Den intellektuelle giganten Walter Laqueur har bedrevet litt kontrafaktisk historieskriving.

I “Disraelia: A Counterfactual History, 1848-2008″ byr han på et alternativt scenario for Midtøsten, hvor en jødisk stat blir etablert allerede på 1800-tallet. Under helt andre forutsetninger enn situasjonen var i 1948, over et større geografisk område og med et radikalt annerledes resultat - for regionen og staten selv. Dette er meget interessant lesning, slik kontrafaktisk historie ofte er. Men det ligger jo selvfølgelig i sakens natur at scenariet er omgitt av enkelte viktige “dersom”.

Som han selv skriver mot slutten:

… there is much reason to believe that this state, given a high birth rate, would have some sixty million inhabitants at the beginning of the 21st century. It would have advanced industries, leading the world in fields such as nuclear and computer technologies. It would be the fifth-largest oil producer in the world, economically reasonably healthy with a growth rate of 6-8 percent, competitive with Europe, America and even Asia.

(…)

Could such a state have come into being? Perhaps—assuming that the great anti-Semitic wave would have occurred in Europe eighty years earlier than it did, provided the Ottoman empire would have disintegrated eighty years earlier, and provided that the Jews of Europe would have read the signs of the times correctly, and under wise leadership would have followed a policy leading them to peaceful solutions.

But Hitler appeared on the scene only in the next century, and the Ottoman empire survived another eight decades. The Jews did not emigrate when it might have been possible, because there seemed no cogent reason to do so at the time. There is a world of difference between 1848 and 1948; what was possible a century earlier was no longer possible a hundred years later. Jewish assimilation was much more advanced; Arab nationalism had awakened.

One century could have been the difference between a strong and rich state, universally respected, and a small and relatively weak country, isolated, without important natural resources. There is a vast difference between a state of six million inhabitants and one with sixty, fortified by considerable oil fields and reserves. In terms of Realpolitik as well as moral legitimacy, six million are bad, an invitation to all kind of calamities; sixty million are beyond good and evil, other categories apply.

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