You're very welcome.

Why choose that precise site...?

As you will see when you read further, there were many reasons, of which it is hard to pick a pre-eminent one. Several other possible sites were considered by Zionists during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of which we mention two in our Brief History: One was Uganda, which was briefly the majority choice in the Zionist movement. As this example shows, the stereotype of the Zionist movement as being driven by religiously-based irredentism is very wide of the mark. The scheme was never implemented, partly because it would have required a degree of organisational cooperation from the British that was, in the event, never forthcoming. Also that idea was overtaken by events as tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from the mass murders in Russia voted with their feet for Palestine. (Note that, at the time, and for several decades afterwards, the Jewish people had worse enemies than the Arabs, and very few friends who were in a position to help: it was far from being a case of 'settling among your worst enemies'.) The other was Alaska, which never became a refuge because the US Congress resolutely refused permission. Remember, casual antisemitism was endemic in the West at the time.

Other pertinent reasons were: that there was already a Jewish community in Palestine, small but culturally significant because of its long history and its tradition of Jewish scholarship. Also, of course, that there were many sites there of historical and religious significance to the Jewish people. Many of these were in Jerusalem, the holy city of the Jewish religion, which had had a Jewish majority since 1850. Then, also, there was the consideration that the safe haven for Jews would have to be a place where the existing non-Jewish population would benefit economically from an influx of Jews [of course, almost anywhere would have benefited, but that was not understood under the then-prevailing socialist economic consensus], and where, as the Balfour Declaration said, no one's civil or political rights would be adversely affected.

While none of these and other reasons would have been decisive in itself, taken together they left no other sane choice. Indeed, the whole thing happened too late. Had the State of Israel been founded a mere ten years earlier, it might well have saved millions from the Holocaust instead of merely hundreds of thousands.