language. They wanted to take their fate in their own hands and found their own national state. This was the birth of the Zionist movement, which aimed to set up a Jewish state in Palestine.
The 208 delegates at the First Congress of Zionists in Basel in 1897 knew next to nothing about Palestine. With one or two exceptions, none of them had ever been there. What concerned them was the desperate situation of the Jews in Europe. This is the only way to explain how they got the idea that the land was uninhabited. Their slogan was "a land without a people for a people without a land."
But the land was not "empty." About half a million people lived there, 90% of them Muslim and Christian Arabs. They were a part of the large Arab population of the Ottoman Empire. This people too had its own national aspirations. Arab intellectuals wrote nationalis-tic manifestos, Arab officers set up underground cells in the Turkish-Ottoman army. The Arabs in Palestine were also swept along in this nationalist development.
This is how it happened that two national movements arose at the same time - the Zionist and the Arab - unknown to each other. When the Jews started to settle in Palestine, conflict was inevitable. The Jewish settlers were surprised to find an Arab population there, which fought with increasing violence against their presence. And the Arab population became increasingly concerned about the rapid growth of the Jewish population, which was developing into a state within a state in their land.
The two populations lived side by side. There were indeed com-pletely mixed villages and towns, but the Jewish and Arab popula-tions had almost no contact with each other. Both groups developed their own world of values and expressions, myths and slogans, that had nothing in common with the mental world of the other side. Through their separate and very different upbringing, a generation grew up with diametrically opposed attitudes and aspirations. The lack of contact on a commercial level ensured that the two groups lived separate lives. They spoke different languages, followed differ-ent religions, and each had their own history.
The Holocaust in Europe produced an almost irresistible pressure in support of the Jewish demands. The Arab opposition gained strength with the foundation of the Arab League in 1945. The conflict sharpened with the United Nations’ declaration in 1947 on