A thought experiment on European postwar history illustrates the absurd mechanics of perpetual conflicts and makes the case for prioritizing the individual human being over collective revisionist claims
History does not repeat itself exactly, but it holds up mirrors in which it shows us the logic of human catastrophes with frightening clarity. When we look today at the seemingly insoluble Middle East conflict, we encounter a phenomenon that is virtually unique in modern diplomacy: the systematic preservation of refugee status across generations, fueled by a policy of refusal and the dream of complete historical revision.
Behind this lies a fundamental ethical dividing line between liberal and authoritarian thought, specifically regarding the relationship between the individual and the collective. A liberal society places the well-being, dignity, and opportunities of the individual human being at the center. Authoritarian rulers—such as the leadership of the Arab League, Hamas, or the Islamist regime in Tehran—on the other hand, ruthlessly subordinate the fate of the individual to a propagandistically glorified collective. Unmistakably, they are supported in this by influential Western circles, including NGOs and the media.
The cementing of revanchist demands has occurred—and continues to occur—in the Middle East on the backs of millions of people whose personal happiness is sacrificed to the abstract idea of an eternal struggle. In 1952, the Arab League decided that none of its member countries would integrate Palestinian refugees—no citizenship, no regular access to the labor market, no equal rights. Housed in huge UNRWA camps, these refugees now live in the 3rd and 4th generation thanks to a heritable status. Despite emigration all over the world, their numbers have since roughly octupled within the pampered camp environment.
The Arab League’s 1952 calculation has paid off. With the support of the UN and its subsidiary organization UNRWA, they have been able to maintain their revanchist claim to Palestine—most of which was lost militarily in 1948—to this day. This also represents a historical absurdity given that it was the four Arab neighboring countries of Israel, along with Iraq and Saudi Arabia, that had attacked the newly founded State of Israel—and thus bore self-evident responsibility for all the results, namely the uprooted refugees. Naturally, the revisionist claim, advanced with growing vehemence, required differing narratives regarding the events before and during the 1948 war—see the notes at the end of the article.
To gauge the absurdity and tragedy of this dynamic, a radical thought experiment is worthwhile. Let us transpose the historical script of the 1948 Middle East conflict into postwar Europe after 1945.
The Potsdam Vacuum and the Fate of the Expellees
In early August 1945, the victorious powers decided in Potsdam to place the German territories east of the Oder and Neisse—Silesia, Pomerania, East Brandenburg, and East Prussia—under Polish and Soviet administration, respectively. A final peace treaty settlement was to be reserved for a later peace conference.
This precarious legal limbo had devastating consequences. Precisely because the territories were legally considered only "under administration," the new rulers felt an immense temptation to enforce the legitimacy of their territorial acquisition through fait accompli: through the comprehensive, largely violent expulsion of millions of Germans, demographic reality was altered so radically that a later return at the negotiating table was rendered largely impossible. The administrative vacuum encouraged harshness; an immediate annexation under international law with regulated transitions would certainly have caused far less misery and fewer than the over 2 million deaths resulting from the wild exodus between 1945 and 1947.
12 to 14 million Germans lost their homeland. They arrived in the remaining occupation zones penniless, traumatized, and unwanted.
The Hypothetical Horror Scenario
Now let us change history at a decisive point and apply the 1952 logic of the Arab League to West Germany:
Instead of creating the Equalization of Burdens Act (Lastenausgleichsgesetz), granting the expellees full civil equality, and actively integrating them into reconstruction, Western European neighbors and German politicians would have decided: "No one will be integrated. We will leave these 14 million people in camps to keep the revisionist claim to Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia alive as an open wound."
The United Nations would have founded a dedicated relief agency that sustains these camps to this day. The camps would have grown into huge, independent cities of misery. Because the status of "expellee" would have been inherited, well over 100 million people in Central Europe would be living today, eighty years later, as stateless refugees in the third and fourth generation, sustained by UN rations and educated in hate schools in the spirit of armed revisionist struggle. From the camps, which are virtually uncontrollable from the outside, radicals would regularly fire rockets at Breslau or Stettin, while millions of descendants worldwide would financially support the struggle and organize demonstrations under their flag.
Neighboring countries would also have been drawn in: the Netherlands thrown into internal turmoil like Lebanon, France devastated by civil war like Syria and half depopulated.
The European continent would never have found peace. There would have been no Economic Miracle, no European Coal and Steel Community, no European Union, and no reconciliation with Poland or France. Europe would have remained a permanent powder keg, entangled in an endless spiral of terror, retaliation, and misery.
The Delicate Scales of Diplomacy
A look at European postwar history also teaches a second lesson, however: reconciliation is a highly sensitive process that must not be misunderstood as unilateral weakness. If a historical waiver—such as the painful German waiver of the eastern territories—is not appreciated by the other side as a common foundation for a new beginning, but is instead seen as appeasement that invites revanchist counter-demands (as occurred in 2003 under Poland’s Morawiecki government), the delicate psychology of reconciliation is placed at risk. For reconciliation presupposes that both sides close the files of the past, do not misinterpret generosity as a permanent moral debt, and focus on what now connects them and on "Never Again."
How remarkably European growth at the grassroots level functions is demonstrated by a look at social reality. Well over 2.2 million Poles and people of Polish descent live fully integrated in Germany today, proving the high cultural compatibility and seamless merging of European peoples—provided that polarizing disruptive influences from politics and the media remain moderate.
Reconciliation Instead of the Preservation of Misery
The comparison with German postwar history is by no means intended to play off old injustices against one another. On the contrary, it affirms the correct management of a European postwar order that places the individual and their right to a self-determined future at the center, not the abstract collective or territory.
True peace does not grow out of preserving enemy stereotypes and clinging to unrealistic promises of return, but out of the pragmatic willingness to respect the heritage of the past in order to give the living peace and dignity. Western Europe’s historical lesson reads: Integration is not treason to the homeland, but the beginning of peace. As long as the Middle East refuses this insight and subordinates the fate of the individual to the power interests of autocratic elites, millions of people remain the hostages of a policy that places the ashes of history above the lives of their own children.
Like any other analysis that supports the firm legal position of the Israeli nation (not that of the Netanyahu government!) , this article will routinely be sharply criticized by some readers. Yet today, one can discuss such extremely controversial events as the 1948 war with AI, receiving a fairly balanced presentation—to the limits of possible objectivity—and, if necessary, corrections of flawed, one-sided, or inaccurate positioning. This paradisiacal (!) state of affairs will only last as long as influential enemies of freedom have not yet succeeded in having AI programmed with the same one-sided partisanship that has already replaced the strict orientation toward truth, fairness, and stringent logic in the mainstream media.