Abstract
The Land of Israel/Palestine again became an actor in world affairs and a focus of wide attention with Zionism’s successful effort to ensure a place for Jews among the nations of the world with a Jewish state. Ottoman Palestine was a woefully underdeveloped country with but 250,000 inhabitants in 1800 and only 500,000 in 1900. By 2000, that same land from the Lebanon to the Sinai and from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean accommodated a population that had grown twentyfold to nearly ten million people. The engine for this remarkable transformation has been the skills, initiative, and capital largely