Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

Approximately 10,000 Eastern European Jews immigrated to Palestine, as compared to nearly a million Jews who immigrated to the United States.5 Most of the Jews of the First Aliyah had no realistic hope of establishing a Jewish nation in Palestine. Although some Jewish intellectuals, such as Leo Pinsker, had advocated “autoemancipation” as early as

However, there is already a fundamental difference from the past. In the past, a threatened Jewish community in Diaspora could hope only to sustain bearable losses and to live on by sufferance or flight. Israel has—and, through it, all Jews have—a major voice in its own fate. In the past, when Jews were destroyed, their wealth and achievement enric

The tensions between the Jewish Yishuv, the Arabs, and the British were escalating rapidly. There were riots, attacks, and counterattacks on all sides. The Arab residents of Palestine, whether they had just immigrated or had been there for generations, were not happy with the sudden return of the Jews. The Jewish residents were similarly unhappy wi

As we shall see, it was only after European Jews began to join their Sephardic cousins in Palestine that these Jewish refugees were able to mount any kind of defense against the religiously inspired violence