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His attention to the details of the future Jewish commonwealth was equaled by his determination to gain international recognition for its creation. On one detail he was to be proved decisively wrong. Hebrew would become the nation’s language. Even so the Zionist Organization was not to adopt Hebrew as its official language until 1907, three years after his death. The Zionist movement was thus forged on two fronts, within the Jewish community and in the general political arena. A critical part of the former was in Palestine itself, and although only about half of Palestinian Jews were imbued with Zionist ideals in 1897 the community did offer an exemplar of nation-building.

Organizations such as the “Lovers of Zion” facilitated migration to Palestine and collected money to buy land. This was very much the tactical phase of Zionism. It was only with the founding of the Zionist Organization in 1897 that the movement acquired the strategy that could sustain it. The agricultural settlements ceased to be romantic experiments and would become part of the Jewish national home. Herzl and the Zionist Movement If it was the Jews of the Russian Empire who pioneered modern Zionism it was to be the Jews of central and Western Europe who provided it with its political program.

The geographical term “Palestine” was somewhat ambivalent before 1918. There was no administrative area of that name in the Ottoman Empire. What was to become Palestine under British rule was divided under Ottoman rule into three different sanjaqs or provinces (Acre covering the north, Nablus in the center and Jerusalem, with greater administrative independence covering some of what became the south of Palestine). 52 However, even making palestine: mapping the middle east 25 these areas were not exactly coterminous with the boundaries of British Palestine.