M E STU 10 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Chaim Weizmann, World Zionist Organization, World Zionist Congress

• School: Berkeley
• Department: Middle Eastern Studies
• Course: M E STU 10
• Professor: Mahmood Monshipouri

Document Summary

The significance: it set the course of the history for the modern middle east. Only the first half of the declaration became operative (homeland for the jews, but not living at peace alongside the palestinians. ) Arab violence followed from 1919 on, as palestine tried to forestall further jewish colonization. Two groups of people, one piece of land. Both have to live with the other", while maintaining their identities (british galvanized their different nationalism). In the middle east, land valuable to humans is scarce. Roughly 90 percent of arab lands are desert or semi-desert, useful for limited cultivation and herding. When such land has religious attributes, the conflict may become particularly intractable. Consider for example, jerusalem: jews built yad vashem (the holocaust memorial) and muslims built the dome of the rock. Every day the separation of israel from the palestinians grows less likely, putting israel on a slippery slope toward apartheid as former israel prime minister.