The issue of Israel and Palestine is quite a divisive one and prompts strong emotional responses from both of the arguing sides. However, I do not intend to argue in favor of either side. Instead, I want to engage in a little thought experiment. As per the logic of Zionists, the land of Israel belongs to them because their ancestors occupied it thousands of years ago. If we follow the same line of thought and apply it to a different scenario, an interesting situation is the result. Using the logic that historical occupation constitutes a legitimate claim even when the land in question has been settled by other peoples for a long time, Germany should at the minimum be returned to its Weimar era borders. These lands were German for centuries and a rich culture flourished in these former eastern territories. At the end of world war II, the Soviet Union and various other Eastern European states decided to punish ethnic Germans for the crimes of the Schutzstaffel(SS) and the Nazi Party. German communities living east of the Oder-Neisse line were forcibly removed from their homes and had their property seized. They were expelled to what was left of Germany and these lands were annexed into Poland(Silesia,East Pomerania,East Brandenburg,southern East Prussia) and the Soviet Union(northern East Prussia). If Jews can have Israel back, then one could reasonably argue that Germany deserves all of this territory at the minimum. To establish the credibility of my claim I will analyze the history of East Prussia which exists today as Kaliningrad Oblast in Russia and the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship in Poland.
The region of Prussia as shown below was originally inhabited by Baltic and Slavic tribes. In 1226, a crusading military order known as the Teutonic Knights conquered the region. These knights came from Germany which was split at the time into the various states in the Holy Roman Empire. The Teutonic order brought in German peasants to populate their territories and attempted to convert the indigenous inhabitants(whom I will call Old Prussians) to Christianity. Two hundred years later, the order warred with the Kingdom of Poland was was forced to cede West Prussia to it. Eventually, the order’s monastic state was transformed into the Duchy of Prussia(East Prussia) which was in the process of Germanisation due to the continuous influx of German peasant-colonists from the Holy Roman Empire. The Old Prussians assimilated into the new German society until they ceased to exist as an independent ethnic/social group by the eighteenth century when the duchy became a kingdom.
(To see the territorial expansion of the Prussian state over the years, use this link: http://www.zum.de/whkmla/histatlas/germany/haxprussia.html)
Over time, the kingdom(which I will simply refer to as Prussia for the sake of simplicity) became a very large state. East Prussia remained one of its provinces from its inception until its dissolution at the end of World War II. It was home to prominent German philosophers like Immanuel Kant who was born in the provincial capital, Konigsberg(Kaliningrad today). East Prussia was populated by Germans and belonged to a German state for centuries before World War II. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union and the newly installed pro-Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe were feeling particularly vengeful for the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany which had killed vast swathes of their populations. Nazi Germany had claimed the territory of other countries on the basis that these lands had majority German populations which were being oppressed by the other ethnicity who dominated that nation’s government(Ex: Poland, Czechoslovakia). The ever-paranoid and ambitious Stalin sought to expand the Soviet Union and did so at Poland’s and Germany’s expense while Poland was compensated with Germany’s eastern territories(all of which were provinces of the state of Prussia within Germany).
Thus, East Prussia among other territories(East Pomerania and Silesia) was stripped from Germany. The Allied Powers embarked on a policy of removing ethnic Germans from these territories and repatriating them to Germany so that the nation states of Eastern Europe could be ethnically homogeneous. This would ensure that the German irredentist cause would be destroyed and in the minds of some, it was a fitting form of retribution for Nazi crimes during the war. Nazis had sought to expel Slavic peoples from their homes and replace them with German settlers. Now, the Allies and the reconstituted Eastern European governments did the same to innocent Germans living in Eastern Europe. Expulsions did not merely occur in the Weimar Republic’s eastern territories but in other countries with large German minorities. 3,000,000 Germans were expelled from Poland’s new territories while another 3,000,000 were removed from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia also expelled most of their ethnic Germans. Similar to the other areas from which Germans were expelled, East Prussia was occupied by settlers from other countries. Poles populated the southern part(Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship) while ethnic Russians took residence in the North(Kaliningrad Oblast). There is a tiny minority of Germans remaining in the Voivideship and the Oblast today.
In the late 19th century and early twentieth century, Zionists justified their desire to establish a Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine using an ancestral claim. Jews had settled the region thousands of years ago and were forced out by Roman authorities which resulted in their diaspora. Based on this logic, Germans who were forced out of their homelands in East Prussia, Silesia and East Pomerania should now be permitted to return to these places and they should receive financial compensation from the Russian and Polish governments. Additionally, these territories should be ceded to the Federal Republic of Germany because they belonged to German states(Prussia and later, a united Germany) for centuries. I recognize that the implementation of the above proposal would be practically impossible and lacks popular support(Irredentist Germans are a tiny minority and unlike in the Israeli case, Germany does not have a military advantage over the countries it would hypothetically be taking said territories from). This is merely a thought experiment intended to explore how the applicability of certain arguments is constrained by the balance of power between states.
