Jillian Rubin
Jews in the Modern World
Professor Lesses
December 2, 2008
Founding of Israel
The foundation of Israel as a state was a very long process that took a long time to complete. Different countries had different perspectives as to what should happen to the Jewish survivors of the war. Britain was anti-Zionist, the prime minister of Britain did believe that it would be best for Jewish people to have their own state. Britain’s White Paper of May 1939 was a policy statement whose purpose was to decrease and ultimately end Jewish immigration to Palestine. However, Ben-Gurion planned that the Jewish Agency should adopt a policy of civil unrest against the British. There was a militant group called the Lech’i that launched an underground campaign against British immigration policy.
The U.S. played an important role in the foundation of Israel as a state. Later in 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered that the refugees had to be returned to their countries of origin (573). This had to be very difficult for the Jewish refugees because they probably had no intention for the most part of going back to their countries of origin. For the most part they wanted a complete exit from Europe.
Ernest Bevin thought that the thousands of Jewish people who had been displaced from the war should not go to Palestine but instead they should go to the United States. Franklin Roosevelt had doubts about a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine; however he outwardly expressed comradeship for the Zionist cause. The Prime Minister believed that there should be an Anglo-American committee to investigate the problem of refugees and then come up with a solution; the committee was made up of six American and six British members. London was rejecting the Anglo-American committee.
In May 1948, it was announced that Israel was now open to all Jews everywhere in the world and would “extend full equality to all its citizens without distinctions of religion, race, or gender” (594). This was a huge event because it took such a long time for Israel to become a state. The Arab states did not have a favorable reaction to Israel becoming a state. Right away there was an invasion by armies of five Arab nations (594). The Jews had to face the possibility of genocide because of the hatred that the Arab nations surrounding Israel had towards Jewish people.