ottoman

A Jewish homeland in backwaters of the Ottoman empire seemed unattainable, and pressing domestic concerns like slavery and temperance took precedence.

The nation’s multilayered historical background has been variously stamped by a basic Arabic heritage, ineradicable remnants of protracted Ottoman Turkish rule and the long arm of the British colonial empire.

During World War One, Britain invaded Palestine, driving out the Ottoman Turks, and it facilitated its promise for a Jewish homeland made in the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

The British and French had tried to fix borders before, he said, when they took the Middle East from the dying Ottoman Empire during the First World War.

It was also the first targeting of the Christian community in Syria since a massacre in 1860, when a conflict broke out between Druze and Maronite Christians under Ottoman rule.