Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

That linkage seemed to me to be the most damaging part of his speech. The Arabs had long complained that they were forced to pay the price of the Jews’ near eradication by Europe, which dumped the survivors in Palestine. That narrative denied three thousand years of unbroken Jewish connection to our land. It overlooked the fact that Jews had always

Organized gangs of Arabs attacked unprotected and unarmed Jewish settlements, and efforts were made to prevent additional European Jews from seeking asylum in Palestine.

By the thirties, the decisive fact was that the growth of Palestinian Jewry was not yet sufficient to change the basic Jewish condition. In 1930, the population of Jewish Palestine constituted little more than one percent of world Jewry. For most Zionists, the goal of statehood remained a long-term pious wish. Those who saw sovereignty as a near-te

Israel, on the other hand, was prepared to extend full citizenship to whatever number of Arabs remained in the Jewish state. Although many Jews surely preferred a smaller, rather than a larger, Arab minority, the official Jewish organizations took no steps to assure a reduction in the Arab population in general, although Israeli military commanders