The State of Israel was established by a vote of the United Nations General Assembly on 29 November 1947 and proclaimed independent on 14 May 1948. Around three years had passed since the liberation of Auschwitz. The connection between the Holocaust and the founding of Israel is real and important. It is also more complicated than it is sometimes made to sound, in either direction. Israel was not created as compensation for the Holocaust. The Zionist project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine had been underway for around fifty years before 1948 and had been making real progress for around thirty. What the Holocaust did was concentrate the political will, both Jewish and international, that turned the long-running Zionist project into a state.
The Zionist movement before 1939
Political Zionism was launched by Theodor Herzl in 1897 with the publication of Der Judenstaat and the convening of the First Zionist Congress at Basel. The movement was a response to the antisemitism of late nineteenth-century Europe, particularly the Dreyfus Affair in France and the pogroms in the Russian Empire. Its central proposal was that the Jewish people, denied a normal national life by their historical exclusion in Europe, required a state of their own. The proposed location was Palestine, the historic Jewish homeland under Ottoman rule.
Jewish settlement in Palestine had been growing through the late nineteenth century. The First Aliyah of 1882 to 1903, the Second Aliyah of 1904 to 1914, and successive waves through the inter-war period brought the Jewish population of Palestine from around 25,000 in 1882 to around 500,000 by 1939. The Yishuv, as the Jewish community in Palestine called itself, was building economic, cultural and political institutions: the Hebrew University, the Histadrut trade union federation, the kibbutz movement, the Hebrew language as a vernacular, and the Haganah self-defence organisation that would become the Israel Defence Forces.
The British Mandate
Britain took control of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in 1917 and held it as a League of Nations Mandate from 1922. The Balfour Declaration of November 1917 had committed the British government to support a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. The mandate authority was supposed to facilitate the development of that national home while protecting the rights of the existing Palestinian Arab population. The two commitments turned out to be in tension, and British policy oscillated through the inter-war period between allowing Jewish immigration and restricting it under pressure from Arab violence and from broader British strategic interests in the region.
The 1939 White Paper restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 over the following five years and prohibited further Jewish immigration thereafter without Arab consent. The White Paper came into force at the moment Jewish refugees most needed somewhere to go. It remained in force throughout the war and was a central source of friction between the Yishuv and the British. Many of the most dramatic refugee episodes of the period, including the Struma in 1942 (a refugee ship turned back by the British and sunk by a Soviet submarine, with 768 lives lost) and the Patria explosion in Haifa harbour in 1940, came from the conflict between desperate Jewish refugees and a British policy that refused them entry.
The displaced persons
By the end of the war in May 1945, around 250,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria and Italy. They could not go home. The home communities in Poland, Hungary, Romania and the Baltic had been destroyed; what remained was often hostile, as the Kielce pogrom of July 1946 demonstrated. Most survivors did not want to return to the countries where their families had been murdered. The Allied governments had no clear plan for them.
Where the survivors wanted to go was, overwhelmingly, Palestine. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry of 1946 found that around 90 per cent of Jewish DPs wanted to settle in Palestine. The British, holding the Palestine Mandate and committed to the 1939 White Paper, refused to admit them in those numbers. The conflict produced the Bricha movement (the underground evacuation of Jewish survivors from Eastern Europe to the Mediterranean coast), the Aliyah Bet illegal immigration operation, and the famous Exodus 1947 incident in which 4,500 Jewish refugees on a ship from France were turned back from Haifa, returned to Hamburg, and re-interned in displaced persons camps in the British zone of Germany.
The political turn
The combination of the displaced persons crisis, the international moral pressure produced by the revealed scale of the Holocaust, and the practical impossibility of Britain continuing to hold Palestine under its existing arrangement, shifted international politics decisively. President Truman, under pressure from American Jewish opinion and the moral case from the camps, called publicly in 1945 for 100,000 Jewish refugees to be admitted to Palestine. Britain refused. By 1947 the British government had concluded that the mandate was no longer sustainable and referred the question to the new United Nations.
The UN partition plan of November 1947 proposed dividing Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem as an international zone. The Jewish leadership accepted. The Arab leadership rejected. War followed in stages: a civil war between Jewish and Palestinian Arab communities from December 1947, then a regional war from May 1948 when neighbouring Arab states intervened. The State of Israel was proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion on 14 May 1948, the day before the British Mandate formally ended. It was recognised by the United States within hours and by the Soviet Union within days. The 1948 war ended in armistice in 1949 with Israel holding around 78 per cent of mandatory Palestine.
The Holocaust survivors and Israel
The displaced persons came in waves. Around 250,000 Jewish DPs eventually reached Israel between 1948 and 1951, the great majority of them Holocaust survivors. They formed the foundation generation of the new state. Many of them never spoke of what they had been through; the Israeli culture of the founding generation was, famously, not interested in hearing about it, preferring the model of the new Hebrew Israeli to that of the European Jew of the diaspora. The shift came with the Eichmann Trial of 1961, in which survivor testimony was foregrounded for the first time in a public Israeli setting. After the Eichmann Trial the Israeli relationship to the Holocaust became central to the country’s public culture, and Yad Vashem, established in 1953, gained the prominence it has today.
What the connection is and is not
The connection between the Holocaust and the founding of Israel is sometimes invoked, particularly in modern political argument, in two opposite ways. One view holds that Israel was created as compensation for the Holocaust by the international community, and that this somehow undermines the historical legitimacy of the Jewish presence in the land. The other view holds that the Holocaust justifies, in moral terms, anything Israel does as a state. Both views are wrong, in different ways.
The historical record is more particular. The Zionist project preceded the Holocaust by half a century and would have continued without it. The Holocaust did not create the State of Israel; the Yishuv created it. What the Holocaust did was concentrate international and Jewish political will at the moment when the British Mandate was breaking down, making the partition plan and the establishment of the state possible at the moment they happened. Without the Holocaust, the Jewish state would probably have been established at some point in the second half of the twentieth century. With the Holocaust, it was established in 1948 by men and women, many of them Holocaust survivors themselves, who knew exactly what was at stake.
See also
- The Displaced Persons Crisis
- Adolf Eichmann
- The Holocaust and the Founding of Israel
- The Eichmann Trial 1961
- The Exodus 1947
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
Sources
- Anita Shapira, Israel: A History, Brandeis University Press, 2012
- Yehuda Bauer, Out of the Ashes: The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust European Jewry, Pergamon, 1989
- Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Henry Holt, 1991
- Idith Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel, University of California Press, 1998
- USHMM: Postwar