[ubermammal]

>>What I don't understand is the need to persecute one already existing set of people to accommodate another set of people who just got persecuted.

But they weren't persecuted - they were paid off.

In 1917, at the end of WW1, Britain was given the mandate of administering Palestine - at the time a chunk of the recently-defeated-and-defunct Ottoman Empire. Part of this mandate was the Balfour Declaration, which basically said that Britain would work to build 'a national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine ("it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine").

They worked with the "Jewish Agency for Palestine" (these days the Jewish Agency for Israel), who had been buying the land in the area from the previous owners - mostly Arab clans and local sheiks and so on. Nothing was seized, nobody was driven out or persecuted.

[kbenson]

How does that relate to governance? Depending on the laws of the nation, property ownership and residence may not imply voting rights (or any sort of say in governance, voting or otherwise). I truly have no idea of the laws regarding this in that part of the world, but a simple argument of land purchase without addressing those issues doesn't really sway me too far one way or the other.

[ubermammal]

One of the things it took me a while to get my head around was that there kinda was no overarching nation at the time in question - at least not in the way we think of it today. The Ottoman Empire was defunct; nominally there were laws of the nation, but it was in no position to enforce them, and many of them hadn't been popular anyway (as they were secularizing).

In practice the people in the area operated as 'millets' - micronations unified by religious belief, governing themselves according to religious law. When the British took over administration of the region in 1917, they didn't try to change this.

So for the most part, the landowners that the Jewish Agency was buying from were the governance. The trade wasn't like one citizen of a nation selling to another citizen of the nation; it was like one country selling land to another country (and so moving its borders).