The most common angle of instruction involves a narrative of Jewish exile from the Middle East followed by years of pogroms and oppression wherever they settled, as the various nations found it convenient to blame their problems on the Jews, ultimately leading up to an attempt to expel and exterminate the Jews in 1941. With this narrative in mind, we are supposed to conclude that Israel is necessary to protect the Jews from persecution and all attacks on Israel regarding boundaries or its closed borders. This is more or less all that is told.
To some degree, the narrative is true. But that is not the point of this text. The point of this text is to acknowledge what had happened leading up to the 1900s, where the status of the Jews helped to fuel their attachment to a "movement of the oppressed" which ultimately became a major labor movement with a branch that eventually, amidst the destruction of the First World War. At the same time, there was a movement to integrate and become more like the host population, making some Jews around this period highly patriotic and supportive of their host countries. And, finally, there was the movement of Zionism, which set out to create a state for just Jews, under the premise that Jews would be safe from any future harm in such a situation.
Interestingly, of the few sources that give attention to this state of affairs, most of them have been written off and associated with Nazi German propaganda. To be fair, it was the Nazis who wrote volumes of material on this topic and took a tremendous interest in it. So, the connection in the public eye is not without merit. But, as the following shows, the Nazis were by no means the only ones who made the "Jewish question" - now only referenced as a sardonic Nazi euphemism - their business.
Winston Churchill, the WWII-era leader of the United Kingdom, had a very interesting relationship with the Jews and wrote the following article in 1920:
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the WWII-era leader of the United States, picked members for his Cabinet who were constantly warning that the intelligent Jews around Roosevelt might not be pushing him to act in America's best interests but rather their own, whether it be Zionism, Bolshevism or simply to consolidate power under powerful Jews in international finance. Reflecting Roosevelt's understanding of the situation, when the Nazis began to remove Jews from positions of influence and power, those Jews were able to arrange a steamship out of Europe and Roosevelt refused to allow them to land the United States. The St. Louis incident, as it is called, has gained a certain level of notoriety in modern scholarship. Roosevelt was also suspicious of Zionism, because it was predicated on the idea that powerful Jews could take refuge there and give support to their own, a small global minority, creating a network of connected and self-interested persons who sought to advance not the interest of the states they lived in, like the United States, but the Zionist state.
Joseph Stalin, the WWII-era leader of the Soviet Union, was one of the most brutal and murderous dictators of all time, and also harbored a deep mistrust of the Jews. It is true that Jews did play an active role in the Bolshevik movement which he eventually came to direct. But Stalin feared the Jews would subvert or infiltrate communism for their own purposes and were just as much of a threat to it as anyone, leading to his purges which murdered, and thus removed, Jews from influential positions within the Soviet hierarchy.
