The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has its roots in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the birth of major nationalist movements among the Jews and among the Arabs, both geared towards attaining sovereignty for their people in the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. The collision between those two movements in southern Levant upon the emergence of Palestinian nationalism after the Franco-Syrian War in the 1920s escalated into the Sectarian conflict in Mandatory Palestine in 1930s and 1940s, and expanded into the wider Arab–Israeli conflict later on.