Ratzel, the founder of Zionism. In the year one thousand eight hundred and ninety-four, the French authorities falsely accused a French captain from Alsace, a Jew, named Henri Dreyfus, on charges of treason and leaking secret information to Germany, France’s enemy at the time. Due to the details of the case, French society was divided into those who sympathized with Dreyfus and those who hated him. This is what generated a deep disagreement between anti-Semites and nationalists. The Dreyfus case turned into a symbol of injustice. Dreyfus was secular despite his Jewish origins, but he became the target of many vitriolic anti-Jewish attacks in French newspapers that contributed to inflaming the situation. Among the journalists who covered the events of the Dreyfus affair was the Austrian playwright Theodor Herzl, who was living in Paris at the time as a foreign representative for an Austrian newspaper. Herzl was not religious either. He wrote a letter with the interesting idea that if anti-Semitism inflicted on a free and high-status human being like Dreyfus, who would be exempt from this violence? Herzl's invitation coincided with the end of the Dreyfus case, and the man was able to find listening ears among Jewish circles in Europe. In the year one thousand eight hundred and ninety-seven, the first conference was held. Zionist in Basel, Switzerland. Herzl devoted the remaining years of his life - since he died in 1914 from a heart attack - to securing financial and political support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Despite the presence of several different Zionist political factions calling for a solution to the Jewish issue, Herzl took the lead and was called the father of Zionism because he demanded the creation of a state for the Jews. For the Zionists, there are no documents more important than that short letter written by the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour in the year one thousand nine hundred and seventeen, known as the Balfour Declaration, in which the Minister expressedHe expressed his sympathy with the Jewish Zionist aspirations, the content of which was to urge the need to find a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. Anti-Zionists viewed the Balfour Declaration as a major betrayal, especially since Britain was making promises to various parties at that time, both Arabs and Jews. Between the years one thousand nine hundred and fifteen and one thousand nine hundred and seventeen, Britain promised to create a unified Arab state for all Arabs in the Middle East in exchange for Arab support for it in the First World War against the Ottoman Empire. Of course, the Arabs supported the British against the Ottomans, and the Balfour Declaration came to destroy all Arab dreams of achieving their own great state. . Following Britain's takeover of Palestine after World War I, Jewish immigration there increased. The British tried to curb Jewish immigration to Palestine, but the Zionist movement did not accept this, so Zionist groups took up arms as well. Britain was forced to completely stop Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939 in the hope of obtaining its oil supplies from Arab oil-producing regions. The horizon was blocked for the British, who began to receive retaliatory attacks from Zionist Jews and Arabs alike. Therefore, in 1947, Britain decided to raise the Palestinian-Jewish issue to the United Nations
New at the time, it was then forced to allow 100,000 Jewish refugees to immigrate to Palestine immediately, at the request of then US President Harry Truman. Establishment of the State of Israel. In November of the year one thousand nine hundred and forty-seven, the United Nations issued a resolution dividing Palestine into two states, a Jewish state and an Arab state of approximately the same size, despite the fact that Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in Palestine at that time, which numbered one point eighty-five million people. The Palestinians rejected the resolution in general and took up arms against the Zionist movements. Coinciding with the intensification of the fighting, the British announced the date of their withdrawal from Palestine, which was the fifteenth of May in the year one thousand nine hundred and forty-eight. One day before the British forces left Palestine, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of the State of Israel, fully aware that war with the Arab countries was inevitably coming. Then, five Arab countries immediately declared war on the newly established state of Israel. One of the differences between the two sides is that the Israelis call it the War of Independence, while the Arabs call it the Nakba. There are two Palestinian and Israeli accounts about the reasons and events that prompted hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs to emigrate from Palestine during the war and turn them into refugees in neighboring countries such as Syria and Jordan, which is one of the crises that still exists to this day. According to the Zionist narrative, the Palestinians left the war zones voluntarily because their Arab allies warned of an imminent invasion that would throw the Jews into the sea. As for the Palestinian story, it says that the Israeli army invaded the villages and forcefully expelled their residents. There is some clear historical evidence that some Palestinians fled their homes in fear of IDF violence, whether or not those forces stormed their homes. But on the other hand, there are many testimonies and clear evidence that prove the Jewish crimes committed against the Arabs and the civilian deaths who fell in deliberate acts of violence during the year one thousand nine hundred and forty-eight. Israel won the war and annexed additional lands to the new state, which amounted to about fifty percent of the lands granted to Israel according to the partition resolution, in addition to the subsequent lands it acquired in the war of 1967. The Jewish crisis, which had worried Europe for centuries and which the Zionist movement demanded a solution for, turned into a Palestinian crisis that remains unresolved to this day. Share your opinion with us: How many years should pass until the Palestinians and Israelis find a solution?