Excerpt from Palestine: The Rebirth of an Ancient People OF all the numberless names to be found in the gazet teers, there is none that excites so widespread and so intense an interest as that of Palestine. There is no one in whom the name of his own country, especially when found amid alien surroundings, fails to arouse a thrill. Some there are who have personal interests or relation ships in foreign lands, which endow the names of those regions with a special personality and life, lacking in the description of regions which, so far as the reader is con cerned, belong to the book and to the book alone. To many the names of Greece and of Italy have a special call; to yet others Egypt or Assyria have an attraction of which those for whom archaeology has no charm can have no consciousness. Yet all these votaries of their own and of other lands, taken in the aggregate, do not exceed in number those in whom the name of that small and geographically unimportant region whose shore is lapped by the eastern waters of the Mediterranean arouses a vivid interest. Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, hold the first place in the minds and affections of most of the inhabitants of those countries. Few of them, if any, have the second place unoccupied, and among the overwhelming number that place is filled by Palestine, a land sacred to Christian, Jew, and Moslem alike. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.