Top Highlights

• ‘Zionism’ expressed the right of the Jewish people to establish a homeland in an area of the Middle East that they called ‘Eretz Israel’, the ‘Land of Israel’.
• The Arabs had lived in this region, calling it Palestine, for the previous two thousand years but now the Jews could claim back their homeland by historic right.
• Both also shared the same fanaticism of belief and the same conviction that violence could quite legitimately be used, indeed had to be used, to further what they regarded as the rightful destiny of the Jewish people.
• the Irgun Zvai Leumi (the IZL or ‘National Military Organisation’).
• The story of how Great Britain and Zionism came into conflict went back to 1917. Palestine had for centuries formed part of the Ottoman Empire. But during the First World War, as the British Army pushed forward and seized vast tracts of the Middle East from the Ottomans, they were confronted by the question of what to do with the territory that now...