[Perseverando]

The Balfour Declaration was a "God thing."

I stand with Israel.

[Oshkalaboomboom]

More on the Balfour Declaration Here

[Fai Mao]

great article

[SJackson]

Middle East and terrorism, occasional political and Jewish issues Ping List. High Volume

If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.

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[PGalt]

Interesting history. Thanks for posting.

[monkeyshine]

What remains puzzling in this historical account is how this idea, proposed by the Zionists and backed for decades by right-wing politicians, led to the creation of the leftist and virtually socialist state of Israel in 1948.

Practical considerations led to Israel starting as a socialist state. They had to absorb immigrants from scores of countries, speaking dozens of different languages, and unite them. They had to create a new language (a speaking version of Hebrew). Hundreds of thousands of war refugees/Holocaust survivors immigrated penniless. This may not have justified every socialist policy (e.g. labor union political party) but is understandable when you consider the social cost of absorbing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands per year into a country of only a few hundred thousand (in the early years).

[Katya]

Article leaves out a lot of information, regardless of which side you stand Israel will remain a state, but in 1917 less than 10% of the population of Palestine was jewish. The revival of Hebrew as a language outside of liturgical text had only been revived since the 188o’s. It had not been a spoken language since the second century AD. The day to day language spoken by Ashkenazi jews up until then had been yiddish, a german dialect.

I often wonder what Hebrew really sounded like almost 2000 yrs ago, it would be a bit like reviving Latin as a spoken language.