On The Atlantic magazine website, Jeffrey Goldberg  introduces a fascinating set of archive articles about Palestine before it became Israel.

Goldberg, who rightly disproves of journalists setting themselves as prophets, is nevertheless struck by this insight from 1919:

The Jewish people do not expect that all the Jews of the world will ever be gathered in Palestine. The country is too small to hold them all, and there is no universal desire to go there. In the fullness of time, there will be several million Jews in Palestine, but in all human probability the majority of Jews will still live outside its borders.

That comes from a piece by Harry Sacher, who was a supporter of Zionism. The other articles - by turns enlightening, annoying, even bigoted - are equally worth reading, if only for the profound light they shed on the early stages of the conflict between Israel and the Arab world.