Editing The Cold War (section)

==The founding of Israel== 
Hoo boy. To say that this is controversial is a bit of an understatement. Let's start with a neutral quote to quickly show the perspectives before anything else.

"A man once jumped from the top floor of a burning house in which many members of his family had already perished. He managed to save his life; but as he was falling he hit a person standing down below and broke that person’s legs and arms. The jumping man had no choice; yet to the man with the broken limbs he was the cause of his misfortune. If both behaved rationally, they would not become enemies. The man who escaped from the blazing house, having recovered, would have tried to help and console the other sufferer; and the latter might have realized that he was the victim of circumstances over which neither of them had control. But look what happens when these people behave irrationally. The injured man blames the other for his misery and swears to make him pay for it. The other, afraid of the crippled man’s revenge, insults him, kicks him, and beats him up whenever they meet. The kicked man again swears revenge and is again punched and punished. The bitter enmity, so fortuitous at first, hardens and comes to overshadow the whole existence of both men and to poison their minds."
—Isaac Deutscher

The processes that lead to the founding of Israel preceded the start of the Cold War by a good twenty years, when Jewish veterans returning home from World War One quickly found their hopes of equal treatment and freedom from harassment squashed by the cultures of their home countries. The idea of Zionism formed around the conclusions of several Jewish intellectuals that Jews would never be free from harassment until they took their fates into their own hands instead of hoping to be at the mercy of the predominantly Christian and Muslim majorities of their home countries. 

The aftermath of World War One in particular saw a massive increase in antisemitic sentiment across all industrialized nations for a variety of reasons, be it from the Jews being blamed for the rise of Communism in Soviet Russia, them being a welcome scapegoat for the erosion of support for the war as it dragged on, or simply already existing antisemitic stances by high and middle-class capitalists being spread through the evolving mass media by businessmen wishing to put their competition out of business through fueling bigotry. This eventually found its tragic culmination in the rule of the Nazis, who stripped the rights of the substantial Jewish population in Germany, justified via the frankly ludicrous conspiracy around what they called "Judeo-Bolshevism". If you want to read into that, be prepared for a "theory" that is incoherent and easily disproven even by the standards of the 30s, QAnon-style. 

Prominent Jewish intellectuals like Theodor Herzl and later David Ben-Gorion (who also became Israel's first Prime Minister down the line) founded Zionist organizations to give Jewish refugees a home in their ancestral homeland, the then British protectorate of Palestine by buying tracts of land from Arabic and Ottoman landlords. The start of World War 2 saw an immense flood of Jewish refugees from all over the world coming to the protectorate that weren't taken in by one of the other powers of the world (the US in particular, which had their own problems with Antisemitism frequently denied them entry). The impressions of the Holocaust, which saw 6 million Jews, as well as even more Romani, sexual minorities, Slavs, disabled persons and political dissidents, dead in the largest organized crime against humanity ever committed, made the Jews that already were in Israel see no other choice but to declare independence in 1948, ten minutes after the British Mandate for Palestine ended. 

Israel saw itself immediately besieged on all fronts from the Arabic nations surrounding it, with 6 countries declaring war on it to protest the proposals of the Allies for the separation of the Palestinian protectorate into a Jewish and an Arabic state. [[Awesome|In spite of all odds being stacked against them, the Israelis won their war of independence and even increased their slice of the cake by a considerable amount.]] Though the rest of it... that's the part where it gets too controversial to address here. In interest of avoiding major flame wars, we will leave this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_conflict Wikipedia link on the Arab-Israeli Conflict in general] and leave it at that.