Yishuv (Pre-State)

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.

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.

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.

Recorded March 20, 2022, this 33-minute presentation by Center for Israel Education President Ken Stein addresses how teachers’ decisions on when in history to begin the story of Israel alter what students learn about Zionism, the State of Israel and the Jewish people’s connection to the land.

Eventual head of the World Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl says anti-Semitism requires a Jewish state.

Nordau's impassioned speech summarized the unique Jewish identity to belief, Torah, ritual and community. With those central elements as a people, their state of impoverishment and wretched physical insecurity, he argued, were vital for rebuilding the Jewish national territory.

British Foreign Ministry promises to set up a Jewish National Home in Palestine with no harm to non-Jewish populations, or to Jews living elsewhere who might want to support a Jewish home.

The European agreement that identified the states of the Middle East, 1920.

Samuel would serve as Britain's first and only Jewish High Commissioner (1920-1925) in Palestine; he noted reasons for Arab political in-fighting, origins of Arab dislike of Zionism, how land sales to Jews generated Arab jealousies, Jewish educational focus, and Palestine as a land area capable of supporting 4 million people.

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...

With intentioned ambiguity, Britain asserted that its goal in Palestine was not to make it wholly Jewish or subordinate the Arab population. Self-determination was not promised. Britain wanted to remain 'umpire' between the communities. Naively it thought it could control communal expectations and keep the peace.

International legitimacy is granted to establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Rules for its establishment clearly give Jews in Palestine distinct advantages over the local Arab population.

Palestine's High Commissioner Chancellor seeks to halt the Jewish National Home in favor of the Arabs. He fails to overcome the Zionist drive and Arab unwillingness to cooperate with his intentions.

Jewish land acquisition in 1930 mostly in the valley and coastal regions.

An invaluable glimpse at Palestine's population: gaping socio-economic distances and vast communal differences between Muslims, Christians and Jews that set the strong preferences for separation of the populations.

The first Maccabiah Games, an international Jewish Olympics, open in Tel Aviv.

By Yehoshua Porath, 1973 Historian Yehoshua Porath wrote “Social Aspects of the Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement” as a chapter for the book Society and Political Structure in the Arab World, Menachem Milson...

Five Arab political parties sent a memorandum of protest to the British asking for a halt to Jewish immigration, a stoppage in Arab land sales to Jews,and a measure of self-determination. The British did not change their policies in these three areas. In 1939, they did severely limit Jewish land purchases and severely curtailed Jewish immigration.

Ben-Gurion recognized that Arab opposition to Zionism is a national feeling and that Palestinian Arab leadership had done little to help the majority impoverished peasant population.

With more Arab sale offers than funds for purchases, Zionist leaders decide on strategic priorities and designate areas around Haifa, Jerusalem-Jaffa road, and the Galilee near headwaters of the Jordan River.

After outbreak of communal violence, the British investigatory committee suggests partition of Palestine, seeking to create two states for two peoples.

This document was secured at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. Less than a year before Hitler invaded Poland, Arab leaders with an interest in Palestine are starkly disappointed that the the German government did not go to war against the Zionists in Palestine. The same leaders give the Zionist national builders high marks for their perseverance against terrorist bands in the Palestinian countryside. They worry that unless Arab states come to the Palestinians’ assistance, Palestine will be lost to the Zionists. A remarkable assessment for Palestinian Arab leaders and their supporters.

A description details the economic devastation caused by the 1936-1939 Arab disturbances in Palestine to the majority rural population. This followed the annually poor crop yields of the early 1930s, and the vast rural wreckage caused by WWI.

Mufti opposes Arab majority state in ten years contrary to wishes of a dozen key other Palestinian leaders. Mufti wants no Jewish political presence in Palestine whatsoever.

The Palestinian Arab elite chose to boycott in virtually all British and U.N. overtures to them from 1920 to 1948, with egregious consequences. The Palestinian Arab elite shunned British officials who were staunch supporters of...

Zionist leaders—David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann and Eliezer Kaplan—learning of the British intent to limit severely the Jewish national home’s growth. Increasingly, they are also aware of the German government’s hostilities towards European Jewry.

These Palestinian Arab newspaper materials and other quotations about Arab land sales to the Zionists during the British Mandate were first read and collected at the National Library at the Hebrew University on the Givat...

In New York, urging American (Jewish) support, Ben-Gurion proclaims the eventual establishment of a Jewish state.

Before ending his term in 1944 as Palestine's High Commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael suggested the partition of Palestine, "Jews and Arabs alike would enjoy the possession of their own respective territories, the former protected by international guarantees for their security, and the latter relieved from fear of further encroachments."

In this 46-minute video recorded Dec. 25, 2022, two emeritus professors from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem joined President Ken Stein to discuss the key period when the Zionists succeeded in creating and securing a...

The head of Arab League says Palestine may be lost in a confrontation with the Zionists, but emphatically states that war is the Arab’s only option.

From the beginning of the Palestine Mandate in 1920, Arabs in Palestine opposed Zionism; Arab states and leaders joined the opposition to Zionism in the 1930s. After WWII, Arab states were vehement in their opposition to Zionism, though the merits of their arguments were genuine, Arab leaders were more interested in controlling the land of Palestine than in the Palestinians themselves.

Earlier in 1947, Great Britain turned the future of the Palestine Mandate over to the newly established United Nations. Then in August 1947, the UN suggested that establishing an Arab and Jewish state with a federal union would be the best solution for the communal unrest there.

The UN recommended establishing Arab and Jewish states in Palestine, with an international regime for Jerusalem. Zionists were jubilant; Arab states and the Palestinians were indignant and rejected two state solution. No Arab state is established, Israel is in 1948

The Status-Quo Agreement is an understanding reached between David Ben-Gurion, then the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, and the religious parties in the period before Israel became a state.

In the months before the UN vote to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states in November 1947, the Jewish Agency leadership there had to overcome a series of foreign policy obstacles working against the Jewish state’s establishment.

Otherwise known as Israel’s War of Independence, or, “the nakbah” or disaster to the Arab world because a Jewish state was established, the war was fought between the newly established Jewish state of Israel opposed by Palestinian irregulars, and armies from five Arab states. Official beginning of the war is usually given as May 14, 1948, the date Israel declared itself an independent Jewish state, but the war’s first of four phases began in November 1947. Lasting for two years, the war ended with armistice agreements signed in 1949 between Israel and four Arab states.

Steady disintegration of Palestinian Arab society from 1945-1949 is detailed by five Arab and non-Arab historians citing local social cleavages, economic impoverishment, fear, indebtedness, and political dysfunction.

One of four agreements Israel signed in 1949 with Arab neighbors, it does not end “state of war,” between Israel and Arab states. No treaty is signed until 1979.

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...

Reprinted with permission from the author. Dr. Avraham Sela’s survey is unique for its breadth and analytical candor. He analyzes Arab authors, country by country who wrote about the 1948 Arab loss of Palestine. Sela...

Musa Alami, “The Lesson of Palestine,” Middle East Journal, Volume 3, No. 4, October 1949, pp. 373-405 Reprinted with permission of The Middle East Institute, October 2021 In this 1949 article published in Middle East...

Emory Professor of Contemporary and Middle Eastern History, Political Science, and Israeli Studies and Center for Israel Education President Ken Stein outlines the history of Zionism and the British Mandate at the CIE 2018 Educator Enrichment Workshop.

Compiled by Dr. Ken Stein, June 2021 These sources and references unfold the history of the Jewish state through 1949, from state-seeking to state-making to state-keeping.

This 10-page report, written by the British Colonial and Foreign Office, along with the 1937 Peel (Royal) Commission Report, is one of the two best summaries of the British presence in Palestine.  Both are substantial in terms of content, detail and analyses; both were written from Britain’s perspective. Read these along with 1931 Census for Palestine to have a fuller grasp of the politics and the populations that shaped Britain’s Palestine’s administration from 1918-1948

Gerda Luft's, "Cultural Life in Palestine," is representative of the dozens of excellent analyses of Jewish life and politics in Palestine/Israel and the world located in the annual Palestine Yearbooks, later the Israel Yearbook, published from 1945 forward.

May 7, 2023 In a 32-minute presentation recorded during the second hour of our special two-hour Israel@75 webinar and Teen Israel Leadership Institute session May 7, 2023, Adina Karpuj, a podcast producer for Israel Story who lives in Jerusalem, talks...

The Israel Year Book, 1950/51, Tel Aviv, Israel Publications Limited, 1951, pp. 23-34.,(reprinted with permission). The Zionist Movement, the unique instance in world history of a people without a land organizing itself for the rebuilding...

With crisp analysis, Haganah Commander Yigal Allon, later a Prime Minister of Israel attributes Israel's successes to multiple factors including the absence of a centralized Arab command, limited Arab military training, underestimating the potential fighting capabilities of local Arabs, and Israel's success in integrating its citizens into the war effort.

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.

By Moshe Naor “Israel’s 1948 War of Independence as a Total War,” Journal of Contemporary History, SAGE Publications, 2008, published with permission of the author. The 1948 Israeli-Arab War is described in most research as...

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...

Edited by Leonard Stein in collaboration with Gedalia Yogev, London, Oxford University Press, 1968 [Reprinted with express permission from the Weizmann Archives, Rehovot, Israel, by the Center for Israel Education.] The purpose of the work commencing with...

The biographies listed from Chaim Weizmann's papers are those individuals with whom he corresponded from the 1870s to 1951. The list includes Americans, Europeans, Zionists and British officials. Each biography is extensive, including affiliation, career high points and other valuable information not usually available elsewhere.

The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann  Summer 1885 – 29 October 1902  Volume I, Series A, English Edition    Edited by Leonard Stein in collaboration with Gedalia Yogev, London, Oxford University Press, 1968 [Reprinted...

The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann  November 1902 – August 1903 Volume II, Series A Introduction: Gedalia Yogev General Editor Meyer W. Weisgal, Editorial Direction Gedalia Yogev,  Editor: English Edition Barnet Litvinoff, London, Oxford...

The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann  September 1903 – December 1904 Volume III, Series A  Introduction: Gedalia Yogev General Editor Meyer W. Weisgal, London, Oxford University Press, 1972 [Reprinted with express permission from the...

The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann  January 1905 – December 1906 Volume IV, Series A Introduction: Camillo Dresner General Editor Meyer W. Weisgal, Volume Editor  Camillo Dresner and Barnet Litvinoff, Oxford University Press, London...

The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann  January 1907 – February 1913 Volume V, Series A Introduction: Barnet Litvinoff, based upon the Hebrew by Hanna Weiner General Editor Meyer W. Weisgal, Volume Editor Hanna Weiner...

The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann  March 1913 – July 1914 Volume VI, Series A Introduction: Barnet Litvinoff General Editor Meyer W. Weisgal, Volume Editors Gedalia Yogev, Shifra Kolatt, Evyatar Friesel, English Edition: Barnet...

The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann  August 1914 – November 1917 Volume VII, Series A Introduction: Leonard Stein General Editor Meyer W. Weisgal, Volume Editor Leonard Stein in collaboration with Dvorah Barzilay and Nehama...

The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann  November 1917–October 1918 Volume VIII, Series A  Introduction: Devorah Barzilay General Editor Meyer W. Weisgal, Volume Editors Devorah Barzilay and Barnet Litvinoff, Transaction Books, Rutgers University and Israel...

This volume spans the period between October 1918, when Weizmann, the head of the Zionist Commission, had just returned to England from Palestine, and July 1920, the month in which Herbert Samuel began his tenure as High Commissioner for Palestine and in which the Zionist Conference took place in London. These twenty-one months are of crucial importance for the history of Zionism and for the Jews in Palestine (the Yishuv). It is a period in which Weizmann's ascendancy to the leadership of the World Zionist Organization becomes undisputed.

The dominant theme of this tenth volume (July 1920–December 1921) of the Weizmann Letters, as of Weizmann's political career as a whole, is one of struggle. Three major conflicts which absorbed most of Weizmann's energies and thoughts in the period are reflected: the struggle with the followers of Justice Louis D. Brandeis within the World Zionist Organization; the struggle over the provisions and ratification of the Palestine mandate; and the struggle over the northern and eastern borders of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.

The opening of the eleventh volume of the Weizmann Letters, which covers the period from January 1922 to July 1923, finds Weizmann in Berlin on his way back to London from a meeting in Vienna of the Actions Committee of the Zionist Organization. The journey was one of many which Weizmann undertook during this period. Of the nineteen months covered by this volume he spent eleven months outside Britain, an indication of the international nature of the complex diplomatic, political, and financial problems which Weizmann and the Zionist movement faced in these years.

This volume of the Weizmann Letters covers a period of two years and nine months, from the 13th Zionist Congress at Carlsbad in August 1923 until Chaim Weizmann's departure from London for a visit to Palestine in March 1926. These were years of reorientation in the history of Zionism, with its center of gravity shifting from the political sphere to the task of construction in Palestine. The transition was bound to involve difficulties for the movement, for political work, with its immediate challenges, would naturally be more appealing than the practical work in Palestine, which was gradualist, and only bore fruit after a considerable lapse of time.

Volume XIII of the Letters of Chaim Weizmann, covering the period March 1926 to July 1929, gives preponderance to two crucial issues: the economic crisis which struck at the Jewish community in Palestine, bringing the Zionist Organization to the verge of bankruptcy and threatening the very survival of the Jewish National Home; and the resumption of efforts to form an expanded Jewish Agency with the participation of non-Zionist Jewish leaders. In March 1926 Dr. Weizmann and his wife Vera arrived in Palestine to find great distress resulting from the developing economic crisis there.

Volume XIV of the letters of Chaim Weizmann, written in the period between the Sixteenth Zionist Congress and the British Government's Statement of Policy of 21 October 1930, gives a central place to the establishment of an enlarged Jewish Agency by the inclusion of non-Zionists, and to the political struggle which followed the 1929 disturbances in Palestine. The achievement of the Jewish Agency would undoubtedly have marked a high point in Weizmann's Zionist leadership were it not diminished by the world-wide economic slump and a crisis in relations with the British Government.

Volume XV of the Letters of Chaim Weizmann opens with the Zionist leader in an ambiguous situation: although he has resigned the Presidency of the Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency in protest against the Passfield White Paper of October 1930, which restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine and the acquisition of land there, no successor has been selected. Weizmann in fact is still the head of the movement, and this situation continues until he finds himself formally replaced as President by Nahum Sokolow at the Seventeenth Zionist Congress the following year.

It was the style of Weizmann's leadership rather than his politics that came under fire at the 17th Zionist Congress held in Basle in July 1931. His policies, to be sure, were much criticized, but his displacement from the presidency of the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency at that Congress did not alter the basic strategy of the movement. Officially, Weizmann remained in the wilderness for the ensuing four years, until his re-election as President at the 19th Congress in Lucerne in August 1935. Nevertheless, he would not allow his political judgment to relax, nor would he abdicate from his role as a Jewish statesman of international rank. For January, 1933, saw the advent of Adolf Hitler to power.

Major changes had taken place in the structure of the Zionist Organization during the four years between the rejection of Chaim Weizmann at the Seventeenth Zionist Congress of 1931 and his reelection in 1935. The most important of these was the secession of the Revisionists, who established the New Zionist Organization in September 1935. The second was the strengthening of the Labour groups to become the central force in the movement, with 45 per cent of the delegates at the Nineteenth Congress compared with 29 per cent in 1931. Finally, there was the continued decline of the two wings of the General Zionists. These factors both necessitated and facilitated Weizmann's return to the leadership.

As mirrored in this volume of his letters, the years 1937-38 were for Chaim Weizmann the most critical period of his political life since the weeks preceding the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in November 1917. We observe him at the age of 64 largely drained of physical strength, his diplomatic orientation of collaboration with Great Britain under attack, and his leadership challenged by a generation of younger, militant Zionists. In his own words he was 'a lonely man standing at the end of a road, a via dolorosa. I have no more courage left to face anything—and so much is expected from me.'

The two and a half years covered by this volume of the Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann introduce a period of unparalleled tragedy for the Jewish people, with, ironically, the Zionist move­ment in deep conflict with Great Britain, for most of the time the only Power actively engaged in the struggle against Jewry's enemy, Adolf Hitler. Despite ever-increasing evidence of Nazi intentions towards the Jews, British immigration policy as regards Palestine remained tied to the rigidly-enforced limits set by the White Paper issued by the Chamberlain Government in May 1939.

We have seen from the previous volume in this series how support for the partition of Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish states, with substantial portions retained under the Mandate, had waned in the British Cabinet during 1938. Chaim Weizmann had struggled throughout that year to keep the scheme alive, but to no avail. The Technical Commission under Sir John Woodhead, which had been in Palestine ostensibly to produce a detailed plan, pronounced the scheme unworkable in any form. Thus, as 1939 dawned, the Zionist leader faced the unwelcome prospect of a conference at which Arabs and Jews would meet with British representatives to seek a compromise solution to the problem based upon a unitary Palestine.

The opening of this volume finds Chaim Weizmann in the United States, facing two urgent tasks: the rallying of American Jewry into a single, united front behind a Zionist platform; and the winning over of the Roosevelt Administration to the Zionist position. Following the breakdown of talks between Zionists and non-Zionists in the autumn of 1942, the Bnai Brith organization was asked by the Zionists to set up a preliminary meeting of American Jewish organizations that would prepare for a democratically-convened conference. This body would then appeal to the American Jewish community over the heads of its established leaders.

The present volume of the Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann begins with the Allied victory in Europe and ends in the investigation of the Palestine problem by the United Nations Special Committee. Within this period Weizmann was reduced from being the President of the Jewish Agency and the acknowledged leader of his people to a lonely figure, virtually retired from public life. This was because he continued to place his faith, at least until the summer of 1946, in cooperation with Great Britain, the Mandatory Power, while his principal colleagues in Zionism were adopting the ways of violence in Palestine.

The last of 23 volumes of Chaim Weizmann’s Letters summarized wonderfully by Aaron Klieman, recalls the Israeli first president’s views of those fateful years for Zionism and Israel from 1947-1952. Chaim Weizmann died at his home in Rehovot on 9 November 1952, shortly before his 78th birthday. All of the letters read together, provide ring side seat to Zionism as an idea to the reality of the Jewish state.

Established in 1920, the League of Nations evolved out of the Paris Peace Conference. One of its objectives was to assist former territories evolve to self-government through Mandates. In the Middle East there were British Mandates for...