Quotes from Larry Collins

In 1880, after the assassination of Alexander II, the mobs, aided by the Czar's soldiers, burned and butchered their way through one Jewish community after another, leaving a new word in their wake: pogrom.

It was Zionism. With the energy of his despair, Herzl produced its blueprint, a one-hundred-page pamphlet titled Der Judenstaat—"The Jewish State." "The Jews who will it," it began, "shall have a state of their own.

Bound together by common ties of language, history and religion, they offered a deceptive appearance of strength and solidarity. Two nations, Syria and Lebanon, were French-style republics. Three, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan, were quasi-feudal kingdoms evolved from desert tribal patterns. Two, Egypt and Iraq, had constitutional monarchies of British inspiration.

For the Arabs, and above all for the 1.2 million Arabs of Palestine, the partitioning of the land in which they had been a majority for seven centuries seemed a monstrous injustice thrust upon them by white Western imperialism in expiation of a crime they had not committed.