History of Israel
What is the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel?
The land of Israel has always been integral to Jewish religious, cultural and national life and remains so to this day. In the Jewish tradition, the land of Israel is central to the covenantal relationship between the Children of Israel and God. The Five Books of Moses, known to Jews as the Torah, tells how the twelve tribes of Israel, the precursors to the Jewish people, entered the land having been freed from slavery in Egypt. The first unified Israelite kingdom was founded under the rule of King Saul, around 1000 BCE. His successor David established Jerusalem as his capital. There, David’s son Solomon built the First Jewish Temple as the centre of Jewish religious life. The First Temple stood until 586 BCE, when it was destroyed by the Babylonians. The Second Temple was consecrated on the same spot in 520 BCE, and stood at the centre of Jewish life and worship until it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.
The destruction of both the First and Second Temples were catastrophic events in Jewish history, in which thousands of Jews were killed and exiled, and which led to the existence of Jewish communities around the world. But even after the destruction of the Second Temple, there was a continuous presence of Jews in Israel. Throughout the centuries, major Jewish cultural achievements were made by Jews who lived there. These include the compilation of the Jerusalem Talmud, dating to the 4th century, and the establishment of Tzfat as a centre for the development of the Jewish mystical tradition in the 16th century.
Jews around the world made remembering the Temple in Jerusalem and the hope for an eventual return to the land of Israel – also referred to as ‘Zion’ – central to all aspects of their religious worship and liturgy. Jewish prayers are always conducted facing towards Jerusalem. For most Jews through the ages, travelling to Israel was an impossible dream. In their prayers, traditions, poetry and scriptures, Jews from around the world expressed their yearning and longing to return.
What is the significance of Jerusalem to Jews, Christians and Muslims?
As the capital of the first Jewish commonwealth, founded by David, and as the site of both the First and Second Temples, Jerusalem is the principal site of Jewish religious importance. It is a central symbol for the national aspirations of the Jewish people. Jerusalem has always been the focal point of the Jewish dream of an eventual return to their homeland. The city also symbolises the prophetic vision of a future age of justice and peace. The holiest place in Jerusalem for Jews is the Temple Mount (known as Har Habayit in Hebrew, and al Haram al Sharif in Arabic), which is the site of both the First and Second Temples. Nothing remains today of the Temple structure, which was destroyed by the Romans. Today the most sacred place for Jews is the Western Wall, known in Hebrew as the Kotel. This is a remnant of an outer wall that supported the Temple Mount. Jewish tradition holds that this is the closest accessible spot to the ‘Holy of Holies’, which was the holiest part of the Temple. Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since the mid-1800s.
Jerusalem also has special significance to Christians. According to the Gospels, Jesus preached and performed miracles in the city and in and around the Temple. Jesus’s birthplace, Bethlehem, is also close to the city. In the New Testament, the capture, trial and crucifixion of Jesus also took place in Jerusalem. As a result, Jerusalem is rich in sites of pilgrimage for Christians. These include the ‘Via Dolorosa’, the path taken by Jesus on the way to his crucifixion; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus’s body is believed to have been placed before his resurrection; and the Chapel of the Ascension, from where he was believed to have ascended to heaven.
Jerusalem’s importance to Muslims dates to the earliest days of Islam. Initially Mohammed had his followers pray in the direction of Jerusalem to associate the faith of Islam with the monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Christianity that preceded it. Whilst Mohammed later shifted the focus of the Islamic faith towards Mecca, Islam retained a connection to Jerusalem. The city came under Islamic control in 638 CE, and the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque were built on the site of the ancient Jewish Temple. In Islamic tradition, Jerusalem came to be associated with a miraculous night journey made by Mohammed from Mecca that is described in the Qur’an. The al-Aqsa Mosque is the third holiest site in the world for Muslims, after Mecca and Medina.
Today Jerusalem is the thriving, modern capital of Israel with a population of over 800,000. The walled Old City of Jerusalem has four quarters: Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Armenian. Members of all faiths have access to their holy sites, and each faith is authorised by the Israeli government to administer and control its own holy places.
What is Zionism?
Zionism is the national movement of the Jewish people, calling for sovereign Jewish life in the land of Israel. The origin of the word ‘Zionism’ is the biblical word ‘Zion’, often used as a synonym for Jerusalem and the land of Israel.
Historically, Zionism as a political movement emerged as part of the growth of national movements in the last quarter of the 19th century. Jews aspired to establish an independent and sovereign entity in the land of their ancestors. Zionist leaders, most notably the Hungarian-born Theodor Herzl, hoped that the fulfilment of such aspirations would end centuries of anti-Jewish persecution in Europe and allow for the renewal of Jewish culture, language and traditions.
The persecution of Jews was a constant of European life in the medieval period. Jews were demonised as the killers of Christ, banned from most professions, frequently confined to ghettos, periodically subjected to pogroms and expelled from one country after another. Many Jews hoped the onset of modernity, which led to emancipation for Jews in many countries, would bring about an end to anti-Jewish prejudice in Europe. However, in the modern period anti-Semitism did not disappear. It took on new forms, such as the belief that Jews were racially inferior, or involved in a global conspiracy. Jews in Europe were subject to waves of pogroms and persecution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Herzl himself was driven to found the Zionist movement after witnessing anti-Semitism in France. In a famous case in 1894, a Jewish captain in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, was falsely convicted of treason. Dreyfus was publicly disgraced at a ceremony in Paris, where crowds of onlookers chanted ‘Death to the Jews’, only later to be acquitted.
Herzl was the first to bring the Jewish need for an independent sovereign state to the world’s attention. He turned the historical Jewish dream of returning to Israel into a modern political movement. He convened the first World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. As a democratic movement from its inception, the broad umbrella of Zionism included secular and religious Jews, as well as those subscribing to political views from across the spectrum. Threads of the wide range of views within Zionism can still be seen today in the complex party political structure within the State of Israel.
The establishment of Israel in 1948 marked the realisation of Herzl’s vision of a Jewish state in their historical homeland, where Jews would be free from persecution and able to develop their national identity. Zionism retains its relevance today as the Jewish state still seeks to build a national home that is at peace with its neighbours and able to fulfil its potential as a cultural and spiritual beacon for the Jewish people. Most Jews around the world consider themselves supporters of Zionism, in that they support the existence and development of Israel as the state and homeland for the Jewish people.
At various times, certain groups have tried to delegitimise Zionism by falsely smearing it as a racist ideology, or inaccurately characterising it as a colonial movement. One of the premises of Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people –who have a shared language, culture, history and historical homeland – constitute a nation. As such, they have equal rights to other nations, including the right to self-determination. To describe Zionism as a form of racism is to discriminate against Jews by uniquely denying their rights to national self-determination.
Zionists sought to end the status of Jews as a persecuted minority, by re-establishing a Jewish-majority state in Palestine through immigration, settlement and peaceful coexistence with the local Arabs. Most of the Jews who moved to Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel came not as colonisers, but as refugees, fleeing persecution from various parts of Europe. Jews did not seek to subjugate the local population, but hoped that the lives of all the residents of the land would be improved by the influx of Jewish immigration. The early Zionists believed that there was ample room in Palestine to support Jewish immigration, without compromising the interests and rights of the local Arab population. The area was a relatively small and underdeveloped part of the Ottoman Empire, with no independent government or unified political structure. Jews did not enter Palestine by force, but purchased land and built new communities.
Mainstream Zionists have always believed that a non-Jewish minority would live alongside the Jewish people as citizens with full and equal rights. This principle was enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which promised Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel ‘full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.’ Today that vision is expressed in Israel. Non-Jewish residents of the State of Israel have citizenship by right and approximately 20 per cent of the citizens of Israel are Arabs or other minorities. The spouses and children of Israeli citizens, whatever their faith, are also entitled to citizenship.
In order to fulfil its goal of being a homeland and refuge for the Jewish people, Israel grants citizenship to any Jew who wishes to live in Israel. This right is extended to the children and grandchildren of Jews and their spouses, even if they themselves are not Jewish. In some cases, it is also possible to become a citizen of Israel through naturalisation.
When did Jews return to Israel?
Since the late 19th century, Jews have come from all parts of the world to live in Israel. Jews use the Hebrew word aliya’, which means ‘going up’, to refer to the act of moving to Israel. Whilst most Jews in Israel were either massacred or dispersed following the failed Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans in the 2nd Century, Jews continued to live in the area in smaller numbers. In 1880, the overall population in the area that today makes up Israel, the West Bank and Gaza was approximately 570,000. Arabs made up the majority of the population, with the Jewish population in the area standing at around 10,000. Most Jews lived in Jerusalem, where there was a Jewish majority, with smaller communities in Tzfat, Tiberias, Hebron and Jaffa.
The first significant movements for Jewish settlement in Palestine came in response to an upsurge in anti-Jewish violence in Russia (the pogroms) following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. This so-called ‘First Aliya’ saw the Jewish population of Palestine swell to approximately 25,000 by 1903, with many of the immigrants establishing new agricultural communities.
The Zionist movement gathered momentum among the Jews of Europe in the early 20th Century. A second wave of immigrants, fleeing great poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe, particularly Russia and Romania, arrived in Palestine between 1904 and 1914. In total, around 40,000 immigrants arrived in Palestine, who were young, secular and inspired by socialist ideals. They sought agricultural work, believing that both personal and national redemption could be achieved through physical toil on the land of Israel. The life they chose was beset with great poverty, disease and hardship. Many left in disappointment, but by 1914 the Jewish population had risen to 90,000.
In 1917 Palestine was captured from the Ottomans by Britain, which supported Jewish aspirations to create a national home. Britain was granted a mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations in 1922, the terms of which included support for Jewish immigration. Growing anti-Semitic hostility throughout Europe spurred increasing numbers of Jewish refugees to move to Palestine throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Many Jews were murdered in Ukraine in the aftermath of the First World War. Throughout the 1920s, other European countries enacted anti-Semitic legislation. In 1924, Poland began to impose severe economic restrictions on its three million Jews. But as more and more Jews faced discrimination in Europe, doors were closed elsewhere, including new restrictions on immigration to the United States. In 1933, the Nazi Party came to power in Germany and immediately began enforcing anti-Semitic laws. This created a new and unprecedented wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine. By 1936, the Jewish population of Palestine was approaching 400,000, close to 30 per cent of the total. However in 1939, with war looming, and Britain keen not to alienate the Arab world, Jewish immigration to Palestine was severely restricted by the British.
By 1945, the Nazi Holocaust had exterminated approximately six million Jews in Europe. After the Second World War, well over 100,000 surviving Jews were in displaced persons camps. Tens of thousands of these survivors attempted to bypass the British blockade to enter Palestine. Many of these displaced persons failed to reach Palestine and were forcibly interned by the British in Cypriot detention camps. After the State of Israel was established in 1948, its doors were opened to these refugees. Israel also absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jews who left as refugees from countries in the Middle East and North Africa as a result of the War of Independence. In 1949, 45,000 Jews arrived in Israel from Yemen, and in 1951-52, a further 130,000 arrived from Iraq.
Since Israel’s independence the Jewish population has swelled, both through immigration and natural increase. Major waves of immigration have come from Morocco (250,000), North America (200,000) and Ethiopia (76,000), as well as significant contingents from South America and Europe. During the Communist era, Jews in the Soviet Union were prevented from moving to Israel. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, close to one million Jews moved to Israel from the former Soviet Union. Some 34,000 Jews have moved to Israel from Britain since 1948. By 2013, Israel’s population exceeded 8 million, of whom 6 million were Jewish.
How did the modern State of Israel come into being?
The objective of establishing a Jewish homeland in Israel gained strong international support with the Balfour Declaration, issued by the British government in 1917. The British government’s decision to support the foundation of a national home for the Jewish people was made known in the form of a letter written by then-foreign secretary Lord Balfour to Zionist leader Lord Rothschild. In September 1922, the League of Nations granted Britain a Mandate over Palestine, noting the ‘historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine’ and the ‘grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.’ Under the British Mandate, three-quarters of the territory east of the Jordan River formed the Emirate of Transjordan (later the Kingdom of Jordan), and was closed to Jewish immigration. The remaining territory remained open to Jewish immigration.
As the Second World War drew closer, the British government, fearing the loss of allies in the Arab and Muslim world, moved away from supporting Jewish immigration to Palestine. In 1939, as the threat to the Jews of Europe reached new heights, Britain issued the MacDonald White Paper, in which Jewish immigration was severely restricted.
The Holocaust and its aftermath
Between 1939 and 1945, the German Nazi Party, with its allies throughout Europe, murdered approximately six million of Europe’s 11 million Jews. The Holocaust was a genocide carried out with ruthless efficiency on an industrial scale throughout Europe. Palestinian Arab leaders welcomed the Nazis’ rise to power, believing that in opposition to the British and the Jews, they shared common interests. The most senior Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, cooperated with the Nazis, and in November 1941, met personally with Hitler in an attempt to forge an alliance. Meanwhile, 30,000 Palestinian Jews joined the British army to fight against the Nazis, despite the restrictions of the White Paper preventing Jewish immigration to Palestine.
After the war, many thousands of Jewish refugees who had survived the Holocaust were in refugee camps in Europe. Having been robbed of all property and rights, most were unable and unwilling to return to their countries of origin. Many who tried to return after the war were subjected to further attacks. Most of the refugees expressed their desire to move to Palestine.
In this climate the Jewish Agency, which represented the Jewish community in Palestine, with American political support, called for 100,000 Jews to be allowed to enter Palestine. The British government refused to agree. This led to illegal Jewish immigration and a direct confrontation between the British government and the Jews of Palestine. Some Jewish extremist groups, the Irgun and Lehi, began to attack British military targets. The British forcefully suppressed all acts of Jewish resistance, at one stage arresting 3,000 people. Over 50,000 Jews who had survived the Holocaust and attempted to enter Palestine were forcibly interned in British camps in Cyprus. In 1946, the leader of the Jews in Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, attempted to unite Jewish resistance forces. The agreement broke down after the Irgun undertook its most notorious act, the bombing of the British headquarters at the King David Hotel. The majority of Palestine’s Jews denounced this act.
The UN Partition Plan and the end of the Mandate
In 1947, the British turned the question of the future of Palestine over to the United Nations, which established the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to determine its future. The UN recommended partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem under international control. The plan would have created a Jewish state with a Jewish majority on the Mediterranean coast, western Galilee and Negev Desert. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly voted in favour of Resolution 181, to approve the UNSCOP plan, by 33 votes to 13. The Jewish Agency, representing the Jews of Palestine, accepted the plan, but the Arab Higher Committee, the Palestinian Arabs’ political representatives, rejected it. As the British Mandate formally ended, on 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel in line with the UN resolution.