When US Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis visited Palestine in 1919, he found it to be a desolate country with no schools, no hospitals, no agriculture, and no industry.
There were pockets of Palestinian Jews who had already established kibbutzim, begun development of Tel Aviv, begun draining the swamps, and planted olive and orange trees but everything was very sparse and rudimentary.
In a letter to President Wilson 2 years later, Brandeis criticized efforts to shrink Eretz Yisrael (the former Ottoman Empire's Jewish Homeland decreed by the Balfour Declaration) that rightfully included from the Litani River in the North and from the plains on both sides of the Jordan River in the East.