At the beginning of the twentieth century the land that came to be known as the Mandate of Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled the whole region of Western Asia since 1516...Palestine was an area filled with hundreds of small villages and a few large towns...The population was ethnically diverse, the legacy of migrations by Greeks, Romans, Turks, Persians, and Jews during the previous two millenniums. As each group passed through, members were assimilated into the existing community, adding to its diversity, but never displacing the Arabs...
Most of the people of Palestine made their living through subsistence agriculture or the export of produce such as olives, grain, sesame products, and oranges which were sent to Europe through the ports at Jaffa, Gaza and Acre...Palestine was a localized world, one in which most people rarely if ever traveled more than a day's walk from their home village and a family might live on the same land for hundreds of years.
...The Ottoman rulers' use of the millet system of governance allowed the Christian and Jewish populations a great deal of autonomy: They were granted communal responsibility for their own religious, social, cultural and even legal affairs...There was a relatively high degree of religious tolerance and a acceptance of peaceful coexistence that was at variance with the situation in many other parts of the world.
...In 1850 neither Jews nor Arabs viewed themselves as members of an ethnically, culturally, linguistically homogeneous, territorially based nation in the modern sense of the word. In the history of how this occurred are found the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
...European attitude toward colonialism in the late 1800s and early 1900s conveyed a clear message that Africa, Asia and the Middle East were the property of any European who wished to settle there, "bring civilization to the masses," and tap its natural resources...Imperialism -the establishment by force or coercion of political and economic control by a state or empire over foreign territories- was viewed as an honorable activity, with little recognition of the exploitation accompanying it. Europeans who settled in Africa or Asia or the Middle East were often romanticized and glorified as pioneers spreading civilization to the non-Wester world...
That Palestine had an existing population, with its own history and aspirations, was no more relevant to early Zionists than was Kenyan history to the British or Algerian society to the French. In describing the attitudes of the early Zionists who participated in the Basel Conference, Israeli politician and journalist Uri Avnery wrote, "Except for a handful, these more or less self appointed delegates of the Jewish people had never been to Palestine, had no idea what it was like and took little interest in its realities, Reality did not bother them. They were out to build a new world, only half imagined. The only reality they knew was one they wanted to get away from - the reality of Eastern Europe, with its pogroms, its discrimination, its foreboding of greater catastrophes to come." Thus, many early Zionists operated under a set of illusions that Palestine was an almost empty land that could easily accommodate their dreams and aspirations, the illusion that the people already in Palestine would welcome Zionist colonization and especially the illusion that any resistance to Zionism could be blamed on Arab politicians rather than broad-based sentiment against the European immigration...
The new immigrants who like those before them came to Palestine to escape pogroms and discrimination, were frequently socialists, committed to Jewish communal living on kibbutzim (agricultural settlements with collective ownership; singular kibbutz)...Because of their ethic of egalitarianism within the community and a desire to strengthen the Jewish people through physical activity, the settlers insisted that only Jewish labor could be used on lands owned by Jews. This policy lead to tensions with Palestinian peasants who lost their traditional right to sharecrop the land when it was sold to Zionist immigrants by absentee owners and were then unable to find work among the new immigrant communities...
They were explicitly interested in establishing a Jewish state rather than living as a part of the existing Arab communities; in fact, many of Israel's first political leaders came from this group. This put them in direct conflict with the existing Jewish population, which was more fully integrated into the indigenous Palestinian community.
Gerner, D. J. (1991). One land two peoples: the conflict over Palestine. Boulder: Westview Press.