The Ottoman rulers were hardly encouraging, permitting immigration to Palestine, but forbidding newcomers from purchasing any land. By now there was a formalized Ottoman Land Code, with a fully fledged western-style land register and a system that laid down the manner in which the acreages—said to be owned by God or by the Turkish sultan, in common with, for example, the British notion that all British land is owned by the British Crown—could be allocated. The idea of the communal ownership of village land was also floated in the code—a code that outlived the Turks and, somewhat modified, became part of British mandatory rule and later to some extent part of Israeli rule also.

  This initial ban on the Jewish purchase of Ottoman acreage was soon cleverly outflanked, so eager were the newcomers to acquire portions of Zion, of their ancient biblically allotted land of Canaan. In a variety of ways, mainly by the employment of proxies, a small gathering of farms and villages managed to pass into Jewish hands—or into the communal hands of Jewish villagers—in the early twentieth century. The population figures started to swell. By 1916 there were some 80,000 Jews in Ottoman Palestine, still less than 10 percent of the total, and the exigencies of the Great War reduced that number again as the fighting in Europe wore on. The Jewish population was still so small back then that few of any non-Jewish persuasion felt threatened, and most residents of prewar Palestine went about their business with a dignified tolerance for one another, Bedouins and bankers, farmers and fellahin all. Most of the rural Jews who in these years seeped in from eastern European shtetls in the various migration waves, or aliyot, came to Palestine to set up collective kibbutzim, busying themselves with, as the phrase of the time had it, making the desert bloom. While the Turks gazed sleepily on.

  All swiftly and dramatically changed once the Allies had begun to celebrate their Great War rout of the Ottoman Turks, which made for the second phase of modern Palestine’s history—the British phase in which, toward the end, my father would play his modest and unsung part. It changed because in 1917, already anticipating victory over the Turks, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had issued his famous declaration, pledging support for what the Zionist movement so dearly wanted: the eventual establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.

  This was a pledge made not so much out of a particular compassion for the then widely beleaguered Jews, nor an especially keen sympathy for Zionism (at the time, the British ruling class had somewhat more tender feelings—if overromanticized—for the Arabs). Rather, a wily Balfour had offered his pledge, which he made in a well-publicized letter to Lord Rothschild as head of the Zionist movement in Britain, in the twofold hope that influential American Jewry might then support Britain in her prosecution of the war against Germany and that the likely eventual settlement in Palestine of large numbers of Jews fleeing the Russian and now central European pogroms would somehow help protect the Suez Canal in nearby Egypt, so vital a communication link with India and the rest of Britain’s eastern empire. The Balfour Declaration was in no sense a decision based on altruism, but, like most of the more Machiavellian decisions of the British empire, was an act of policy finely calculated for the playing of the diplomatic long game.

  It had its practical effects almost immediately. Scenting at last the possible realization of the Zionist dream, those encouraging the migration of Jews to their long denied gathering grounds in Palestine redoubled their efforts, and the pace of settlement started to pick up. The figures were still limited—but consequential people, many of them outsiders with money and influence, supported the immigrants, and a trend started to appear. Jews, or their proxies, began to buy up the land.

  Some believed they had a Talmudic duty to do so. It was an intensely felt compulsion, almost—one so strong that rabbinic law had this to say about it:

  If one buys a house from a non-Jew in Eretz Israel, the title deed may be written for him even on the Sabbath. On the Sabbath!? Is that possible? But as Rava* explained, he may order a non-Jew to write it, even though instructing a non-Jew to do a work prohibited to Jews on the Sabbath is forbidden by rabbinic ordination, the rabbis waived their decree on account of the settlement of Eretz Israel.

  So, matters of scripture and doctrine and belief now ran headlong into the creaking machinery of an aging and sagging British Imperium. The Allies’ defeat of the Turks meant initially that the British army occupied Palestine, to be succeeded after some months by the installation of a British colonial government that took practical administrative charge at the beginning of July 1920. They came, fully equipped with their customary colonial equipage, to rule under the authority of the League of Nations. Bureaucrats from Surrey and Yorkshire, Scotland and Cornwall—well seasoned with running as district officers and public works officers and directors of marine and tax collectors the lives of foreigners in places from Somaliland to Samoa, Melbourne to Kolkata—would now be in near exclusive charge of this tiny sliver of seaside territory, barely two hundred miles from north to south,* of special significance to Christians and Muslims, and sacred in particular to nearly all of the world’s Jews. The place had become formally subsumed into a junior branch of the British empire, its official name transmuted into the British Mandated Territory of Palestine.

  London thus also had practical authority over the Holy City of Jerusalem, and with it the first Christian government there for a thousand years was installed. At first the newcomers had ambitions galore for their ability to rule at last from this golden and glorious city—ambitions that were soon to prove themselves tragically out of sync with the febrile passions of the time, passions that started to show themselves forcefully when European Jews began to arrive in the thousands to live among an Arab population not unnaturally surprised and dismayed by what they saw as the sudden usurpation of their territory.

  For a while, the Britons sought to burnish and cherish the loveliness of their ancient possession. With the Temple Mount, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall all now under British administration, the new rulers entertained a host of naïve dreams. Idealists among them hoped that Arab and Jew—who were in British eyes not too terribly different a people, after all—might in time learn to get along and form together a Palestinian governing class. The fantasy held that educated and dignified Arab gentlefolk, plucked from the dunes where they had long been schooled in the same kind of hierarchy and aristocracy that the British then so liked and admired, would mix and mingle with urban intellectual exiles from Warsaw, Berlin, and Kiev, would furnish their own libraries with books from Jewish-run bookshops, would eat cream cakes in Viennese bakeries, would attend concerts given by Bronislaw Huberman’s famous Palestine Orchestra, where they would marvel at the masterly grace of Arturo Toscanini’s conducting and at the number of priceless Stradivarius and Guarnerius instruments that the exiles had brought down with them. Jerusalem, both Promised and so promising, would in time be restored and made properly divine once again, and at last under properly civilized guidance and rule.

  But it was a dream that all turned soon to ashes, acid, and amertume. Instead of harmony and propriety there was fighting and revolt, insurgency and ugliness. And all the distemper and disobliging behavior came about, essentially, over the vexed questions relating to the possession of this newly available tract of Levantine land. Just as in Ireland, here in Palestine, land was all.

  The Ottoman rulers for most of their four centuries in situ had as a matter of strict policy initially prohibited the sale to all foreigners of any of the five million acres of either their Syrian Vilayet or the Jerusalem Mutesarrifate. Toward the end of the nineteenth century they somewhat relaxed this ban, although Jews—many of those few who came before Balfour spoke did so from Tsarist Russia, which was generally hostile to the Ottoman court—were still not allowed to buy. But when after 1919 the British assumed power, they came with a raft of new regulations, issued mainly to protect the fellahin, the members of Arab rural peasantry. No one, said the imperial rulers, could now buy more than sixty acres of land, and they could not spend more than three thousand Palestine pounds in doing so, without government approval.

  It was a valiant attempt to control matters, one might say—one measure among many. But the incoming Jews soon found ways to circumvent such regulation, and a wave of purchases soon began on a heroic scale. Many were purchases of land not made by individual Jews, but by wealthy outsiders, by sympathizers and supporters, and by enormous new funds that had been set up specifically to buy land and encourage immigration and settled settlement. The largest and best known of these funds were Baron Edmond de Rothschild’s Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (which bought 125,000 acres), the Palestine Land Development Company, and, most significant of all, then and still, the Jewish National Fund.

  The eventual ability of well-financed Jews to buy up large tracts of territory in Palestine—many tracts hitherto owned by Lebanese and Syrians and others beyond the Mandate’s borders—led swiftly to the creation of a sizable class of landless Arabs workers—men whom the Jews would not then employ, preferring as laborers those whom they felt they could trust. Separation of the two societies, Arab and Jew, began in earnest around then. As matters worsened, Arab riots, revolts, and strikes—staged, called, and organized to protest what was seen as a stealthy expropriation of their traditional lands, a wholesale usurpation of fields they had tilled and on which their goats had wandered for millennia—became a common feature of the period. Intercommunal strife veered out of control on occasion, most especially in 1933 and 1936, and it spread into cities and in manners too many to describe or evaluate.

  The British made countless attempts, measures drawn from the vast armory of colonial control elsewhere—royal commissions, judicial inquiries, orders in council, regulations, states of emergency, declarations of martial law—to still the trouble and stem the tide of inrushing Jews. For a while in the 1930s, when there were no more than 200,000 Jews in place, and still four times that many Arabs, whose birthrate (thanks in no small part to improved colonial medical care) was suddenly increasing to levels the British thought might stabilize matters; the demographic mix seemed controllable, manageable, suitable, and appropriate. But then came Adolf Hitler—and the purges in Germany, Kristallnacht, the Wannsee Conference, the Final Solution, the Holocaust—and the floodgates opened wide and forever, and the tide roared unceasingly inward.

  Though British soldiers, my father included, were ordered to turn the scores of rickety refugee boats away from the ports of Haifa, Hadera, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Yafo, and to send the frantic dispossessed European Jews off to internment camps in Cyprus and even to faraway Mauritius, the game was evidently up. The British dream was over; the hopes of civility and stability were dashed; the time had come to redeem the promise that Balfour had made thirty years before. Hence Arthur Creech Jones, and his speech in Lake Success.

  By the autumn of 1947 the British government had realized what my father and his weary soldier-colleagues on the hot and hard Palestinian ground had already come to know well: the violent passions felt by thousands of these incoming Jews, demanding of a seemingly dithering international community that they should be granted title to their long promised sanctuary homeland in Palestine—a passion that manifested itself in ever greater violence directed at Arabs and those foreign soldiers whose job was to keep the peace—created a situation that was militarily and politically untenable and unsustainable. More than one hundred British soldiers had already been killed by bombs, shootings, and hangings dealt out by the Irgun, perhaps the toughest of the guerrilla groups behind the growing Jewish insurgency. It was abundantly clear that unless Palestine was handed over to the Jewish people, wholesale, and soon, matters would only get worse, becoming a full-scale civil war, spiraling hopelessly out of control.

  Accordingly, and understood today by parsing the circumlocutions of Mr. Jones’s U.N. address, it was eventually decided by Downing Street and then formally announced to the world that September day in 1947, that Britain would cut and run, would wash its hands of this troubling corner of its now fast-crumbling empire. The vexed territory would now be formally abandoned, handed over at last to Palestinians and Jews to sort out on their own.

  As if to make sure the British truly did get out, the Irgun staged a spectacularly cruel massacre in a village outside Jerusalem, Deir Yassin, just five weeks before the departure deadline. Irgun irregulars came into the tiny community during the night of April 9, 1948, and in the battle that followed at least 120 villagers died, by some accounts 255. There were mutilations, rapes, savagery, and slaughter, and a lasting certainty that whatever blandishments and nostrums might be offered at the departure ceremonies due thirty days later, the new state of Israel would get off to an inconsolably tragic start.

  And so it was, that on May 14 the Union Jacks were all struck from public buildings, marines played farewell dirges to the inhabitants of Mandatory Palestine—Jew, Arab, and gentile all the same—and the final detachment of tropical-kitted and mightily relieved infantrymen, under the watchful eyes of a cluster of army generals, boarded their landing craft and bobbed out into the Mediterranean Sea.

  The high commissioner of Mandatory Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, who had been based in the badly damaged King David Hotel in Jerusalem, left on a Royal Air Force Dakota once his men had gone. On telegraphed instructions from London he had ordered the officials and the generals to leave this melancholy rump of the empire, announcing as he did so that once he himself had quitted the scene, the territory was to be officially transformed from a mandated possession into a sovereign and independent state, to be named what it is still named today: the Medinat, the State, of Israel.* It would be run under the prime ministership of a Polish refugee and ardent Zionist named David Ben-Gurion, and from his own headquarters in the newly built seaside city of Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv–Yafo, more formally—the onetime location of the ancient desert city of Jaffa, built on land bought from the Bedouin in 1909.*

  The declaration that Ben-Gurion then made of the establishment of the new state contained nineteen paragraphs. Probably the most significant of them came halfway down the page, stating:

  The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the ingathering of the Exiles. It will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants. It will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

  The Palestinians have named the day that Israel came formally into being, May 14, 1948, as Al Nakba, the Catastrophe. They scoff, almost all of them, at just about every word of Ben-Gurion’s declaration—equality, pah!, freedom, pah!, faithful to principles, pah! They decry, almost all of them, what they see even at this remove as the savagery and rapine and outright theft of their land that took place during the first few months of the existence of the state. The Deir Yassin massacre, they say, was only a small part of the violence that attended the birth of Israel. In tens of thousands, crowds of defeated, dejected, and demoralized Palestinians began to leave, and to become for the time being refugees, displaced people, heading in caravans and cars and camel trains west to Gaza or east to Jordan or else to safer places farther afield. By 1949, some 720,000 had either fled or been expelled. This set the stage for the eventual population of Israel to be overwhelmingly Jewish: of the current 8.7 million inhabitants, 6.5 million are Jews, almost 1.8 million—a fifth of the total—are Arabs.

  The Jewish side of the land argument is, quite naturally, the polar opposite of that of the Palestinians. Zionists will argue that what took place during those early days—and in all of the subsequent battlings, including, most notoriously the 1967 war, after which Israel annexed the West Bank of the River Jordan and the seaside Gaza Strip—reflected a reasonable and graduated response to the wholesale policy of existential attacks from disaffected Arabs. The two sides have been arguing ever since, and despite occasional moments of optimism show no real signs of forgiveness or real reconciliation.

  And the land remains at the heart of it. By far the greater part of Israel’s land is effectively now owned by the state, held in trust for the Jewish people as the government insists; it is leased to those who live there. The huge tracts originally acquired by the Jewish National Fund are administered by the Israel Land Authority—which grants leases wholesale to Jewish Israelis, and with some restrictions that are said to be for security reasons, to Israeli Arabs. There is a small amount of privately held land still, and this may be sold to whoever has the requisite money, be they Jew, Muslim, or gentile.