Fighting for your home: joining the Maquis?

[kkt]

I still think the writers were thinking of the Sinai as their immediate inspiration for the story. The Sudetenland crisis didn't directly involve the United States. Britain and France signed the treaty in which they guaranteed Czechoslovakia's independence, the U.S. didn't. The Sudentenland crisis was 55 years before DS9 was being written.
The U.S. mediated negotiation between Israel and Egypt in 1978, and settlers who didn't want to leave were on the U.S. evening news often in 1981-1983.

 

[Unicron]

It could be the writers took some measure of inspiration from both, but I think they're different scenarios. Israel was a sovereign state that went to war several times with its neighbors, while the Sudetenland was a portion of Austria-Hungary (bordering Germany) that had been carved away after WWI and effectively annexed by an emerging state (Czechoslovakia). It had a historically significant population of Germans and suffered a higher casualty rate during the Great War than some other areas of the Empire. As of February 1921, the German minority in the area comprised almost a quarter (23.5%) of the entire population then living in the Sudetenland under the Czech government.

The British and French also betrayed the Czechs in the hope of securing peace, even though they'd watched Hitler gobble up other territories without firing a shot. He probably expected to do the same in Poland, and that they wouldn't have the spine to finally stand up to him. But it's worth remembering there's a context to why they made bad choices: they were still recovering from the Great War and much of the British and French populations didn't want a renewed conflict, even against a historical enemy like Germany.

 

[kkt]

Modern Israel was a newly created state, but the Sinai was part of Egypt for ages. A principle of international law in the post-WW II world was that territorial changes do not result from wars, regardless of which side started or won the war.

Germany was a relatively new creation too, unified in 1871. German borders were still unsettled, and it was argued that Austria should have been part of Germany from the start.

I think the Sudentenland was the first territory that between-the-wars Germany gobbled up. They had violated some nonterritorial provisions of the peace treaty - remilitarized the Rhineland and reintroduced conscription, and the union with Austria happened already, but that was with the approval of Austria through a vote. While the vote was not completely honest, indications from opinion polls are that Austria's vote to merge with Germany would have got a healthy majority even in a totally honest vote. While the peace parties in Britain and France did renege on their guarantee to Czechoslovakia, they didn't have the benefit of hindsight to see that Hitler would gobble up territory after territory until the great powers went to war to stop it.

Yes, the British and French population and government were looking back at the Great War, every family having lost people, and at great expense, and gained nothing they could point to that made it worth while. Why, they wondered, didn't they let Austria-Hungary have Serbia? What's Serbia to them? An unimportant little country that can't control its assassins.