Sorry if the answer is obvious / there’s a FAQ for this, but I’ve always found it curious that Great Britain, a nation (so far as I know) without a particularly large or historically significant Jewish population would support the idea of a Jewish Homeland in the Middle East. Why did the British authorities support this? Even if they didn’t predict the century of turmoil that would surround Israel and Palestine, what did Britain expect to gain from supporting Jewish settlement in the Levant after the fall of the Ottoman Empire?