A land without a people for a people without a land throw upon the Jews the actual manual labor of regeneration and prevent them from exploiting the "fellahin", whose numbers and lower wages are moreover a considerable obstacle to the proposed immigration from Poland and other suffering centers". In 1914 Chaim Weizmann, later president of the World Zionist Congress and the first president of the state of Israel said: "In its initial stage Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without a people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish
History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict defeating the Ottoman Turkish forces and occupied the Palestine region. The land remained under British military administration for the remainder of the war. On January 3, 1919, future president of the World Zionist Organization Chaim Weizmann and the future King Faisal I of Iraq signed the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement in which Faisal provisionally accepted the Balfour Declaration conditional on the fulfillment of British wartime promises of Palestine being included in the area of Arab independence. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles, Turkey's loss of its Middle East Empire was formalized. After World War I and the collapse