Germany
The situation in Germany after World War II was dire. Millions of Germans were homeless from Allied bombing campaigns that razed entire cities. And millions more Germans living in Poland and East Prussia became refugees when the Soviet Union expelled them. With the German economy and government in shambles, the Allies concluded that Germany needed to be occupied after the war to assure a peaceful transition to a post-Nazi state.
What the Allies never intended, though, was that their temporary solution to organize Germany into four occupation zones, each administered by a different Allied army, would ultimately lead to a divided Germany, until the fall of the Soviet Union.
Korea
For centuries before the division, the peninsula was a single, unified Korea, ruled by generations of dynastic kingdoms. Occupied by Japan after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and formally annexed five years later, Korea chafed under Japanese colonial rule for 35 years—until the end of World War II, when its division into two nations began.
The decision that was made—really, without the Koreans involved—between the Soviet Union and the United States to divide Korea into two occupation zones.
Palestine
United Nations Resolution 181, resolution passed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1947 that called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with the city of Jerusalem as a corpus separatum (Latin: “separate entity”) to be governed by a special international regime.
Palestine had been governed by Great Britain since 1922.
Over the past century Palestine has been carved up, walled-in and filled with hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements and military checkpoints.
During World War I, Britain made several conflicting agreements to gain the support of various groups in the Middle East. Most notably was the Balfour Declaration – a public pledge promising the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
On October 31, 1917, British forces conquered Palestine from the Ottoman-Turks, ending 1,400 years of Islamic rule over the region. In 1920, it began its 28-year rule over British Mandate Palestine.
The opening words of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, addressed to the Rothschilds, represented the first public expression of support for Zionism by a major political power. The term "national home" had no precedent in international law, and was intentionally vague as to whether a Jewish state was contemplated. The intended boundaries of Palestine were not specified, and the British government later confirmed that the words "in Palestine" meant that the Jewish national home was not intended to cover all of Palestine.
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| The 3rd World War was planned in 1871. |
