Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 4, 2025

When the U.S. Navy Saved the Jews of the Holy Land

A World War I-era humanitarian intervention.

With the beginning of World War I, economic life in the Land of Israel ground to a halt, Turkish troops began confiscating food and other goods from Jews and Arabs alike, and the charitable donations from Jewish communities in the Diaspora—on which a large share of Palestinian Jews depended—could no longer be delivered. A plague of locusts made a bad situation worse. Lenny Ben David tells the story of an American humanitarian intervention: 

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