A CHRONOLOGY OF THE ZIONIST COLONIAL PROJECT
1866: Moses Hess called for the creation of a Jewish national state in Palestine.
1870: Mikve Israel, a Jewish agricultural school, was established north of Jaffa.
1878: Colony of Petach Tiqva, financed by Lord Rothschild, was established.
1881: Czarist pogroms in Russia sparked Jewish migration and settlement in Palestine.
1882: Leo Pinsker urged the Jews to settle in Palestine and founded the society of Hovevi Zion, which sponsored emigration of Jews to Palestine.
1882 – 1903: First wave of 35,000 Jewish émigrés arrived in Palestine.
1891: German Jewish millionaire Baron Maurice de Hirsch founded the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), which began its operations in Palestine in 1896.
1896: Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and writer, published a pamphlet calling for the creation of a ‘Jewish State’.
Ottoman Sultan Abd-al Hamid II rejected Theodor Herzl’s proposal that Palestine be granted to the Jews.
1897: The first Zionist Congress (ZC) met in Basle, created the Zionist Organization (ZO) and adopted the Basle Program, which called for Jewish colonization in Palestine.
1901: The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was founded to buy lands in Palestine for the exclusive ownership and use of the ‘Jewish people’.
1901-1902: Herzl tried in Constantinople to obtain a Charter for rights, duties and privileges of a Jewish-Ottoman Colonization Association for the Settlement of Palestine and Syria and grant the Jews with the right to deport the native population.
1903: The Anglo-Palestine Bank (later renamed as Bank Leumi) was established as the principal financial institution of the Jewish community in Palestine.
1903, December: The Anglo-Palestine Company, a subsidiary of the JCA, was established in Palestine to finance Zionist colonization.
1904 – 1914: A 2nd wave of 40,000 Jewish émigrés arrived in Palestine.
1908: The ZO opened an office in Jaffa.
1909: - The Palestine Land Development Co. was founded to coordinate land purchases.
- 1st kibbutz, based exclusively on Jewish labour, was established in Palestine.
- Tel Aviv was founded north of Jaffa.
- Hashomer was founded as a countrywide organization that would assume responsibility for the security of as many Jewish settlements as possible.
1911, May: In a memorandum to the Zionist Executive, Arthur Ruppin, the director of Zionist settlement in Palestine, proposed a limited population transfer by purchasing land near Aleppo and Homs in Syria to resettle dispossessed Arabs.
1912, July 12: Leo Motzkin suggested that the Arab-Jewish problem was soluble if the Arabs would be willing to resettle in the uncultivated lands around Palestine.
1914: Another security organization, called the Jaffa Group, came into being during WWI providing security services for Tel Aviv and the Jewish community in Jaffa.
1914, 12 November: Chaim Weizman wrote a letter to C. P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, stating “Should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence, and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there, perhaps more. They would develop the country, bring back civilization to it and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal”.
1917, 2 November: The Balfour Declaration, promising support for a ‘Jewish National Home in Palestine’, was issued by the British Secretary of State Balfour. The declaration was endorsed by the U.S. Congress in 1922 and was incorporated into the British Mandate in Palestine.
1919: The Zionists asked the Paris Peace Conference to provide them with the territory outlined within a line running east from Sidon in Lebanon to a point South-East of Damascus. The line then goes south along a line parallel to the Hijaz railway and ends in Aqaba in Jordan. From there, the line goes northwest to Al Arish in Egypt. This area included all of Mandate Palestine, the Golan Heights, both sides of the Jordan River, and southern Lebanon up to the Litani River.
1919 – 1923: A 3rd wave of 40,000 Jewish émigrés arrived in Palestine.
1921, March: The Haganah, a Zionist underground military organization was founded.
1923: Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky published two articles calling for the erection of an iron wall of Jewish military force in order to impose ‘peaceful’ coexistence between Arabs and Jews.
1924 – 1929: A 4th wave of 82,000 Jewish émigrés arrived in Palestine.
1925: Jabotinsky formed the World Union of Zionist Revisionists and the youth movement Betar. He later on seceded from the official Zionist movement, established the New Zionist Organization, and took over the leadership of the military organization, the Irgun.
1931: A group of Haganah members seceded from the organization and established the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL) advocating a more militant policy against Palestinian Arabs.
1935: - Ben-Gurion was elected chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive (JAExec) and held this post until 1948.
1929 – 1939: A 5th wave of 250,000 Jewish émigrés arrived in Palestine.
1937, August: The 20th ZC decided to accept the British Peel Commission proposal for partition of Palestine as a basis for negotiation with the British government.
A ‘Population Transfer Committee’ was appointed by the Jewish Agency (JA) to come up with plans to rid the ‘Jewish State’ of its Palestinian Arabs.
Yosef Weitz, director of the JNF, who served on the Population Transfer Committee, developed a plan for this purpose.
1938: The report of the British Woodhead Commission concluded that a voluntary ‘transfer’ is not going to happen and compulsory transfer of population was ruled out.
The Zionist leadership believed that the Zionists had to exert pressure to force the British to act. But if necessary, David Ben Gurion wrote in his diary, “We must ourselves prepare to carry out the removal of the Palestinians”. In a report to the JAExec on 12 June 1938, Ben-Gurion stated “I am for a compulsory transfer; I don’t see anything immoral in it...”
1938, June: British officer Orde Wingate organized Special Night Squads of British and Haganah personnel for operation against Palestinian villages.
1939, October: Differences of opinion emerged in the Irgun and led to a split in the organization and the establishment of the new organization Irgun Zvai Leumi Beisrael, which became to be known as the Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Lehi).
1939 – 1948: A 6th wave of 150,000 Jewish émigrés arrived in Palestine.
1940: Yossef Weitz, head of the settlement department of the JNF, wrote the following: “Transfer does not serve only one aim – to reduce the Arab population – it also serves a second purpose by no means less important, which is to evict land now cultivated by Arabs and to free it for Jewish settlement”. Therefore, he concluded, “The solution is to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries. Not a single village or a single tribe must be let off”.
1940, Dec. 20: Yosef Weitz wrote in his diary: “It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples…If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us…The only solution is a Land of Israel, at least a western Land of Israel without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises…There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [bedouin] tribe. The transfer must be directed at Iraq, Syria and even Transjordan. For this goal funds will be found…And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist…”
1941: Palmach, the Haganah’s strike force, was formed.
1942, 9-11 May: The first national conference of American Zionists was held at the Biltmore Hotel in New York. The conference adopted the ‘Biltmore Program’, which called for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine.
1944, 16 October: A confidential report was submitted by Roberto Bachi, an expert in demography, to the Haganah and the JA. In this report, Bachi proposed Arab ‘transfer’ to ensure ‘Jewish majority’.
1945, September: Large-scale illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine resumed under Haganah control.
1946, 22 July: A wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the Government Secretariat and part of the military headquarters, was blown up by the IZL killing and wounding about 150 Government officials.
1946, August: The JAExec agreed to consider the establishment of a Jewish state on an adequate part of Palestine.
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