Early History

Palestine has been a crossroads for trade and commerce since before the beginning of recorded history. Jericho, which many archaeologists call the world's oldest city, became a thriving trade center around 7800 b. c.e. Palestine has only rarely enjoyed political independence during those many centuries. It has been a battleground for and dominated by a long succession of kings and emperors.

Walled cities proliferated in Palestine around 3100 b. c.e. No evidence of a political union between the cities exists, so archaeologists assume that each of the cities was independent. The city states were eventually conquered by the Canaanites, who were in turn defeated by the Israelites around 1300 b. c.e. In 1020 b. c.e. the Israelites established the Jewish kingdom of Israel, which split into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the middle of the following century. The two kingdoms eventually fell to invaders, after which Palestine experienced a succession of foreign rulers.

The region was taken over by the Roman Empire in 63 b. c.e. In 70 c. e. the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and scattered the Jews throughout the Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire ruled Palestine until its conquest by Muslim Arabs in 636.

In 1099 Crusaders from Western Europe conquered Palestine, which they called the Holy Land, and held it for almost 150 years, when it was recaptured by the Arabs. In 1516 the region fell to the Ottoman Turks, who kept it until the end of World War I.

During the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army accused of selling military secrets to the Germans in the mid-1890's, an Austrian-Jewish journalist named Theodor Herzl despaired of Jews ever receiving justice from the Christians among whom they lived. Consequently, he called a meeting of Jewish leaders from all over the world and proposed that they help establish a homeland for Jews in Palestine.

The movement for resettling Jews in Palestine was called Zionism. During the period between 1897 and 1914, several thousand Jews emigrated to Palestine, financed in part by Lord Rothschild, a Jewish banker living in England.

In 1917, with World War I hanging in the balance, members of the British government made two contradictory commitments. Arthur Balfour issued the famous Balfour Declaration, which promised British aid in establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine in return for large loans from Jewish banking houses that the British desperately needed to finance their participation in World War I.

Almost simultaneously, a British army officer named Thomas Lawrence, best known as Lawrence of Arabia, promised independence to the Arabs of the Middle East in return for their military help against the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence's promise stirred Arab nationalism.