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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

We can thank Hitler for the exodus of academics to the US and for the creation of the Israel/Palestine issue (without the holocaust/ww2, the state would never had been made).

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Israel/Palestine started long before WW2.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine/World-War-I-and-a...

Yes, but the final push was due to Germany’s neighbors passing the buck on helping fleeing Jews. After the world learned the consequences of that, the political will to create the state was cemented.

We won't know if Israel would or wouldn't have been created if the Holocaust hadn't happened, but Jewish immigration to Palestine started much earlier in response to renewed pogroms and rising antisemitism in the late 19th / early 20th century. Already in the 1920s there were tensions and occasional eruptions of violence in Palestine.

Zionism and Jewish colonizing of Palestine started before WW1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism

Yes, but they didn't steal the land until after WW2. What happened in the decades before WW2 is a strong warning to everybody about what can happen when you have mass immigration of young radicals of military age.

Yeah. We've coasted for a long time on importation of geniuses and on being the only un-bombed industrial nation ... in 1946.

And now we've largely closed the door to geniuses from wealthy countries. (Why take the risk of living in the USA right now?) We've even taken the first few steps towards deliberately driving out the geniuses we have. I didn't expect that even six months ago.

Academic institutions in the last decade or two started pre-filtering based on ideology goals before taking into account actual research. In general the system was veering off as the massive bureaucracy gained mission creep.

So I hear. But how much has that really affected medicine, math, physics, chemistry, engineering? And is destroying universities altogether really the solution?

What do you mean?

Jews were already migrating to British Mandate since the 1900s (read about the Aliyah). Even without Hitler, communist expansion would have resulted in a World War 2 (with different players) and a mass Jewish exodus (from Russia, which happened later on in our timeline). Jews were already carrying out terror attacks on both Palestinians and British troops and Britain was already stretched thin after WW1.

The creation of a rogue Israel happened with decolonization, and while it might have been delayed, was inevitable.

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