Israel was not founded because of the Holocaust. The Zionist movement had been working for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine since the late nineteenth century, and the British Mandate of Palestine had been administering the territory since 1920. But the Holocaust transformed the political environment in which the question of a Jewish state was decided. The murder of approximately one third of the world’s Jews provided the final and decisive case for international support of partition, and the United Nations vote of 29 November 1947 cannot be understood except in the immediate post-Holocaust moral and political context.
The displaced persons crisis
At the end of the war, several hundred thousand Jewish survivors were held in displaced persons camps in Allied-occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy. They had no homes to return to. Many of those who attempted to return to their former homes in Poland, Lithuania, or Hungary were met with hostility or violence, of which the Kielce pogrom of July 1946 is the most-cited example. The Jewish Agency, the British, the Americans, and the relief organisations were faced with the question of where these survivors were to go. Most wanted to go to Palestine. The British, who held the Mandate, restricted Jewish immigration to a small annual quota under the 1939 White Paper. The result was a sustained illegal immigration operation, the Aliyah Bet, in which survivors were transported to Palestine on improvised vessels, intercepted by the Royal Navy, and often interned in camps in Cyprus.
The political turning point
The British government, exhausted by the war and unable to maintain order between the Jewish and Arab populations of Palestine, returned the Mandate to the United Nations in February 1947. The UN Special Committee on Palestine recommended partition into a Jewish state and an Arab state with an internationally administered Jerusalem. The General Assembly voted on 29 November 1947 to accept partition. The Jewish Agency accepted the partition plan. The Arab Higher Committee and the surrounding Arab states rejected it.
The founding
The State of Israel was declared on 14 May 1948 by David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency. The declaration was made on the day the British Mandate formally expired. Within hours, the surrounding Arab states declared war and invaded the territory of the new state. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War lasted until early 1949 and resulted in Israel’s establishment, expanded territory beyond the partition plan boundaries, and the displacement of approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs. The two events, the Holocaust in Europe and the founding of Israel in Palestine, became inseparable in the political and historical memory of both peoples, and they remain inseparable today.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards