A lot has been written and forgotten about how the Balfour Declaration lead to part of Historic Palestine became the modern state of Israel. What was included and what actually happened forms a strong background for learning about how the situation has changed so radically since then.
In THE BALFOUR DECLARATION: 67 WORDS; 100 YEARS OF CONFLICT, Elliot Jager provides an in-depth account of the events and people that lead to the Balfour Declaration, before, during, and after until December 1949. In “Some Final Words,” Jager briefly mentions people and events after then. There is a concise time line from 1250 BCE to December 1949 at the end of the book.
After the end of WWI, when the Turkish Ottoman Empire was defeated, the British took control of the territory called Palestine. The year before, Alfred James Balfour, former British Prime Minister and foreign secretary during the war, presented a declaration to create a national home for the Jewish people on that land. He believed it would solve many problems, including Jewish assimilation, end anti-Semitism, and revitalize what had been a long neglected territory. The proposal was accepted and later codified by the San Remo Conference in 1920 and by the League of Nations in 1922.
When Balfour was replaced soon afterwards by a Conservative government, the support for Zionism weakened. In fact, during WWII, when six million European Jews were being slaughtered in Europe, Britain refused to let any Jews who managed to escape find a safe home in Palestine. It did, however, allow Arabs to move there.
At various times, Arab leaders agreed with the idea of forming a Jewish state in historic Palestine. Until Israel became a state, the Vatican sided with the Arabs because the Jews did not accept Jesus.
In 1946, 78% of historic Palestine became Transjordon.
When the UN announced the formation of 1947, the Jewish Agency accepted the reduced area and the Arabs rejected it and, in 1948, fought to destroy it. They lost.
THE BALFOUR DECLARATION....is a well-written, detailed story of the declaration and the people and governments involved. It is both thorough and easy to follow.
I received a copy of this book from LibraryThing Early Reviewers ( )

A well-researched and detailed book describing the transformation in Jewish and Western views on the establishment of a Jewish homeland based on a British policy published in the early twentieth century. The book includes detailed biographical information on the leaders and events responsible for establishing Israel as a nation state from the groundwork laid in the nineteenth century. ( )

I should have a review here, but am struggling to figure out how to open this with a chrome e-reader web app. But since not reviewing it could interfere with my opportunity to receive fugure books from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, this message will have to suffice for now...

This book was received in exchange for an honest review. As an avid consumer of historical text, I found this book to be a difficult read. I suppose that, when faced with a brand-new and somewhat dense topic, a reader like myself should be able to rely on the compelling voice of the author to lead me through the darkness. Unfortunately, I could not hear that voice here, and the author's evident bias, established right at the beginning of the work, caused me to spend more time questioning the veracity of his statements and accuracy of his information than I normally do when reading about a new topic. The absence of an even-handed discussion left a bad taste in my mouth, so, part-way through, I put the book aside and decided to return to this topic with another author as my guide. ( )

This book will only be of interest to people who are deeply interested in the background of the Balfour Declaration or the men involved in drafting it. The author writes his political opinions on a variety of subjects (Zionists versus anti-Zionists, the way the United States should relate to Israel, etc) into his book as well - although I do not agree with him on much, I at least give him credit for not trying to conceal that or hide from it.

Ultimately the book is something of a collective hagiography of the original Zionists - Herzl and Weizmann foremost, but there are numerous others. Gentiles who cooperated with the Zionists get mentions as well, but the Zionists are clearly the main subject of the book. ( )