Britain and the creation of Israel

Contemporary Review, Sept, 2004 by Charles Foster

God, Guns and Israel: Britain, the First World War and the Jews in the Holy Land. Jill Hamilton. Sutton Publishing. [pounds sterling]20. xx 294 pages. ISBN 0-7509-3323-2.

If one leaves frank supernaturalism out of it, there are broadly three schools of thought about the origins of Israel. The first is that the pioneering, swamp-draining Israelis, inspired by the dreams and machinations of Herzl, were the midwives of their own nation. The second is that Israel was the creation of an international consensus represented by the United Nations which, compelled by collective guilt and pity at the horrors of Auschwitz and the millennia of pogroms which preceded it, cathartically carved the new state. The third is that Israel is an outpost of a Christian Zionist empire. Each school is more or less true, and each feeds the other. But the evidence increasingly suggests that Christian Zionism was the most important of the factors.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was, incontrovertibly, the cornerstone of modern Israel. Many Arabs never mention it without a curse. It expressed, on constitutionally dubious authority (it was never debated in the House of Commons), the support of His Majesty's Government for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It was really the handiwork of Lloyd George. Many motives for his sponsorship have been suggested: a wish to safeguard the Suez Canal; the pre-empting of French claims in Palestine by giving an altruistic pretext for British control; the protection of trade routes to British Imperial possessions; and the desire to recruit worldwide Jewry (and particularly Jews in the US and Bolshevik Russia) to the Allied war effort. Lloyd George himself said, in his memoirs, that there were two reasons--to encourage Jews to join the Allies, and to reward Weizmann for his revolutionary synthesis of acetone (crucial in the manufacture of explosives).

The real reasons are unlikely to have been so prosaic. Nations are not built from acetone. Men do big, wild, creative things because they feel deeply, and no-one has ever felt deeply about a Canal. We get closer to the heart of things when we learn that Lloyd George's heart leapt when he heard Weizmann say that Palestine was a 'little mountainous country'--just like Wales. But even that will not do: the world is full of little mountainous countries with passionate national zealots. It is more significant that Lloyd George admitted to knowing the names of the towns in the Holy Land better than those on the Western Front. He stood, in short, in the long tradition of Christian Zionism.

This was an almost exclusively Protestant, Nonconformist tradition. When the Reformers rediscovered the Bible, they rediscovered a two-tier Holy Land: a real, dusty place and, lying over it and perfusing it, an even more real spiritual land. One could not be a proper spiritual geographer unless one knew what the physical Judea and Samaria looked like. What happened to the Land mattered; some awesome Messianic promises depended on it. There was more than a hint in the Old Testament that the return of the scattered Jews to their ancestral nation would trigger or facilitate the Second Coming of Christ. There was a sectarian dimension too. The Roman Catholic Church had re-built a sort of metaphorical Jerusalem in Rome. To stress the Palestinian origins of Christianity was to imply that Rome had strayed too far from its roots--to imply that Rome was dangerously inauthentic.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Nonconformist-Evangelical ethos had worked its way deep into the British body politic. In the first half of the twentieth century the influence was even more deep and obvious. Prime Minister after Prime Minister had imbibed a mystical, Messianic philo-Semitism with their mothers' (or their Presbyterian nannies') milk. There was nothing heretical about thinking that a move which benefited British foreign policy might also hasten the return of Jesus: God's special relationship with the British meant that this was very likely to be the way He worked.

So Israel was established. She has been sustained since by the votes and the colossal lobbying power of US Christian Zionists--votes and power which seem to be increasingly and frighteningly determinative of US foreign policy. The biblical Israel is, in the sermons of the Christian Zionists, identified wholly with the modern state of Israel. The leading US evangelist, Pat Robertson, says: 'The future of [America] may be at stake, because God will bless those that bless Israel'. President Bush appears to agree, and, even if he does not, would be, from an electoral point of view, ill-advised to say so.

The thesis of this very good and highly readable book by Jill Hamilton is that the history of Zionism over (at least) the past five hundred years is the history of Christian Zionism, which, in turn, is the history of the use which Christians have made of the Old Testament. She knows that philo-Semitism cannot be understood without understanding anti-Semitism, but rightly, though unfashionably, does not simply dismiss the former as a reaction to the latter. It is unusual, and a huge relief, to find a fast, intelligent account of the Reformation which does not pretend that religion had nothing to do with it. She rummages fascinatingly through the backgrounds of Britain's Victorian and Edwardian movers and shakers, producing compelling evidence of the influence of their Sunday School classes on British foreign policy. Her book is a un-put-downable whodunit: the Balfour Declaration is the crime (she makes little secret of her own stance on Israel), and the criminal who is finally run to ground is the Old Testament as interpreted by the Congregationalists of the rural chapels. I would have liked the book to have gone on and on; to have dished up more theological dirt on Campbell-Bannerman and Bonar Law, and to have followed the story on into the churches of Tennessee. Hopefully Jill Hamilton will oblige in her next book.