The influx of European Jews into the area began in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Jews living in Europe, especially those in Poland and Russia, fled from Cossack butchery and Russian pogroms, or massacres, and began immigrating into this part of the Ottoman Empire, where they established primitive farming communities. United by a common religion and the Hebrew language, they were fervent in their belief — despite having to live in crude huts and tents, exposed to the continual menace of malaria, and resented by their unfriendly Palestinian neighbors — that they had returned to a land that had, since biblical times, been divinely promised to them as a national home.
At the beginning of World War I, Great Britain inflamed the passion for a Jewish homeland on an international level by issuing the Balfour Declaration, promising a home for the Jewish people within Palestine. The war ended in 1918 and Great Britain supplanted the crumbling Turkish influence; Palestine was now in the hands of the British. The League of Nations further sanctioned the role of Great Britain in creating a Jewish state.
The plan for a Jewish homeland began to founder as Arabs realized that Zionism had spurred an immense, unprecedented immigration of Jews who suddenly destabilized a centuries-old Arab milieu. The newcomers' land-grabbing, communal living, and insistence on gender equality angered and appalled the native Palestinians, and outbreaks of hostility soon led to bloody confrontations.
