The modern belief that the Jews should have a homeland, made concrete in the nineteenth and twentieth century program of developing the Land of Israel (the biblical Zion) as a Jewish state. While the idea that the Jews will have Zion as their homeland goes back to the original promise of God to the patriarch Abraham, modern political Zionism dates only to the nineteenth century. Under the leadership of Theodor Herzl, in 1878 the Zionist Organization was organized in Basel, and European and American Jews began to work for the creation of a Jewish state in what was then the province of the Ottoman Empire known as Palestine. The Zionist cause was boosted in 1917 when the British assumed control of Palestine and issued the Balfour Declaration, which supported the establishment there of a Jewish homeland. Between 1917 and 1947, hundreds of thousands of Jews settled in Palestine.
From 1933 to 1945, however, the Jews in Europe, facing persecution by the Germans, were officially prohibited from entering the country in sizable numbers due to pressure put on the British mandatory power by the Arab population. In the aftermath of World War II, many of the Jews who had survived wanted to go to Palestine. In 1947, the United Nations voted to create a Jewish and an Arab state on the land. In 1948, the Jewish state declared independence and survived invasion by its Arab neighbors, thus fulfilling the dream of modern Zionism. Since then, Zionists inside and outside Israel have worked to assure the safety and stability of the Jewish state and to promote worldwide Jewish immigration to Israel.
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