The land of Palestine remains part of the Ottoman Empire.

However, this area does not constitute a single political unit.

The northern districts of Acre and ...

The indigenous Arab population of Palestine had worked for and generally cooperated with the small number of Jewish colonies before the Second Aliyah.

The increased Jewish presence and the different policies of the new colonists of the Second Aliyah arouse Arab hostility.

The increasing tension between Jewish colonist and Arab peasant does not, however, lead to the establishment of Arab nationalist organizations.

In the Ottoman-controlled Arab lands, family, tribal, and Islamic ties bind the Arab masses; the concepts of nationalism and nation-state are viewed as alien Western categories.

Thus, an imbalance evolves between the highly organized and nationalistic colonists of the Second Aliyah and the indigenous Arab population, who lack the organizational sophistication of the Zionists.

The First World War sees the end of the centuries-old Ottoman Empire, and its rule in Palestine replaced by the British Mandatory Government.

Initially, the Jews of Palestine think it best serves their interests to cooperate with the British administration.

The Zionist Organization is regarded as the de facto Jewish Agency stipulated in the mandate, although Chaim Weizmann, its president, remains in London, close to the British government; David Ben-Gurion becomes the leader of a standing executive in Palestine.

Labor Zionism, the dominant form of Zionism, seeks to link socialism and nationalism.

By the 1920s, Labor Zionists in Palestine have established the kibbutz movement, the Jewish trade union and cooperative movement, the main Zionist militia (the Haganah) and the political parties that will ultimately coalesce in the Israeli Labor Party in 1968.

The Catholic and Orthodox Churches meet with the World Council of Churches in 1961, inaugurating the Ecumenical Movement towards Christian unity.