Edmund Allenby (British)

General Edmund Allenby was the British commander who captured Jerusalem from the Ottoman Empire during World War I. On 11 December 1917 he entered the city on foot through the Jaffa Gate, ending four centuries of Ottoman rule that had begun in 1517 and opening the way for the British Mandate period. For Jewish history the timing was decisive, because only weeks earlier, on 2 November 1917, the Balfour Declaration had committed Britain to support a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. Allenby's conquest therefore marks the transition from Ottoman rule to the political framework in which modern Zionism developed toward the creation of the State of Israel.