under the British the Jewish population of the Yishuv had increased tenfold; it had soared from 56,000 to approximately 600,000—a number sufficient to make a small state viable.

Djemal Pasha, who had recently been appointed as Ottoman commander of the Egyptian front, made his anti-Zionist stance eminently clear just a few weeks after the Ottomans entered the war. He disbanded a Turkish-loyalist Jewish defense organization, which had been founded by labor leaders Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi; he closed down the Zionist ne

IT WAS A BOLD DREAM, and a fanciful one in many ways. But it quickly became exceedingly practical, as well. The more desperate the Jews in Europe became, the more amenable they grew to imagining a very different world. Hess had. Pinsker had. Then Bialik did. Theodor Herzl transformed all that passion into a political movement. He was under no illus

FOR ALMOST TWO MILLENNIA—1,762 years, to be precise—the Jews would live without political autonomy. They would make their homes in lands ruled by others, hosted by people who would treat them better at times, worse at others. For the most part, there would be no serious attempt to restore Jewish sovereignty until 1897, when Theodor Herzl gathered h

“Even unavoidable occupation is corrupting occupation,” he wrote soon after the war in a column for Davar, then the Labor Party newspaper. It was a position he would espouse, along with other Israeli novelists like David Grossman, for decades.*

Palestinian Arabs were infuriated, and, in a pattern that they would often repeat, they responded with violence. In 1920, rioting Arabs in Jerusalem killed six Jews and wounded others. In 1921, there were riots in Jaffa that soon spread; they left in their wake four dozen dead Jews, including Yosef Chaim Brenner.

Palestinian nationalism was an international concern, and eventually, it would put Israel on the diplomatic defensive.

After all, to those Jews who had despaired of Europe, to those Jews for whom Zionism was the beginning of a renewed dream and a renewed hope, Herzl was Abraham, who first wandered “to the place that I will show you.” He was Moses, leading his flock to the Promised Land. He was David, with the promise of renewed Jewish sovereignty. He was Bar Kokhba

Having lost his support in the Knesset, Barak called for elections to be held in February 2001. Israeli Arabs boycotted the elections as a reaction to the events of October 2000, which further weakened the Left. Barak lost, and Ariel Sharon, heading the right-wing Likud party, was elected to replace him. Once again, Palestinian violence had returne