Between 1933 and 1945, Britain, along with its U.S. imperialist ally, severely restricted Jewish immigration into their own countries. This policy, aimed at pushing Jews to immigrate to Palestine, was carried out while the Jewish people in Europe faced the Holocaust. (During World War 2, the U.S. and Britain also refused to bomb the tracks leading to the Nazi concentration camps.) Zionist leaders also cut deals with the Nazis—such as the Havara Agreement- -allowing some wealthier Jews to escape to Palestine and undercutting Jewish resistance in Nazi-controlled areas.

There was Palestinian resistance to the Zionist settlers as early as the turn of the twentieth century. In 1936 Palestinians launched an armed uprising against the British authorities and the Zionist settlers. The British brutally crushed the uprising in 1939 and passed emergency laws condemning to death any Palestinian found with a gun. ( Roots , p. 68).

Zionist leader David Ben Gurion wrote at the time: "In our political argument abroad, we minimize Arab opposition to us...[but] let us not ignore the truth among ourselves... Politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country...." (Chomsky, pp. 90-91)

The Beginnings of Zionist Settlement
Israel is a Zionist state—a state based on the political ideology known as Zionism. Israel was founded by Zionist Jews from Europe, who began to colonize historic Palestine (what is now Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank) in the late 1880s. At that time, there were small Jewish communities that had long existed in the Middle East, but Jews had not been a large part of the population in Palestine for some 2,000 years. Most Jews who lived in the area in ancient times had migrated to other parts of the world following the fall of the last Jewish kingdom in Palestine to the Roman Empire, around 70 AD. By the time the Zionist movement arose in the late 1800s, there had been many centuries of Jewish migrations, persecutions, and intermarriage with other people. Most Jews lived in Europe, and they were a very diverse group which included many different nationalities as well as religious and political viewpoints.

The Zionists based their movement on the claim that Jews were god’s "chosen people" and that Palestine was the land god promised them. They said that Jews could never assimilate into other societies and could only deal with anti-Semitism by having their own state. Zionism did not reflect the views of many Jews who saw themselves as part of the life and struggles of the people in the countries where they lived. The Zionist movement reflected the interests of bourgeois Jews in Europe, and from the beginning it was based on allying with imperialism against the masses in the Middle East. Theodor Herzl, a founder of Zionism, wrote that a future Zionist state "would be the advance post of civilization against barbarism." (Rodinson)

The Zionists promoted the myth that Palestine, which is about the size of the state of Maryland, was a barren desert, "a land without people for a people without land." In truth, some of the first urban societies in the world originated in historic Palestine, and Palestinians had lived and farmed there for centuries. In 1947 some Palestinians could trace their land ownership back a thousand years. (Guyatt, p. 1),

The Security Council resolution condemns Israel for building “settlements” in areas of Palestine that the UN recognizes as territory that should be administered by Palestinians. Those settlements are highly militarized encampments of heavily armed Israeli settlers engaged in expanding the terrorist ethnic cleansing of sections of Palestine.
The settlements violate international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention—which has been adopted by nearly every country on Earth—prohibits an occupying power from transferring its citizens into the territory it occupies and from transferring or displacing the population of an occupied territory within or outside the territory (See “Occupation Inc.” from Human Rights Watch.)
The wording of the UN resolution condemns “all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, including, inter alia [among others], the construction and expansion of settlements, transfer of Israeli settlers, confiscation of land, demolition of homes and displacement of Palestinian civilians, in violation of international humanitarian law and relevant resolutions.” And it expresses “grave concern that continuing Israeli settlement activities are dangerously imperiling the viability of the two-State solution based on the 1967 lines.”1
Every other country represented on the UN Security Council voted for the resolution. Because the U.S. abstained (didn’t vote), and didn’t veto the resolution, it passed.