Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

With his financial assistance, more than thirty such communities were founded between 1880 and 1895 alone. Given that there were roughly 160 villages in Palestine by 1937,…

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Barbara Tuchman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and historian, once observed that of all the peoples of the world from three thousand years ago, it is only the Jews who live in the same place, speak the same language, and practice the same religion.

The first wave of Jewish immigration, known as the First Aliyah, began in 1882 and continued, with breaks, until 1903.* This

Palestinian terrorists changed that, however, with two attacks in Jerusalem, one in Tel Aviv, and another in Ashkelon, killing almost sixty Israelis in the heart of Israel’s cities within nine days. Israelis were outraged and frightened, and Peres was voted out of office a mere seven months after he had assumed Rabin’s place.

“Night of Broken Glass.” In many ways, it marked the beginning of the Holocaust.

WORLD WAR II HAD EXACTED a terrible toll on Britain, and the empire needed to retrench. India would achieve independence in 1947, and in the Middle East, the cost of maintaining the Mandate had simply climbed too high. Some one hundred thousand British soldiers (one-tenth of the empire’s entire army) were stationed in Palestine, one soldier for eve

The Mizrachi met for its first world convention in what is today Bratislava in 1904, a year after Kishinev and the year of Herzl’s death. Largely alone, they rejected both the anti-Zionism of the religious eastern Europeans as well as the antireligious sentiments of many in the Zionist world. They would remain relatively peripheral but dogged until

Among Ahad Ha’am’s earliest devotees was a group of intellectuals in Palestine who established Brit Shalom (the Covenant of Peace), an organization that sought to promote peace between Jews and Arabs, primarily by advocating that the Jews give up their quest for statehood. Brit Shalom members were convinced that since a Jewish state would forever b

short book of approximately one hundred pages, The Jewish State made Herzl a household name across the Jewish world. Published in February 1896, it caused a stir worldwide.