Ever greater waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine resulted from the growth of Nazi hate groups in Germany and its fascist satellites during the 1930s. In 1935, for example, over 61,000 European Jews felt so threatened that they left their homes, jobs, and families and immigrated to Palestine. From 1936-39, Palestinians erupted in a series of riots, trying to force Britain out of power to save what they considered their ancestral land from the mounting tide of Zionists.
The world's reaction to the execution of six million Jews during the Holocaust forced the matter of a Jewish homeland onto the agenda of the fledgling United Nations. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly approved a partition of lands, dividing Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. On May 13, 1948, British peacekeepers relinquished their control.
The next day, Jewish Zionists proclaimed Israel a sovereign state, with David Ben-Gurion as leader. A day later, Jordanian and Egyptian forces invaded the new nation and initiated a bloody era of terrorism, open warfare, and usurpation. During the first year of the new Jewish state, over 6,000 Jews were killed. By this time, however, Israel was now a militarily strong and victorious nation. It had increased its original territory by fifty percent and had reclaimed Jerusalem, a city held sacred by Jews, Muslims, and Christians.
During the following years, the displacement of Arab refugees after they had lost their lands to Israel in military upheavals kept the area in a perpetual state of unrest, including the war for control of the Suez Canal in 1956, the Six-Day War in 1967 (which increased Israel's territory two hundred percent), the assassination of Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in 1972, and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
