The Gateway Chronicle 2020

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already appeared to be a State at the
hands of the Labor Zionists so Labor Zionism
made it more difficult to refuse a formal
Jewish State too. Indeed, the United
Nations Special Committee on Palestine
Report specifically notes that kibbutzim,
“express the spirit of sacrifice and co-operation
through which [agricultural success]
has been achieved”.
Regardless, a Jewish State would not have
been considered without a Jewish population
in Mandatory Palestine. This too was
provided in part by the Labor Zionists. Of
course, the various issues facing European
Jews (social and economic) were the main
‘push factors’ but the kibbutzim created a
method of getting
work, finding
a community
upon arrival and
– for most immigrants
during the
Third Aliyah (literally
‘ascent’,
but a word for
the waves of migration)
from
1919 until 1923
but fewer immigrants
among the
later (and larger)
waves of Aliyot –
provided an ideological
home for socialist Jews. While
only a minority of Jews lived on kibbutzim,
their success did create a sense among the
Jewish diaspora that moving to Israel was
possible; for many it grew to be necessary,
but it did make the move more palatable.
In 1936, the local population of Palestine
began a general strike that turned into a
violent rebellion; the 1937 Peel Commission
found the cause of this to be the rapid
demographic change. The Peel Commission
also concluded that the Mandate was
untenable and that partition would be
necessary; according to Roza El-Elini, the
Commission’s report, “proved to be the
master partition plan, on which all those
that followed were either based, or to
which they were compared”. Furthermore,
the presence of a Jewish population
specifically was vital for a Jewish State to
be considered; if there were no Jews in
Palestine, there would have been no reason
to consider creating a state for Jews in
Palestine. This strongly suggests that Labor
Zionism had a notable impact on the
demographic change which ultimately
lead to the partition of Palestine and hence
the creation of the State.
With that said, there were many other significant
factors in the creation of the State
of Israel. First among them was the collapse
of the Ottoman Empire. From the
beginning of the First World War, the British
Government
concerned itself
with the fate of
Ottoman Palestine.
As part of
that, the British
Government entered
into negotiations
with another
group of
Zionists: the socalled
Political
Zionists, who
aimed to create a
Jewish State
through pure diplomacy.
The result
of the negotiations was the Balfour
Declaration of 2 November 1917, giving
sympathy to the Zionist Cause. Historians
have argued at great length as to why the
Government did this; Lloyd-George himself
claimed in his memoir it was to gain
financial support from Jews and the
American Government (Geoffrey Wheatcroft
notes that the Balfour Declaration
was almost “Wilson’s Fifteenth Point”), to
prevent Zionist support for Germany, due
to the negotiating of the Political Zionists
and his own support for the cause. Whatever
the actual reason, the declaration is of
paramount importance to the Zionist
cause. The declaration was later endorsed
by the United States and gave hope to