Palestine: The Legacy of a Stolen Land

The Zionist Congress at Basle in 1897 defined as its political aim the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, and during the early 20th century the organization attracted the support of the British government. In 1917 the former Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, issued the declaration that called for a Jewish homeland in the Palestine that Britain had wrested from the Ottoman Empire. Settlements in Palestine having previously been privately funded by such philanthropists as Baron Rothschild, of the banking family, the ending of the Great War saw a greatly accelerated rate of Jewish emigration to the Holy Land. This was to the dismay of 600,000 Palestinian Arabs whose ancestors had occupied the land for many centuries, and who feared that they were about to be engulfed by a European tide. This account describes the near-century since.