History of the State of Israel

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Map of Israel

The history of the state of Israel did not begin with its founding in 1948. You went efforts of thought leaders of Zionism over a period of more than 100 years requires the return of Jews to the " Promised Land " permit and later a sovereign nation state with wanted to create their own national territory for the Jews of Europe .

prehistory

Jewish immigrants went ashore near Nahariya in 1948 .
Partition of Palestine according to UN plans (1947)

Since Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement during the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 , practical steps have been taken to gain international support for a Jewish nation-state in Palestine , which was then part of the Ottoman Empire .

Jewish immigration at the beginning of the 20th century was strongly influenced by the kibbutz movement . Numerous immigrants from Eastern Europe contributed to the establishment of kibbutzim . April 11, 1909 is considered to be the founding date of Tel Aviv , the first modern Jewish city in Palestine. With the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British government pledged its support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which was also supported by a number of other states. In 1922 the League of Nations gave the United Kingdom the mandate of Palestine (and thus also of present-day Jordan).

In the 1920s, when there were bloody attacks on the Jewish population in Jerusalem in 1920 and Jaffa in 1921 and the Hebron massacre in 1929 , Amin al-Husseini began to assume a leading role among the Palestinian Arab population. Al-Husseini, who was appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel in 1921 , was the leader of the Arab uprising from 1936 to 1939 .

The history of women's suffrage is part of the political history of the state. In 1920 the yishuv created an assembly of representatives. This did not have any legal legitimation, since the power lay with the British mandate power ; but this was encouraged to cooperate with Jewish representations. Ultra-Orthodox men successfully blocked women's suffrage in the yishuv in the beginning. As a compromise solution, women were given the right to vote for a limited time in April 1920. The ultra-Orthodox men were compensated by receiving two votes: one for themselves and one for their wife. There was a permanent right to vote for women from 1925 in the elections for the second legislative assembly. However, the principle of one vote per person was not applied until the election of the fourth legislative assembly in August 1944. The rules governing this election formed the basis for the constitution of the State of Israel. After the declaration of independence, a constituent assembly was supposed to draw up a constitution within five months, but this was not possible because of the war. In January 1949, Knesset elections were held according to the system that had applied to the Assembly of Representatives (see above). On February 16, 1949, a few basic laws were passed by the Constituent Assembly. The rule that gender shouldn't matter was part of these basic laws.

In 1937, the Peel Report proposed for the first time the division of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.

After the National Socialists “ seized power ” in Germany and the persecution of the Jews that began in 1933, Jewish immigration increased considerably, but in 1939 it was partly forcibly pushed back by the British mandate administration. The White Paper provided for a five-year period during which the immigration of 75,000 Jews (10,000 per year and an additional 25,000 refugees) should be allowed. It determined British politics in Palestine until 1947 and led to reactions from the Jewish side such as the Aliyah Bet and help to escape from war-torn Europe .

At the beginning of the British mandate, the Hagana was founded as a Jewish paramilitary organization, which generally adopted a rather moderate stance. The Arab uprising and the obstruction of the escape from National Socialism according to the White Paper led since the 1930s to the split from underground organizations such as Irgun and Lechi , which resorted to terrorist measures such as the attack on the King David Hotel .

After the end of the Second World War and the Shoah , which claimed six million Jewish victims in Europe, international support for the Zionist movement grew. Great Britain announced its intention to withdraw from the British mandate area. The UN General Assembly decided on 29 November 1947, the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, with Jerusalem as a " corpus separatum should be" under UN administration. The resolution was accepted by most of the Jews in Palestine, but rejected by most of the Arabs.

Founding of the state

Israeli prisoners of war, likely in Egypt, 1948–49

On May 14, 1948, the last British forces withdrew from Palestine and David Ben Gurion read the Israeli declaration of independence . On the very night of the founding, Egypt , Saudi Arabia , Jordan , Lebanon , Iraq and Syria declared war on the young state.

Israel successfully drove back the armies in the Israeli War of Independence . The Israeli army was able to capture some of the territories that the partition plan would have given to the Arabs or Jerusalem . The war lasted 15 months and resulted in a 50 percent expansion of Israeli territory (including West Jerusalem). In June 1948, clashes over the disarming of the ship Altalena led to heavy fighting between the Israeli government under Ben Gurion and representatives of the Irgun , including Menachem Begin .

In the course of the war, many Palestinian Arabs began to flee or displace them. The hour of birth of Israel (see Jom Haazmaut ) is considered a catastrophe ( Nakba ) for the Palestinians . Most of the Jewish refugees moved to the State of Israel; Many of the Arab refugees and their descendants still live in refugee camps operated by UNRWA (see Palestinian refugee problem ).

Under the leadership of the United Nations, four armistice declarations were signed in 1949 in Rhodes between Israel and, on the other side, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, with the Green Line as the border between the states. The West Bank, including the eastern part of Jerusalem with the Old City , was annexed by Transjordan (Jews had no access to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount , although the ceasefire agreement with Jordan allowed them to do so ) and the Gaza Strip came under Egyptian rule. So far, peace agreements have only been concluded with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994).

On January 23, 1950, the Israeli government declared West Jerusalem its capital.

History until 1967

On January 25, 1949, the first elections to the Knesset took place, from which the Mapai emerged as the leading force. This party and its successor Avoda led all government coalitions until 1977. David Ben Gurion became the first prime minister after the elections and Chaim Weizmann became the first president. On May 11, 1949, Israel became the 59th member of the UN .

The surrounding Arab states remained hostile to Israel despite the ceasefire. Immediately after the establishment of the state, the economic boycott of the yishuv was transferred to the state of Israel. This was followed by a boycott of Israel by the Arab League that lasted until the 1990s , in which third countries were also included. This ensured an ongoing economically precarious position for Israel, which, under the leadership of Ben Gurion and his successors Moshe Sharet , Levi Eschkol , Golda Meir and Jitzchak Rabin, tied itself politically and economically strongly to Western Europe and the USA and, incidentally, was very interventionist and at the beginning pursued a state-socialist economic policy. Further political determinations of the early days included: Declaration of Hebrew and Arabic as national languages; state-guaranteed, secular schooling (instead of camp schools run by political or religious groups); (initially) no firm ties to one of the two superpowers USA and USSR in the Cold War .

On July 5, 1950, the Knesset passed the Law of Return , which gives all Jews in the world the right to immigrate to Israel. Even before this law was passed, immigrants came to Israel in droves, causing major financial and logistical problems. Some of them were supported by the Israeli state, so from 1947 to 1950 around 250,000 Holocaust survivors came to the country. The " magic carpet operation " brought about 49,000 Yemeni Jews to Israel between 1949 and 1950 . The operation had become possible with the consent of the British; it had been preceded by pogroms in Aden. Many of these immigrants were Orthodox Jews in large families, often they were rural residents who first had to be informed of the possibility of emigration. There was also resistance from the ranks of the Mapam to this action because of the feared costs of integration. The new immigrants were housed in the Arab villages abandoned during the War of Independence, in British barracks or in tent camps.

By 1958, the population of Israel rose from 800,000 to 2 million people, in particular due to immigration. This influx was an economic burden on the young state, which made rationing of most consumer goods (food, fuel, furniture, clothing) necessary until 1959. Israel financed itself primarily through economic aid and donations, for example from the USA. Against domestic political resistance, the Luxembourg Agreement with West Germany was concluded in 1952 , which promised Israel considerable economic support from the Federal Republic of Germany as reparation for the crimes of National Socialism. This support ran for several years and included cash transfers, services and German export goods, including large quantities of armaments.

The Lavon Affair , named after the then Israeli defense minister Pinhas Lavon was a political affair following a botched covert operation that in 1954 in Egypt under the code name Operation Susannah was performed. The affair sparked many years of controversy among the Israeli public and ultimately led to the final resignation of David Ben Gurion in 1963, whose post as Prime Minister was taken over by Levi Eshkol .

The Suez Crisis (also the Sinai War or Sinai Campaign ) in 1956 was a crisis that resulted in an armed conflict between Egypt on the one hand and an alliance of Great Britain , France and Israel on the other. The main point of contention was the control of the strategically important Suez Canal . Despite military successes, the result was an embarrassment and weakening of the European powers and a strengthening of the Egyptian position in the Middle East. Since Gamal Abdel Nasser and other Arab states were politically more closely tied to the Soviet Union, the latter distanced itself from Israel towards the end of the 1950s, so that Israel's policy of neutrality in the Cold War ultimately had to be abandoned; From the Suez crisis onwards, Israel worked mainly with the USA, France (the most important arms supplier until 1966) and Great Britain.

Six Day War 1967 and aftermath

The Six Day War immediately followed the closure of the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping, the forced withdrawal of UNEF troops from Sinai by Nasser , and an Egyptian deployment of 1,000 tanks and almost 100,000 soldiers on the borders of Israel. The war began on June 5, 1967 with a preemptive strike by the Israeli air force against Egyptian air bases, which was intended to forestall a feared attack by the Arab states. Jordan, which had signed a defense treaty with Egypt on May 30, 1967, then attacked West Jerusalem and Netanya . At the end of the war, Israel controlled the Gaza Strip , the Sinai Peninsula , the Golan Heights , the West Bank and East Jerusalem .

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Israel until 1990

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Israel in the 1990s

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From 2000

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On October 4, 2001, the charter flight of the Russian airline Siberia Airlines from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk over the Black Sea was shot down by a surface-to-air missile of the Ukrainian Navy . All 78 people on board, including 40 Israelis, were killed.

Economic development

Cooperation with Asian and African countries

Because no peace could be achieved between Israel and its neighbors, the Israeli government tried to improve relations with countries in the Far East . For example, on May 15, 1952, diplomatic relations were established with the Japanese government. A similar attempt was made to come about with the governments of India and the People's Republic of China , but failed in the 1950s.

In the 1960s, Israel received requests for economic and technical cooperation in the development of infrastructure, the army and administration from a group of newly independence African and Asian states - including Burma , Nigeria , Kenya , Cameroon , the Ivory Coast and the Republic of Liberia . Israel's government was then able to conclude treaties with these countries for their mutual benefit. The former colonial powers France and Great Britain and even the USA took note of this development with horror. At the Bandung Conference, a group of Arab and North African states, headed by Egypt , took a diplomatic stand against the emerging economic appreciation and strengthening of Israel's foreign policy .

Economic relations with the EU

First relations with the European Community existed since 1964 in the form of a trade agreement. In the 1970s, Israel embarked on monetary and financial reforms and trade liberalization measures recommended by the EC and the US. As a result, a trade and cooperation agreement was concluded with the EC in 1975. Within this, a free trade zone in the commercial sector was established in 1989, and it also gave Israel tariff preferences in the agricultural sector. As a result, however, there were conflicts over goods that did not come exclusively from the Israeli heartlands. Finally, on November 20, 1995, an association agreement was concluded, which replaced the 1975 agreement. In addition to economic cooperation, there are also forms of scientific and cultural exchange. The Barcelona Process , which began in 1995 and led to the establishment of the Union for the Mediterranean in 2008, plays a special role . Except for the EU member states and Israel, with the exception of Libya, all Arab countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea are members of this union. The Union started operating in March 2010.

society

Immigration of Russian Jews

Organized immigration of Russian Jews began around 1880 with the Chibbat Zion movement, a forerunner organization of Zionism. In the next decades, up to around 1930, hundreds of thousands of Jews emigrated to Palestine from the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union in the first four Aliyots .

From 1948 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union , Soviet-Israeli relations were marked by manifold changes, although the actual goals always remained the same. These goals were based on a combination of three factors. As early as the days of the Tsars, there was a desire that Russia should gain possibly exclusive influence in the Middle East by playing off the opposing great powers. The second, ideological factor was the leading role of the USSR in the communist world and in the "anti-imperialist" struggle against the West. Third, the Soviet government under Stalin tried to resolve the “Jewish question” by resettling the Jews in Israel. Anti-Semitism was officially a criminal offense in the USSR, but it was common practice.

On the last day of the Six Day War , June 10, 1967, the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with Israel and in the following years, until it was dissolved, refused to emigrate approximately 3 million Jewish citizens wishing to leave the country or combined the issue of passports with high financial costs and bureaucratic hurdles. Israel's unexpectedly quick victory in the Six Day War was also a disappointing defeat for the Soviet Union, to which it responded by rearming Egypt and Syria and supporting Egypt in the war of attrition against Israel in the hope of increasing Arab dependence on the Soviet Union. The buzzwords “Soviet-Arab Alliance” and “Israel, the Nazis of the Present” shaped the Soviet Union's relations with Israel in the last decades.

After Mikhail Gorbachev took office and the perestroika he initiated , the exit regulations were relaxed. In 1989 the mass immigration of Jewish people from the Soviet Union began. In total, over a million people immigrated to Israel from the successor states of the former Soviet Union by 2003. There are numerous newspapers, radio and TV channels in Russian. The nationalist party Yisrael Beitenu was founded by Russian immigrants . The Jewish identity of some emigrants from the Soviet Union is occasionally questioned on the religious side. This is based on contradictions between the Halacha , in which the Jewish religious affiliation is transferred matrilinearly , and the concept of the (Jewish) nationality in the Soviet Union and its successor states, which is determined patrilinearly .

Social protests 2011

The summer of 2011 saw the largest social protests across the country since the state was founded. The protests ignited in mid-July 2011 with a spontaneous camp out of anger about the high rents in Tel Aviv . The movement organized large demonstrations on the weekends and swelled quickly. In addition to the housing problem, food prices, health care, the education system and the excessive tax burden were discussed. After the first peak of the wave of protests in early August, when 300,000 Israelis took to the streets, Prime Minister Netanyahu set up a team of experts led by the former chairman of the National Economic Council, Manuel Trajtenberg , to work out proposed solutions over the course of about eight weeks. It was generally expected that no further mass actions would take place during this period. On the Saturday evening of September 3, 2011, however, the largest demonstrations in the history of Israel took place, in which, according to media reports, over 450,000 people took part. In Tel Aviv alone, 300,000 demonstrators called for a fairer social order. In Jerusalem , 30,000 people gathered in front of the prime minister's residence; other demonstrations took place in Haifa and Afula , among others .

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : History of the State of Israel  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Aryeh Akiva Weiss / Akiva Arie Weiss, born 1868 in Belarus, grew up in Lodz, watchmaker, died 1947, new immigrant in Palestine, driving force within the Ahusat-Bajit society, later overshadowed in the historical memory of Dizengoff .
  2. ↑ a b c d June Hannam, Mitzi Auchterlonie, Katherine Holden: International Encyclopedia of Women's Suffrage. ABC-Clio, Santa Barbara, Denver, Oxford 2000, ISBN 1-57607-064-6 , p. 153.
  3. ^ Emmanuel Saadia: Systèmes Electoraux et Territorialité en Israel. L'Harmattan Paris, Montreal 1997, p. 69.
  4. ^ Emmanuel Saadia: Systèmes Electoraux et Territorialité en Israel. L'Harmattan Paris, Montreal 1997, p. 12
  5. ↑ Johannes Glasneck, Angelika Timm : Israel. The history of the state since its foundation , Bonn 1992, ISBN 3-416-02349-8 , p. 117.
  6. ↑ List of UN members , United Nations website.
  7. ^ English translation of the law , website of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
  8. ^ Tsafrir Cohen: Six days that do not pass. In: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Israel Office. March 7, 2017. Retrieved June 14, 2017 .
  9. ↑ Russian jet explodes over the Black Sea. bbc, October 4, 2001, accessed March 25, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Ben Aris: Ukraine admits it shot down Russian airliner. In: The Telegraph. October 13, 2001, accessed on March 25, 2018 (English): "Although both Russia and Ukraine were almost certainly aware of the cause from the start, it took eight days for Ukraine to accept responsibility."
  11. ↑ Aircraft accident data and report in the Aviation Safety Network (English)
  12. ↑ When rockets bring passenger jets down from the sky. In: welt.de. July 18, 2014, accessed March 25, 2018 .
  13. ↑ ISRAEL / AFRICA AID: Pray with Nasser . In: Der Spiegel . No. 43 , 1960, pp. 53-54 ( Online - Oct. 19, 1960 ).
  14. ^ Encyclopedia Judaica . Vol. 14, pp. 490-506
  15. ↑ Information on Political Education, Israel, No. 287, p. 80
  16. ↑ With us, but in the offside article on hagalil.com from July 9, 2003
  17. ^ Mass demonstrations for social justice Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 4, 2011
  18. ↑ 450,000 during the largest social protests in Israel ( memento from September 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) zeit.de, September 4, 2011
  19. ↑ Mass rallies revive Israel protest movement Al Jazeera, September 4th 2011