Originally posted by Jon`C:
I disagree with the latter.
For starters, the international community didn't want anything resembling Israel as it is today. The United Nations had a starkly different vision for what the country should be, and western countries (particularly Britain) actively tried to halt migration in order to prevent Israel from becoming a thing. As-is, it's not a product of the international community at all, the Jewish diaspora deserves all of the credit.
For starters, the international community didn't want anything resembling Israel as it is today. The United Nations had a starkly different vision for what the country should be, and western countries (particularly Britain) actively tried to halt migration in order to prevent Israel from becoming a thing. As-is, it's not a product of the international community at all, the Jewish diaspora deserves all of the credit.
I wrote a whole big thing about this, but I'll just save you the time. Here it is in bullet points (but still long) with a TL;DR:
1. Britain conquering Palestine was a sine qua non for the creation of the state of Israel. With the Balfour Declaration, the British had committed to creating a Jewish homeland before they even had conquered the land from the Ottomans. (Of course, Zionist Jews had already immigrated to Palestine during the Ottoman period, starting in the 1880s, and some Jews had already been living there before that.)
2. The British Mandate was passed by the League of Nations and enshrined in international law Britain's commitment to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. (The mandatory government, managed by the British, existed from 1923 until 1948, and its termination, called for by the 47 Partition Plan, was the occasion of Israel's declaration of independence).
3. The migration story is a little more complicated than you say. At first (that is, in the early days of the Mandate), it was actually the Zionists who capped Jewish immigration to Palestine because they didn't want to harm the (segregated) Jewish economy in Palestine by flooding it with workers it couldn't sustain. As a rule of thumb, the British gave preferential treatment to the Zionists over the Arabs until violence in mandatory Palestine made the pro-Zionist position too costly over the course of the 30s, when it gradually shifted to a more pro-Arab posture. It wasn't until 1939 that Britain really clamped down on Jewish immigration in a big way, after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had been a big violent mess for about a decade.
4. During the clampdown on violence during the Arab Revolt that started in 1936, the British expelled many Arab notables and with them much of the nascent infrastructure of the Palestinian national movement. This also made it much easier for Israel to win the 1947-49 War, especially during its first phase, when it was a low intensity civil war (that is, before nations of the Arab League invaded, the war was only a battle between Jews and Arabs living in Palestine).
5. After WWII, the British effectively handed the whole conflict over to the US because they were sick of dealing with it and it had required so many resources for so long. The passing of the baton had to do with a controversy over the fate of 100,000 Jewish refugees after Holocaust (nobody wanted them), and it became an international issue, which ultimately led to them being sent to Palestine and the UN partition plan in 1947. (Which is pretty close to the partition plan advocated by the United States and which is called the two state solution. Even if the borders are quite different, the principle is that partition is the best way to solve the conflict between the two peoples.)
TL;DR: the support of the international community over several decades was a condition without which Israel wouldn't exist, even if it's also true that Israel was created, in some cases, despite the objections of the international community, especially England. (This actually goes back to Theodor Herzl's initial strategy outlined in the 1890s, which had been to create an international consensus among dignitaries and heads of state in Europe that creating a Jewish state was the best solution to the problem of antisemitism in Europe.)