The creation of the State of Israel is one of the most significant events of the 20th century and it gave the international Jewish community a homeland of their own after feeling like aliens and experiencing anti-Semitism throughout much of Europe. The events of World War II made the demand for a Jewish homeland in Palestine much more plausible. However, in order to create a homeland for the international Jewish community, part of Palestine had to be carved out for this to become a reality. As a result, the existence of Israel has caused a great deal of resentment from Arabs, in particular Palestinian Arabs who felt that their homeland was stolen from them by outsiders. This has led to ongoing communal fighting between Jews and Arabs which …show more content…
Theodore Herzl was not the creator of Zionism in general as there were people in the Zionist movement before him, however he did create the global Zionist movement through a book he wrote titled the The Jewish State that called for a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. Herzl’s actions allowed the movement overtime to gain a great deal of support from the international Jewish community and the political and financial backing it needed in order to further the Jewish agenda (Yambert 91). The origins of Herzl’s creation of the global Zionist movement was his disgust of the treatment of a Jewish army officer in the French military who was wrongly accused of giving classified information to the rival Germans (Yambert 92). This incident lit a match to the already existing anti-Semitic tensions and it resulted in anti-Jewish rioting throughout France (Yambert 92). These events led Herzl to conclude that Jews and Gentiles would never be able to live in peace amongst each other and it gave him the idea to expand the Zionist movement internationally (Yambert 92). After the first Zionist global conference meeting in Switzerland, the idea of the Jewish people settling in Palestine came into fruition and Herzl until his death made his case throughout Europe, however he found the most support for his position in England (Yambert 93). The Zionist movement in England perhaps gave the British government ideas for their future …show more content…
World War II is probably considered by many to be the deadliest war in human history mainly due to the amount of civilian casualties throughout the duration of the war. When Adolf Hitler took power in Germany the Nazi government he controlled made it clear early on that anyone was not a member of “Aryan” race would subjected to harsh treatment and the main target of the Nazi regime were members of the Jewish community. German Jews and then eventually European Jews as a whole due to Germany’s domination of Europe were subjected to discriminatory treatment which eventually morphed into genocide as the war went on. After the discovery of Nazi concentration camps, the Western world due to the guilt it felt over the actions another Western nation cleared up all of the confusion that had been generated over what the eventual fate of Palestine would be, came to a decision in which the American Jewish community also played a role by getting the United States involved in the Palestine debate, made the decision to grant a portion of Palestine to the international Jewish community to be known as the State of Israel. (Cleveland 246-247). This was not without backlash because the local Palestinian Arabs not only felt betrayed by the British but hundreds of thousands of them were either pushed out of the newly Jewish controlled territory or they fled (Cleveland 251). These events eventually lead to the first