Jews and Palestine

Arab Jews lived in Palestine, though in small numbers, before the organized waves of immigration that resulted from the rise of the global Zionist movement after the Basel Conference in Switzerland. That conference laid the foundation for the principles promoting immigration. It pressured Jews around the world to leave their main homelands forcibly and through deceptive and falsified means, based on mythical and distorted biblical and Torah-based narratives—such as the slogans “A land without a people for a people without a land,” “God’s chosen people,” and “the Promised Land.”

The formation of groups like the “Lovers of Zion” in the 1880s led to the growth of “national” sentiment among Jews and support for Jewish farmers in Syria and Palestine. Additionally, the use of terrorist methods such as bombings among Jewish communities in countries like Iraq and Egypt, as well as the rise of separatist and racist tendencies in Russia and Germany after the rise of Nazism, forced tens of thousands of Jews to leave their home countries and immigrate to Palestine.

Jewish immigration campaigns from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Arab countries began early, at the end of the 19th century, and took the form of European colonialism then. Thus, we see them intensify and become more organized after the end of World War I in 1914 and the victory of the British and French European colonial powers, with military and political support from the British Empire. The immigration continued to increase during the 1930s and after World War II and the victory of the Allied Powers over Nazism.

Following the partition resolution in November 1947, the features of Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine became increasingly clear and took shape. Its military, political, and economic institutions became entrenched in the form of a state within Palestine under British support and sponsorship, until the empire relinquished Palestine on May 15, 1948, and exited the international stage as a leading power, replaced by American imperialism as the victorious force of World War II.

Palestine witnessed six waves of Zionist settler immigration from the 19th century until the end of World War II, including Jewish migrations from Germany and the Netherlands.