Several decades before World War Two, a movement began in Europe among its Jewish population known as Zionism, which believed that the Jewish people were a separate one, and had the need for a state to govern the Jewish nation within it. This came as a result of the rampant antisemitism in Europe at the time, even in western countries such as France, much less in eastern Europe in places like Russia and Poland. After some deliberation, the Zionist Organization (now World Zionist Organization, whose emblem is below), an umbrella organization for all organized Zionists in Europe, determined that the Zionist state should be established in what was then Palestine, to which European Jews had already been emigrating in what are known as aliyah, or waves of immigration into the region of Palestine, starting in the 1880s and carrying on until the mid-1900s.
The idea of moving to Palestine and forming a Jewish state appealed to many Jews, be they Zionists or not, due to the collective heritage that Jews across Europe shared; however, the problem of international recognition was present in the mind of Zionist leaders, who secured the “Balfour Declaration” from the British during World War One, which announced that Britain would support the establishment of a Jewish home state in the Arab region of Palestine. After WWI, the territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire were divided between Britain and France, with the former being mandated (put in control of without making it a colony) the region of Palestine until 1948.
Afterwards, during the 1930s, the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, under the hand of Adolf Hitler, and Jews in Nazi Germany began to face further persecution, having been made scapegoats by the Nazis for Germany’s failings and struggles over the past two decades. During this period of the European Jews fled the continent, many went to the British Mandate in Palestine, having somewhere deemed safe (despite the German embassy flying the Nazi swastika in Jerusalem, a holy city in what was then Palestine and is now Israel and the West Bank). In 1939, World War Two began, and with it, Hitler’s Final Solution, to remove the Jewish people from Nazi territory (and, therefore, most if not all of Europe) so that they could not hinder German success. Unfortunately, this “removal” became genocide not only of the Jewish people, but of anybody deemed “undesirable” by the Nazi regime, including homosexuals, disabled persons, and gypsies, among others. It was not until the end of the war, with the Nazi defeat approaching, that the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed by the invading Allied powers. The outcry that came afterwards was enormous, but despite this seeming support for the Jewish people in Europe, displaced Jews did not receive a great deal of help from the organizations put into place to allow DPs (discussed here) to return to their homes.
As a result, many of the survivors of the Holocaust emigrated from Europe to the United States and Palestine, as a result of the undeniable sense that not only were the Jewish people different from the various European nationalities, but they were – clearly – unwanted and unwelcome in a very definitive manner. In a perverse way, Hitler’s goal – the removal of the Jews from Europe – was accomplished, but in a manner that granted the Jewish people a level of autonomy and relative security that was unprecedented in Europe upon the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. Had it not been for the events of and reaction to the Holocaust, it can be argued that the state of Israel might not exist today, or, at least, it would certainly not be the same state that it is today, in the modern geopolitical landscape, or that of the Cold War.
