ABSTRACT
The horror of the Jews’ experience of Nazism was of such magnitude that it became the justification for the Jewish people to establish their own independent state. Such a step was universally welcome, for this development relieved the world's conscience in a practical way. Moreover, the magnitude and far-reaching aspirations of the exponents of Zionism at the time were realized and fulfilled only in a small and relatively insignificant geographical area of the Arab world and the Middle East. The map of the Arab world showed the scattered domains of a multitude of tribal entities and monarchical thrones lumped together and divided between the spheres of influence of the Western camp, notably Britain and France. By 1948 the sheer weight of numbers of Jews assembled in Palestine, many of them from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, brought into being ‘natural links’ between the new state and the original homelands of its settlers.
