I've said in comments to other writers that in the end, it's all about the land. But of course, many of them won't have that and rabbit on about religion etc.

Israeli intelligence is very good at hunting people down, but falls short in the everyday business of intelligence gathering. That said, it is more than ordinarily difficult to inflitrate an organisation made up largely of fanatical true believers whose asceticism does not leave them open to the usual methods of compromise.

The fundamental mistake, and not the only one of its kind, was the insistence of the Zionists on Palestine as the site for a Jewish homeland and the Wests' acceptance of that. As late as the 1940s, there remained large areas of inhabitable land in Australasia and the Americas that were at best thinly populated and often quite empty. Easily enough to settle a substantial number of Jewish people without discommoding anyone else.

But that would have been a sensible thing to do!