Besides all this he helped Sir Charles Wilson gather and edit material for the Palestine Pilgrims Text Society, an offshoot of the P.E.F. Early accounts of Palestine by pilgrims from all lands from the fourth century to the fifteenth were translated and, after eleven years’ work, eventually published in a twelve-volume series.
Conder, when he wrote on the prospects for the regeneration of Palestine through Jewish colonization, brought to the subject the practical common sense of a man who knew the ground. His flat statement that “there is not a mile of made road in the land from Dan to Beersheba” is enough in itself to reveal the awful extent of the task that would be required to make Palestine livable again. Roads, said Conder, to allow transport by wheeled vehicles were the first necessity. Irrigation and swamp drainage, restoration of aqueducts and cisterns, sanitation, seeding of grass and reforestation to check soil erosion were all, he pointed out, essential to a colonization program.
Until the work of the Palestine Exploration Fund began to be published there were few practical people who thought the land could be revived at all. It was the great contribution of the P.E.F. (apart from its historical findings) to show that Palestine had once been habitable by a much larger population and a more advanced civilization than was commonly supposed and therefore could be again. When the work started the common picture of Palestine was of a deserted tract left to the desolation predicted by Isaiah, “an habitation of dragons and a court for owls.” The infertile ground left the impression that even in Biblical times the land had been an obscure, unproductive country inhabited by simple people of simple pursuits. But gradually the true grandeur of the past hidden beneath the surface was scraped out. Outlines of old cities, of temples and vineyards, kingdoms and thoroughfares, markets and bazaars emerged, and a civilization, “with its settled institutions, priests, kings, magistrates, schools, literature and poets,” was revealed. Fields of grain had once covered the plains, and even the Negeb had supported, in Byzantine times, six towns of from 5,000 to 10,000 population, with many smaller settlements in between. The country was not under a curse, the archaeologists found. It had reverted to the nomad and gone to decay for a simpler reason: lack of cultivation. The Arab conquest had swept out the last of Byzantine civilization “as a locust swarm devastates a corn-field,” leaving the land to Bedouins and goats.
The implications of the P.E.F.’s work could not escape Palestine’s venerable champion, and the P.E.F. itself did not long escape Lord Shaftesbury. Ten years after its founding he became, inevitably, its president. And here in the closing years of his life he could still expound more eloquently than anyone else the hope of Israel. “Let us not delay,” he told the Fund in his opening address, “to send out the best agents … to search the length and breadth of Palestine, to survey the land, and if possible to go over every corner of it, drain it, measure it, and, if you will, prepare it for the return of its ancient possessors, for I must believe that the time cannot be far off before that great event will come to pass.…
“I recollect speaking to Lord Aberdeen when he was prime minister, on the subject of the Holy Land; and he said to me, ‘If the Holy Land should pass out of the hands of the Turks, into whose hands should it fall?’ ‘Why,’ my reply was ready, ‘Not into the hands of other powers, but let it return into the hands of the Israelites.’ “
Lord Shaftesbury was perfectly aware that he did not have the full sympathy of his audience, many of whom were interested more in Israel’s past than in its future. (One in the audience was the famous and erratic Captain Burton, Arabian explorer and translator of the Arabian Nights, whose views on the Jews were distinctly unfriendly. Speaking after Lord Shaftesbury, he made the point, fairly taken, unfortunately, that the “Israelites of Europe” were not going to prove too ready “to unloose their purse strings for the benefit of Judea.”) But Shaftesbury, evangelical to the last, refused to be intimidated by scientists and archaeologists. All over England, he told them, were people like himself, animated by “a burning affection for that land” [Palestine]; its revival should be a goal equal in importance to the recovery of its past; and on this question he concluded: “My old age is not much tamer than my early life.”
Tamer he certainly was not. In 1876, nearly forty years after his first article on the subject in the Quarterly Review, he wrote another that reveals how much, for all his still fervent Evangelicalism, he had learned from the rise of Jewish nationalism in the intervening years. It is perhaps the classic expression of England’s role in the revival of Palestine:
“Syria and Palestine will ere long become most important. The old time will come back … the country wants capital and population. The Jew can give it both. And has not England a special interest in promoting such a restoration?… She must preserve Syria to herself. Does not policy then—if that were all—exhort England to foster the nationality of the Jews and aid them, as opportunity may offer, to return as a leavening power to their old country? England is the great trading and maritime power of the world. To England, then, naturally belongs the role of favouring the settlement of the Jews in Palestine.… The nationality of the Jews exists; the spirit is there and has been for three thousand years but the external form, the crowning bond of union, is still wanting. A nation must have a country. The old land, the old people. This is not an artificial experiment; it is nature, it is history.”
*Presumably Dean Stanley meant Isaac and Jacob; Joseph’s tomb is not at Hebron.
CHAPTER XIV
CLOSING IN:
Disraeli, Suez, and Cyprus
England’s purchase of the Suez Canal in 1876 as the opening gun of Disraeli’s premiership ushered in a quarter-century of imperial expansion unequaled since the conquests of Alexander the Great. Following logically after Suez came the Cyprus Convention in 1878. By this treaty Britain committed herself to a military guarantee of Turkish possessions in Asia. Thus the historic area from the Nile to the Euphrates, staked out by the Lord for Abraham, was embraced as a British sphere of influence. Palestine was to remain under Turkish rule for another forty years, but after Suez and Cyprus its ultimate physical possession by Britain was a foregone conclusion.
England had become officially an empire after the Indian Mutiny of 1858; from India and around India and along the paths to India, all the rest followed. Under the “imperious and irresistible necessity of acquiring defensible frontiers—in the words of Lord Cromer, a senior partner in empire-building—Britain acquired a million and a quarter square miles in the ten years 1879–89. Afghanistan to block Russia off from India on the north, Burma on India’s eastern frontier, Egypt to protect the Suez Canal, were brought in during these years. Next came Africa, from the Transvaal at the bottom to Egypt at the top, with enough in between to complete a road of British red the length of the Dark Continent from the Cape to Cairo. The vast horizon of empire was pushed outward not only for the sake of defensible frontiers, but also under the equally imperious necessity of acquiring markets for Manchester cotton goods. What made the combination irresistible was the imperious, and often genuine, belief that Britain was fulfilling her manifest destiny to extend the civilizing benefits of rule by the British race. It is, said Joseph Chamberlain unhesitatingly, “the greatest of governing races the world has ever seen.”
“God’s Englishman” was the phrase made famous by Lord Milner, the spokesman of empire. Lord Rosebery saw in imperial expansion “the finger of the Divine.” Doctor Livingstone opened up central Africa as a missionary. General Gordon went to his death in the Sudan with the Bible in his pocket and read it as often as did Oliver Cromwell. W. T. Stead in his opening manifesto for the Review of Reviews proclaimed the imperialist’s creed that “the English-speaking race is one of God’s chief chosen instruments for executing coming improvements in the lot of mankind.” On the other hand the “Little Englanders” of the Gladstone wing saw nothing but a “mania for grabbing” and “a fatal lust for empire.”
But the trend was against them, and the Suez Cana
l was its initial impulse. By giving Britain command of the Red Sea route to India and the Far East it made the southeast corner of the Mediteranean the most vital strategic spot in the Empire. Henceforth the Holy Land became its military left flank, even as Egypt and the Sudan became its right flank and were accordingly occupied in the eighties. It becomes understandable why the War Office was ready to send Royal Engineers to map Palestine in the interests of Biblical research.
The second step, the guarantee of Turkey-in-Asia under the Cyprus Convention, is less well known but of equal importance. It meant that Britain now recognized as paramount her interests in the Palestine area; and it led eventually to her occupation of it, under a variety of mandates, after World War I. Guarantees mean a willingness to fight; in fact, they generally imply an assumption that a fight is looming. Witness Britain’s guarantee of Poland in 1939. Thus the Cyprus Convention marks the point at which Britain decided that the region including Palestine was worth a war if it should come to that. Actually the Cyprus Convention did not work out that way. Russia, the aggressor against whom it was aimed, was on the down grade and by the end of the nineteenth century had been superseded by Germany as Britain’s chief imperial rival. When it did come, the war whose outcome was to make Britain the inheritor of Turkey-in-Asia and the occupier of Palestine was fought, not against Russia in support of Turkey, but against Germany and Turkey itself.
But through the middle of the nineteenth century, between Napoleon at its beginning and the Kaiser at its end, Russia was the chief opponent, not so much of the British Isles as of the British Empire. It was Russia’s old restless hunger for the south that brought her into collision with Britain’s path of empire. It had gnawed at every Russian ruler since Catherine the Great. Pitt had risked war to keep Catherine from Odessa; Palmerston defeated Nicholas I’s grab at the Black Sea in the 1830’s. The Crimean War was fought over the same issue in the 1850’s, and Disraeli came to the very brink of war for the same cause in the 1870’s. The Russians never gave up. When Nicholas I visited England in 1844 he proposed to the foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, a joint partitioning of the Turkish Empire, Russia to become protector of Turkey’s European possessions in the Balkans, England to have Egypt and Crete, and Constantinople to become a free city “temporarily occupied” by Russia. Nicholas, a simple autocrat, saw no harm in giving history a push, since everyone was momentarily expecting the breakup of the Turkish Empire anyway. But his delightful plan, appealing as it might be, was not possible to England under parliamentary government. Despite a reputation for deep-laid scheming, England has always been under the necessity of composing a policy to fit events rather than vice versa, and she managed to conquer half the world in a series of haphazard fits and starts, if not altogether in that “fit of absence of mind” of Seeley’s ingenuous explanation.
Jerusalem itself provided the excuse for Russia’s next attempt to break into the Ottoman house. The quarrel over the Holy Places that brought on the Crimean War was one of the most ridiculous causes of a major war in all history. “Tout pour un few Grik priests,” shrugged Princess Lieven. Trivial as it was, it could never have burst into such a flame had not Nicholas I and Napoleon III both been breathing hard upon the coals. Russia had traditionally been protector of Greek Orthodox institutions in the Holy Land, France of the Latin or Roman Catholic. The various monastic orders, priests, and pilgrims of both rites were forever clashing over access to the Holy Places and shrines. France had secured dominant rights for the Latin clergy under capitulations originally granted to Francis I in 1535 by Suleiman, but had suffered them to decline during the anti-Christian policy of the French Revolution and Napoleon I. The Orthodox, purposefully supported by the Czar, had encroached more and more, and now Nicholas, using them as a wedge to penetrate the Ottoman empire, demanded that the Sultan confirm him as protector of the Holy Places and of all Orthodox Christians in Ottoman dominions.
But Europe’s newest imperial pretender, Napoleon III, wearing uneasily the crown that he had just taken out of storage to place on his own head, had Eastern longings no less than his uncle. He, too, was insecure, on his throne, in his person, and in the awful shadow of his namesake. He needed glory. A war, a victory, a gift to France of territory in the East, would settle him in the saddle and establish the Napoleonic dynasty at last. He pressed for the Latin rights to the Holy Places. The poor Sultan, caught between the two emperors, offered a compromise solution that was satisfactory to neither. The Czar wanted a war with Turkey so that he could extract the Balkan provinces as the price of victory and stand at last on the mouth of the Danube. He issued an ultimatum. The Sultan turned to Britain for help. Britain, determined as ever to keep Russia from access to the Mediterranean and unwilling to let France win or lose alone, dispatched her fleet to the Dardanelles. The Czar, wrongly supposing that British public opinion would never support a war, moved his fleet from Sebastopol and slaughtered a Turkish squadron at Sinope, on the Asiatic shore of the Black Sea. The British public got wildly excited. Britain rang with Russophobia. Palmerston, chafing in the Home Office, to which he had been relegated by party politics, was asked by the Queen if he had any news of the strikes in the north of England. “No, Madam,” he replied in anguish, “but it seems certain the Turks have crossed the Danube.” The Crimean War, with Britain and France allied in support of Turkey against Russia, was soon in full swing.
It ended in a defeat of Russia’s aims, ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1856, which bound all signatories to respect the independence and territorial integrity of Turkey and admitted Turkey to the concert of European powers in return for equal rights for Christian subjects of the Porte and the usual solemn promises of reform. The treaty was supposed to usher in a rejuvenation of Turkey, but the “Sick Man” continued to deserve the contemptuous phrase that Czar Nicholas had coined for him. The government of the Porte remained as despotic, as corrupt, as unreformed as ever. And the eagles continued to hover in hopes of a corpse. In fact, the Treaty of Paris not only changed nothing, but also provided a spark for the next crisis.
Moslem indignation at the granting of equal rights to Christians reached a pitch among the bellicose Druses of Lebanon and exploded in 1860 in a three-day massacre of the Maronites, a Christian sect that had been under the special protection of France since the crusade of St. Louis. Here was another opportunity for Napoleon III, who immediately offered to send troops to restore order, as the Turks showed no interest in doing. Palmerston and Russell, deeply suspicious of Napoleon’s eagerness to protect the Maronites, yet unable to say No when Christians were being massacred, reluctantly agreed to an international convention authorizing French troops to occupy Lebanon for six months for pacification purposes. Mutual mistrust breathed in every line of the protocol in which the powers proclaimed their “perfect disinterestedness” and declared that they did “not intend to seek for and will not seek for any territorial advantages, any exclusive influence or any concession with regard to the commerce of their subjects.…” Napoleon secured an extension of another four months, which only deepened English suspicions. “We do not want to create a new Papal state in the East and to give France a new pretext for indefinite occupation,” wrote the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell. He could not rest till he got the French out of Syria, and for putting British interests above the safety of Christian lives he has earned a posthumous scolding from the Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy. But he had his way. By forcing the Porte to grant semiautonomy to Lebanon under a Turkish Christian governor nominated by the Powers, he removed the basis for the French occupation.
Napoleon withdrew his troops in 1861, but the prestige that France had gained by coming to the rescue of the Christian community gave the French a foothold in Syria that lasted down to the French mandates of our own time. Meantime Napoleon had not given up his dream. He commissioned Gifford Palgrave, the English Jesuit missionary and explorer, who had settled in Syria and brought out firsthand reports of the Damascus massacres, to travel th
rough Arabia in 1862–63 to report on the Arabs’ attitude toward France. Nothing came of this. But meanwhile he pursued another and older dream of his predecessors. In 1866 he secured the Sultan’s consent to cut a canal connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. By 1869 de Lesseps had triumphed. The Suez Canal was a reality. On November 17, 1869 the Imperial yacht, with the Empress Eugénie on board, led the opening procession through the locks. It was the Second Empire’s last hour of glory. Within eight months came the Franco-Prussian War; Napoleon was broken by Bismarck, a new conqueror emerged on the Continent, a new era of German expansion had begun.
Meanwhile the Canal was an accomplished fact. Britain had long dreaded it and long opposed it. It had always been the symbol of France’s Eastern ambitions from Louis XIV to Napoleon, and again when France tried to realize them through Mehemet Ali as her protégé. The Pasha had hoped to build up a Suez route to the Red Sea by connecting railway and canal lines. Viewing this project as a blind for the occupation of Egypt by France, Britain had attempted to build up an alternative route to the Red Sea by the Euphrates and connecting railways. Despite repeated experiments, this never proved practical. But anything rather than the Canal was Palmerston’s settled conviction; he feared that the Canal would create a new source of rivalry in the Middle East and make the Eastern Question more insoluble than ever. “I must tell you frankly,” he said to de Lesseps, “that what we are afraid of losing is our commercial and maritime pre-eminence, for this Canal will put other nations on an equal footing with us.”
Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour Page 27