ABSTRACT
This chapter examines an ancient land—historic Palestine—and the two modern polities that in the twenty-first century constitute it: the still-young State of Israel and the emerging State of Palestine. It considers a few topics common to the land itself—such as landforms, climate, soil and vegetation, and natural resources—and focuses on the two polities individually, following the general structure used in the country. The chapter explores how the defeat in World War I of the Ottoman Empire, the penultimate in a long series of foreign and local suzerains of historic Palestine, led to the international League of Nations mandate over the geographic region. It argues that over several millennia, when one conqueror after another overran historic Palestine, the mass of the population remained in place, with the conquerors usually blending in genetically with that population for the most part.
