There were many Jews residing in that area over the years; religious scholars who weren't there to claim the land, but who had moved there in order to study its religious history. .
Things changed when the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 required the registration of the land under individual owner's names. (5) As indicated by the publication "The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict" by Jews for Justice in the Middle East, the peasants living there for many years and working the land had no official claim to ownership other than the communal laws practiced in the past, such as the inalienable right to pass the land they worked and lived on to their offspring. Under the provisions of the 1858 law, communal rights of tenure were often ignored and the upper classes registered large areas of land as their own. The peasants often had no knowledge that they no longer owned their land until the Zionist movement, when the land was sold to Jewish settlers by an absentee landlord and they were evicted.] (5) In 1896, a Jewish journalist and writer living in Vienna by the name of Theodor Herzel wrote Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). .
The Conflict between Israel and Palestine.
It was based on this book that the movement called Zionism began. It is interesting to note that in his book, Herzel states that the new "Jewish State" could either be Palestine OR Argentina.
Zionism.
The Jewish Virtual Library states that Zionism is the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel which advocated, from its inception, tangible as well as spiritual aims, and essentially the common goal of a Jewish state in its ancient homeland. (6) Consistent with the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the word Zionism comes from the Biblical word for Jerusalem and Israel, Zion. "Central to Zionist thought is the concept of the Land of Israel as the historical birthplace of the Jewish people and the belief that Jewish life elsewhere is a life of exile.
