Zionism and the Creation of Israel

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English 11
Zionism and The Creation of Israel:
A Country That Has The Right To Exist

100 Years Ago to Now
100 years ago if someone were to mention a country named Israel, a country that was founded as homeland for Jews, people would laugh at the idea. Let 40 of those years pass and that idea came into fruition when the United Nations voted to spilt a strip of land known as Palestine into two separate states, a Jewish state and an Arab state. Thus Israel was born after years of Zionists promoting the idea of the state, the Holocaust, and fighting against the British Palestine mandate. Immediately after the state was created, the neighboring Arab nations who opposed the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine immediately attacked starting a string of wars after the initial 1948 Arab-Israeli war (Zipperstein, Steven J, and Frerichs, Ernest 12). The location of the state has received unanimous opposition from Arab nations due to the Israel displacing the Palestinian people who no longer have land to call their own and have to stay in an Israeli controlled territory. Countries have even supported terrorists until the “collapse of Israel” (Ahmadinejad vows support to Hamas). Since conception many countries in the middle east have not acknowledged Israel as a country and claims that it has no right to be in existence, despite opposition and frequent attacks at cities within, the state of Israel has shown its ability to maintain and become a prosperous country which success that shadows over their neighbors, showing the right they have earned and deserve. The foundations of Zionism: Persecution

To understand why so many Jewish people were warm to the idea of Zionism was, it is necessary to know some of the long history of persecution that has unfortunately followed them everywhere they went after the Diaspora. Persecution is basically what founded the idea of creating a homeland for the Jewish people. In Europe the people experienced extreme persecution, it seemed wherever they went, the country would use them as a scapegoat for their problems. In Russia, Poland, Germany and many others they were blamed for the problems of the masses, were forced to live in ghettos, in Russia the Pale Settlement, paid extreme taxes, and were not allowed to own land. While the Jews were usually subject to violence on a regular basis, in the late 19th century the Jewish people in Russia had to suffer through a series of massacres known as pogroms (Greenberg 78).

This persecution started to die down in the early 20th century, in France the people were no longer considered a second class, and in Germany and Austria they gained rights and began to assimilate into the population. This was all true until a new German political party known as Nazis rose to power. Germany had suffered major losses in the last war, and was blamed for WWI. This new party chose extend the blame and the problems Germany was facing onto the Jews. With the blame and the degree of anti-Semitism already being faced, the Jews felt a new degree of persecution. On the brink of WWII, Nazi Germany began to take away rights from Jews and violence escalated to a new level. Once the war had started in 1939 the leader of the Nazis, Adolf Hitler had decided that he was going to eliminate the Jews of Europe and initiated the “Final Solution”. This solution spawned one of the greatest crimes against humanity. Jews were collected up from all across Europe and were sent to concentration camps to be exterminated or used as slave labor. Over 6 million Jews died during the Holocaust (Rozett, Robert, Spector 213). By 1945 the war was ending and Germany surrendered. Most of the Jewish people who had survived the Holocaust were now without homes, many with broken families, and were seeking hope of escaping future persecution. Hope was found in the idea of founding a Jewish homeland.

During WWI the British were seeking Jewish support for its war efforts; in an attempt the...
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