History of the Jews in Quebec by Pierre Anctil

Author:Pierre Anctil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Published: 2021-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Israeli Declaration of Independence

While European Jewish communities were disappearing during the tumult of the war years, the Jews living in Mandatory Palestine were suddenly entering a period of political ferment. As soon as the Second World War ended, heightened tensions between Jewish and Arab populations living in the Middle East came to the attention of the newly created United Nations. To a large extent, this came about when the American government recommended in April 1946 that 100,000 European Jews who had survived the Holocaust be allowed to settle in Palestine. Mindful of the threat that such a policy would pose for the already precarious peace in the region, the British maintained their nearly total ban on Jewish immigration, as prescribed by the White Paper of 1939, despite pressure from Washington. This did not prevent Britain from announcing in February 1947 that it would soon unilaterally terminate the Palestine Mandate.9

Called upon to reach a decision, the Allied powers opted for a partition of the region into two zones, one in the hands of the Arab populations and the other controlled by leaders of the Jewish communities. Sharing the same border, the two political entities would be encouraged to cooperate on the administrative and economic levels while governing themselves independently by means of a legislative body elected through universal suffrage. The resolution put to the United Nations General Assembly at the end of November 1947 provided for the creation of a Jewish State and an Arab State, with the expectation that the two states would cooperate to maintain peace in the region. Very detailed geographic boundaries were drawn which corresponded roughly to the location of the different populations in the territory. This did not take into consideration the fact that the vast majority of Arab political elites were opposed to international intervention in the region and to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In the face of this peremptory refusal and indefinite standoff, the leaders of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Palestine decided in May 1948 to unilaterally declare the creation of the State of Israel. The event opened the doors to the most important wave of immigration on the territory now under Jewish control. Between 1948 and 1951, nearly 700,000 people arrived, including a significant number of Holocaust survivors. The Declaration of Independence was immediately followed by open warfare between the newly created Jewish state and its Arab neighbours, mainly Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The hostilities lasted from May 1948 to July 1949, at the end of which Israel had doubled its land mass, although the old city of Jerusalem remained in the hands of the Jordanians. This marked the beginning of a long conflict.

Absorbed by the war effort and the situation in Europe, Jewish Canadians had not foreseen at first that the geopolitical order in the Middle East could be so radically upended after peace was declared in 1945. Everyone was preoccupied by the refugee question and the long-term consequences of the Nazi genocide.

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