Update June 9, 2026; originally posted June 2021. Compiled by Dr. Ken Stein, CIE President, June 9, 2026 These sources and references unfold the history of the Jewish state through 1949, from state-seeking to state-making…
The Israeli Declaration of Independence was crafted in the final month before independence but reflects a thoughtful approach to citizens, neighbors and American precedents.
When the British and the French decided on the borders of some modern Middle Eastern states in the Levant in the 1915-1922 period, no Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi, Jewish, Lebanese or Jordanian state existed. Before the…
From Ancient Times to the 19th Century The bond between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel is one of the most enduring in human history. Since the Roman destruction of the Second Temple…
Ken Stein, President, Center for Israel Education, May 19, 2025 Introduction Since 1937, the idea of geopolitically separating Jewish and Arab populations west of the Jordan River has been a recommended solution to mitigate violence between…
When Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resigned in 2008 amid allegations of bribery, Israel came within reach of a milestone in gender equality — one that was a credit to the Jewish state as much as…
Stein, Kenneth, “Legal Protection and Circumvention of Rights for Cultivators in Mandatory Palestine,” in Joel S. Migdal, (Ed.) Palestinian Society and Politics, Princeton, (1980): 233-260. In the immediate wake of communal violence that plagued Palestine…
By Scott Abramson and Ken Stein, April 4, 2025 The Exile and the Homeland It may be said that the Jewish people’s entire cosmology (the origin and nature of the universe) from their birth as…
March 12, 2025 By Ken Stein The Jewish growth in Mandatory Palestine in the period of the New Yishuv to establish a Jewish territory for a state had significantly developed by 1939. Arab leadership in…
By Ken Stein and Scott Abramson, March 23, 2025 Zionist/Jewish Economic Development in Palestine Before 1948 Jewish physical growth in Mandatory Palestine in the period known as the New Yishuv was sufficient through land acquired…
By Scott Abramson and Ken Stein In his famous 2004 essay “Between Right and Right,” Israel’s most celebrated novelist, Amos Oz, reflects on Israeli society, summing up his fellow citizens with this appraisal: “What we,…
Kenneth Stein, “Palestine’s Rural Economy, 1917-1939,” Studies in Zionism, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1987), pp. 25-49. During the early decades of the 20th century in Palestine, the majority Arab population sustained itself primarily through agricultural and pastoral…
April 14, 2025 The period of the New Yishuv lasted from the last 40 years of Ottoman rule in Palestine through the British Mandate until the establishment of Israel in 1948. It saw the growth…
From biblical times to the present, Jews and Judaism have had an unbroken connection to Zion, a reference to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, derived from the hill at the heart of Jerusalem. Zionism…
From 1898 to 1948, Zionism evolved from an idea to a concrete reality: the actual establishment of the Jewish state, Israel. Slowly, a few immigrating Jews created facts by linking people to the land. For half a century, fortuity and fortitude made the Zionist undertaking a reality. They exhibited pragmatism and gradually constructed a nucleus for a state. Through perseverance Zionists empowered themselves.
Neither Israel’s political culture nor Israel’s democracy based on Jewish self determination simply materialized on May 15, 1948. A connection exists from Jewish self-rule in the Diaspora to Zionist political autonomy during the Yishuv and to contemporary Israeli political culture. Likewise, the origins of Israeli democracy are found in the hundreds of years of Jewish Diasporas transitioning into the Zionist movement to the state; from aliyot before the Palestine Mandate to 1948 and since. Components of Israeli political culture…
Adopting a systematic, yet non-technical, approach, Jacob Metzer’s book is the first to analyze the divided economy of Mandatory Palestine from the viewpoints of modern economic history and development economics.
Examination of the mobilization of society for the Israeli War of Independence effort enables one to present a more extended process that began in October 1947 — some two months prior to the outbreak of the war — and ended, from the standpoint of mobilization of personnel, at the beginning of 1949, when demobilization of the first draftees from the wartime army took place, and from an economic standpoint in April 1949, when an Austerity system was declared in the State of Israel.
Since the 1920s the Sacred Esplanade of Jerusalem came to symbolise the bone of contention in the conflict over Palestine. The maintenance and even definition of the lines of division between the communities was a clear aim of the British authorities from 1920-1948. The communal/religious conflicts intensified after 1967 with the Israeli capture of East Jerusalem and other Arab-populated territory, which left neither side fully content.
Kenneth W. Stein, “Zionist Land Acquisition: a core element in establishing Israel,” in Michael J. Cohen, (ed.) The British Mandate in Palestine: A Centenary Volume, 1920-2020, Routledge, 2020, pp. 189-204.
By Bernard Wasserstein Included as a 15-page chapter in the 2019 book Serendipitous Adventures With Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain, edited by Wm. Roger Louis and used with permission, this overview of the…
In two books written sixty years apart, When Prophecy Fails, 1957 (Festinger, Riecken and Schachter) and The Influential Mind, 2017 (Sharot, an Israeli neuroscientist), the conclusions were the same.
“A Zionist State in 1939,” Dr. Kenneth W. Stein, CHAI (Atlanta), Winter 2002 “Had not the Nazi crimes been committed against Jews during World War II, the Jewish State would have never come true.” So…
