From legal immigration...

During a visit to D.P.’s camps, members of the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine discover what this land symbolizes for most Jewish refugees. Of the 19,000 people interviewed in a survey conducted by UNRRA in May 1946, 18,700 responded with the choice of Palestine as the host country. Behind the word Palestine is the image of home found in opposition to wandering, the sense of security in response to the anti-Semitism they have endured. Moreover, the Zionist movements are strongly represented in the DP camps and a structure of community life similar to that of the kibbutz is sometimes set up. In order to prepare young people for emigration to Palestine, agricultural farms were also established with the help of the occupation authorities.

Zionisms

In 1939, the Jewish National Home in Palestine (Yishuv) brought together more than 500,000 Jews whose British mandatory power on Palestine recognized in 1937 that they were ready to self-manage in a state form. This population was not yet another Jewish community, but the embryo of a state that already had most of the social, economic, cultural, military and political institutions that made it viable.

If there has always been a Jewish presence in Eretz Israel, the emergence of modern anti-Semitism, the birth of a political Zionist movement, the dislocation of the Ottoman Empire, then the advent of Nazism will provoke the intensification of Jewish immigration between the end of the 19th century and the Second World War.

During the first wave of immigration, between 1881 and 1903, 12,000 people arrived in Eretz Israel, pioneers who were fleeing pogroms and anti-Semitic persecutions from Russia, but also, and above all, concerned with a Jewish national revival.

The second wave, between 1904 and 1914, saw the arrival of 40,000 people, mainly activists and socialist sympathizers engaged in the Russian Revolution of 1905.

In the years 1915-1923, 35,000 people gain Eretz Israel fleeing the anti-Semitic exactions that caused the death of more than 100,000 Jews massacred by Ukrainian bands and white armies during the civil war following the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in October 1917.

From 1924 to 1927, 80,000 people, mainly from Poland and fleeing economic difficulties, settled in Palestine.

In 1933 alone, when Hitler came to power, nearly 35,000 Jews arrived in Palestine from Germany. In total, about 180,000 legal immigrants from Austria and Czechoslovakia reached Palestine between 1929 and 1939, to which were added 17,000 illegal immigrants, in three waves: the one in 1933, the one in 1935 caused by the promulgation of the Nuremberg race laws, and the "Nuit de cristal" in 1938. Among these German Jews, about 20,000 arrived as part of an agreement signed in August 1933 between the leaders of the Zionist executive and the Reich’s Ministry of Economy. On one side, the Nazis, who wish to build a Germany without Jews, allow Jews who want it to immigrate with part of their capital, and on the other, the Zionist movement, which wants to encourage the largest number of threatened Jews to join the Jewish National Home.

The White Paper

Since the Treaty of San Remo (1920), the Ottoman Empire has been broken up and Palestine is managed by the British, to whom the SDN (League of Nations) certifies the mandate in 1922.

Following the various Jewish-Arab tensions, which resulted in demonstrations, protests, but also deadly riots that erupted from the early 1920s onwards, the British authorities bear the brunt of an ambiguous policy and renege on the commitments made in the Balfour Declaration in 1917. While war seems inevitable, the British mandatory power does not want to run the risk of seeing Arab populations turn towards the Nazi Reich.

The White Paper of Malcolm MacDonald, published on 17 May 1939, limits for five years to 75,000 people the number of Jewish immigrants, 10,000 per year and 25,000 visas granted exceptionally.

In the White Paper, the British authorities decided to end the policy of partition of Palestine into two separate states and move towards a unitary Arab state after five years.

With the threat to Europe’s Jews, intensifying immigration is a priority for the Zionist movement. Refugees crowd on boats chartered by the Haganah (the organization of armed defense of the Jews of Palestine) and try to reach Palestine clandestinely.

British naval forces do not hesitate to intercept and return to their ports of departure, usually Constanza in Romania, boats loaded with Jews for whom Palestine is the last hope: on March 25, 1939, the Sandru with 269 refugees on board, on April 6, the Astir with 698 refugees, and on April 23, the Assimi with 250 refugees. Many immigrants are also interned at the Atlit camp near Haifa in northern Israel or transferred to Mauritius.

The ship United States, United States, coming from Bari in Italy lands on the beaches of Nahariya with 700 clandestine passengers on board including 40 children.
The Haganah managed to hide nearly 530 people, while the others were arrested and placed in a camp of repressed people. Palestine, 1 January 1948.
© Bundesarchiv.

Visit of David Ben-Gurion, president of the Jewish community in Palestine, to the displaced persons camp at Zeilsheim, Germany, 1946.
David Ben-Gurion made several visits to displaced persons camps between 1945 and 1946, encouraging the emigration of Jewish survivors to Palestine.
© Shoah Memorial.

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