Twenty-Second Congress - Basle, 1946

The Congress met after the conclusion of the Second World War and the Holocaust, in which most of European Jewry had been massacred.

• The major human resource for the Zionist movement had been destroyed.
• The Jewish community in Palestine had volunteered in large numbers for the British war effort but had been able to do little to bring sustenance to their brethren behind enemy lines.
• The British had only consented to the establishment of the Jewish Brigade in October 1944 and therefore this unit could play only a limited role.
• The Yishuv had also tried unsuccessfully to pressurize the British authorities into repealing the White Paper.

Initially, the policy of violent confrontation had been rejected by the vast majority of the Yishuv but, by the summer of 1945, the various armed groups were co-ordinating their efforts against the Mandate. This led to increased tension with the British who, in July 1946, incarcerated the leaders of the Yishuv at Latrun.

Congress met following the publication of the Morrison-Grady report which had recommended the cantonization of Palestine into four districts and called for a Jewish-Arab conference to be held in London.

Weizmann, still President of the WZO, called on the delegates to approve the political platform of the Zionist movement as passed at conferences at the Biltmore hotel in New York during May 1942 and in London, 1945. The central passage of this program was the call that

"Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the democratic world."

Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of the program but rejected Weizmann's call for participation in the London conference. Weizmann resigned his position as President of the WZO, which then remained vacant until 1956.

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