The Everlasting Hatred (27 page)

Besides promoting the restoration of Israel, this Bible-believing Christian is also credited by historians with pushing through Parliament laws that dramatically improved working and living conditions for the wretched poor of England. In fact, that is what Lord Shaftesbury is most remembered for. But he also worked diligently on behalf of those he called reverently “God's ancient people.”
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Belief in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ “has always been a moving principle of my life, for I see everything going in the world subordinate to this great event.” He told his biographer. He confidently believed on the basis of the Scriptural evidence that the return of the Jews was indispensable to the Second Coming.
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But Shaftesbury, like his contemporary evangelicals and his seventeenth-century Puritan forebears, still believed that the Jews must be converted before Israel could or would be reborn.
He believed Israel should be restored under the aegis of the Anglican Church. He foresaw the day when a converted Jew would preside as the consecrated Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. This effort, obviously, did not meet with a great deal of success.

Interestingly, Lord Shaftesbury and his contemporaries were persuaded of the important role of the Jews in restoring Israel by the books of Lord Albert Lindsey, who wrote eloquently about how the barrenness and decay of the Holy Land was due to the “removal of the ancient inhabitants.”
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Lord Lindsey wrote, “The Jewish race, so wonderfully preserved, may yet have another stage of national existence opened to them, they may once more obtain possession of their native land. The soil of Palestine still enjoys her Sabbaths, and only waits for the return of her banished children, and the application of industry, commensurate with her agricultural capabilities, to burst once more into universal luxuriance, and be all that she ever was in the days of Solomon.”
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Shaftesbury and other British evangelicals of his day were also influenced by the Frenchman Napoleon Bonaparte, who, in 1798, had pledged to conquer Palestine and “restore the country to the Jews.” He of course, failed, as I explained in a previous chapter.

The efforts of these men of vision were not fruitless. England took up the cause of restoring Israel once more in the early twentieth century. But Lord Balfour's declaration would not have been possible without the strong Biblical case that had been made for Israel by British Christians in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries.

Following Lord Shaftesbury, another Englishman became taken by the idea of restoring Israel. Benjamin Disraeli, who would one day rise to become prime minister, was one of the most provocative figures in British history. A Jewish convert to
Christianity, he was more concerned with the world's debt to the Jews than the Jews' future in the world. In 1878, Disraeli recaptured Cyprus for Britain and purchased Suez—both geographically speaking a mere stone's throw from the Holy Land. Disraeli knew that it was just a matter of time.

The next British leader to catch the vision for restoring the state of Israel was Arthur James Balfour, who, as England's foreign minister, signed the famous Balfour Declaration that mandated the recreation of the Jewish state. He, too, believed religion and civilization in general, owed Judaism “an immeasurable debt, shamefully ill repaid.”
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Freshly deposed as prime minister in 1906, Balfour set out on a personal mission. Having met Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Zionist movement who would one day be Israel's first head of government, Balfour saw an opportunity not only to bring the Holy Land back to life but also, as he put it, to do “something material to wash out an ancient stain upon our own civilization.”
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His motivations were made even clearer in a speech he delivered to the House of Lords in 1922:

This is the ideal which chiefly moves me . . . that Christendom is not oblivious to their [Jews'] faith, is not unmindful of the service they have rendered to the great religions of the world, and that we desire to the best of our ability to give them the opportunity of developing in peace and quietness under British rule, those great gifts which hitherto they have been compelled to bring to fruition in countries which know not their language and belong not to their race.
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While Lord Balfour's motivations were clear, the motives of the others who were responsible for the mandate and what
followed were more suspect. The World War I campaign in the Middle East was the paramount concern. And the Jews had much to offer—strategically and militarily.

In 1917, Britain's Palestine policy was being shaped by many hands—from Cabinet ministers to bureaucrats. But, nevertheless, on October 13, the Cabinet authorized the foreign secretary to issue the Balfour Declaration that promised the Jews a homeland after the war.

A few days later, the
London Times
published a story about a celebration by the British Zionist Federation. “Its outstanding features,” said the
Times
, “were the Old Testament spirit which pervaded it and the feeling that, in the somewhat incongruous setting of a London theatre, the approaching fulfillment of ancient prophecy was being celebrated with faith and fervor.”

“It was appropriate that it should be so,” concludes author David Fromkin. “Biblical prophecy was the first and most enduring of the many motives that led Britons to want to restore the Jews to Zion.”
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In the next chapter, however, we will see how those good motives were hijacked on the way to Jerusalem.

“This land is capable of supporting a large population if irrigated and cultivated scientifically. . . . The Zionists have as much right to this no-man's land as the Arabs, or more.

—A
RNOLD
T
OYNBEE
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“If we must have preferences, let me murmur in your ear that I prefer Arabs to Jews.”

—A
NTHONY
E
DEN
, British secretary of foreign affairs
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Of all the injustices perpetrated against the Jewish people in the Holy Land, the worst is the way their land has been continually reduced from its original mandated seize. As we have seen, historical evidence shows that during the four centuries under Ottoman control, the Holy Land reached its ultimate state of desolation.

During that period, the absentee landlord effendis practiced such calloused usury and taxation on the poor Arab's who attempted to farm the land that they all were eventually overwhelmed with debt and fled the land. By the beginning of the
nineteenth century, every report from officials and visitors described a land virtually absent of any settled people. Remarks such as these call attention to the terrible condition of the land, and speak of hardly any living souls inhabiting the vast desolation that lay between the few villages and towns.

True history also reveals there has continually been a sizable Jewish remnant living in the Holy Land despite the Roman destruction of Israel in A.D. 70 and the final crushing of Jewish rebellions in the second century A.D. Amazingly, as we jump forward to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the number of Jews living in Jerusalem actually exceeded the number of Muslims.

Another very important factor we saw in previous chapters is that the Arab-Muslim world of the nineteenth-century Middle East was totally wiped clean of national entities. All semblances of independent states and nationalism were crushed during the centuries of harsh Ottoman occupation of the Arabs. All that was left were tribal sheikdoms that warred with each other constantly, and the small Arab Hashemite Kingdom of the Hedjaz region that controlled Mecca and Medina.

There never was any such thing as a Palestinian state—much less a people known as “Palestinians.” The few Arabic-speaking people that lived there thought of themselves as “Ottomans,” “Turks,” “Southern Syrians,” or simply as “Arab people,” but never as “Palestinians.” The migratory Bedouins who seasonally moved through the area never had any claim to the land.

The Jews who began to come to the Holy Land in earnest during the mid-nineteenth century bought land from the all-too-willing-to-sell Ottoman effendis and the few local owners, who also were delighted to sell the desolated lands for enormously inflated prices.

At the price of Herculean labor and the loss of many lives to malaria, the Jews began to reclaim the land and make it flourish. This is when a significant number of poor Arab-Muslim people flocked to the land the Jews had settled, to find work and a better standard of living. Becoming victims of their own success, little did these Jews realize that these migrant Arabs they were helping would later claim that the Jews had “stolen their land that had belonged to their families from time immemorial.” Most of these so-called Palestinian refugees couldn't even establish to the UN officials sent to help them that they had lived in Palestine more than two years before fleeing in 1948 to allow the Arab armies to annihilate the new state of Israel.

This was the condition of the Middle East the British Parliament knew. It was because of full knowledge of all these conditions that Lord Balfour and other members of the British Parliament thought it not an invasion of Arab-Muslim land to set forth the propositions contained in the Balfour Declaration. The motto of the British forming committee was, “
A people for a land, for a land without a people
.” Furthermore, the League of Nations concurred with the declaration for all the same reasons. As we have noted in this and in previous chapters, apart from a few villages and towns, the land was an utter desolation devoid of people. No one could live in it until the returning Jews almost miraculously restored it.

It was because of the above facts that the actual Balfour Declaration of 1917 was a rather simple statement. A simple statement was thought all that was necessary. It committed Britain to work toward the establishment of a Jewish homeland in
the vast wasteland of the area designated as the Palestinian territory. It reads:

His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

With its passage in the Parliament, Lord Balfour expressed the Parliament's general feelings, saying, “We hope that the ‘small notch' of Palestine being given the Jews would not be ‘grudged' by the Arab leaders.”

Now look at the map (No. 1) on page 184, and see what Lord Balfour referred to as “a small notch” of Palestine. This map shows the borders specifically designated for a Jewish National Homeland by the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

On January 4, 1919, a formal agreement on this mandated Jewish homeland illustrated by map No. 1 was signed in London. The signatories were: His Royal Highness the Emir Feisal ibn-Hussein, representing and acting on behalf of the Arab Kingdom of Hedjaz, and Chaim Weitzmann, representing and acting on behalf of the Zionist Organization.
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The Balfour Declaration was the end product of a great many debates and compromises within the British government but, without question, reflects the unequivocal goal at the time. Later, all kinds of ridiculous interpretations were placed on the declaration, but representatives of all sides clearly and unambiguously understood at the time: A Jewish state was to be established as soon as Jewish immigration and development was sufficient in the barren wilderness of Palestine.

1917 The Jewish National Homeland The Balfour Declaration

The boundaries of this new nation were codified and approved unanimously by the League of Nations five years later (1924) with Britain being given authority over the entire Middle East, from the Mediterranean to the borders of India. The territory that would become the state of Israel—then variously referred to as “Palestine,” “Western Palestine,” “South Syria,” or even as part of Turkey—extended east and west of the Jordan River from the Mediterranean to Arabia and Iraq, and north and south from Egypt to Lebanon and Syria. On today's map, that would include most of the Arab nations of Jordan, southern Lebanon, and the Sinai. (See map No. 2 on page 186)

At the same time, independent Arab statehood was being granted to Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. With this giant landmass being turned over to Arab control, Lord Balfour hoped that the “small notch” of Palestine being given to the Jews would not be “grudged” by Arab leaders. The land originally given here was considerably bigger than today's Jewish state, even if you include the territories Israel captured in June 1967. There is some evidence to show that Arab leaders were initially satisfied with their acquisition and unquestioning as far as the status of Jewish Palestine.