A few months after the Ottoman Empire joined Germany in World War 1 in 1914 by attacking Russian ships, Herbert Samuel, a British Zionist, later appointed as the first Commissioner of the British Mandate in Palestine, recognized this was likely an opportunity to obtain a Jewish Palestine. But he decided that there were too few Jews in the population in Palestine at that time for immediate statehood to be practical. Although in the Jerusalem area the Jews were two thirds the total population, in the Palestine territory as a whole they only numbered about 100,000 or about one sixth the total of perhaps 600,000 Arab Muslims and Christians.
Herbert Samuel, a British Jew who had risen high in the British Labor Government, wrote in a memo to the British War Cabinet entitled “The Future of Palestine”: If Palestine were to be open to unrestricted Jewish immigration, it might become a Jewish majority state. How could they become a Jewish majority state? It would need a majority to be able to command obedience from the Arab ethnic population; also a larger population to protect the state against Arabs or other enemies external to the state. A failed Jewish state might set back Zionism for 100 years. After looking at what he conceived were the only alternatives, Samuel decided the way to go was to have Britain annex Palestine. The only alternatives to British annexation he thought of were: 1. Annexation by France, 2. Internationalization, 3. Annexation to Egypt, and 4. continued Turkish rule with guarantees permitting Jewish settlement.