The two greatest achievements of Zionism in this century are the commitment made by the British government in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the establishment of Israel in 1948.<\/p>\n
During World War I, the British wooed the Zionists in order to secure strategic control over Palestine and to gain the support of world Jewry for the Allied cause. The declaration, contained in a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour to a British Zionist leader, approved the establishment in Palestine of a “national home for the Jewish people.” As Palestine had passed from Turkish to British control, this provided the Zionists with the charter they had been seeking.” (1)<\/p>\n
After the war Zionism faced two critical setbacks. Russian Jewry, the traditional source of Zionist migration, was sealed off by the new Soviet regime. In addition, a dispute arose between the leader of American Zionism, Judge Louis Brandeis, and Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the man credited with obtaining the Balfour Declaration. The dispute involved both personal issues and an ideological debate over the future of Zionism. Weizmann’s “synthetic Zionism,” which advocated both political struggle and colonization, won out over Brandeis’s pragmatic approach, which concentrated on colonization without reference to future nationhood. Weizmann emerged as unchallenged leader, but Brandeis and his group seceded, and until World War II, American Jews directed the major part of their philanthropy to the relief of European Jews rather than to Palestine.<\/p>\n
In 1929, Weizmann set up the wider Jewish Agency, a body that harnessed the financial support of Jews who were willing to aid their brethren in Palestine but did not subscribe to the political goals of Zionism.<\/p>\n
During the period of the British mandate (1922-48), the Yishuv grew from 50,000 to 600,000 people. Most of the new immigrants were refugees from Nazi persecution in Europe. In 1935 a revisionist group led by Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky seceded from the Zionist movement and formed the New Zionist party. During the late 1930s, Jabotinsky, who advocated a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River, devoted himself to a fruitless campaign to arrange for the mass evacuation of European Jews to Palestine.<\/p>\n
Coexistence with the Arabs of Palestine became an increasingly intractable problem. Recurrent riots in the 1920s culminated in full-scale rebellion from 1936 to 1939. The Zionist movement adopted various approaches, including that of Judah L. Magnes, president of the Hebrew University, who advocated the foundation of a joint Arab-Jewish state, and that of future Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, who argued that accommodation with the Arabs could come only from a position of Jewish strength, after the Yishuv had become a majority. For Socialist-Zionists, unresolvable conflict arose between the ideal of class cooperation with Arab workers and the higher national goal of consolidating a new Jewish working class in Palestine.” (1)<\/p>\n
On the eve of World War II, the British government changed its Palestine policy, in an effort to appease the Arab world. The White Paper of May 1939 terminated Britain’s commitment to Zionism and provided for the establishment of a Palestinian state within ten years. The Arab majority in Palestine was guaranteed by a clause that provided for the further immigration of 75,000 Jews during the following five years, after which additional entry would depend on Arab consent.<\/p>\n
The 1939 White Paper broke the traditional Anglo-Zionist alliance and provoked many in the Yishuv to violent protest. In May 1942, Zionist leaders meeting at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City demanded a Jewish Democratic Commonwealth-that is, a state-in all of western Palestine as part of the new world order after the war. This “Biltmore program” marked a radical departure in Zionist policy. The Holocaust, the systematic murder of European Jews by the Nazis, finally convinced Western Jewry of the need for a Jewish state. In 1944, the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), a Zionist guerrilla force led by the future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, began an armed revolt against British rule in Palestine.” (1)<\/p>\n