Abstract: This article explores the history of political maturation in Israel. Various indigenous people,
mainly Arabs, Jews and what was left of the populace from the various crusades, were present in
a sparsely populated and Ottoman ruled Palestine, at the turn of the 20th century. In the late
1800s a new group was making in-roads as European Jews chose to turn to their biblical
homeland and began arriving as settlers, mainly seeking agricultural sustenance and, for the most
part, bolstered by beneficent philanthropists. Many of the settlements were social experiments
and destined to fail, but some continued and prospered. By the early 1900s their numbers grew
and European migration, under the influence of political and utopian enterprises, most notable of
which was the dream of Theodore Herzl for a Jewish homeland, increased exponentially. These
numbers were bolstered by increasingly virulent anti-semitism, and groups, known as Aliyot,
were now succeeding on the farms, in the commercial and trade crafts and increasingly
appearing in cities as well. By the 1920s under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion, who arrived
in Palestine in 1906, serious nation building aspirations were unfolding. As social structuring
demanded, political and social groups ranging from capitalism to socialism appeared and
organized. The article then continues to trace the development of statehood, the birth of the
independent nation of Israel in 1948 and the political system as it evolved into present day
eventuality.
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Citation: [Mayer, Gabriel. "FROM HISTORIOGRAPHY TO ARCHEOLOGY: THE DIALECTICS OF ISRAELI POLITY." IJAH, vol. 1, no. 9, 2017, pp. 700-706. October.] |