One Million Plan
Strategic plan detailing the methods of Jewish return to British Mandatory Palestine post-Holocaust / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The One Million Plan (Hebrew: תוכנית המיליון, romanized: Tochnit hamillion) was a strategic plan for the immigration and absorption of one million Jews from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa into Mandatory Palestine, within a timeframe of 18 months, in order to establish a state in that territory.[4] After being voted on by the Jewish Agency for Palestine Executive in 1944, it became the official policy of the Zionist leadership.[5][6][7][8] Implementation of a significant part of the One Million Plan took place following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.[9][10]
When the extent of the decimation of Jews in the Holocaust became known in 1944, the Biltmore Conference ambition of two million immigrants was revised downwards, and the plan was revised to include, for the first time, Jews from the Middle East and North Africa as a single category within the target of an immigration plan.[11] In 1944–45, Ben-Gurion described the plan to foreign officials as being the "primary goal and top priority of the Zionist movement."[12]
The ongoing immigration restrictions of the British White Paper of 1939 meant that such a plan was not able to be put into immediate effect. Upon the establishment of Israel, Ben Gurion's government presented the Knesset with a new plan – to double the population of 600,000 within four years. Israeli historian Devorah Hacohen describes the opposition against this immigration policy within the new Israeli government, such as those who argued that there was "no justification for organizing large-scale emigration among Jews whose lives were not in danger, particularly when the desire and motivation were not their own",[13] as well as those who argued that the absorption process caused "undue hardship".[14] However, the force of Ben-Gurion's influence and insistence ensured that unrestricted immigration continued.[15][16] The plan has been described as "a pivotal event in 'imagining' the Jewish state"[4] and "the moment when the category of Mizrahi Jews in the current sense of this term, as an ethnic group distinct from European-born Jews, was invented."[11] The large scale immigration in the first few years after Israel's declaration was the product of this policy change in favour of mass immigration focused on Jews from Arab and Muslim countries.[10]