One century ago, in the middle of the First World War, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour issued a declaration that paved the way for the establishment of a Jewish state.  The declaration was ambiguous in some respects because the British aimed not only to win the support of Jews around the world, but also to bring Arabs into more direct conflict with the Turkish Ottomans, who ruled both Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. The Turks had dealt savagely with both the Jews and the Christians.  The genocide of Armenians is an overlooked holocaust, and Bat Ye'or's book on the long persecution of Christians by the Ottomans is a vital, but often missing, part of the history of the region.  The creation of a Jewish state had less to do with religion – many of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine after the First World War ended were agnostics or even atheists – than with race.  The Kurds, for example, had no specific religious identity....(Read Full Article)