As violence continues in the Middle East, the roots of the conflicts in the area can be seen to originate from World War I. This is important to understanding the modern Arab-Israeli conflict as the culmination of more than a century of hatred on the part of Arabs to compromise with the existence of a Jewish state. Now Muslims and Jews each believe the land in Israel belongs to them. By the beginning of World War I, although the Middle Eastern Conflicts did not play a significant part during the war, the Middle Eastern Conflicts is best understood as a power struggle between Arabs and Jews because of Zionism and Arab Nationalism before WWI, three essential agreements during WWI, and the affects following World War I. .
Before World War I, the declining Ottoman Empire had two rising movements that would begin the conflict in the Middle East. The first movement is Zionism which called for a nation state for Jewish people. "Palestine was simultaneously the scene of a confrontation with Zionism that became a key issue between Ottomanists and Arabists throughout the Empire in the five years before World War I. A survey of nine major organs of the Arabic press in Syria and Egypt revealed 441 articles on Zionism between 1911 and 1913, an indication of the extraordinary attention paid to Zionism."[1] Almost forty thousand Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to escape anti-Semitism into Ottoman occupied Palestine to create a safe haven for all Jewish people. The problem of trying to take over Palestine was that Palestine was under control of the Ottoman Empire and the Arabs did not want to hand over land in Palestine to Zionists from Europe. However, in 1917, Palestine would change for both Jews and Arabs when the British Government issued the Balfour Declaration that completed the Zionist idea of a nation state for the Jewish people. Subsequently, while Zionism was taking place, Arab Nationalism was also taking strides.
