More than even most of the history i've read, this book reveals and emphasizes just how contingent was this consequential moment on the accidents of association, timing and personality that led up to it. I'd like to be able to understand how committed and resourceful were the broader movements involved, such that if not for Balfour's declaration things might still have proceeded similarly, but Schneer argues convincingly that the declaration itself could easily not have been.

The book also treats the Arab nationalist and Zionist movements, as well as Britain and the other imperial powers and their representatives, with an empathetic frankness that i think suits the subject well. None of these campaigns were at all egalitarian (except perhaps the Russian revolutionaries, insofar as they play a role), but they were all to an important extent idealistic—and idealism comes off meriting less sympathy than we typically impute to it. Of course this story has no heroes or villains, but Schneer excavates a surprising amount of honor, prejudice, cynicism, delusion, and internal conflict from the principal players.

One unavoidable takeaway is the surprisingly shaky social foundation on which the Zionist project was founded. Any number of religious or nationalist mythologies claim divine mandates, and only the ideology and influence of a chance faction seem to have lent this one imperial endorsement. Another is that this endorsement was itself purely tactical; Britain's triplicitous maneuvering of the Arab nationalists, the Zionists, and its allies around the fates of the Ottoman holdings could barely have been designed to seed more discord. But i did not come away thinking of the Arab Revolt as anything other than a national liberation movement—with its characteristic chauvinism and community connections. My impression is that it might have been much less an outlier among the wave of such movements that ensued, but for this entanglement. They seem to have been confronted with a change in the mechanics of power they did not foresee and could not navigate.*

* Having recently read "The Octopus", "Things Fall Apart", and "Amusing Ourselves to Death" played into this takeaway.