In July 1943 , Eliyahu Dobkin , the head of the Jewish Agency 's immigration department , presented a map of the estimated 750,000 Jews in Islamic countries , and noted that : … many of the Jews in Europe will perish in the Holocaust and the Jews of Russia are locked in . Therefore , the quantitative value of these three-quarters of a million Jews has risen to the level of a highly valuable political factor within the framework of world Jewry … The primary task we face is to rescue this Jewry , and the time has come to mount an assault on this Jewry for a Zionist conquest . Similarly , Ben-Gurion stated at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on 28 September 1944 that " My minimum used to be two million : now that we have been annihilated l say one million " . On 30 July 1945 , Ben-Gurion stated in his diary : One of the issues that came up during discussions of the One Million Plan , particularly after the Baghdad pogrom and reports of antisemitic manifestations in Arab countries , was the security of Jewish communities in Islamic countries . In a 1943 Mapai central committee speech , Eliyahu Dobkin , the head of the Jewish Agency 's immigration department , said : " The very same day that brings redemption and salvation to European Jewry will be the most dangerous day of all for the exiles in Arab lands ... these Jews will face great danger , danger of terrible slaughter ... Our first task is therefor to save these Jews . " and Ben-Gurion wrote at a similar time of " the catastrophe that the Jews in eastern lands are expected to face as a result of Zionism " , although these gloomy forecasts proved false
Baghdad pogrom
Farhud
One Million Plan