Comradeship // Freechat

The [Ottoman] empire would eventually collapse after its defeat in the first World War [...] It was during the final few decades of this dramatic collapse that a certain Austro-Hungarian thinker, Theodor Herzl, was planting the seeds of a new political movement that would change Palestinian history forever.

Convened in the Swiss city of Basel in 1897, the first Zionist congress included over 200 delegates from all over Europe. [...] While there were other Zionist and proto-Zionist movements preceding this which had settled in Palestine, such as Hibbat Zion, the Zionist congress was the first to organize and marshal the colonization efforts in a centralized and effective way.

In the wake of its defeat in WW1, the Ottoman empire was dissolved and its regions carved up and divided among various European colonial powers. In the Levant, Palestine and Jordan fell under the mandate of the British, while Syria and Lebanon to that of the French. The British entered Jerusalem in 1917, and Palestine officially became a mandate in 1922.

The mandate of Palestine provided a golden opportunity for the Zionist movement to achieve its aims. The British were far more responsive to Zionist goals than the Ottomans were, and had earlier produced the Balfour Declaration promising the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine [...] The British had no genuine sympathy for the plight of the historically oppressed Jewish people; Rather, they saw in the Zionist movement a mechanism through which British interests in the Levant and Suez could be realized.

Emboldened by the Balfour Declaration and supportive British governors, the Zionist movement ramped up its colonization efforts and established a provisional proto-state within a state in Palestine, called the Yishuv. While the Yishuv’s relationship with the British had its ups and downs, the British provided the Zionists with explicit as well as tacit sponsorship which would allow them to thrive. Meanwhile, they would harshly repress any Palestinian movement or organization while turning a blind eye to Zionist expansion, which by the end of the mandate enabled the conquest and mass destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages and neighborhoods.

Herzl’s WZO was created in 1897, and identified Palestine as the site of the future Jewish state. With its support, Zionist settlers began to migrate to Palestine. The WZO attempted to gain support for their project from the Ottoman Empire, but their efforts were in vain [...] With the outbreak of WWI, [...] Zionists found official support for their project from the British Empire. The British, then fighting the Ottomans, sought to colonize whatever territories they could seize from the evidently decaying empire.

In 1917, near the close of the war, the British issued the Balfour Declaration. Supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was clearly a component of the aim of claiming the formerly Ottoman-held territories, and would have world-historic consequences. Much of the supplementary support behind the Declaration from British gentiles was motivated by Evangelical Protestantism, which viewed it as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, and, significantly, an antisemitic desire to solve the so-called “Jewish Question” by encouraging Jewish people to leave Europe. Settler migration into Palestine grew significantly following WWI, and Israel as a settler-colonial nation began to emerge.

Under British rule in Mandatory Palestine, native Palestinians began to be displaced by the settlers, being excluded from the labor force and the purchase of land and property, which Zionist settlers confined to other settlers [...] From 1936 to 1939, Arabs revolted against British rule and Zionist settler-colonialism.

The British then issued the 1939 White Paper, restricting further Jewish immigration into Palestine. After WWII and the devastation of the Holocaust, Europe was convinced that their “Jewish Question” could only be answered by pushing Jewish people out of Europe and into a colonial outpost. And significant sections of the Jewish population were convinced the same

Zionists began to migrate into the settlements in even higher numbers, in defiance of the White Paper. Zionists even began to revolt against British rule, seeking to establish Israel as a state. By 1947, the UN created a plan to partition Palestine into two independent states and a neutral Jerusalem, though it failed to implement it. In response to the passage of the plan, the 1947–1948 civil war broke out between Zionists and Palestinians. By 1948, the state of Israel was established.