Introduction

‘At Basle I founded the Jewish State’, Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary on 3 September 1897, following the First Zionist Congress which he had convened in the Swiss town. ‘If I said this aloud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.’ Precisely fifty years later, on 29 November 1947, the United Nations' General Assembly passed a special resolution on the partition of Mandatory Palestine into two independent states — one Jewish and one Arab. On 14 May 1948, as the last British forces were leaving the country, David Ben-Gurion, Chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, declared the establishment of the State of Israel.