[[link removed]]

WHO CREATED THE ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT?  
[[link removed]]


 

Harold Meyerson
May 6, 2024
The American Prospect
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ It wasn’t really Jews or Palestinians. It was the U.S. Congress,
which closed American borders 100 years ago this month. _

The Jewish population of Palestine by the end of the First World War
was just 60,000, roughly one-tenth of the overall population., Oded
Balilty/AP Photo

 

Without either side even noticing it, we’re coming up on the
centenary of the most decisive event in the fraught history of the
Israel-Palestine relationship. It was not the 1896 publication of
Theodor Herzl’s Zionist manifesto, nor the 1917 Balfour Declaration
in which the United Kingdom pledged its support for the establishment
of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was not the 1948 founding of the
Israeli state and subsequent Nakba—the expulsion of many thousands
of Palestinians from Israel. Nor was it Israel’s occupation,
following the 1967 war, of what had been Palestinian territories, or
either of the two intifadas.

Rather, it was the enactment on May 26, 1924, of the Johnson-Reed Act
[[link removed]] by the
Congress of the United States.

Fueled chiefly by white Protestant xenophobic fear and rage at Jews
and Catholics flowing into the United States since the 1880s, the act
effectively outlawed immigration from Russia, Poland, Italy, and all
of Eastern and Southern Europe. Had that pre-Trumpian wall not gone up
on America’s borders, there’s no reason to think there ever would
have been more than a trickle of Jews moving to Palestine.

Consider the numbers, and whence they came. The ascension of Tsar
Alexander III to the Russian throne in 1881 made state support for
violent antisemitism a major priority of Russia’s government, which
also ruled Poland until 1918. Bloody pogroms became a regular feature
of Jewish life (and death) among the roughly five million who lived
under the Tsar’s rule. Not surprisingly, millions began to leave:
Approximately 2,367,000 Jews fled Europe
[[link removed]] from 1881 to 1914, when the outbreak
of World War I made any such travel impossible.

Consider the numbers, and where they went. Of those 2,367,000 Jews
(the vast majority from Russia and Poland) who left between 1881 and
the outbreak of the war, 2,022,000 went to the United States
[[link removed]]. That’s 85 percent of the European
émigrés. Just 3 percent made the trek to Palestine. The Jewish
population of Palestine by the end of the First World War was just
60,000, roughly one-tenth of the overall population. At the time, more
Jews had come to Canada or Argentina than had come to Palestine.

To be sure, a journey from Minsk to Tel Aviv was arduous, but so was a
journey from Minsk to Hamburg or Bremen, and then to the Lower East
Side. Next year in Jerusalem? Apparently not.

Large-scale immigration to the U.S. recommenced with the end of World
War I, but anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic sentiment was exploding in
the American heartland. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan was soaring,
and that iteration of the Klan, unlike its 19th-century predecessor,
directed most of its ire at the immigrants, who they thought
threatened America’s white Protestant identity.

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 effectively outlawed immigration from
Russia, Poland, Italy, and all of Eastern and Southern Europe.

This was not simply a backlash of the lumpen; the xenophobia infected
much of the nation’s business and political elites, and had a
distinguished Brahmin pedigree. Massachusetts’s Republican senator
and Mayflower descendant Henry Cabot Lodge had been introducing bills
to ban the immigration of Jews and Catholics for many years, and
Congress put some preliminary restrictions in place in 1922, before
Johnson-Reed slammed America’s Atlantic door shut two years later.
(Its Pacific door had largely been slammed shut four decades earlier
with the Chinese Exclusion Act, whose scope Johnson-Reed expanded to
include—by excluding—all East Asians.)

Johnson-Reed, named for Rep. Albert Johnson (R-WA) and Sen. David Reed
(R-PA), had two aspects. The first restricted the yearly number of
immigrants from anywhere who could come to the United States to
150,000—nothing like the million-plus who’d been coming in the
years preceding the World War. The second established annual limits on
who could come from particular countries, setting quotas
that effectively limited
[[link removed]] immigration
to people coming from Northwest Europe.

That was accomplished by setting the level of immigrants from
particular countries to match the percentages of the nations of origin
of Americans who were tallied in the 1890 census, when damn few
Americans either came, or had their ancestors come, from places like
Russia and Poland. A 1927 amendment to Johnson-Reed made those
strictures a tad less Nordic and Aryan, but even under those, just
10.4 percent of the 150,000 immigrants admitted annually could come
from all the nations of Eastern Europe: Russia (by then, the USSR),
Poland, the Baltics, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria.
The hundreds of thousands who’d been coming each year from those
nations were reduced to 15,400.

Not surprisingly, it was only then that Jewish immigration to
Palestine began to soar, particularly after the Nazis took power in
Germany and antisemitic movements and governments came to dominate
Poland, Hungary, and much of the rest of Eastern Europe. The 3 percent
of Jewish emigrants from Europe who were going to Palestine before the
U.S. closed off its border soared to 46 percent
[[link removed]] from 1932 to 1939, as the Nazis took
over Germany and loomed as a threat over the rest of Europe.

Which is to say that the appeal to European (or non-European) Jews of
Zionism—of building a Jewish state—was not so persuasive that they
chose to go to Palestine over other non-European options, the U.S. in
particular, while those other options were still very real. Rather,
after 1924, they came to Palestine for the same reason they had come
to America: to get the hell out of a Europe where simply being Jewish
was in itself dangerous. Like many of the hundreds of thousands of
would-be immigrants who today trek to our southern border, they felt
driven to leave their homelands and flocked to a place where they
thought they could get in.

That, in and of itself, was not settler colonialism, though
Zionism _per se_ did have those aspects. Many, perhaps most, of the
first generations of Zionists were also socialists, for whom the
appeal of building genuinely socialist institutions like
the _kibbutzim _was part of Zionism’s appeal. Then again, many of
the Jewish immigrants who came to America were socialists, too, and
they built social democratic institutions like the clothing unions and
socialist political parties. In Palestine, of course, those Zionist
socialist institutions were explicitly Jewish, though the ferociously
anti-Palestinian wing of Zionism was centered among the explicitly
anti-socialist and ultranationalist Jabotinskyites
[[link removed]].

Ultranationalism is a politics that almost invariably creates
ultranationalism in its opposing camp, and the synergies between both
Palestinian and Jewish ultranationalists had both so determined to
overthrow Britain’s rule over Palestine and then establish their own
(Jew-free or Palestinian-free) state that each camp had elements that
tried to enlist Nazi Germany in their cause. Lehi (the Stern Gang)
made overtures to Hitler during World War II to join them in attacking
the Brits, while the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini,
actually spent World War II _in Germany_, trying to arrange a meeting
with Hitler in the hope that Germany’s war on the Jews might be
extended to Palestine.

There’s plenty that both sides need to answer for over the contested
history of Israel and Palestine, and there’s no question that
Israel’s occupation and suppression of Palestinian territories since
1967 has been a catastrophe for Palestinians, not to mention a moral
catastrophe for Israelis—in both cases, never more so than right
now. But the real author of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy is the
American xenophobia, nativism, and bigotry that planted the seeds for
that conflict 100 years ago this month, and that, wielded against
other peoples fleeing for their safety to the banks of the Rio Grande,
is malignantly alive and well in America today.

_HAROLD MEYERSON is editor at large of The American Prospect._

_Used with the permission. THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, Prospect.org, 2024.
All rights reserved._

_You can count on the Prospect, can we count on you?_

_There's no paywall here. Your donations power our newsroom as we
report on ideas, politics and power — and what’s really at stake
as we navigate another presidential election year. Please, BECOME A
MEMBER [[link removed]], or MAKE A ONE-TIME DONATION
[[link removed]], today. Thank you!_

* War on Gaza
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Palestine
[[link removed]]
* US History
[[link removed]]
* Immigration
[[link removed]]
* Congress
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]