Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights:#1 I lived in Jerusalem for several months in the early 1990s, doing research in the private libraries of some of the city’s oldest families. I found a worldly man with a broad education who was deeply interested in comparative religion.#2 Yusuf Diya was an Ottoman government official who spent much of his career training to be a diplomat. He was also elected as the deputy from Jerusalem to the Ottoman parliament in 1876, supporting parliamentary prerogatives over executive power.#3 Yusuf Diya was a well-read man, who had gained knowledge of the intellectual origins of Zionism from his time in Vienna. He was aware of the anti-Semitism in Europe, and knew that there was no way to reconcile Zionism’s claims on Palestine and its explicit aim of Jewish statehood with the rights and well-being of the country’s indigenous inhabitants.#4 The letter from Yusuf Diya was the first response by a founder of the Zionist movement to a cogent Palestinian objection to its embryonic plans for Palestine. Herzl established what was to become a pattern of dismissing as insignificant the interests, and sometimes the very existence, of the indigenous population.