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With 20 maps and prose, trace the progression of Jewish physical and demographic growth toward state building from 1882 to 1948 (25,000 to 600,000), with two-thirds in place by 1940.
The area of Eretz Yisrael was part of the Ottoman Empire and composed of three large administrative areas without any political identity as a state or part of a state. At times, portions of the area that was later designated as the Palestine Mandate were ruled from Mecca, Damascus, or Baghdad, or in the case of Jerusalem, directly from Istanbul.
The region prior to the outbreak of World War I. After the war, modern Middle Eastern states had their borders arbitrarily drawn by European powers.
This map shows the Ottoman Empire’s administrative districts before World War I broke out in August 1914 in areas that today are Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and part of Iraq.
Great Britain and France secretly negotiated the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916. The two European powers agreed, according to their respective spheres of influence, to divide the Middle East territories previously administered by the Ottoman Empire.
The British and French zones of influence, or mandates, in the eastern Mediterranean region were ratified by the San Remo Agreement in 1920 and approved by the League of Nations in 1922.
The European agreement that identified the states of the Middle East, 1920.
As shown in this map, the British in 1921 separated a new emirate, Transjordan, from what officially became the Mandate for Palestine the next year. The British officially maintained political and military control of both areas until withdrawing in 1948.
When Britain controlled Palestine, she lopped off 80% of it and assigned it to the Hashemite family leader, Emir Abdullah. It became today’s Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Jewish land acquisition in 1930 mostly in the valley and coastal regions.
Stein, Kenneth W. The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1984 and 2003. Copyright, Ken Stein and the Center for Israel Education, 2024.
A map shows the partition of Palestine proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937.
The UN suggested partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states with an economic union between them and an internationalization of Jerusalem.
The United Nations General Assembly approved Resolution 181 on Nov. 29, 1947, to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state along the lines in this map, with an international zone around Jerusalem.
The area of Israel expanded and the potential area for a Palestinian Arab state decreased because of the 1948-49 war, Israel’s War of Independence. The Arab rejection of the 1947 U.N. partition plan thus hurt the Arab side, as the maps demonstrate.
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