Zionism History, Theory and Practice

Part 2: Creating Jewish Migrants to Palestine

Migration of the Jewish population of Europe to Palestine prior to the Second World War was slow and somewhat sporadic.  Many Jews living in Eastern, Central and Western Europe faced various degrees of open discrimination and anti-Semitism.  However, they did find enhanced economic freedom to pursue trade and business in these countries.  As a result, the Jewish communities prospered to a degree that that had been impossible under the conditions their parents experienced before fleeing Czarist Russia. 

Conditions for Jews had also changed in Russia following the overthrow of the Czar and the advent of the Soviet Union in 1917.  The new Soviet state officially banned anti-Semitism and many leaders of the Communist Party came from Jewish backgrounds.  Jews were therefore full participants in the building of the new socialist state.

The Jews who had left Russia for non-European countries, like their Soviet and European counterparts, felt little incentive to relocate to the Middle East.  Jews in North America and Europe often faced discrimination and some degree of anti-Semitism.  However, these conditions were not sufficiently serious to cause many to want to relocate to the Jewish settler communities being set up in Palestine during this period. 

The Zionist project to establish a Middle Eastern Jewish state therefore had a problem attracting the Jewish migrants it needed.  Without wholesale Jewish immigration the prospects for creating a Jewish state Palestine were quite dim.  In 1931 the estimated Jewish population in Palestine was less than 175 thousand, less than one tenth of the Arab population of the area.  By contrast, in the same period the Jewish population of Europe, including the Soviet Union was about eight to nine million.  Jews living elsewhere, such as in North, Central and South America, numbered in the neighbourhood of six million.  As the 1930s began, only a tiny fraction of Jews in the Diaspora had chosen to go to Palestine as settlers. 

Before the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany during the 1930s, Jews had by and large decided to stay where they were.  There were likely a number of reasons for this.  Some were obviously doing well enough economically and saw a better future by staying put.  Most identified as citizens of these new countries and saw them as their new homes.  For various reasons Zionism at this time was not a majority trend among Jews in Europe and other western countries. 

Nazism and the Second World War were responsible for completely changing this dynamic at least for European Jews.  The attempted genocide of European Jewry by the Nazi regime killed almost three quarters of the Jews in the countries and areas occupied by the German army.  By 1945 there were fewer than two and a half million Jews left in Europe.  Most of those did not want to stay. 

The Zionist theory that Jews could not live safely among nations of non-Jews seemed to have been borne out by the bitter experience of European Jewry.  Some Jews concluded that they could not live in peace in the ethnically homogeneous countries of Europe.  Others understandably did not want to live there any longer.  The experience was too bitter.  The result was a significant exodus of Jews from Eastern and Central Europe. 

Many of these post-war Jewish emigrants simply chose to leave Europe.  A large number ended up in North America.  The US to this day has the largest Jewish population of any country, including Israel.  However, a significant number of Jewish migrants from Europe went to the British mandated territory of Palestine.  By doing so they became part of the Zionist project and in fact for the first time made that undertaking possible. 

In 1931 prior to the war, the Jewish population in Palestine consisted of fewer than 175,000 people.  Jewish immigration from Europe during the Nazi period and immediately following the war raised the Jewish population in Palestine by 1950 to 1.2 million.  This represented a six-fold increase in the Jewish population in Palestine.  Thus, the influx of Jews to Palestine during this period finally produced a situation where the Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine were almost equal.  The Nazi persecution of the Jews therefore was the single event that created the conditions for the partition of Palestine into two states one for Jews and one for Palestinian Arabs.

The partition of Palestine by the United Nations in 1947 was proposed to be a solution to the problem of anti-Semitism.  The anti-Semitism that produced the genocidal murder of three quarters of European Jewry, according Zionist theory, could only be solved through the physical removal of Jews from the society of non-Jews.  The great powers that bullied the United Nations into creating an exclusionary Jewish state in Palestine bought into that theory.  In doing so they by implication endorsed the Nazi point of view that coexistence of Jews and non-Jews in a single society was neither desirable nor possible.  Over the next sixty years that theory would be tested both within the Jewish state and in the other societies that accepted post-WWII Jewish immigration.

 

Next: The failed experiment