Why did the Jews migrate to Palestine?

Answer 1

After the Romans expelled the Jews from Judea and renamed it Palestine, a Jewish presence continued in outlying places like Hebron, Tiberias and Safed. This was a very small presence, but when Byzantine Palestine fell to Arab armies in the year 638, the new Muslim rulers allowed Jewish settlement. The Crusaders slaughtered and expelled the Jewish and Muslim communities in 1099. In 1187, Saladin drove out the Crusaders and Jews were again welcome. Jewish settlements in Jerusalem, in particular, were not terribly prosperous, but when the Jews of Spain were expelled in 1492, many came to Palestine (others dispersed across North Africa and up the Adriatic coast to Venice, as well as Sicily and Italy). For many years, the Ottoman Empire encouraged Jewish settlement as an economic development tool. In late Ottoman times, however, the flood of refugees from Russian persecution led the Ottoman Empire to worry about possible Jewish majorities in some towns. By this point, the Ottoman Empire was essentially a Turkish nation and not the pan-Islamic center it had aspired to, and the response to Jewish settlement was a program of moving Turkish settlers into the land. Combined pressure from Jews and Turks led to the formation of resistance organizations like the Islamic Brotherhood. As World War I devastated central Europe, the pressure of Jewish refugees continued to mount, and resistance to refugee resettlement mounted in response -- to see why, look at the response of modern communities that face waves of refugees; it doesn't matter where they come from. In the case of Jewish refugees in Palestine, the global Jewish community helped by financing the purchase of property for the refugees. Things can get ugly, and they did. World War II triggered another wave of refugees, and despite the fact that refugees were settling on land they bought, tensions rose, the British left, and there was the 1948 war. One consequence of this and the fall of the French North African empire was the expulsion of the Jewish populations of much of the Arab world, creating yet another wave of refugees into the new state of Israel. As with every previous wave, not all went to Israel/Palestine. France and the United States welcomed many, and some moved to many other places.