The (in)famous 1917 Balfour Declaration to Baron Rothschild on Palestine (as it was then called) perfectly encapsulates the root of the conflict: a colonial power pledging to European Jews land that belonged to neither.

A decade before the '47 UN Partition Plan, David Ben-Gurion (who would become Israel's first prime minister) candidly articulated Zionist strategy: "We shall accept a state with fixed boundaries today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspiration are the concern of the Jewish people and no external power can limit them."