re: #47 austin_blue

European and western guilt for the Holocaust. We’ll just give the surviving Jews a chunk of British Palestine and then run away, letting them divvy up the land.

Not entirely.

The Balfour Declaration was 1926; UK was already on board with establishing a Jewish homeland on part of what UK won from the Ottomans in WWI. Right around the same time UK was using other parts of the former Ottoman Empire to establish Iraq, Transjordan (that the now-called Palestinians were supposed to be part of), Saudi Arabia, etc.

But it wasn’t until after the Holocaust and those gazillion Jews piling up in the Displaced Persons camps in Cyprus that there were enough people to make it a hugely controversial thing (controversial in the sense that Arab and/or Muslim nations got upset about it; and what remained of the European nations were happy enough to just not have the survivors trying to reclaim their homes and be an in-your-face reminder of something the Germans, Poles, French, Italians, etc., didn’t want to have to think about)