then flourished and prospered. There was enough
room for Arabs and Jews in Palestine. There were
many who believed they could live well together,
but instead the Jewish immigration ended in con-
flict and a struggle for predominance. The Arabs,
displaced from their land, were filled with resent-
ment and hatred for the new settlers from other
parts of the world. There were many Jews who
claimed the land as theirs by historical right,
looking back to the kingdom of David and its
capital city, Jerusalem, established a thousand
years before Christ. But there had been no Jewish
state for 2,000 years since its extinction in Roman
times. Jews had been dispersed (the diaspora) to
live in the Christian and Islamic world. Their reli-
gion and culture survived and with them the
belief that there would one day be a return to the
Holy Land. An orthodox Jewish community had
constituted the largest single religious group in
Jerusalem since 1840. (The others were the
Christians and Muslims.) It was persecution in the
Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century and
Nazi persecution and Soviet discrimination in the
twentieth that created a mass migration of Jews
from central and Eastern Europe. Until then
Zionism had attracted only a small minority of
European Jews; the majority were proud to be
Germans, Poles and Hungarians. (The Jews of
Britain, France and the US are still proud citizens
of their countries, even if they materially support
Israel at the same time.)
The early pioneers from central and Eastern
Europe have provided the great majority of
Israel’s political leaders up to the present day.
Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel,
and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister
and dominant political leader until 1963, were
both born in Russian Poland. Golda Meir was
born in Kiev, and after she and her parents had
emigrated to the US in 1906, she settled in 1921
at the age of eighteen in a kibbutz; prominent in
politics and diplomacy she became prime minis-
ter in 1969 on the death of Levi Eshkol.
Menachem Begin’s family perished in Poland; he
had headed the Irgun and uncompromisingly
claimed the whole biblical land of Israel. The
strong political influence of central and Eastern
European Jews is not surprising. They formed
the largest group of immigrants from 1903 to
1939, some 200,000. In the 1930s a new wave
of immigrants from Germany, about 50,000,
entered Palestine. The majority were profession-
als, doctors, lawyers, teachers, traders or the chil-
dren of middle-class parents, whereas the majority
of Eastern and central European Jews were skilled
workers or farmers. It is perhaps surprising that
the German-descended Israelis have not played a
larger political role so far. After 1945 the sur-
vivors of the death camps who came to Palestine
were again mainly Jews from Eastern Europe and
the Balkans. The next large-scale migration after
the war for independence came from the Middle
East, the oriental Jews, of Morocco, Tunisia,
Syria, Egypt and the Yemen. They were the least
educated and as a group are economically and
socially the least privileged. After three genera-
tions the gap between the European and oriental
Jews remains wide and is only slowly narrowing,
despite common service in the army, which is a
great leveller. The Jews of the former Soviet
Union provided the largest group of immigrants
in the 1970s and 1980s.
The population of Israel, excluding the territor-
ies conquered in the 1967 war, grew almost six
times from 750,000 in 1948 to 2.8 million by
1968 and to 6.4 million in 2001. Not all are Jews.
In 1948–9 some 600,000 Palestinian Arabs fled to
neighbouring Arab countries and became refugees
in camps, but 150,000 remained in their homes in
Israel; by 2001 they had grown to over 1 million
of whom 966,000 were Muslims mainly Sunni and
134,000 were Christians. In the West Bank
and Gaza there are about 200,000 Jewish settlers
and more than 3 million Arab Palestinians. In
Israel, the Arab Muslims were clinging to their
land as peasant farmers and poor villagers, eco-
nomically the great majority remained disadvan-
taged and from 1949 until the 1960s, their loyalty
suspected, they were placed under many restric-
tions, curfews and military rule. Yet outwardly they
were accorded the civic rights of all Israeli citizens,
including the right to vote for the Israeli parlia-
ment, the Knesset. Then in the 1960s a policy to
integrate them was followed with some success.
The Palestinian Arab Israelis have remained a
separate community, sympathetic to the Pale-