Palestine

About the size of New Jersey

Stretches from the Mediterranean Sea in the West to
the Jordan River in the east, and from Lebanon in the north to
the Gulf of Aqaba and the Sinai Peninsula in the south (217).
Consists of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip
80% of the Palestine territory is Israel

Populations

Israels population is 6.5 million

10% of the population of Turkey, Iran, or
Egypt
The West Bank and the Gaza Strips population is 3 3.5 million
This is around the population of Chicago
The total amount of Palestinians globally
is 9 million

Arab-Israeli Conflict

A forefront of international attention for 60+ years

It is a conflict between Jewish immigrants and their
descendents (Zionists) against the Palestinian Arab people
whom the Zionists settled with
Both of these groups claim a right to
completely control Palestine
In 1948, 150,000 people died in this conflict

Theodor Herzl

Lived from 1860 to 1904

He was a Viennese journalist
One of the most important figures in the beginnings of
the Zionist movement
He was the son of a Hungarian merchant whose family
had moved to Vienna back when the city was believed to
promise a lot to upwardly mobile Jews who wanted to be part of
the European society
Had a secular education and received a doctorate in law
Herzl became a French correspondent for an important
Viennese newspaper
When he was in Paris, he became a
Zionist
The Dreyfus Affair in 1894 was thought to cause this
turn towards Zionism for Herzl
Emil Zola wrote a famous article about
this that talked about the secret anti-semitism in France
A French army captain was accused of
spying for Germany when all he was guilty of was being
a successful Jew
He was mainly accused of
this for being a Jew in Catholic France

 This made Herzl realize that if even

France could be the host of viral anti-semitism, the Jews
were not safe anywhere
He thought the Jews
needed their own homeland or safe-haven so to
speak
Initially, he considered
Western United States and even Argentina, but
when he came upon Palestine his ideas and
Zionism went hand and hand
While there were many other important and more
influential Zionists in Herzls time, few had the amount of
passion he did
In 1897, Herzl held the First Zionist Congress in Basel,
Switzerland
This congress created the World Zionist
Organization which still exists and is active today
This also included the Basel Program
that not only called for the making of a Jewish Home in
Palestine, but made its goal to do such
They mainly believed Palestine would
work since the Jews lived there 2,000 years ago
This program believed the
creation of a home in Palestine should be
through diplomacy
The Aliyots

Moshav and
Kibbutz
Hebrew

This is the Hebrew name for the waves of immigration to

Israel
The first was a settler-like plantation colony similar to
those the French made in Algeria
These settlers pretty much failed since:
They did not have support
They needed a lot of
quality land for it to work
The second and third wave taking place in 1904-1914
and 1918-1923 had longer lasting results
65,000 Jews emigrated during this wave
These immigrants shaped and influenced
many ideals and institutions that still exist in Israel today
1931-1935 Jewish population rose from 175,000 to
400,000 (17 to 31 percent)

A kibbutz is a collective farm

A moshav is a communal farm

Like latin now Hebrew was a dead language only

spoken by rabbis

 When Israel was created this was not true anymore and
Hebrew became the national language
The Two Slogans

When the Jews in the second and third emigration

waves came, they had two main slogans
Conquest of land
Conquest of Labor
The first slogan refers to the Jews believing that they
needed to make an imprint on the land of Palestine for proper
settlement
The second slogan refers to the Jews needing to be of
any type of job
Back in Europe, the Jews were only
allowed to take up certain jobs, so when they came to
Palestine they wanted to be in every part of the
economy
Also, Arabs were willing to work for lower
wages than the European Jews
To combat this, the Jews
bought land removed all Palestinian-Arabs from it
and payed for the labor only of other Jews
As can be expected this
was fought with violence

Embracing of British

One of the main reasons the Zionists were so successful

was they embraced the mandate system and Balfour
declaration so they could take advantage of it
This was extremely helpful for them since the Arabs and
Palestinians ignored it decreasing their success