Pre-State History: From Antiquity to UN Resolution 181

Antiquity, Exile and Expulsions (c. 1200 BCE to 1517 CE)

The earliest known mention of a people called Israel outside the Bible is the Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian inscription from about 1208 BCE. In the Iron Age, two Israelite kingdoms existed: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom in 722 BCE. Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and its First Temple in 586 BCE and deported much of Judah's elite. After Persia conquered Babylon, Jews were allowed to return from 538 BCE, and the Second Temple was built in Jerusalem. A revolt that began in 167 BCE against the Seleucid Greek rulers led to the Hasmonean state, which held independence until Rome took control in 63 BCE. A Jewish revolt against Rome began in 66 CE. Roman forces destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE. The Jewish historian Josephus, who witnessed the siege from the Roman camp, wrote that 97,000 people were taken captive during the war and that 1,100,000 died during the siege, most of them pilgrims trapped in the city at Passover [1]. These are Josephus's own figures, and no independent count exists to check them. A second revolt, led by Simon bar Kokhba, lasted from 132 to 135 CE. After it, Emperor Hadrian refounded Jerusalem as a Roman colony named Aelia Capitolina, barred Jews from living in it, and renamed the province Syria Palaestina. Jewish life continued elsewhere in the land, especially in Galilee. Rabbis there compiled the Mishnah around 200 CE and the Jerusalem Talmud around 400 CE. Rule over the land then passed from the Byzantine Empire to the early Muslim caliphates in the 630s, to the Crusaders, who killed much of Jerusalem's Jewish population when they took the city in 1099, and then to the Mamluk sultans of Egypt from the late thirteenth century until 1516. Most Jews by this time lived outside the land. Large communities grew in Babylonia, where the Babylonian Talmud was completed, and later across North Africa, the Middle East and Europe. In Europe, Jewish communities faced massacres, such as those in the Rhineland in 1096, and state expulsions. England expelled its Jews in 1290. France expelled Jews in 1306 and again in 1394. Spain expelled Jews who would not convert in 1492, and Portugal followed in 1496 and 1497. Many of the Jews expelled from Spain moved to the Ottoman Empire, which was then expanding across the eastern Mediterranean. Some of them settled in the land itself, and this movement shaped the Jewish community there during the next century.

Ottoman Palestine and the Old Yishuv (1517 to 1881)

The Ottoman Sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluks in 1516 and 1517 and took the land into the Ottoman Empire. His son Suleiman rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem between 1537 and 1541, and those walls still stand. The Ottomans did not treat Palestine as a single unit. They divided it into districts, called sanjaks, centred on Jerusalem, Nablus, Gaza and Safed, which were governed from the province of Damascus and later partly from Beirut. From the 1870s, Jerusalem became a district answering directly to Istanbul. The population throughout this period was mostly Muslim Arab, with a Christian Arab minority and a small Jewish minority. Under Ottoman law, Jews and Christians were protected non-Muslim subjects. They paid a special poll tax and ran their own religious and legal affairs through their community leaders. In the sixteenth century, Safed became a major centre of Jewish learning, largely because of scholars expelled from Spain. Joseph Karo wrote the Shulchan Aruch, a code of Jewish law first printed in 1565, and Isaac Luria taught a new school of Kabbalah there. Safed's position later declined because of economic changes, epidemics and an earthquake in 1837. Jewish communities in the land from this period until the late nineteenth century are called the Old Yishuv ("yishuv" means settlement). They lived mainly in the four cities Jews considered holy: Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias. The Old Yishuv was religious in purpose. Most of its members devoted themselves to prayer and study and depended on charity collected from Jewish communities abroad, a system called halukka ("distribution"). The money was divided through community groups, called kollelim, organised by country of origin. Two groups of Jews born in Europe added to the Old Yishuv. A group led by Judah he-Hasid arrived in Jerusalem in 1700. Hasidic Jews came in 1777, and followers of the Vilna Gaon, known as Perushim, arrived between 1808 and 1812. Egypt's Muhammad Ali, through his son Ibrahim Pasha, ruled the land from 1831 to 1840. After Ottoman rule returned, the Tanzimat reforms of 1839 and 1856 gave non-Muslims more legal equality. European states opened consulates in Jerusalem, and many Jews lived under the protection of foreign powers as foreign nationals. In 1860, Jews built Mishkenot Sha'ananim, the first Jewish neighbourhood outside Jerusalem's walls. In 1878, Jews from Jerusalem founded Petah Tikva as a farming village. These steps show that the Old Yishuv was already changing before organised immigration began in 1882.

The First Aliyah, Herzl and the Basel Congress (1882 to 1914)

In 1881, the assassination of Tsar Alexander II was followed by a wave of attacks on Jews across the Russian Empire. In 1882, the Russian government passed the May Laws, which restricted where Jews could live and work. Many Jews left for the Americas, and a smaller number went to Ottoman Palestine. Groups calling themselves Hovevei Zion ("Lovers of Zion") formed across Eastern Europe. In 1882, Leon Pinsker, a doctor in Odessa, published Autoemancipation, which argued that Jews needed a territory of their own. The immigration from 1882 to 1903 is called the First Aliyah ("aliyah" means ascent and refers to Jewish immigration to the land). The Jewish Agency, the body that later organised immigration, puts the number of immigrants in this wave at about 25,000, mostly from Eastern Europe, arriving in two main waves, 1882 to 1884 and 1890 to 1891. It records that 28 new farming villages, called moshavot, had been founded and 90,000 acres of land bought by 1903, and that about 3,000 newcomers had settled in Jaffa [2]. The first organised group, the Bilu students from Russia, arrived in Jaffa in July 1882. Rishon LeZion, Rosh Pinna and Zikhron Ya'akov were founded in 1882. Many villages failed financially and survived only with money from Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris. Ottoman authorities restricted Jewish immigration and land purchase in the same period, though the rules were enforced unevenly. Around 1881, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda arrived and began work to revive Hebrew as a spoken language. Yemenite Jews also arrived in this period and settled mainly in Jerusalem. Political Zionism came mainly from Theodor Herzl, a Jewish journalist from Vienna. He reported from Paris on the Dreyfus Affair, in which a French Jewish army officer was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894. In February 1896, Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), which argued that antisemitism would continue as long as Jews lacked a state, and that a Jewish state should be won by international agreement rather than by small-scale settlement alone. Herzl organised the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, from 29 to 31 August 1897. About 200 delegates from seventeen countries attended. The congress founded the Zionist Organization, elected Herzl its president and adopted "Hatikvah" as its anthem [3]. It also adopted the Basel Program. In an English translation printed in The Jewish Chronicle on 3 September 1897, the program states that Zionism aims to create for the Jewish people "a home in Palestine secured by public law." It listed four means: settling Jewish farm and industrial workers in Palestine, organising Jews worldwide through local and international bodies, strengthening Jewish national feeling, and taking steps to obtain the consent of governments [4]. After Basel, the movement founded the Jewish Colonial Trust in 1899 and the Jewish National Fund, which bought land, in 1901. Herzl sought support from the German Kaiser, whom he met near Jerusalem in 1898, and from the Ottoman Sultan, whom he met in 1901. Neither granted a charter. After the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, Britain offered land in East Africa. The proposal split the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, and the movement rejected it in 1905. Herzl died on 3 July 1904. A Second Aliyah followed from 1904 to 1914, again mostly from the Russian Empire. It included young socialists who founded the first collective farm, Degania, in 1910, and the guard organisation Hashomer in 1909. Tel Aviv was founded near Jaffa in 1909. Arab newspapers in the land began to publish opposition to Zionist land purchase and immigration in the years before 1914.

War, the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate's Institutions (1914 to 1938)

The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on Germany's side in 1914. During the war, Ottoman authorities deported or expelled many Jews who held enemy nationality. Britain made separate wartime commitments. Letters between the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Henry McMahon, and Sharif Hussein of Mecca in 1915 and 1916 discussed Arab independence. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 divided the region into British and French spheres of influence. On 2 November 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour sent a letter to Lord Rothschild. It stated that the British government viewed "with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." It added that nothing should be done to prejudice "the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," or the rights of Jews in other countries [5]. British forces under General Edmund Allenby advanced from Egypt. Jerusalem surrendered on 9 December 1917. On 11 December, Allenby entered the Old City on foot through the Jaffa Gate. War Office records show that the Chief of the Imperial General Staff advised him to walk, in contrast to the German Kaiser's entry on horseback in 1898, and that the War Cabinet sent him the exact text of the proclamation of martial law read that day [6]. Four centuries of Ottoman rule over Jerusalem ended. A British military administration governed until 1920. At the San Remo conference in April 1920, the Allied powers assigned Britain the mandate for Palestine, and a civil administration under High Commissioner Herbert Samuel began that July. The League of Nations Council approved the Mandate for Palestine on 24 July 1922, and it came into force on 29 September 1923. The Mandate included the Balfour Declaration in its preamble. Article 2 made Britain responsible for securing the Jewish national home and developing self-governing institutions. Article 4 recognised "an appropriate Jewish agency" to advise the administration and named the Zionist Organization as that agency. Article 6 required Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration and "close settlement" on the land, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population were not prejudiced [7]. The Yishuv built its own institutions under this framework. Jews elected an Assembly of Representatives in 1920, which chose an executive called the Va'ad Leumi (National Council) to handle education, health and religious affairs. After Arab riots in Jerusalem in April 1920, Jewish leaders founded the Haganah ("defence") in June 1920 as an underground militia. It had no legal status under the Mandate. In December 1920, workers' parties founded the Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish Labour, in Haifa. It became a trade union, an employer, a health fund, a builder and a bank. In 1929, the Zionist Organization enlarged the agency named in Article 4 into the Jewish Agency for Palestine, bringing in non-Zionist Jewish leaders from abroad. The Jewish Agency ran immigration, settlement and diplomacy. David Ben-Gurion became chairman of its executive in 1935. Violence between Arabs and Jews broke out in 1920, 1921 and 1929. The 1929 riots included the killing of Jews in Hebron, after which Hebron's old Jewish community left the city. In 1931, a group of commanders left the Haganah and formed a separate force, which became the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organisation), linked to Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionists. When part of that group returned to the Haganah in 1937, the rest continued as the Irgun. From 1936 to 1939, Arabs in Palestine revolted against British rule and Jewish immigration, beginning with a general strike. A British Royal Commission under Lord Peel reported in 1937 and proposed, for the first time, partition into a Jewish state, an Arab state and a British-held zone around Jerusalem. The UN committee that later reviewed this history summarised the Peel plan and noted that a later British commission in 1938 found partition impractical [8]. Britain dropped the plan.

The White Paper, the Holocaust and the Underground Revolt (1933 to 1946)

In May 1939, Britain issued a policy statement known as the White Paper. It said Britain did not intend Palestine to become a Jewish state, and it planned an independent Palestine within ten years. It limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 people over five years, made up of 10,000 a year plus 25,000 refugees, which it described as bringing Jews to about one third of the population. After five years, further Jewish immigration would require Arab agreement. It also gave the High Commissioner power to restrict land transfers to Jews [9]. The Zionist movement rejected the White Paper, and Arab leaders also rejected it. The White Paper came as the persecution of European Jews was growing. The Nazi Party took power in Germany on 30 January 1933. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 removed German Jews' citizenship rights. On 9 and 10 November 1938, in the attacks known as Kristallnacht, synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany and Austria were destroyed. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, bringing about two million Polish Jews under its control, and forced many into ghettos. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen, with police and local collaborators, shot Jews in mass executions across occupied Soviet territory. Killing by gas began at Chełmno in December 1941. On 20 January 1942, senior German officials met at Wannsee in Berlin to coordinate the deportation and murder of Europe's Jews. Killing centres at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau operated through 1942, 1943 and 1944. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives its best estimate of Jews murdered as about six million. It counts about 2.7 million killed at killing centres, with about one million Jews killed at the Auschwitz complex, and the rest killed in mass shootings, in ghettos and camps, and through other violence [10]. Soviet troops reached Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, and the war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945. In Palestine, the Haganah formed a full-time strike force, the Palmach, in 1941, and about 30,000 Jews from Palestine volunteered for British forces during the war. The Irgun largely suspended attacks on Britain in 1939. Avraham Stern rejected that decision and in 1940 founded Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), which continued to attack British targets. British police killed Stern in February 1942. In February 1944, the Irgun, now commanded by Menachem Begin, declared a revolt against British rule. Lehi members killed Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State in Cairo, on 6 November 1944. The Haganah then conducted an operation called the "Saison" ("hunting season") from late 1944 into 1945, in which it handed Irgun members to the British. After the war, Britain kept the White Paper limits in place. In late 1945, the Haganah, Irgun and Lehi formed a joint command, the Jewish Resistance Movement, which attacked railways, bridges and British installations. On 29 June 1946, British forces arrested Jewish Agency leaders and thousands of others in Operation Agatha. On 22 July 1946, the Irgun bombed the wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that housed the Mandate's Secretariat and British military headquarters. The official British count was 91 dead, among them British, Arab and Jewish staff [11]. The Haganah withdrew from the joint command soon after.

Displaced Persons, Aliyah Bet and the Road to Resolution 181 (1945 to November 1947)

At the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors had nowhere safe to return to. Many lived in displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany, Austria and Italy, often in the same camps where they had been held. US President Harry Truman later stated that after Earl Harrison reported on DP conditions in 1945, he urged Britain to admit 100,000 Jews to Palestine [12]. A joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry reported on 20 April 1946. Its Recommendation No. 2 called for 100,000 immigration certificates for Jewish victims of Nazi and Fascist persecution to be issued as far as possible in 1946. It noted that more Jewish survivors than that were in Germany, Austria and Italy alone [13]. Britain did not carry out the recommendation. The Yishuv responded with clandestine immigration, called Aliyah Bet ("bet," the Hebrew letter B, meaning unofficial). According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Mossad l'Aliyah Bet, set up by the Jewish leadership in 1938, organised 62 voyages between 1937 and 1944. After the war, an underground network called the Brihah ("flight") moved survivors from DP camps and Eastern Europe to ports in Italy, France, Yugoslavia and Greece. More than 90 % of the ships were intercepted by the Royal Navy, and from August 1946 Britain interned passengers in camps on Cyprus, where it held more than 50,000 Jews by 1948. The museum counts well over 100,000 people who took this route by 1948, including more than 70,000 Holocaust survivors [14]. In July 1947, the ship Exodus 1947 sailed from France with about 4,500 DPs. British destroyers intercepted it before it reached Palestinian waters. Three passengers were killed in the struggle. Britain returned the passengers to France and then took them to Hamburg, where they were removed by force and held in camps on German soil [14]. In early 1947, Britain decided to hand the Palestine question to the United Nations. At Britain's request, the General Assembly held a special session [15]. On 15 May 1947, it created the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) with representatives of eleven states: Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay and Yugoslavia. It gave the committee "the widest powers" to investigate and set 1 September 1947 as the deadline for its report [16]. UNSCOP held hearings in Palestine in June and July 1947. The Jewish Agency took part. The Arab Higher Committee, the main Palestinian Arab leadership body, boycotted the committee [8]. UNSCOP's report recorded the Mandate government's estimate of the population at the end of 1946: 1,076,783 Muslims, 608,225 Jews, 145,063 Christians and 15,481 others, a total of 1,845,559 people, with Jews about 31 % of the total [8]. These are de facto estimates in persons, produced by the Government of Palestine, because no census had been taken since 1931. The eleven delegates signed the report in Geneva late on 31 August 1947 [17]. All eleven agreed that the Mandate should end. A majority of seven members recommended partition into an Arab state and a Jewish state with an economic union and an international regime for Jerusalem. India, Iran and Yugoslavia recommended a single federal state with Arab and Jewish units. Australia supported neither plan [8]. On 23 September 1947, the General Assembly set up an Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question to consider the report and related proposals, including Arab states' proposal for an independent unitary Palestine [15]. On 29 November 1947, at its 128th plenary meeting, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 (II) by 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions [18]. The resolution recommended the Plan of Partition with Economic Union. It stated that the Mandate should end, and British forces should leave, as soon as possible and no later than 1 August 1948. It called for independent Arab and Jewish states and a special international regime for the City of Jerusalem, administered by the United Nations. It set up a five-member UN Palestine Commission, with Bolivia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Panama and the Philippines elected as members, to manage the transition [19]. The Jewish Agency accepted the resolution. The Arab Higher Committee and the Arab states rejected it.

In One Paragraph

Jews lived in the land as a nation in antiquity, with kingdoms, a temple in Jerusalem and periods of independence, and lost self-rule after Roman victories in 70 and 135 CE. Jewish communities remained in the land, while most Jews lived in a diaspora that faced massacres and expulsions, including from Spain in 1492. From 1517 to 1917, the Ottoman Empire ruled the land, where a small, religious Old Yishuv lived mainly in four holy cities on charity from abroad. Organised immigration began with the First Aliyah in 1882, and Herzl's First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 set the aim of a legally secured Jewish home in Palestine. Britain promised support for a Jewish national home in November 1917, entered Jerusalem that December and governed under a League of Nations mandate from 1922, during which the Yishuv built the Jewish Agency, the Histadrut and the Haganah, and the Irgun and Lehi formed as separate armed groups. Britain's 1939 White Paper capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years as Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered about six million Jews. After the war, Jewish survivors in displaced persons camps, more than 100,000 clandestine immigrants, armed revolt against Britain and a UN committee of eleven states led the General Assembly to adopt partition in Resolution 181 on 29 November 1947, by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions.

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