ISRAEL 1948 - Rebirth of the Jewish State ✡ ☀

• Report rights infringement
• published: 15 Jan 2014
• views: 4203

In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was falsely accused of selling military secrets; after a show trial he was imprisoned in solitary confinement on Devil's Island. Anti-Semitic mobs chanted "Death to the Jews." A year later, a notorious bigot named Karl Leuger was elected mayor Vienna. In 1986, appalled by these two events and fearing they signaled a dramatic worsening in Anti-Semitism in Europe, a young journalist named Theodor Herzl published a book called "The Jewish state", in which he argued that, to free themselves from oppression and violence, the Jewish people needed to regain political independence. In 1897 he founded the World Zionist Congress. With the defeat of the Ottoman empire in WW1, the British government obtained a mandate to govern Israel, then called by its Latin name, Palestine. In 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, claiming it would "look with favor...on the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people." Throughout the interwar period the Zionist movement gained momentum, building farms and kibbutzim, founding new cities, starting schools, hospitals and universities. It also came to reflect the political divisions of the age, with Labor Zionism, inspired by socialism, competing with the more conservative Revisionist movement. Both right and left-wing Zionist groups organized political activism and youth groups in the diaspora; Hashomer Hatzair, Poale Zion and Betar would all contribute to the anti-fascist struggle. Despite the increasing support it enjoyed it remained, the goal of a Jewish state remained a distant reality. Despite their official endorsement of the idea of a "national home for the Jewish people", the British government took no steps to honor this commitment; by 1939 it had reversed its policy completely. As pan-Arab nationalists expressed increasingly violent hostility to Zionism, the British sought to appease them by placing a virtual ban on Jewish immigration. As a result of the 1939 white paper, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees were prevented from entering the British mandate. In 1945 after the defeat of Nazi Germany, hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors remained homeless in displace persons' camps across Europe. When Jewish families tried to return to their former homes in Kielce, Poland, they were massacred. The US and UK had passed racist immigration quotas against Jews. Their lives in Europe destroyed, thousands of desperate survivors tried to emigrate to the British mandate, where the Zionist movement was still struggling for a Jewish state. The British labelled these refugees 'illegal immigrants' and imprisoned them in internment camps on Cyprus and in Haifa. Then, on 29 November 1947, the newly formed UN voted to partition the British mandate into two states- one Jewish, and one Arab. For the first time in two millennia, the Jewish people would be free. While Jews celebrated the UN decision by dancing in the streets of Tel-Aviv, extreme Arab nationalists were furious, declaring they would never except a Jewish state in the middle east, vowing to destroy it at birth and massacre its people. The armies of five countries now attacked a tiny country populated mainly with traumatized refugees; they expected a quick, sensational victory. Instead, the poorly armed young people of the Haganah and Palmach managed to defend the Jewish state and ensure its survival. One of those fighting was a Captain Abba Kovner of the Givati brigade, who had led the Vilna ghetto uprising against the Nazis. The reestablish of Israel in 1948 marked the end of centuries of brutal oppression in which Jews in both Europe and the middle east were deprived of basic civil rights, treated at best as second-class citizens and subject to arbitrary racist violence. Now, with a nation-state and army, the Jewish people could defend themselves. LONG LIVE ISRAEL ✡ ❤