How many Jews can move to Palestine without the Holocaust?

Prior to WWII, revisionist zionists in Palestine and their correspondents in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and other countries with large Jewish minorities planned to evacuate millions of Jews to Palestine, ideally with British cooperation but also taking steps to drive the British out. Jabotinsky and the Polish government, in particular, planned a migration of a million Polish Jews to Palestine over the course of the 1940s, and the Polish government lobbied diplomatically (and militarily, training Jewish militias for war against Britain) to expand the areas of Jewish settlement. Similar discussions with the Romanian and Hungarian governments indicate willingness on those governments’ parts to support Jewish emigration. Timothy Snyder’s ‘Black Earth’ describes the revisionist Zionist plan as involving mass landings of ships loaded with refugees and Jewish fighters on the Palestinian coast.

If WWII is averted circa 1938 and there is no catastrophic European war before about 1950, could Jabotinsky’s plan come to fruition? Could the Zionists drive out the British by force without WWII, or illegally immigrate in large numbers without a fight? What would such an Israel look like, with an additional 1-2 million Eastern European Jews by 1949?
 
I doubt there would be as much Jewish immigration to Palestine than OTL considering WWII and the holocaust were major factors to the migration. Butterfly that, then would you likely have the creation of Israel be delayed, if not completely butterflied.
 
The British had the Palestine Mandate and even after the Holocaust tried to prevent uncontrolled immigration from European Jews etc

In 48 the UN agreed to the creation of a Jewish homeland (a vote in which Britain abstained).

With no WW2, there is no UN and therefore no 'sympathetic' vote to create a Jewish state and Britain is not war weary and therefore likely to oppose any such attempts to move the Jewish populations from Europe into the area.

A lot of democratic countries refused to accept attempts to move large numbers of Jews (in this case mere 100s) in the late 30s partly because they did not want the burden and also to prevent the setting of precedent such actions would provide.

And Jewish terrorists verses British Regulars generally ended badly for the Terrorists so I do not believe that the British could be forced out by military action alone.

So IMO - no Israel by 1949
 
If WWII is averted circa 1938 and there is no catastrophic European war before about 1950, could Jabotinsky’s plan come to fruition? Could the Zionists drive out the British by force without WWII, or illegally immigrate in large numbers without a fight? What would such an Israel look like, with an additional 1-2 million Eastern European Jews by 1949?

The Zionists definitely can't drive the British out, especially without WWII weakening the Empire enough to cause them to start considering withdrawal from their more annoying colonies (which OTL is what caused them to pass the Mandate onto the UN for disposal).

Zionist illegal immigration to Palestine during the British "blockade" amounted to thousands, maybe even a few tens of thousands - obviously there aren't good records, and in many cases records were intentionally doctored, and so numbers vary wildly.

Now, if there was somehow an enormous wave of landings (though who would fund and organize it?), I doubt that the British would resort to great violence, as they'd been very hesitant to do so OTL, and British navy ships gunning down transports full of poor immigrants makes for bad copy in London.

The implications of a couple extra million Ashkenazi Jews in Israel in 1950 have, of course, enormous implications. We can start with the fact that this places Jews as a comfortable majority between the Jordan and the sea, and continue on with the fact that this country will be completely dominated by Ashkenazim, with the Mizrahi and Sphardi Jews really side-lined, and the fact that nevertheless it'll probably be more religious than OTL. I'm not certain whether Labour will continue to dominate, though; it might well, as unorganized shtetlers figure that a government willing to help fund farming by small communities and provide services to all might be a good one.
 
Could palestine economically support mass migration in a few years, or even over a decade? OTL the Jews that could leave Germany were stripped of their wealth, so in that case there would be a shortage of capitol for development at the individual level. In other words the Immigrants would be penniless refugees.
 
No Holocaust/WWII doesn't mean no antisemitism. Germany getting rid of its Jews for years before the war. The Fifth Aliyah, from 1929 to 1939, resulted in 225k to 300k Jews emigrating to Palestine. That's on average 22.5k to 30k a year.

Holocaust Deaths in lands controlled by Germany before WWII.
165k Jews from Germany died.
260K Jews from Czechoslovakia died.
65K Jews from Austria died.

Poland was a sponsor of the Zionist project too, if only because it wanted a place in which it could get rid of its Jews.

Poland had 3.3 million Jews before the Holocaust. If 5% of Poland's Jews made it to Israel, that's 165K Jews.

I think you could feasibly expect 500k-700k Jews to make it to Palestine over a 10 year period. Especially if foreign governments (Poland probably, maybe even Germany) are supporting the illegal immigration

@Minchandre I actually think most Jews who head to Israel during this "sixth aliyah" will be liberal, secular, German-Austrian Jews rather than Jews from the shtetl. Meanwhile the Jews most likely to be expelled from Poland are the ones who irked Polish leadership the most: the liberal professionals. Over time this will change, given the intense antisemitic direction of the Polish state, but I think that the more religious would arrive later.
 
No Holocaust/WWII doesn't mean no antisemitism. Germany getting rid of its Jews for years before the war. The Fifth Aliyah, from 1929 to 1939, resulted in 225k to 300k Jews emigrating to Palestine. That's on average 22.5k to 30k a year.

Holocaust Deaths in lands controlled by Germany before WWII.
165k Jews from Germany died.
260K Jews from Czechoslovakia died.
65K Jews from Austria died.

Poland was a sponsor of the Zionist project too, if only because it wanted a place in which it could get rid of its Jews.

Poland had 3.3 million Jews before the Holocaust. If 5% of Poland's Jews made it to Israel, that's 165K Jews.

I think you could feasibly expect 500k-700k Jews to make it to Palestine over a 10 year period. Especially if foreign governments (Poland probably, maybe even Germany) are supporting the illegal immigration

@Minchandre I actually think most Jews who head to Israel during this "sixth aliyah" will be liberal, secular, German-Austrian Jews rather than Jews from the shtetl. Meanwhile the Jews most likely to be expelled from Poland are the ones who irked Polish leadership the most: the liberal professionals. Over time this will change, given the intense antisemitic direction of the Polish state, but I think that the more religious would arrive later.

I might disagree with your last point. One of the big drivers of Polish support for emigration was the mediocre economic situation in Eastern Poland, where the unemployment rate was about 50%. Sponsoring emigration from Polesian shtetls (and allowing Polish peasants to occupy their abandoned homes/businesses) directly addresses that problem in a way that pressuring more educated (and more economically productive) Jews to leave does not.
 
The limit on the number of Jews that can go to Palestine is basically how many the British will let in. Assuming no WWII Jews in Europe and the USA have the resources to support a large aliyah.
 
With million of Jewish immigrant entering Palestine, how would British Government feed them? Where were the land? How would they make a living?

If somehow, there was a plan for the world Jewish congress to start to purchase land legally from Arabs and Arab were willing to sell them land to Jewish investors from Europe, then yes million of Jewish immigrants could enter British controlled Palestine without major incidents. Arab upper and middle classes would probably be tolerated the Jewish immigrants to certain extend.
 
I might disagree with your last point. One of the big drivers of Polish support for emigration was the mediocre economic situation in Eastern Poland, where the unemployment rate was about 50%. Sponsoring emigration from Polesian shtetls (and allowing Polish peasants to occupy their abandoned homes/businesses) directly addresses that problem in a way that pressuring more educated (and more economically productive) Jews to leave does not.
50% unemployment?

That might be an interesting thread in and of itself. If Poland fixes that they could have a much bigger military budget.
 
No Holocaust/WWII doesn't mean no antisemitism. Germany getting rid of its Jews for years before the war. The Fifth Aliyah, from 1929 to 1939, resulted in 225k to 300k Jews emigrating to Palestine. That's on average 22.5k to 30k a year.

Holocaust Deaths in lands controlled by Germany before WWII.
165k Jews from Germany died.
260K Jews from Czechoslovakia died.
65K Jews from Austria died.

Poland was a sponsor of the Zionist project too, if only because it wanted a place in which it could get rid of its Jews.

Poland had 3.3 million Jews before the Holocaust. If 5% of Poland's Jews made it to Israel, that's 165K Jews.

I think you could feasibly expect 500k-700k Jews to make it to Palestine over a 10 year period. Especially if foreign governments (Poland probably, maybe even Germany) are supporting the illegal immigration

@Minchandre I actually think most Jews who head to Israel during this "sixth aliyah" will be liberal, secular, German-Austrian Jews rather than Jews from the shtetl. Meanwhile the Jews most likely to be expelled from Poland are the ones who irked Polish leadership the most: the liberal professionals. Over time this will change, given the intense antisemitic direction of the Polish state, but I think that the more religious would arrive later.
Yiddish might become a more Important language there.
 
OTL it would not matter if all of the large numbers of Jews who might want to go to Palestine arrived in formal clothing with top hats and money belts full of gold sovereigns. No matter how many Jews want to come to Palestine, no matter how well financed this immigration is by foreign Jews, the British simply did not want, as a matter of policy, Jewish immigration to Palestine. Rich or poor, scientist or farmer, Jews were simply not wanted. The reality was the Balfour Declaration was a political move to engender support for the UK/Entente from the world Jewish community particularly in the USA. Once the war was over, "looking with favour upon the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine" came to mean, we let in a small number of Jews and assure the Arabs that a Jewish State is not happening any time soon.

It is worth noting that in 1913 if you asked the average Jew which country they disliked more, Germany or Russia the answer would be almost universally Russia. The Jews of Germany were highly assimilated, and in spite of antisemitism and restrictions were advancing in professions and business. In Russia, fuggedaboutit. While Jews in the British Empire responded like everyone else, in the USA there was a good deal of ambivalence especially early on before the USA was in the war. Hence the Balfour Declaration.
 
Prior to WWII, revisionist zionists in Palestine and their correspondents in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and other countries with large Jewish minorities planned to evacuate millions of Jews to Palestine, ideally with British cooperation but also taking steps to drive the British out. Jabotinsky and the Polish government, in particular, planned a migration of a million Polish Jews to Palestine over the course of the 1940s, and the Polish government lobbied diplomatically (and militarily, training Jewish militias for war against Britain) to expand the areas of Jewish settlement. Similar discussions with the Romanian and Hungarian governments indicate willingness on those governments’ parts to support Jewish emigration. Timothy Snyder’s ‘Black Earth’ describes the revisionist Zionist plan as involving mass landings of ships loaded with refugees and Jewish fighters on the Palestinian coast.

If WWII is averted circa 1938 and there is no catastrophic European war before about 1950, could Jabotinsky’s plan come to fruition? Could the Zionists drive out the British by force without WWII, or illegally immigrate in large numbers without a fight? What would such an Israel look like, with an additional 1-2 million Eastern European Jews by 1949?
Would Arab and North African Jews still immigrate ?
 
Most of the Jews of North Africa and Arabia immigrated after the creation of the State of Israel in response to the reaction of various Arab governments to the creation of Israel - ranging from increased pogroms to confiscation and expulsion (Iraq for example). I expect the situation here would be similar, some would immigrate but Zionism until after WWII was primarily a European/Western movement. For a host of reasons a mass movement of Mizrahi Jews to Palestine Israel is going to be driven more by being pushed out than pulled in, more so than European/Western Jews (Ashkenazi of Sephardic).
 
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