The Nakba and the Zionist Dream of an Ethnonational State.

Jews in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Germany were at the centre of such attempts, when these states attempted to "solve" their Jewish question by encouraging Jewish emigration.[48] Zionists took note of two things: the feasibility of a homogenous state and the urgent need of such a state for the Jews. These expulsions were part of a larger European process whereby the borderlands of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, and Ottoman Empires, geographical areas of multiethnic co-existence, turned in the first half of the twentieth century into a locus of ethnic cleansing and genocides in state-authorized suppression of ethnoreligious difference.[46] Palestine was part of this wider process of nationalist state-formation, from the Baltic Sea to the shores of the Mediterranean.[47] Most Zionists were born and raised in the Russian Empire and eastern Europe, and their view of their national movement resembled the ethnically exclusivist states born out of World War I in this area of Europe. The plunder of Palestinian property reflected a popular outburst of enthusiasm for the removal of Palestinians that needed no official order.[59] Plundering started right at the beginning of the war, gaining popular momentum during the months leading to the declaration of the state of Israel on 15 May 1948, and then receiving the state imprimatur. The shift in the 1930s, then, was not so much one of finally embracing transfer thinking, as finally resolving a - perhaps I the i - fundamental contradiction of Zionism by acknowledging that its success depended on drastically reducing the number of Palestinians in the area of the future Jewish state.[39] EXPERIENCE OF SETTLEMENT Zionist talk, plans, and imagination about an ethnonational state, with imperial and international legitimacy to Jewish nationhood and denied to Palestinians, combined with a settlement practice that gave the future state a distinct character. [Extracted from the article]