Israel: A Twice Promised Land

Episode 1

Birth of a State

In 1896, Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist worried about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, published The State of the Jews, a book in which he advocated the foundation of a Jewish national home. Palestine, the destination definitively chosen by the Zionist movement in 1905, saw the first waves of immigrants arrive. They founded the first kibbutzim and cultivated the land they had bought from the Arabs. Initially peaceful, relations between the two communities became strained when the Palestinians realized that their territory was slipping away from them.