Miscellaneous: 1900 (Alternate) History Thread

That will have a major impact on World War II.

'AHC: Richard Nixon Revered Instead Of Reviled'.

‘Nazi Analogues In A Central Powers Victory TL?’.

Besides Imperial Germany being nasty in the east (despite butterflying OG Nazis), I suppose the Ottomans would continue their own series of genocides. Might take a bit more of everything going horribly astray to make them reach “Holy CP Hitler, Batman!” levels of genocidal, but the groundwork for atrocities that could've escalated to that point was still there.

What if the Anglo-Ottoman Aqaba Crisis or Taba Affair of 1906, over the placement of the Sinai border, resulted in an actual, declared shooting war between the United Kingdom and the Ottoman Empire in that year? What would that warlike intrusion do the do the Liberal Campbell-Bannerman government's domestic program? I imagine it would be distracting. On the other hand, Liberal Party stalwarts, *in principle* disliking wars and armaments, typically hated *the Turk*, and none more than Sultan Abdulhamid. How does Abdulhamid go about trying to defend himself and his empire. What do the other interest powers, major (Germany, France), medium (Russia-solely because of R-J War exhaustion, Austria, Italy), and minor (the Balkan states, and Egyptian natives) do in reaction to this outbreak of fighting in the Sinai-Palestine border?

What if the onset of the April 1936 Arab Revolt in Palestine prompted the British government of Stanley Baldwin, with a desire for quiet and imperial defense and cohesion concerns in mind, to issue a Palestine White Paper that year sharply limiting Jewish immigration for the following five years and making it dependent on majority approval thereafter*. The measure is intended to appease Arab Palestinian opinion and deflate the revolt. The poor consolation the Baldwin government grants would-be Jewish immigrants to Palestine is an unlimited right to emigrate and reside in Britain's League Mandates that were formerly German colonies, provided the emigrants or charitable organizations can fund transportation and demonstrate possession of funds to provide two years support for food, shelter, medicine, and housing.

The rationale behind this policy is that a) Britain does not feel it needs to consult the local populations of these Mandates/former German colonies, and b) this 'band-aid' solution to the desire of large number of especially German Jews to quickly emigrate from Germany and even from Europe is basically just, because German antisemitic laws and policies are the leading force at the moment pressing Jews to feel unsafe in Germany and wider Europe.

This does mean that Baldwin needs to drops particular options considered in Foreign Office circles that were leaving the door open to appeasing Nazi Germany in its world position by returning some of its colonies confiscated at the end of WWII, but the British government gives this a go.

Let's say this policy of basically starting to close the door on Palestine (turning the door into a doggie door for now, and in actuality, shutting off the door for a Jewish majority, ever) and opening the door to the Mandates, mainly in Africa, is adopted by August 1936.

The territories that Britain thus opens up are Togoland, British Cameroon, Tanganyika, and Nauru (with basically no room). PM Baldwin asks, and receives, the agreement of New Zealand Labour PM Savage to open up the Western Samoa Mandate similarly to Jewish immigration/settlement, and United Australia Party PM Joe Lyons to open up the New Guinea territory to Jewish immigration/settlement. He does not bother to ask South African United Party, but pro-German and Boer nationalist leaning South African PM Hertzog to similarly open the quite spacious Southwest Africa mandate, although he is tempted. Baldwin *might* also ask Belgium about its willingness to open Ruanda-Urundi to Jewish immigration or France to open its pieces of formerly German Kamerun and Togo.

In any case, while the different mandate territories could accommodate a trickle of settlers, Tanganyika is the main what that could accommodate them at scales of 10s of thousands plus, with Cameroon and its highlands starting to approach that scale.

The offer will not be attractive, adequate, or desirable to most Zionists, nor most Jews simply seeking to get out of Germany, or other Central European countries. The most favored destinations will continue to be countries next door to Germany like Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia and Austria....while they last.

But there will still be 37 months between the start of this policy and the start of WWII in September 1939. How much Jewish emigratation to these African and Pacific locations will likely happen over that time? Especially after escalating antisemitic events, like the November 1938 Kristallnacht, and the failure of any more desirable destination states to loosen immigration laws to offer refuge during the July 1938 Evian Conference on refugees? From Sep 1939, refugee mobility from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and occupied Poland gets more difficult, but those who are alarmed in neutral but now right-leaning Balkan countries and Italy may still depart. Only a tiny share will probably anticipate falling directly under German control however. Likewise, French residents, Gentile or Jew, don't really expect to get occupied by Germany. People in Netherlands and Scandinavia expect to be left alone.

And are local reactions in these mandated territories to locally large immigrant numbers enough to be economically or politically fraught, or to get beyond the scope of imperial powers' ability to control? Does it influence the course of Japanese campaigning in New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago/Rabaul at all?

In the meantime, what is going on in Palestine? Is the Arab Revolt pacified earlier than OTL, with less or no British use of Jewish-manned 'Night Squads' and less training for these men who also moonlit as Haganah militiamen? How extensive and confrontational will Jewish underground illegal immigration efforts get? How violently will the Zionist Revisionist Irgun organization react to the announced immigration policy of the British starting in late 1936, and with what effect over the following years until the war starts? And then when the war starts, what do they do? And does Avraham Stern even start his own gang called Lehi?

With a policy pledged to limit and then subject Jewish immigration to majority veto and ultimately transition Palestine to majority controlled (Arab Palestinian) representative institutions, can the British end up recruiting and training fairly reliable Arab Palestinian police and security forces that it could use internally, and even in the Middle East neighborhood, like in Lebanon and Syria, the way it used the Arab Legion of Jordan?

*The terms of the Passfield White Paper Britain ultimately issued in May 1939, after three years of Arab Revolt, to appease Arab and Muslim opinion during anticipated global crisis and probable wartime.

WI the Young Turks had been more successful and led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire before WW1?