Theodor Herzl was born in 1860 in what is now Budapest, Hungary, to an affluent family, and he lived much of the rest of his life among the upper crust of Vienna. Educated, privileged, and intelligent, Herzl thought he could change the world. For reasons that remain unclear to me, he did a stint as a young man working as a journalist. Although he only worked as a reporter for a very short time, it changed his life and altered his hopefulness in change.
Herzl came face to face to antisemitism. Not just an isolated incident, but ongoing, unrelenting, hate-fueled antisemitism. The bubble of privilege burst. Suddenly, Herzl was no longer making small talk over sherry in a salon, he was meeting people who wanted the Jews dead.
Strangely, Herzl did not take this personally at all, although he was a Jew himself. Instead, Herzl viewed it from a sociological and political perspective. Theodor Herzl belonged to a large and growing group of prosperous 19th century European Jews who did not practice Judaism at all. He never attended synagogue services, never observed any Jewish holidays, and in a time when observent Jewish kids memorized long passages of Scripture in Hebrew, Herzl didn’t know a word of Hebrew. Likewise, he was unfamiliar with the works of leading Zionists of his day.
Shortly after discovering that some people did not like Jews, he found out Jews in Eastern Europe, particularly Russia, were being persecuted. This came as a surprise to him.
Strangely, Herzl was almost untroubled by raging antisemitism, perhaps because so little of his identity revolved around being Jewish. However, Herzl did recognize antisemitism as a problem.
An innovative and imaginative thinker who wanted to change the world, young Theodor Herzl decided that antisemitism was not fixable. There was no way to stop it and no way to prevent it. Instead, Herzl did not think Jews could assimilate into other cultures and they should not try. Nor should the nations of the world try to accommodate Jews. This was an unusual perspective for a Jew. He didn’t blame the antisemites for their feelings—he somewhat agreed with them, but he had an idea.
In 1896, Herzl wrote a pamphlet called Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) advocating that Jews should have their own country somewhere else. Jews should stop trying to live in other cultures but should have their own nation. Wildly unspecific as to where this nation should be or how it was to be set up, the booklet catapulted Herzl to international fame, particularly among the intelligentsia. This secular Jew soon became the global voice for Zionism.
Having never been to Jerusalem and being largely ignorant of many Jewish traditions, Theodor Herzl was nevertheless elected president of the Zionist Foundation in 1897. His first and only trip to Jerusalem was a brief political junket. Of course, at this time, Herzl had no plans that the Zionist movement should create a Jewish state in the Middle East. Herzl just wanted a Jewish state somewhere. Anywhere.
No matter what you think of Theodor Herzl, you have to concede he came up with some pretty astonishing ideas. His next idea has been dubbed The Uganda Scheme. Herzl argued that the British East Africa Company—which was still busy colonizing parts of Africa—should create a temporary Jewish state. This idea never gained much traction.
Undeterred, the surprising Herr Herzl traveled frantically from nation to nation, trying to gain support for a Jewish homeland, wherever it could be established. In his last years, Herzl worked tirelessly with world powers. He wrote to Cecil Rhodes in Africa in 1902 to get support. No dice. He also approached Pope Pius X, but the Catholic Church ruled their intervention regarding a Jewish state was “non possumus,” a Latin phrase meaning that as long as the Jews denied the divinity of Christ, the Catholic Church could not support any of their political efforts. Still optimistic, Herzl went to Russia, where Jews were being persecuted in brutal pogroms that sometimes annihilated whole villages. He struggled to negotiate a solution that would allow Russian Jews to exit Russia, but after that, he didn’t have much of a plan. Where would they settle? The point was moot anyway, since Russia didn’t want to let the Jews leave.
By the time Herzl died, he more or less had resigned himself to the idea that a Jewish homeland had to be in the Middle East, since no other parts of the world were amenable to giving up land to create a Jewish state. The Middle East wasn’t exactly amenable to the idea, either, but the Middle East was more chaotic around the year 1900; national lines were blurry, politics were strange, alliances fleeting and puzzling. Herzl came to the conclusion that the Jewish State had to be somewhere in the Middle East, but he did not necessarily reflect on the fact that the other nations in the Middle East were not too crazy about the idea. However, Herzl thought that the Middle East could be, perhaps, strong armed or bribed or persuaded in some way to relinquish some territory for the Jewish State. After all, a lot of the Middle East was desolate, barren wilderness land that was largely unoccupied. Surely, they could spare a little land for the Jews?
Theodor Herzl is a honored name in the history of Israel and he is lauded as being the Father of Modern Zionism for his idea that Jews should have their own homeland. Not all Jews believed like Herzl that Jews could not assimiliate into other cultures, but Zionism soon expanded so that a Jewish state became an option for Jewish people in a troubled world.
While Herzl condemned antisemitism, he did not think it was worth the trouble to fight it; instead, he thought Jews should just go elsewhere. When the world descended into chaos and then two back-to-back world wars, Herzl’s ideas seemed all the more timely.
The Balfour Declaration
Arthur Balfour was the sort of plodding, practical, slow-talking, well-connected, and impeccably mannered man who thrives in European politics. It was the turn of the 20th century when Balfour plodded his path all the way to the British office of Prime Minister, but he did not hold it for long. In terms of Balfour’s foreign policy, he was deeply disturbed by the pogroms in Russia and Jewish persecution throughout Eastern Europe. Balfour was not Jewish, but he advocated for the Jewish people.
Balfour had the politician’s knack of being able to support contradictory causes at the same time. He endorsed the Aliens Act of 1905 which said that Jewish people should have their own homeland, but that Eastern European Jews should not be allowed to enter the United Kingdom. In other words, Jews were to be given a homeland just as long as that homeland was not in Britain.
As World War I approached, the practical politician in Balfour realized in might be helpful to drum up support among the Jews for the Allied war effort. In 1917, Arthur Balfour was Foreign Secretary of Great Britain; he wrote a letter to Lord Lionel Rothschild, who was a wealthy and powerful Jewish leader.
Balfour was prepared to promise the Jewish people a national homeland in return for their war time support of the Allies. Balfour talked big, but he neglected to specify where this homeland was going to be. Balfour also did not mention how he intended to secure the land, but the letter went public. It immediately became a sore point in the Middle East, particularly among Arabs and Palestinians, who guessed that Balfour was promising Jewish people their land.
This document was the first in a series of steps that set up the nation of Israel. But long before Adolf Hitler arrived on the scene, there was a large and growing political movement in Europe to afford the Jews some sort of state.
Chaim Weizmann
Meanwhile, Chaim Weizmann was the President of the World Zionist Organization. He would later become the first President of the new nation of Israel. But before Israel was ever on a map, Chaim Weizmann scoffed at the Uganda Scheme and other attempts made by Balfour to set up a Jewish state. Weizmann brought clarity to the discussion; Zionists could not support a Jewish state anywhere outside of the Middle East. Not only was there land available, Jewish people had historic ties to that land and Biblical claims to it.
Meanwhile, the Rothschild family had a wealthy aristocratic relative living in France. Baron Edmond de Rothschild announced in 1914 that he was going to fund the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Edmond de Rothschild was not part of the World Zionist Organization, or any Zionist organization for that matter, but he was definitely a Zionist.
Some of the great Zionists of the 20th century were not card-carrying Zionists. In fact, in 1905 Great Britain, it is estimated there lived about 300,000 Jews, and only about 8,000 of them were members of a Zionist organization. I suspect a lot more than 8,000 of them were Zionists at heart.
My Funny Palestine
Palestine was a small nation that had been part of the Ottoman Empire since the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire had its capital in Constantinople and would today be mostly modern Turkey.
So going back to World War I, Palestine was a small country that held a small territory and had a small population. In this little country, there were three main religions: the majority was Muslim, next came Christians, and about 3% were Jews. Many of these people were very serious about their faith.
As the movement toward setting up a Jewish homeland spread, more and more Jews tried to gain entry into Palestine. In an anti-emigration move, Constantinople started to block their Jewish citizens from leaving the country to go to Palestine. This effort, like many immigration policies, was not entirely successful. By 1914, 7% of Palestine was Jewish. These were the people who arrived to Israel before Israel was officially on the map. The Ottoman Empire in general and Palestine in particular were not pleased.
In the early documents about setting up a Jewish homeland, there was a bit of word parsing. The movement in the first decades of the 20th century was endorsing that the Jewish homeland be founded “in Palestine” but not “of Palestine.” What did that even mean? How could a new Jewish state be in Palestine but not of Palestine?
To put it most charitably, it was unclear from the very outset what the relationship was to be between Israel and Palestine. To the Ottoman Empire, it was clear that foreign powers would be calling the shots. The Ottoman Empire was on its last legs anyway. To the local people of Palestine, it appeared that they had little control of their nation’s sovereignty. There was a lot of confusion as to whether or not this new Jewish state was going to be Palestine (that is, Palestine would accommodate both its current population but Jewish immigrants) or whether there would be two separate entities, namely Palestine and Israel. Even today, the “two-state solution” is unresolved in the minds of many.
Coming back to the First World War era, the big problem was that nobody knew where this new Israel was to be created or how Israel and Palestine were supposed to get along. About 90% of the population of Palestine at the time was not Jewish and just about all of this group did not like the idea of setting up a Jewish homeland in their country or even near their country. These early discussions caused deep estrangement in the once positive relationship between the Arab nations and the British Empire. In fact, some have argued that this forced shoe-horning of Israel into Palestine was the “original sin” of the Middle East that has led to a century of warfare.
Of course, Palestine was not firmly established as a nation at this time, either. True, there were people who talked about Palestine and Palestinians, but there was no established political identity and no firm national borders. Palestine lacked its own government. During World War I, the British administered large areas of teritory that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Part of this British-controlled area was called “Mandatory Palestine.” Mandatory comes from “mandate,” because this Palestine was a nation established by a mandate from the League of Nations. In other words, Palestine did not exist before this, but a mandate set it up.
The League of Nations later became the United Nations. Mandatory Palestine existed from 1920 to 1948, and these were not happy years. While the Jewish state was struggling to get established, the Palestinian state was arguing that it already existed, except it didn’t.
The Nazis
Nobody played a bigger role in setting up the modern state of Israel than the Nazis. The brief respite between World War I and World War II in Europe brought financial devastation to Germany and set the stage for a strong nationalist movement led by a guy with a funny mustache. Hitler once tellingly told the German people, “Give me 10 years, and you won’t recognize Germany!”
Hitler did not introduce antisemitism to Germany or Europe; it was already there. And Hitler was not the first to make laws limiting where Jews could live, work, get educated, or who they might marry. What Hitler arrived at was called the “final solution.” Like Theodor Herzl before him, Hitler did not think antisemitism could be fixed, but Hitler’s solution was not setting up a separate Jewish homeland. Hitler thought it more expedient to just get rid of the Jewish people.
World War II brought devastation to Europe and the extermination of about half of the world’s Jewish population in Hitler’s death camps.
At this point, Britain gave up on Mandatory Palestine and handed the Palestinian can of worms over to the United Nations, which issued Resolution 181. This resolution demanded that the Middle Eastern territory be divided into an independent Arab state (Palestine) and a Jewish state (Israel), with Jerusalem in the middle as an international zone. Jews were largely in favor of Resolution 181, Arabs not so much. And Resolution 181 did not really explain how the Jewish state was going to come into possession of the land. This was a bit of a sticking point for the people who actually owned the land in question.
(I sometimes wonder how things might have played out had there been a Donald Trump like figure in Britain at this time and how he might have negotiated a settlement. The politicians of this era largely bungled everything they touched with regard to the Middle East!)
Nevertheless, on May 14, 1948 the State of Israel was announced in what the Bible prophesied centuries earlier as a nation being born in one day. Maps were drawn, teritories claimed, a government was set up, and Israel was on the map faster than the Gulf of America.
This immediately launched the 1948 Arab-Israeli War which only served to expand the amount of land controlled by Israel. For better or worse, Israel has always had a mighty fighting force.
Many Palestinians were displaced during this first Arab-Israeli War. The Palestinians called this war “Nakba” which means catastrophe; it’s the same basic word as “Shoa,” the Hebrew word for catastrophe used to describe the Holocaust. Both sides, Israel and Palestine, saw themselves as victims. The Jews were victims of the Holocaust now and the pogroms before; they needed Israel. The Palestinians were victims of having to give up some land to the Jews. It must be noted that at this time, Palestine was under British control so it did not really have national status. What the Brits did was legal and politically expedient. Nevertheless, Palestinians perceived themselves as victims.
When the dust settled, the land was officially divided into Israel, Palestine, and Jordan (which got the West Bank of the Jordan River). Part of Egypt was annexed to Palestine; this is the area we today call Gaza.
Much of the desire to create a Jewish state was to establish a safe haven for Jews who were persecuted in many parts of Eastern Europe and nearly all of Russia. Ironically, antisemitism fueled Zionism, because some of the early proponents of a Jewish state wanted to create a safe place for Jews to live—just as long as the Jews did not live in their country. This reminds me of a recent event, when illegal aliens from Mexico arrived at Martha’s Vineyard. The elite residents of this tony little Massachusetts community just fawned all over these illegals for the first 24 hours and then got the military to sweep them away. They wanted these poor Mexicans to have a better life, just as long as it wasn’t on Martha’s Vineyard.
Jewish persecution was no myth and it far exceeded the persecution of other ethnic groups. The Palestinians saw themselves as victims, but the Jews had truly been targeted for genocide.
While Stalin made noise in his speeches about fighting antisemitism, he also continued to persecute Jews
Between 1880 and 1920, two million Russian Jews left Russia, mostly landing in the United States or the Middle East
Adolf Hitler enforced antisemitic policies but accelerated his persecution to the Holocaust, an effort to “deport” German-Jewish citizens to slave labor or death camps
Hitler’s plan to destroy the Jews rolled out in steps. In 1935, Jewish people in Germany lost their citizenship. By early 1939, most Jewish Germans had lost their jobs or been driven out of their small businesses
Jews in Hitler’s Germany were not allowed to marry non-Jews
Jews in Germany or German-occupied Europe were obligated to identify themselves as Jews by wearing yellow stars
Many German businesses forbade Jews from entering; Jews were expelled first from universities and then public schools
Jews in Germany scrambled to leave the country but there were few nations that would accept them. About 304,000 Jews had left Germany by September 1939
Some German Jews fled Germany but didn’t go far enough. Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank of diary fame, managed to leave Frankfurt but settled in Amsterdam, thinking he would be safe there. It wasn’t
Hitler’s troops started to deport Jews from Poland and other areas Germany occupied, bringing them in for slave labor or extermination
If you ever hear about how Ukraine was full of Nazis, it dates back to this period. Technically, Ukraine was on the Allied side in World War II, joining forces with Russia, England, France, and the United States against Hitler. But many Ukrainians were on Hitler’s side and actively cooperated with delivering Ukrainian Jews to Hitler’s death camps. It was almost as if Ukraine was politically linked to the Allies, but it endorsed Hitler’s genocide
It is estimated Hitler killed 6 million Jews when it was all over, but not everyone who died in the camps was Jewish. Some were Romany (gypsies), others were homosexuals, political dissidents, troublesome Christian pastors, the disabled, and the mentally ill
Anne Frank’s famous diary chronicled the life of several Jews who spent two years in hiding. While her diary is a unique testimony to Jewish resistance, her story is not. Many Jews had to hide or assume false identities. I knew a Jewish woman born in Germany around the start of World War II. Her parents gave her and her older sister up for adoption to a farm family in another part of Germany under the provision that they get new names and be raised as Catholics. Their Jewish past was wiped away from them. (She did not even find out her true heritage till years after the war and she also learned both of her biological parents died in Hitler’s camps.) So there are many types of “hiding.” Some of those hideaways survived. Most did not. Among those who hid in the “attic” with Anne Frank and her sister, only one survived and it was rather by accident. The lone survivor was Otto Frank, Anne’s father.
During the Nazi era and World War II, the United States did not have an open border policy for immigrants, particularly Jews. The United States enforced strict quotas on how many Jewish people could come to America. A poignant story about this closed-border immigration policy involved the St. Louis. Nine hundred Jews aboard this merchant ship were denied entry, first, in Cuba and later to the United States; the ship had to return to Europe and many of those passengers would later die in the death camps.
The United Kingdom was not generous either, although it had set up immigration provisions that favored children but not their parents (about 10,000 Jewish children were allowed into Britain). This was a curious policy, but our British cousins have many curious approaches to things.
While Central and South America took in small numbers of Jews, it was only the Dominican Republic that was willing to take on significant numbers.
Canada (who are not nearly as nice as their reputation claims they are) was not only high restrictive to Jews, they were rude about it too. When a Canadian official was asked about how many Jewish immigrants could enter the country, he said, “None is too many.”
Switzerland, like other European nations, was schizophrenic about Jewish emigration. Switzerland took on many Jewish refugees but denied more than they took in, with no clear policies. It all depended on what day the refugees asked for asylum.
Today, Israel has its own unique immigration policy. The Law of Return, passed in 1950, said that any Jew from anywhere at any time could receive immediate citizenship upon arrival in Israel.
Of course, this requires a definition as to who is a Jew. According to the Law of Return, you are Jewish
If you have a Jewish mother
If you converted to become a Jew
If you are the child or grandchild of a Jew
If you are the spouse of Jew or the spouse of child/grandchild of a Jew
The Law of Return allows for dual citizenship, so an American who claims Israeli citizenship need not give up his or her American passport. The Law of Return provides some generous government benefits to help the new Israeli citizen settle in Israel and learn Hebrew. If you want to emigrate to Israel seeking political asylum, but you are not Jewish, you will encounter far more obstacles. Israel’s rules on asylum are complex and overwhelming for many asylum seekers. Israeli has fairly restrictive immigration laws for non-Jews who just want to live in Israel. But the point of all this was to make it easy for Jews to become citizens of Israel.
The Law of Return worked. Israel had a population of about 806,000 in 1948, but by 2024, it counts 10 million citizens. There are two main drivers of this population boom: the Law of Return brought in lots of immigrants and Israel has an astonishingly high fertility rate. In 2025, Israel overall has 2.9 children per woman. But if you look exclusively at Israel’s ultra-orthodox population, that rate is 6.5 children per woman. (That’s a very very high average!) By contrast, in the United States, it’s 1.6 children per woman and in Japan, it’s 1.2 children per woman.
What Now?
Putting Israel and Palestine next to each other is a bit like forcing two people who strongly dislike each other to live next door to each other or to work side-by-side on the job. It’s an unhappy marriage on its best days.
This forced tandem of Israel and Palestine has led to political movements, terrorist organizations, wars, and nonstop politics. No matter how much you think politics is out of control here in terms of radical discourse, family arguments, heated rhetoric, and dizzying news cycles, it’s been this way or worse in Israel for at least 80 years, maybe longer.
Locating Israel in the Middle East makes good Biblical sense since there is a long-standing historical claim the Jewish people can make on what is sometimes called the Holy Land. However, Muslims also have historical ties to the land and an not-so-hidden antipathy toward the Jews. This all started when Theodor Herzl argued Jews could not assimiliate into other cultures—and they’re struggling right now to assimilate with Palestine and vice versa.
If you look into Biblical prophecy, you’ll see that the centerpiece of eschatology (the study of the End Times) is Israel. Israel is going to experience a lot of trouble and wars in these last days, and if that’s what is going to happen, Israel is well situated. The Bible even talks about Israel being surrounded by nations who want to destroy it. Well, that’s right, too. For those of us who consider Biblical prophecy in our political discourse, it is unrealistic to hope for a happy-slappy Israel surrounded by loving neighbors in a land of dancing chipmunks and unicorns. Israel is right now where the Bible said it would be and it wasn’t religious zealots who put it there. On the surface, it was the handiwork of bumbling and sometimes short-sighted politicians working their own agendas. On a higher plane, it was a sovereign God arranging things as He sees fit.
And as for Palestine, it has its own issues. The United Nations, for example, does not even today recognize Palestine as a member state. It does however recognize Israel as a member state.
Palestine is like the Vatican, because it has been accorded only “non-member observer state” status in the United Nations, where it can observe proceedings but cannot vote. The status of Palestine is muddled. Is it a state? Or isn’t it? Why won’t the United Nations recognize it as a state?
Part of this confusion is legalistic and semantic. The United Nations defines a nation as a people with a common identity, language, culture, and history. By that definition, Palestine is a nation. However, nations are not members of the United Nations—only states can be members. A state has a defined territory, a permanent population, an established and recognized government, and the ability to enter into relations with other states. Here is where Palestine falls short as a state:
It lacks clearly defined and universally recognized borders
While many countries have diplomatic relations with Palestine, many do not and the ones that do not include the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, and lots of Western European countries
A lack of diplomatic ties means that Palestine cannot—as a state—enter into meaningful international deals with other nations
Palestine does have a government, but even that is problematic, because the government of the West Bank is different than the government of Gaza. You can’t have one state with two different governments
Hamas was the ruling party over part of Gaza for 15 years and Hamas is considered a terrorist organization
Palestine does not issue its own currency and has no monetary policies (Palestinian money is a whole nother can of worms… it’s complicated)
All of these problems may get ironed out, but this is where we stand now.
When people talk about a two-state solution, they are not just talking about having both Palestine and Israel coexist near each other. They also mean that Palestine must be recognized as a state, necessitating clearly defined and defended borders and an elevation in its status in the global community. They also mean that Israel must be able to live in safety and security in their own land.