American Alternatives

I’m not a big fan of counterfactual history, but sometimes it has a bit of value as a project to consider how some slight changes here and there might have had a gargantuan impact on world history. Molly Crabapple has a new book out on the Jewish Bund and Adam Hochschild reviews it in the New York Review of Books. He provides one of the useful ways to consider all this:

Two catastrophes haunt Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country. One is the Holocaust, which devoured the lives of many of the people in her pages. The other, more in the background but never far from her thoughts, is the ordeal of the Palestinian people. This includes the Nakba of 1948, in which some 750,000 men, women, and children were forced to flee their homes and land; the slow, creeping seizure of Palestinian farms and villages in the West Bank by Jewish settlers; and the Israeli military campaign that has left large parts of Gaza reduced to rubble, much as the Nazis left the Warsaw Ghetto.

Are the two tragedies connected? “The Holocaust and the Nakba,” writes the Israeli-born genocide scholar Omer Bartov, “are inextricably linked,” despite “each group’s insistence on the exclusivity of its victimhood.” And, of course, Americans are implicated in both. We closed our borders to almost all Holocaust refugees, and many of those Gaza hospitals and apartment buildings were flattened with American bombs.

If we could magically change something in history to greatly reduce the toll of both these cataclysms, what might it be? Imagine that the United States had not passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which essentially slammed the door on almost all newcomers for more than forty years. Without it, Jewish immigration to the US would surely have soared during the 1920s and 1930s. Some 2.5 million Jews, most of them hoping for a better life than they had in tsarist Russia, had already come here between 1880 and 1924. Then, even in the decade before Hitler took power, Jews still had many reasons to leave Europe. Poland, whose Jewish population of 2.8 million was the continent’s largest, was a cauldron of antisemitism between the wars, with outbreaks of deadly violence, segregated seating and de facto quotas in many universities, and numerous other humiliations.

What if Jews from Poland, Germany, and elsewhere had been allowed to immigrate to the United States with no restrictions after 1924? Millions might have done so, escaping Hitler, and far fewer might have gone to Palestine. In this imagined scenario, Jews and Arabs might have found a more equitable way of sharing a part of the world where both peoples have roots. And with our power to adjust history, we would give both Jews and Arabs leaders who were far more open to coexistence and compromise than either people have had over the past century.

Finally, we would have to eliminate the powerful surge of American nativism that was responsible for the Immigration Act of 1924. The political ancestors of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller became ever more vocal during the first decades of the twentieth century. And sadly, millions of Americans across the class spectrum agreed with them.

In other words, America could have just not passed its racist anti-immigration law. But it did because we are reminded again what a horrible nation the United States has been and continues to be. Of course there are lots of other figures responsible for these two atrocities of global history in the Jewish Holocaust and the Nakba, not so ironically placed on the world by survivors of said Holocaust. It’s not all the United States’ fault. But it is also the United States’ fault.