Skip to Main Content

Palestine/Israel: A Primer: What bearing does antisemitism have on Palestine/Israel?

Theodor Herzl

“The Jewish Question still exists. It would be foolish to deny it. It exists wherever Jews exist in perceptible numbers. Where it does not yet exist, it will be brought by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence soon produces persecution…Let the sovereignty be granted to us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the requirements of the nation--the rest we shall manage for ourselves…Shall we choose [the] Argentine [Republic] or Palestine?” -Theodor Herzl, Jewish Currents, 1896

What bearing does antisemitism have on Palestine/Israel?

  • Jewish peoples have been persecuted for centuries

  • Germany and collaborationist regimes in Europe murdered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust

  • Palestinians did not perpetrate the Holocaust

  • Jewish people began migrating to Palestine to avoid persecution in the mid-19th century, see above

  • Theodor Herzl popularized the idea of Zionism, that Jews should have a state of their own (various places around the globe were considered) after centuries of dispersion.

  • Religious Eastern European Jews convinced Herzl that Palestine was the ideal place for a future Jewish state based on religious reasons

  • Beginning in the 1920s, US immigration quotas kept out Jews, leading many to head for Palestine instead

  • The British White Paper of 1939 restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine to just 15,000 people per year. This coincided with the acceleration of Nazi horror

Theodor Herzl

 

"Theodor Herzl in Basel" by Ephraim Moses Lilien is in the Public Domain, CC0

Library Media Resources Center
LaGuardia Community College
31-10 Thomson Avenue, room E101
Long Island City, NY 11101
Email the Library