Without either side realizing it, we are approaching the 100th anniversary of the most defining event in the troubled history of Israeli-Palestinian relations. It was not Theodor Herzl’s Zionist Manifesto, published in 1896, nor the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Britain pledged support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. It wasn’t the creation of Israel in 1948 or the subsequent Nakba, the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from Israel. Nor was it the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory after the 1967 war or either of the two intifadas.
Rather, it was the enactment of the Johnson-Reed Act by the U.S. Congress on May 26, 1924.
Motivated primarily by Protestant white-chauvinist fear and anger at the influx of Jews and Catholics into the United States since the 1880s, this law effectively banned immigration from Russia, Poland, Italy, and all of Eastern and Southern Europe. It was legalized. If the pre-Trump wall had not been built on America’s border, there is no reason to think that Jewish migration to Palestine would have been more than a trickle.
Other works by Harold Meyerson
Think about numbers and where they come from. After Tsar Alexander III ascended the Russian throne in 1881, state support against violent anti-Semitism became a major priority of the Russian government, which also ruled Poland until 1918. Bloody pogroms became a daily feature of life (and death) for approximately 5 million Jews. People who lived under the rule of an emperor. Not surprisingly, millions of people began to flee the country. From 1881 to 1914, approximately 2,367,000 Jews fled Europe when the outbreak of World War I made such travel impossible.
Think about that number and where it went. Of the 2,367,000 Jews (mostly from Russia and Poland) who left the country between 1881 and the outbreak of war, 2,022,000 went to the United States. This represents 85% of European immigrants. Only 3% went to Palestine. By the end of World War I, there were only 60,000 Jews in Palestine, about one-tenth of the total population. At that time, more Jews came to Canada and Argentina than to Palestine.
Sure, the trip from Minsk to Tel Aviv was tough, but so was the trip from Minsk to Hamburg or Bremen and on to the Lower East Side. Will it be Jerusalem next year? Apparently not.
With the end of World War I, large-scale immigration to the United States resumed, but anti-Semitism and anti-Catholic sentiment exploded in the American heartland. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan has skyrocketed, and that iteration of the Klan differs from its 19th-century predecessor in that most of its anger is directed at immigrants, whom it sees as a threat to America’s white Protestant identity. I was thinking.
The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 effectively outlawed immigration from Russia, Poland, Italy, and all of Eastern and Southern Europe.
This was not just a repulsion from Lumpen. Xenophobia infected many of the country’s business and political elites, many of whom had prominent Brahmin pedigrees. Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican senator from Massachusetts and a descendant of the Mayflower, had for years introduced legislation to ban Jewish and Catholic immigration, and two years later Johnson Reed opened America’s Atlantic door. Congress established some preliminary restrictions in 1922 before closing. (That Pacific door was largely closed 40 years ago by the Chinese Exclusion Act, but Johnson-Reed expanded its scope to include all East Asians by excluding them.)
Johnson-Reed, named after Representative Albert Johnson (R-Wash.) and Sen. David Reed (R-Pennsylvania), had two sides. The former limited the annual number of immigrants from any country that could come to the United States to 150,000. This was not like the over 1 million immigrants who had come in the years before the World War. The second set annual limits on people coming from certain countries, effectively setting quotas that limited immigration to people coming from northwestern Europe.
This was accomplished by setting the level of immigration from a particular country to match the percentage of Americans counted in their country of origin in the 1890 census. At the time, there were very few Americans, or whose ancestors came from countries like Russia and Poland. . The Johnson-Reed Amendments of 1927 eased these restrictions slightly for Northern Europeans and Aryans, but even under that restriction, only 150,000 immigrants admitted annually came from all countries in Eastern Europe. Only 10.4% were able to do so. Russia (then the Soviet Union), Poland, the Baltic States, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. The hundreds of thousands of people who came from these countries each year have dropped to 15,400.
Not surprisingly, Jewish immigration to Palestine began to surge, especially when the Nazis came to power in Germany and anti-Semitic movements and governments began to spread in Poland, Hungary, and many other parts of Eastern Europe. It was after he came to dominate the The 3 percent of Jewish immigrants leaving Europe for Palestine before the United States closed its borders jumped to 46 percent from 1932 to 1939 as the Nazis occupied Germany and loomed as a threat to the rest of Europe. .
In other words, Zionism’s appeal to European (or non-European) Jews, namely the creation of a Jewish state, was not as convincing as other non-European options, especially choosing to go to Palestine rather than America. be. Other options remained very real. Rather, after 1924, they came to Palestine for the same reasons they came to America. This was in order to completely escape from Europe, where being a Jew itself was dangerous. Like many of the hundreds of thousands of would-be immigrants making the journey to our southern border today, they feel forced to leave their homeland and believe they can enter the country. We gathered in a place where we could.
Although it was not settler colonialism per se, Zionism itself had aspects of it. Many, perhaps most, of the first generation of Zionists were also socialists, and for them the appeal of building truly socialist facilities such as kibbutzim was part of the appeal of Zionism. Again, many of the Jewish immigrants who came to America were also socialists, and they established social democratic institutions such as clothing unions and socialist political parties. In Palestine, of course, the Zionist Socialist Organization was distinctly Jewish, but the virulently anti-Palestinian wing of Zionism was centered around the distinctly anti-socialist and ultra-nationalist Jabotinski faction.
Ultra-nationalism is a politics that almost invariably creates ultra-nationalism in opposing camps, with the synergy of both Palestinian and Jewish ultra-nationalists to overthrow British rule in Palestine, and then to each was determined to establish an independent state (without Jews or without Palestinians). There were elements in the camp that sought to enlist Nazi Germany to the cause. The Leahy (Stern Gang) offered Hitler to join the attack on the British during World War II, but the Palestinian mufti in Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, actually started World War II in Germany. and tried to arrange a meeting with Hitler in Germany. Hope that Germany’s war against Jews might extend to Palestine.
Both sides have much to answer for when it comes to the disputed history of Israel and Palestine, and it goes without saying that Israel’s occupation and oppression of the Palestinian territories since 1967 has been a moral disaster for Israelis. There is no doubt that this is a catastrophe for the Palestinian people. We have never been in that situation more than now. But the real authors of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy are the American foreigners who, 100 years ago this month, planted the seeds of that conflict and exercised it against others fleeing to the banks of the Rio Grande in search of safety. It is exclusion, xenophobia, and prejudice. , is alive and well in America today.
