From legal immigration...

During a visit to the D.P. camps, members of the Anglo-American commission of inquiry on Palestine discover what this land symbolizes for most of the Jewish refugees. Out of 19,000 people interviewed in a survey conducted by UNRRA in May 1946, 18,700 responded with the choice of Palestine as host country. Behind the word Palestine is the image of home found in opposition to wandering, the feeling of security in response to the anti-Semitism they have endured. Moreover, the Zionist movements are strongly represented in the D.P. camps and a community life structure similar to that of the Kibbutz is sometimes implemented. In order to prepare young people for emigration to Palestine, agricultural farms are also created 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 over Palestine recognized in 1937 that they were ready to self-manage under a state form. This population was not an additional 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 appearance 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 gained Eretz Israel, pioneers who fled the pogroms and anti-Semitic persecutions from Russia, but were also, and above all, concerned with a Jewish national renaissance.

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 win Eretz Israel fleeing the antisemitic exactions that caused the death of more than 100,000 Jews massacred by Ukrainian gangs and by the White armies during the civil war following the takeover 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 from Germany in Palestine. A total of about 180,000 legal immigrants from Austria, from Czechoslovakia, reached Palestine between 1929 and 1939, to which were added 17,000 illegal immigrants, in three waves that of 1933, that of 1935 caused by the promulgation of the racial laws of Nuremberg and the "Night of Broken Glass" in 1938. Among these German Jews, about 20,000 of them arrived as part of an agreement signed in August 1933 between the leaders of the Zionist executive and the Reich Ministry of Economy. On one side, the Nazis, who wish to build a Germany without Jews, allow Jews who wish to immigrate by taking part of their capital, and on the other side, the Zionist movement which wants to encourage the greatest 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, whose mandate was certified by the SDN (League of Nations) in 1922.

Following the various Jewish-Arab tensions, which resulted in demonstrations, protests, but also murderous riots that erupted from the beginning of the 1920s, the British authorities are bearing the brunt of an ambiguous policy and are reneging on the commitments made during the Balfour declaration in 1917. While the war seems inevitable, the British mandatory power does not want to run the risk of seeing the 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 the number of Jewish immigrants, 10,000 per year and 25,000 visas granted on an exceptional basis.

Through the White Paper, the British authorities decide to put an end to the policy of dividing Palestine into two separate states and to move towards a unitary Arab state at the end of the 5-year period.

With the threat hanging over the Jews of Europe, the intensification of immigration is a priority for the Zionist movement. Refugees are crowded on boats chartered by the Haganah (the organization for the 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, generally Constanza in Romania the 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, on April 23 the Assimi with 250 refugees. Many immigrants are also interned at the Atlit camp located next to Haifa in northern Israel or transferred to Mauritius.

The boat United States, États-Unis, coming from Bari in Italy docks on the beaches of Nahariya with 700 stowaways on board including 40 children.
The Haganah managed to hide nearly 530 people, while the others are arrested and placed in a camp of repressed people. Palestine, January 1, 1948.
© Bundesarchiv.

Visit of David Ben Gourion, president of the Jewish community of Palestine, to the camp for displaced persons in Zeilsheim. Germany, 1946.
David Ben Gourion went several times to the camps for displaced persons between 1945 and 1946, to encourage the emigration of the surviving Jews to Palestine.
© Shoah Memorial.

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