re: #86 Etaoin Shrdlu

It would be nice if the events of 1948 had ended that way. But they didn’t. We can theorize why they didn’t. There’s a 2000 year gap between the end of the last state of Israel and the beginning of the new one. Europe was so traumatized to end WII that there were too many wrongs to right (the middle east wasn’t devastated the way Europe was). There was less sympathy for displaced germans at the end of WWII, forcing them to make do with new homes (other europeans didn’t rally around them the way other arabs did around the palestinians). That, and the fact those former homes were in the east behind an iron curtain.

But none of that matters. The fact is that, like Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland, those dispossessed aren’t going to dissolve into neighboring countries or regions and accept their displacement. Besides, the treatment of displaced germans is hardly a moral example by which to guide modern events.