similarly trapped by the logical impossibility of maintaining a multi-ethnic empire with a shared national consciouess. The blue water empires of the 19th century did not fully work out this dilemma either, though their colonies were at least far enough away that they could have in some measure empire abroad and nationalism for the domestic market. Perhaps indeed empire of some kind is the only solution to the failures and dilemmas of the nation state. Certainly in the Middle East the destruction of Ottoman power has largely proved to be a disaster. I am not 100% certain that postcolonial democracy has been a great success in India and Pakistan though perhaps, like the French Revolution, it is too soon to tell. And then there's the United States. I am not sure I would want to actively call for a return to tolerant, peaceful global imperium as a solution to the furious raging of the nations, but the idea is not wholly without attractions. It was, indeed, the tacit understanding that maintained something like global peace (or at least 'security') in the second half of the twentieth century, though fatally our empires have never been willing to call themselves by that name. |