The Rise of Zionism and the Creation of the State of Israel

Part 3 of "Israeli/Arab Conflict in Palestine: How Did It Start? A Historical Review"

This is Part 3 in this series. Part 1 and 2 are linked below in case you missed them:

Part 1: The Gaza Strip

Part 2: Israeli Military Policy Since 2006—The Dahiya Docrtine

“…in the history of Jewish persecution, the Muslims were always relatively better (more benevolent) than the Christians. We do not find tragedies such as the Chmielnicki massacres in the annals of our communities … in Islamic lands. The position has now been radically reversed… tens of millions of Muslims, in particular Arabs, have become Amalekites… What has brought about the wave of hatred that has engulfed the Moslem world? We all know that the major reason is the founding of the State of Israel.”

—Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “one of the foremost religious Zionist authorities of the 20th century.” (As cited here, emphasis added)

“The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one, it is a tragedy for the world because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world’s peace.”

—Arnold Toynbee, British Historian

Twenty years ago, I read an account written by a Palestinian Christian minister who’d been living in Palestine during the mid-20th century, tending a village church. He told how Christians, Muslims and Jews lived in peace together in many of the villages, and often worked side by side in the fields. There were even religious sects that represented a syncretism of two or all three of these monotheistic religions. But then, in 1948, the year Israel became a Jewish-led state, Zionist Jews from Europe arrived in the villages with machine guns, terrorizing the villagers, chasing off the Muslim Arab population, sowing tension and strife.

I cried through the pages of that book the same way I cried the first time I read of the plight of the American Indians… the Trail of Tears, the Battle of Wounded Knee, the Sand Creek Massacre… It changed me. I could never be the same.

According to Aljazeera:

Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.

Palestinians in 1948, five months after the creation of Israel, leaving a village in the Galilee [Reuters]

The terrorism and ethnic cleansing inflicted on Arab Palestinian inhabitants during those years is remembered by Palestinians as Al Nakba, or “the Catastrophe,” although this term is also used to refer to ongoing terrorist assaults by Zionist forces that didn’t begin, or end, with Israel becoming a state. Zionism, which had its beginnings in the 1880s, was already well established in Palestine by the mid 20th century. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe (see video below), Zionist Jews had been secretly surveying the villages in Palestine since the 1930s, taking advantage of Arab hospitality to gather detailed information on each of the villages and what advantages there might be in taking them.

Then, when Britain announced in February 1947 that it was abandoning to the UN the disaster it had created in British Mandate Palestine, the Jewish Agency in Palestine, led by David Ben Gurion, began conducting secret meetings discussing a major military operation for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Weekly meetings to consider their objectives continued for an entire year into Feb/March 1948.

Jonathan Cook makes an important distinction between standard colonialism and what he terms “settler colonial movements” like Zionism.

First, settler colonial movements are distinguished from standard colonialism – like British rule in India – by the fact that the settler population wishes not just to steal the native population’s resources but to replace the native population itself.

There are lots of examples of this: European settlers dispossessed native peoples in what we today call the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, for example.

The definition of genocide in international law exactly describes what those Europeans did to the local population: mass killings; inflicting conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of all or part of the native community; preventing births within the local population; and forcibly transferring native children to the settler population.

European settlers who today call themselves Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders never had to account for their crimes against those native peoples. Which possibly explains … why European countries and their settler colonial outgrowths are today lining up against the rest of the world to support Israel as it intensifies industrial genocide in Gaza.

The truth is the “western” world order was built on genocide. Israel is just following in a long tradition.

Origins of Zionism

In 1840, the British Ambassador in Constantinople sought support from the Ottoman Sultan for Jews to immigrate from Europe to Palestine as a way of staying the growing power of Egyptian ruler Muhammed Ali. At that time there were no more than 3000 Jews in Ottoman controlled Palestine.

Over the years, Jewish presence in Palestine increased. In the 1880s, Baron Edmund de Rothschild began visiting the region and helped the establishment of 30 Jewish settlements, the most important being Rishon Le Zion, founded in 1882. That same year, radical Eastern European Jewish nationalist Leo Pinsker, cofounder with Moses Lilenblum of “The Friends of Zion,” published a book called Auto-emancipation. The word Zionism would be coined by another nationalist Jew, Nathan Birnbaum, in 1886.

Birnbaum, who was from Vienna, organized Jewish students in Germany and Austria into a body called the kadimah. Though the kadima promoted “the idea of a Jewish renaissance and the resettlement of Palestine,” as time went on Birnbaum himself would begin to question political Zionism and even to oppose it while consistently promoting Jewish cultural identity and solidarity of the diaspora.

Influential Jews of Western Europe were not so interested in a national homeland, being more concerned with matters of business in the countries in which they found themselves. They were more assimilated, and were happy with their newfound freedoms and rights that had allowed many to become affluent—in fact, very affluent indeed.

To win Western Jews over to the cause of Jewish nationalism, Theodor Herzl, an assimilated Jew from Hungry, was conscripted to write a paraphrase of Pinsker’s Auto-emancipation. Herzl was one of the most accomplished and influential Jewish journalists of his day. His pamphlet Der Judenstaat, or The Jewish State, appeared in 1896.

The First Zionist Congress was held the following year in Basle, Switzerland, with Herzl at the helm, becoming its first president. According to L. Fry, Herzl “did not know Hebrew, and had never been taught the fanatical books of the Talmud, such as the Shukhan Aruk and the Abodah Zarah. He was opposed to violent methods, and in one of his novels, Altneuland, has left a picture of a civilized Jewish state, patterned on those of Western Europe." (Waters Flowing Eastward (1931/1988) by Mrs. L. Fry.)

“Herzl does not envision the Jewish-Arab conflict or of the need for a strong defence force.”

—interview with Professor Derek Penslar

True to his cause, Herzl began approaching heads of state in attempt to find a homeland for the Jews. According to Fry,

He failed to get Palestine from the Sultan, and later, the El Arish peninsula from the Khedive of Egypt; but he received, and virtually accepted, the offer of Uganda from Great Britain. In 1903, he laid this proposal before the sixth Zionist congress: it was thrown out by the Zionists who would have no land but Palestine. Herzl died the following year, and with him the leadership of the moderate party was soon to pass into the hands of the violent nationalists.

Herzl died in his mid-forties. It has been suggested he may have been assassinated by radical Eastern Jews who felt thwarted by his liberal ideas of non-violence and compromise, including his suggestions of a Jewish homeland somewhere other than Palestine.

Radical Jewish racism taught in the Talmud

You may be wondering what is meant by the reference to “the fanatical books of the Talmud, such as the Shukhan Aruk and the Abodah Zarah”—books Herzl may or may not have been familiar with. These were apparently later additions to the Talmud (lit. “instruction”), which had grown in volume over the centuries to prodigious proportions. In Chapter 2 of her book, Fry gives a sampling of quotes from the Shukhan Aruk:

"When a Jew has a gentile in his clutches, another Jew may go to the same gentile, lend him money and in his turn deceive him, so that the gentile shall be ruined. For the property of a gentile (according to our law) belongs to no one, and the first Jew that passes has the full right to seize it."20

"When a Jew makes a deal with a gentile, and another Jew comes up and deceives the gentile no matter in what manner, whether he give him false measure or overcharge him, then both Jews must share between them the profits thus sent by Jehovah."21

"Although it is not a direct obligation for a Jew to kill a gentile with whom he lives in peace, yet, in no case, is he allowed to save a gentile's life."22

"It is always a meritorious deed to get hold of a gentile's possessions."23

"Marriages taking place among gentiles have no binding strength, i.e. their cohabitation is just as the coupling of horses, therefore their children do not stand as humanly related to their parents."24

References cited above from Fry’s book correspond as follows:

19. The Shulchan Aruk is a manual of Jewish laws, drawn from the Talmud, and compiled by Rabbi Joseph Caro (1488-1575).

20. Loc. cit., Law 24.

21. Ibid., Law 27.

22. Ibid., Law 50.

23. Ibid., Law 55.

24. Ibid., Law 88.

These are just a few examples of brazen racism endorsed as official teaching in Talmudic texts. There appear to be many more.

Thus from a very young age, many Jews have been taught that non-Jews have no value except what they can get from them. I cannot say this is always the case. Certainly there are Jews who would object. I would guess it would depend on the family, the sect of Judaism, personal bent, and the culture and circumstances surrounding them.

The Balfour declaration and establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine

In Britain in the early 1900s, a committee “to devise a strategy toward the Muslim Arab Population of the Ottoman Empire” was formed. Its report, submitted to British Prime Minister Henry Campbell Bannerman in 1907, “recommended the establishment of a buffer state hostile toward the its neighbors and friendly to Europe,” thus to weaken Arab solidarity in the region and ensure continuation of British Imperial domination. Zionists in Britain worked hard to gain the support of British statesmen for their cause. With the beginning of WWI, Britain needed financial “help” from the people who had for all means and purposes already taken over the economies of Europe and America.

Beginning in 1916, the British hoped that in exchange for their support of Zionism, “the Jews” would help to finance the growing expenses of the First World War, which was becoming increasingly burdensome. More importantly, policy-makers in the Foreign Office believed that Jews could be prevailed upon to persuade the United States to join the War. At this time, there were very strong pro-Zionist feelings by many of the political elite and establishment.

—The Rothschild Archive

(On financing the war and harnessing American support for the war, my previous post highlighting Eustace Mullins’ Secrets of the Federal Reserve: The London Connection should be instructive.)

Ongoing negotiations and deliberations while WWI was still in full swing led to what has become known as the Balfour Declaration, written as a letter addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild (Lord Rothschild), a figurehead for Jews in Britain, and signed by Sir Arthur Balfour in 2017 pledging the support of the British Crown for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…” The letter was intentionally vague in that it did not mention the invasion and violent takeover of Palestine and even promised that it be “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…” The wording had been carefully constructed so as not to rile the opposition of skeptics.

Fry (p. 33) notes several reasons that were effective in convincing the British cabinet to go along with the Zionist plan. However:

… the great plea was that the English and the Jews, the two great trading races of the world, should unite forces and take over the trade routes between Europe and Asia.

The lands of the near east, including Palestine and Mesopotamia are at a strategic crossroads between three continents. This was thought to be of great advantage as it could supply the British Empire with the upper hand. But notice how the words of the Balfour declaration—originally formulated by the Zionist committee of London under Rothschild friend Chaim Weizman—were modified at the last minute to thinly veil British and Zionist intentions.

Although the Zionists had made all preliminary arrangements with the allied governments and the cabinet as a whole was desirous of complying with every point, yet some over-scrupulous member, with (the Zionists thought) undue regard for the actual inhabitants of Palestine, altered the text Weizmann's committee had prepared. Instead of the words, "The reconstitution of Palestine as the national home of the Jewish people", at the last minute were substituted the words, "The establishment of a national home in Palestine".

—The Balfour Declaration was the result of careful planning on the part of London Zionists throughout the year 1917. Read the Declaration and see who was involved here.

Just several days after British and Zionist leaders celebrated the consummation of the Balfour Declaration, British forces accompanied by Jewish militants captured Ottoman-controlled Jerusalem. With the new pledge of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, the British swept aside the promise of freedom they’d pledged to the Arabs two years earlier if they joined forces with them in defeating the Ottoman Turks—which many had done, only later to be disappointed.

Both of these [the Balfour declaration and the Sykes-Picot agreement] were in direct violation of the agreement made by the British government in 1915 through Sir Henry MacMahon with the Sherif of Mecca, Hussein. Then the Sherif had agreed to aid the British cause against the Turks, in return for a promise that Great Britain would recognize and support the independence of the Arabs, south of the prospective Turkish boundary.

At the end of WWI, the Ottoman Empire was dissolved and the nation state of Turkey erected from its remnants. Meanwhile the rest of the empire was divided up among the Europeans into several “Mandates,” with the Brits receiving the Mandate of Palestine. At that time, despite ongoing Jewish immigration from Europe since the 1880s, only around 10% of the population in Palestine were Jews.

In the 1920s, apart from the preponderant proportion of Muslim Arabs, there were also around 100,000 Orthodox Christians living in Palestine. The British didn't know what to do other than ignore the fact because they lumped Palestinians together as a group of Muslim sects. The belief that all Palestinians were Muslims was necessary to justify British support of Zionism under the guise of Christianity and to classify Palestinians as second class citizens to be pushed out of their lands.

Early Zionist terrorist activity

In December 2017, the centennial of the Balfour Declaration, Tom Suarez, author of State of Terror (2016), was invited to address the House of Lords in London on his new book which draws from original documents and declassified records of the National Archive. These records show that Zionist terrorist groups had been active in Palestine long before 1917. Among their targets: busses or marketplaces full of Palestinians had been bombed. Oftentimes the bombers were children or adolescents who’d been indoctrinated to see non-Jews as "animals" rather than humans. The Jewish Agency in Palestine was involved in covering for the terrorist groups.

With the establishment of the British Mandate, four decades of peaceful Palestinian resistance had proved futile, and armed Palestinian resistance—which included terrorism—began. Zionist terror became the domain of formal organizations that attacked anyone in the way of its messianic goals—Palestinian, Jew, or British. These terror organizations operated from within the Zionist settlements and were actively empowered and shielded by the settlements and the Jewish Agency, the recognized semi-autonomous government of the Zionist settlements, what would become the Israeli government.

There was no substantive difference between the acknowledged terror organizations—most famously, the Irgun, and Lehi, the so-called Stern Gang—and the Jewish Agency, and its terror gang, the Hagana. The Agency cooperated, collaborated, and even helped finance the Irgun. The relationship between the Jewish Agency, and the Irgun and Lehi, was symbiotic.

[…]

The fascist nature of the Zionist enterprise was apparent both to US and British intelligence. The Jewish Agency tolerated no dissent and sought to dictate the fates of all Jews. Children were radicalised as part of the methodology of all three major organizations, and by extension, the Jewish Agency.

Britain’s wake-up call regarding the Zionists’ indoctrination of children came on the 8th of July, 1938. That day, the Irgun blew up a bus filled with Palestinian villagers. Now, this was not the first time the Irgun had done something of this sort, but this time the British caught the bomber. She was a twelve year old schoolgirl.

Teenagers, both boys and girls, were commonly used to plant bombs in Palestinian markets and conduct other terror attacks. Teachers were threatened or removed if they tried to intervene in the indoctrination of their students, and the students themselves were blocked from advancement if they resisted, even being taught to betray their own parents if those parents tried to instill some moderation. Jews who opposed and tried to warn of the emerging fascism were assassinated, and indeed most victims of Zionist assassinations—that is, targeted, rather than indiscriminate—were Jews.

The Jewish Agency was founded in 1929 by Chaim Weizman as a branch of the World Zionist Organization (an umbrella organization for Zionist groups, formerly known as the World Zionist Congress) in a bid to harness cooperation and monetary donations from a broad array of Jews—Zionist or otherwise—for the Zionist project.

Leading up to WWII, Zionism and Nazism worked hand in glove

…the degeneration which calls itself Anti-Semitism has begotten the degeneration which adorns itself with the name of Zionism.

—London Standard correspondent to the first Zionist Conference in 1897

Zionists used and promoted antisemitism as a means of driving more Jews to Palestine as their aim was to create a majority Jewish population in Palestine to displace the natives. Palestinians who survived and remained in Palestine would be used for cheap labor.

The push by Zionist elements for more Jewish settlers in Palestine for their demographic project was vigorous and brutal. The most deadly terrorist attack of the Zionists did not target Palestinians but rather Jews.

Violence targeting Jews was, and I would argue remains, a core tactic of Zionism. In fact, the single most deadly terror attack of the entire Mandate period was not the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 as is commonly thought. Even some of the Irgun’s bombings of Palestinian markets killed more people than the King David attack. But the most deadly single terror attack was the Jewish Agency’s bombing of the immigrant ship Patria in 1940, killing an estimated 267 people, of whom more than 200 were Jews fleeing the Nazis.

The Jewish Agency bombed the Patria because it was bringing the DPs [deported persons] to Mauritius, where the British had facilities for them. The Agency needed the DPs to be settlers in Palestine without delay, and was willing to risk the lives of all aboard in order to get the survivors to remain—which, indeed, they did.

In further violence against its Jewish victims, the Agency framed the dead for the bombing. It spread the lie that the DPs themselves blew up the vessel, that they committed mass suicide rather than not go directly to Palestine, posthumously conscripting the dead to serve the Zionist myth.

This was no aberration, but the driving principle of the Zionist project: Persecuted Jews served the political project, not the other way around.

Another major tactic of violence against Jews by the Jewish Agency and American Zionist leadership was the sabotaging of safe haven in order to force them to Palestine. As but one example, in 1944 US Zionist leaders sabotaged President Roosevelt’s provisional success in establishing a half million new homes for European DPs, most of these homes in the United States and Britain. When Roosevelt’s aide Morris Ernst visited the Zionist leaders in an attempt to save the program, he was, in his words, “thrown out of parlours and accused of treason”— ‘treason’, because he was Jewish, and the Zionists owned Jews.

—Tom Suarez, 2017 address to the House of Lords, London

Suarez goes on to describe how Jews fleeing Nazi Germany were astonished to find a different but parallel brand of Nazism in Palestine. It was Nazism turned on its head, with the Jews as the oppressors:

German Jewish immigrants to Palestine during war were outraged by the Zionists’ exploitation of the Nazi horrors they had just fled. This outrage given voice by, among others, the prominent journalist Robert Weltsch, editor of Berlin newspaper until banned by the Nazis in 1938.

Weltsch warned that Zionist leaders

have not yet understood that the enemy seeks the destruction of the Jews … We who have been here only a few years, we know what Nazism is.

[…]

These German Jewish immigrants were shunned by the Zionists, their publications and presses bombed. Even Kiosks were bombed for selling non-Hebrew papers to German Jewish immigrants.

In 1943, a man whom British records describe as “a Jew whose integrity is not open to question” risked his life to warn the British about the threat of Zionism. For his safety, he was referred to only by the code-name ‘Z’.

Z described Zionism as a parallel movement to Nazism. He warned that the Zionist indoctrination of Jewish youth was producing a society of extremists who will use any method necessary to achieve Zionist goals; and he pointed out that, as fascism in Europe has demonstrated, such a society is very difficult to undo once it has taken root. The result, I’m afraid, is what we, or more accurately the Palestinians, are facing today in the so-called ‘conflict’.

How trustworthy is this anonymous testimony? I found at the National Archives a private letter in which Z is identified — he was J.S. Bentwich, the Senior Inspector of Jewish Schools in Palestine.

Zionist tactics fail to provoke Palestinian response

Apparently, by the beginning of WWII Palestinian Arabs had learned an important lesson about Zionist tactics…

From the beginning of World War II through to the summer of 1947, there were virtually no Palestinian attacks, even though Zionist terror against Palestinians continued. A British explanation for the Palestinians’ failure to respond in kind was that they understood that the attacks were a trap, intended to elicit a response that the Zionists would frame as an attack against which they would have to ‘defend’ themselves. This was a Zionist tactic noted by the British as early as 1918, and it remains Israel’s default strategy today, most blatantly in Gaza, but also in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

As late as the fall of 1947, the Jewish Agency was concerned by the Palestinians’ failure to respond to its provocation, but when the end of 1947 came and the Jewish Agency could wait no longer for the civil war it needed, it was simply a matter of ratcheting up the terror.

In January 1948, Jewish paramilitary group Hagana bombs the Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 20

I believe this brings us up to where I started this article with the Nakba of 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel. What a horrifying story!

Various details and quotes in this article have been gleaned from the documentary below which is found accompanying the article on Aljazeera’s website cited at the beginning of this essay.

In Part 4, I intend to look into even deeper behind-the-scenes influences that shaped the rise of violent Zionism, including Rabbi Sabbatai Zevi who was proclaimed the Jewish messiah in 1666 and the Frankist movement that followed.

For now, I’d like to leave the reader with the following potent words from Tom Suarez’s address:

Now, there is no point in my having taken up your time here, no point any tree wasting its paper on this book, unless I thought that it had some value in the collective effort toward ending the conflict. So … How do I think that this book, how do I think my approach, might be constructive?

The historical record makes plain what should already have been obvious from the present reality—that Israel’s and Zionism’s pretenses regarding Jews and Judaism, and in particular its pretense of being a response to anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution, is a fraud. Indeed quite the opposite, it thrives by exacerbating and capitalizing on these, and has turned them into a cynical, deadly business.

Exposing this, in my opinion, is Israel’s—and the conflict’s—Achilles Heel. And this should be a simple case of the Emperor’s New Clothes—except that every time the child points out that the Emperor is naked, he or she is labelled an anti-Semite and silenced.

Appendix: Timeline

1862 - Rome to Jerusalem by Moses Hess

1864-1869 A group of so-called "universal brotherhoods" drawing affluent Jews organized in only five years in several European countries

1882 - Auto-emancipation by Leo Pinsker, cofounder with Moses Lilenblum of "The Friends of Zion"

1886 The term Zionism first coined by Nathan Burnham who later would organize Jewish students in Germany and Austria into the kadimah

1889 Asher Ginzberg helped found the "Sons of Moses" in Odessa

1896 Der Judenstaat, by Theodore Herzl

1897 First Zionist Congress held in Basle, Switzerland, uniting the Eastern and Western Jewish groups under Theodore Herzl

1903 Herzl’s proposal of [British] Uganda as a homeland for the Jews before the sixth Zionist congress rejected

1904 Herzl dies and is replaced

1907 British committee report recommends the establishment of a buffer state hostile to its neighbors in the Middle East

1913 The Federal Reserve established in the US under President Wilson, planned by international bankers including Paul Warburg (a German Jew recently immigrated to America); funds would be used to facilitate WWI

1914 Beginning of WWI

1915 Britain makes an agreement with the Sherif of Mecca to help Arabs become independent of Ottoman rule

1916 Sykes-Picot agreement secretly arranges for the dividing up of the Ottoman Empire among European colonial powers

1917 Balfour declaration followed by British and Jewish capture of Jerusalem

1918 End of WWI

1933 Haavara Transfer agreement under the Nazis

1939 Britain says Jews need to establish an independent state within 10 years

1941 Lehi, an extremist Zionist terrorist group led by ex-Irgun member Avraham Stern, proposes first to Italy, then Germany to help the fascists win the war, asking in return that the fascists uproot any Jewish communities not in Palestine and force their populations to Palestine (proposal not accepted)

1945 End of WWII

1947 In February as Britain announces it’s going to give up its Mandate in Palestine, the Jewish Agency begins secret deliberations for major program of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

1948 Britain gives up its Mandate; Jewish terrorist attacks and massacres of Palestinians are carried on intensely throughout the year; on May 15, the Jewish Agency declares the founding of Jewish state, the “State of Israel”

1949 An armistice is called providing temporary respite; more than 80% of Palestinians have been displaced; nearly 80% of Palestinian lands remain in Jewish hands

1950-1967 After the tumultuous events of 1948, 150,000 Palestinians remained in Israel and were eventually granted citizenship. However, they were subjected to military rule until 1966. After the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, Israel began its military control over Palestinians living in the now Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Tobin Owl is an independent researcher/writer. Over the past three years he’s conducted in-depth investigation focusing on the history of modern medicine, medical science, geopolitical conspiracy and the environment. Articles written prior to his move to Substack are found on his website Cry For The Earth