The history of Jewish immigration to Israel is a long and complex one, closely intertwined with the project of nation-state building and the ongoing conflict between Jews and Palestinians. The settlement of Jews in Palestine began at the turn of the twentieth century, and the first wave of immigrants came in the 1800s
. The phases of immigration are also referred to as Aliyah and primarily consisted of Jews fleeing from persecution or dreaming of building the Holy Land.During the 1920s and 1930s, Jews continued to migrate to Palestine, with the largest number of immigrants arriving during the Fifth Aliyah, which coincided with the rise of Nazism in Germany and extreme nationalism across Eastern Europe. This group of immigrants included professionals, doctors, lawyers, and artists, who created a thriving art and architecture scene, and with the establishment of the Port of Haifa, a thriving economy.However, the British began imposing harsh restrictions on Jewish immigration in 1936 as a result of increasing anger and violence in the Palestinian Arab community, and in 1939, the British issued the White Paper of 1939, which severely restricted Jewish immigration, leaving many European Jews during the Holocaust with nowhere to go. Illegal immigration became a necessity.When war broke out between Israel and the Arab states in 1948, many of the Jews living in Arab countries fled to Israel under threat of persecution and a desire for safety. The years between 1948 and 1951 witnessed the largest migration ever to reach the shores of modern Israel, with approximately 688,000 immigrants coming to Israel during the country’s first three and a half years at an average of close to 200,000 a year.Winter 1989 marked a turning point, reversing the declining Jewish flows witnessed during the prior decade. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, massive numbers of Jews began leaving the Soviet republics to settle in Israel. A country of 4.5 million residents at the beginning of the 1990s, Israel took in nearly 1.1 million immigrants from the former Soviet Union between 1990 and 2018 (about 400,000 of whom arrived between 1990 and 1991) .Overall, Jewish immigration to Israel has been a significant factor in the country's history, with the state of Israel being founded by immigrants.
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