Israel’s detractors regularly claim that the establishment of a Jewish state was part of the European colonial agenda, and that it remains nothing more than an outpost of European imperialism. The reality, Jonathan Adelman and Asaf Romirowsky point out, was closer to the opposite:
Consider the convocation of the First Zionist Congress by Theodor Herzl in Basel in 1897. At the congress there was no real involvement of international powers. Before his death in 1904, Herzl met key leaders in Germany, England, Ottoman Turkey, and the Vatican. While achieving some legitimacy for the movement, he failed to make any deals with them. . . . [Even the] 1917 British Balfour Declaration of support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine was matched by other British promises of Arab sovereignty in the same area. . . .
The refusal of the British colonial masters of Palestine to allow more than a handful of Jews (75,000 in 1939–1944 and none thereafter) into Palestine while millions were eager to emigrate there was matched by the 1939 British declaration that it supported an Arab state in Palestine. . . . [D]uring the 1945-1948 period, England sent 80,000 troops to Palestine to put down any Jewish moves to create a state.
In the November 1947 United Nations vote for [the creation of] a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine, the British refused to support the resolution. The winning votes were provided by a bloc that could never be considered a Western colonial power—the Soviet Union and its East European allies. . . .
[In short], the notion that colonial and great powers were the main force behind the creation of Israel is not supported by history. It was precisely the great powers and colonial powers who made the Jewish path to the creation of Israel so very difficult.
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