The Return: from the First Aliyah to the State of Israel
Two centuries from the first organised resettlements to a state and the great waves of aliyah. The route passes through pogroms, Herzl, Tel Aviv, the Balfour Declaration, the Shoah, 1948, and the mass immigrations from Arab lands, Ethiopia and the USSR. You will see that "return" was never one decision but dozens of different ones — religious, political and forced.
18 steps · about 15 minutes
The beginning comes a century before Zionism and for entirely different reasons. The Gaon's disciples go to Safed and Jerusalem as a religious project, not a national one.
Step 2 · 5641–5645The Pogroms of 1881, the First Aliyah and Hibbat Zion1881: pogroms after the assassination of Alexander II push millions out. Most go to America, a minority to the Land of Israel. The First Aliyah begins as a choice of direction.
Step 3 · 5655–5657The Dreyfus Affair, Herzl and the First Zionist CongressThe decisive turn: an assimilated Viennese journalist watches the Dreyfus trial and concludes that emancipation has failed. Two years later comes Basel.
Step 4 · 5620Theodor Herzl"If you will it, it is no dream." Note his diary entry: he gave the state fifty years, and was off by only half a year.
Step 5 · 5669The Second Aliyah and the Founding of Tel AvivThe Second Aliyah brings a different ideology: manual labour, Hebrew as a spoken language, the commune. Tel Aviv is founded as a suburb of Jaffa and becomes the first Hebrew city.
Step 6 · 5669Tel AvivSixty families divide the plots by lottery with seashells. A useful detail: the city arose not as an ancient shrine but as the solution to a practical problem.
Step 7 · 5678The Balfour DeclarationFor the first time a great power puts support for a Jewish national home in writing. Note the size of the document — sixty-seven words that changed the map.
Step 8 · 5625Rav Abraham Isaac HaKohen KookThe religious answer to a secular movement: the first Chief Rabbi saw the non-observant pioneers as part of a design. That argument continues today.
Step 9 · 5699–5705The Shoah: the Destruction of European JewryThe very reservoir from which aliyah flowed is destroyed. After the Shoah the question of a state stopped being a theoretical debate and became one of survival.
Step 10 · 5708The UN Partition Resolution29 November 1947: thirty-three votes in favour. Note that the Jewish side accepted partition and the Arab side rejected it — this determined everything that followed.
Step 11 · 5708The Declaration of the State of IsraelThe 5th of Iyar 5708, eight hours before the Mandate expired. The Declaration was being edited to the last minute — partly over whether to mention God.
Step 12 · 5647David Ben-GurionThe man who read out the Declaration and signed the status quo agreement with the religious parties. Many of today's conflicts were set in place right there.
Step 13 · 5708–5709The War of IndependenceThe war began the next day. The cost was about one per cent of the population — proportionally, hundreds of thousands by today's numbers.
Step 14 · 5708–5712The Exodus from Arab Lands: Magic Carpet, Ezra and NehemiahThe often forgotten half of the story: within a few years the thousand-year-old communities of Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and Morocco vanished. The state doubled its population in three years.
Step 15 · 5727The Six-Day War and the Liberation of Jerusalem1967 changes both the map and the sense of self. It is after this that religious Zionism becomes a mass movement rather than a current.
Step 16 · 2884JerusalemA good place to step back to the city as a whole: from David to 1967, three thousand years of the single theme of return you have been walking.
Step 17 · 5745Operation Moses: the Aliyah of Ethiopian JewryA community cut off from the rest of the Jewish world for millennia returns by air. A stress test for the very idea of return.
Step 18 · 5750–5752The Great Aliyah from the Soviet UnionA million people in a decade — the largest aliyah in history. The route ends here: the return turned out not to be an event of 1948 but a two-hundred-year process.