III. A New Beginning
A Brief History of Mandated Palestine and Kibbutz Yagur Between 1880 and 1914, about sixty thousand Jews fled their homes in Russia, Galicia, Romania, Poland, and other Eastern Eu- ropean countries and immigrated to Palestine, most of them set- tling in the cities of Haifa, Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron. During this period, the Zionist movement was catching the imagination of Jews throughout Russia and Europe; the first kibbutz in Palestine, Degania, was established in 1910. Seven years later, Britain won a victory over the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and announced, in the Balfour Declaration, that it would set aside 11,000 square miles of its 1,184,000-square-miIe Mandate for a Jewish national home. The declaration was ambig- uous, however. At the same time that it favored the establishment of a “national homeland” for the Jewish people in Palestine, and said that it would use its best efforts to facilitate such a homeland, Britain imposed severe new limitations on Jewish immigration to the Mandate and assured Arabs that they would take preference over Jews; nothing would be done that might infringe on existing, non-Jewish communities. Between 1917 and 1920, during which period 100,000 Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe were murdered in pogroms, large num- bers of Jews made aliyah to Palestine. 10,000 immigrated in 1919 and 1920, and 27,000 more fled there during the next three years. The Arab response was immediate. On March 1, 1920, Arabs at- tacked and killed eight Jews, including the founder of HeChalutz, Josef Trumpeldor. What followed became a pattern. Britain restrict- ed Jewish immigration (to 16,500 a year) and otherwise ignored the
330
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online