Railway concessions became the favored method of penetration. Abdul Hamid, soon after the Congress of Berlin, had determined to solidify his Asiatic dominions, of which he considered Syria the key, by a planned program of modernization. He began to increase garrisons and multiply guards, to build roads and railways for military transport, linking Syria to Constantinople, Mesopotamia, and Arabia. He improved Syrian port facilities, paved streets, built modern buildings, added tramways. All this opened a grab bag to European concessionaires and carpetbaggers, chiefly German. The newly established Deutsche Palästina Bank became headquarters for an army of German commercial travelers, commission agents, exporters and importers, and a superabundance of consular officials. The French predominated in building the major railways of Syria, but Berlin won the concession for the Bagdad railway, being favored over Britain, which had previously held options for rail development of the Euphrates valley. Berlin-to-Bagdad has a romantic oriental sound that brings to mind cloak-and-dagger adventures on the Orient Express; but its significance to Britain was sinister enough in fact. Its proposed route would put a rival European power in control of communications leading to the head of the Persian Gulf, which opens upon the Indian Ocean. It was a direct threat to the road to India.
Britain’s strategic effort in the Middle East during this period focused on Egypt. Her approach to Palestine had stopped, for the time being, at Cyprus. Palestine was in any event not a conscious goal of imperial policy. Along the Nile Lord Cromer, the great modern proconsul, was busy sinking the eagle’s claws into a more easily detachable part of Turkey’s non-European empire. He guided the intricate business of extending the foothold gained at the Suez Canal to a position as virtual ruler of Egypt while still maintaining the khedive on his throne and the legal fiction of Turkish over-all sovereignty. It had to be delicately done in order to keep the jealousy of the other European powers below the boiling point. By the time European rivalries finally boiled over in 1914, Britain from her base in Egypt commanded the classic approach to Palestine, the route that Moses took to possession of the Promised Land.
England had become suspect in the Sultan’s eyes after the Cyprus Convention. In casting about for a new prop Abdul Hamid, listening to the persuasive arguments of an unofficial Englishman, Mr. Laurence Oliphant, considered for a while the possibility of using the Jews. Oliphant was a former foreign service officer, a journalist, and a religious eccentric. (It is a curious fact that so many notable English eccentrics have been drawn irresistibly to the East. Perhaps it was because most of them, like T. E. Lawrence, the archetype, were voyaging on some private religious or metaphysical quest of their own and, like Disraeli’s Tancred, sought spiritual rebirth in the place where three great religions were conceived.)
Oliphant’s religious aberrations verged on the ridiculous, but he was at the same time an experienced and brilliant young man of affairs. He seemed to young Henry Adams, who met him at a house party, “exceptionally sane, and peculiarly suited to country houses where every man would enjoy his company and every woman adore him.” This worldly creature threw himself into the promotion of Israel’s restoration from the same religious motives as Lord Shaftesbury’s, though like Shaftesbury he tried to conceal them behind arguments based on strategy and politics. Born of fervent evangelical parents, he entered the diplomatic service, served in posts ranging from Canada to Japan, traveled through India, the Turkish Empire, Europe, and the United States, covered the Crimean War as correspondent of the Times, aided Garibaldi and Cavour in Italy, and became an M.P. in 1865. Suddenly he resigned his seat in Parliament and disappeared. The shock rocked London when it became known that this ornament of society, famous for his charm, his flirtations, his far-flung adventures, had gone off to dig ditches in a religious community in New England.
Actually Oliphant had embarked on a recurring endeavor of the disillusioned: the attempt to forsake the world and live the humble life of the first Christians. It did not suit him, and he was allowed to return to the world as a proselyte. Although his association with the shady prophet of the Brocton colony was a prolonged mortification involving his mother, two wives, and several lawsuits, he remained to the end of his life dedicated to the “regeneration of humanity.” He denied that his advocacy of the Jews’ return to Palestine had anything to do with this or even that it was based on Scriptural grounds. But the second Mrs. Oliphant, who was subject to visions and voices, was less reticent. She described a vision of a Jew on a White Horse; the horse, she explained, symbolized power, the color white stood for righteous power. This she took to mean that Israel, “redeemed” by Christ, would be restored to power in Palestine and, thus “illumined,” would become a “splendid Jewish-Christian race wielding religious power, for none but true Christians may fittingly govern the Holy Land.”
Oliphant himself stated the case on more earthly terms. The fact that it coincided with “a favorite religious theory,” he said, “does not necessarily impair its political value.” In 1879, the year after the Congress of Berlin, he was in Rumania during a series of anti-Semitic outbreaks. He saw the gathering of refugees at Brody and Lemberg and, caught up in their tragedy, he went to a Chovevé Zion conference at Jassy. Enthralled at the glimpse of Biblical prophecy coming true, he immediately set off for Constantinople to persuade the Sultan to grant lands to the Jews under a charter for colonization. Next he went to Palestine to survey the land and in 1880 published his book, The Land of Gilead, proposing Jewish resettlement, under Turkish sovereignty and British protection, of Palestine east of the Jordan.
Oliphant believed that England, acting through the Jews could—indeed, must—revitalize Turkey-in-Asia if it were to be held against the advance of a rival imperial power. He had in mind Russia, in that day still the leading menace, but his predictions hold good equally for the rival that he did not foresee. “The day is probably not far distant,” he warned, “when it may be found that the most important interests of the British Empire may be imperilled by the neglect to provide in time for contingencies which are now looming in the immediate future.”
It was unfortunate, he admitted, that English efforts to bolster Turkey-in-Asia—Disraeli’s policy—“should be misconstrued at Constantinople into a desire to obtain possession of Asia Minor.” But that risk must be taken. Palestine’s strategic and prestige value leap to the eye. It is the logical place to begin, and the Jews are the logical colonists. “It remains for England to decide whether she will undertake the task of exploring its ruined cities, of developing its vast agricultural resources, by means of the repatriation of that race which first entered into its possession 3,000 years ago and of securing the great political advantages which must accrue from such a policy.”
Describing the existing condition of the country, as he saw it in 1880, he proposes a million-and-a-half-acre colony east: of the Jordan, connected by rail to a port at Haifa and eventually, through future railways, to Akaba on the Red Sea and to the Suez Canal. East of Jordan the land is more fertile than on the near side, less settled, and therefore easier to acquire. The problem of the existing Arab population he disposes of easily. The war-like Bedouins can be driven out, the peasant Arabs conciliated and placed on “reserves” like the Indians in Canada. Elsewhere the fellahin can be used, as Colonel Conder suggested, as a source of labor, under Jewish direction. In any event the Arabs “have very little claim to our sympathy [having] laid waste to the country, ruined its villages and plundered its inhabitants until it has been reduced to its present condition.”
The incoming Jews would become Turkish subjects and Syria eventually a semi-independent province. Opened to colonization by an enterprising, energetic people of known “business intelligence, industry and wealth,” it would become a source of strength to Turkey.
Contrasted with the painful realities of the first Jewish colonies, in which at that moment the half-starved settlers stared helplessly at their crops withering in the sun, Oliphant’s prognosis was perhaps optimistic. He was a victim
of the same misconception shared by all non-Jews, that the Jews would be united in the desire to go to Palestine and that Jewish wealth would finance the return. He argued that it would be advantageous to any power likely to become involved in the “impending complications” in the Middle East to secure as an ally this “wealthy, powerful and cosmopolitan race.” He forgot, as Shaftesbury and other predecessors had forgotten, that nine tenths of the Jews were not Montefiores and Rothschilds, but submerged minorities living on the edge of subsistence. These enthusiasts failed to realize that the Jews who wanted to go to Palestine had neither money nor influence (indeed, the fact that they had nothing to lose was the reason they wanted to go) and that the Jews who had money and influence did not want to go to Palestine.
But Oliphant’s talk, during several visits to Constantinople, of Jewish industry, business acumen, and gold pouring like a river of nourishment upon Palestine tempted the Sultan and found favor with the progressive party in Turkey. He won a valuable ally in the English financier, Victor Cazalet, who had interests in the Euphrates Valley railway development. The two men presented to the Sultan a plan to give the Jews a strip two miles wide on either side of the proposed railway. It did not materialize, and in the end, when the baksheesh clique turned out the reform party, all Oliphant’s efforts were defeated. His failure lay in the times. In England, where the anti-imperialist Liberals had replaced Disraeli, no one was interested. In Turkey Abdul Hamid, one of the most erratic sovereigns in history, now became frightened at the thought of admitting a new and questionable element into Syria. Was another non-Moslem minority with support from outside to root itself in his dominions? Would it not provide, like the Christians of Lebanon, a perennial cause of Western protests, not to mention an avenue of Western penetration? Lebanon was already gone, detached from his sovereignty in all but name, having been a French sphere of influence ever since the intervention of 1860. The Sultan had no wish to see Palestine become another Lebanon.
Now the diplomatic atmosphere began to warm perceptibly around the representatives of Berlin. England, then enjoying the government of Mr. Gladstone, did nothing to counteract this tendency. Mr. Gladstone was disgusted with the Turks, hated the whole business of imperialism, and appeared to believe that, by ignoring the responsibilities that Britain had acquired for herself through imperial expansion, he could make them vanish. Ireland and Home Rule loomed larger in his eyes than Europe, Asia, Africa, and America put together. Unfortunately the world beyond the English Channel, though Mr. Gladstone turned his back on it, refused to vanish. The death in the Sudan of General Gordon, left to his fate through the tragic ineptitude of the Liberal government, proved that Britain’s imperial undertakings could not be ignored out of existence. In a wave of indignation over the Gordon tragedy Mr. Gladstone and the Liberals were voted out; Lord Salisbury and the Conservatives came back.
This was in 1885. Lord Salisbury took the Foreign Office for himself, and one of his first acts was to call for the file on Turkey to learn what had become of England’s position at Constantinople under the previous government. He read it through in silence and laid it down in despair. “They have just thrown it away into the sea,” he said, “without getting anything whatever in exchange.”
Lord Salisbury did not think restoration of Britain’s former influence at the Porte likely or even worth while. He had no faith in the possibilities of Turkish reform and did not believe the empire could hang together much longer. Long ago in his famous afterthought on the Crimean War he had said: “We put our money on the wrong horse.” He believed that it would have been better all around had England accepted Czar Nicholas’ suggestion to partition the Ottoman Empire in 1840. Why then, did he author England’s guarantee of Turkey-in-Asia under the Cyprus Convention in 1878? Lord Salisbury was once called by a perceptive observer the Hamlet of English politics. He suffered from that fatal affliction of being able to see both sides of a question and of being consequently unable to elect wholeheartedly for either. He had no love for Turkey, but he was obliged to contain Russia, which was then pressing down upon her. The Cyprus Convention was not an expression of confidence in Turkey, but a warning to Russia as well as a precaution that would permit England to move in if and when the Turkish collapse came.
Now back in office and (with Disraeli gone) in full command, he determined to waste no more effort on wooing the Sultan. Egypt was the thing. It would be a “terrible blow,” he acknowledged to his ambassador at Constantinople, to lose the leading influence at the Porte, but, he asked, “have we not lost it already?” And, “with this sickly, sensual, terrified, fickle Sultan on the throne,” it was impossible in any event to maintain a steady policy for two days together. Rather go ahead in Egypt on a step-by-step basis without trying to extract signed agreements from the Sultan, which were worthless anyway and would only provoke opposition from the other powers.
Salisbury sensed that the Sultan’s alienation from England was permanent. “He hates us,” he wrote again in 1891 to the ambassador, who had complained that never had his influence at the palace been so low or the Sultan’s aversion to him so evident. “Egypt and Cyprus would be sufficient to account for this feeling,” he goes on, but worse than that, the English have shown that they can govern Moslems better than he. “In Arabia people have begun to talk and move, and to ask themselves whether eternal misgovernment by the Turks is their irrevocable doom. And Arabia is the terror of the Sultan’s dreams—the joint in his armour: because it is in Arabia that some day an opposition Commander of the Faithful will be manufactured.” He concludes that the Sultan, “to whom his position as the first Moslem of the world is everything,” cannot forgive England’s intrusion into the Moslem world.
Lord Salisbury’s somber eyes saw the truth. The unhappy Sultan saw his empire eroding at both ends: while Egypt was being swallowed by England, the Balkans were slipping away in the north. Consequently he was determined to hold like grim death onto Syria, including Palestine and especially Jerusalem. The Holy City, because of its prestige value, was absolutely vital, for already, as Lord Salisbury had seen, the Sultan’s Moslem sovereignty was beginning to fray at the edges and his position as caliph to come into question. Foreign influence had penetrated Syria too far already. More and more “visitors” were flooding the Holy Land. There was a curious accretion of Russian pilgrims; formerly numbered annually in the hundreds, they now began to appear in thousands and to acquire land in Jerusalem on the basis of the old claim as Orthodox protectors of the Holy Places. French Jesuits, English Protestants, American missionaries spreading dangerous liberal ideas through their schools, were increasing in numbers every year. Jewish colonists were buying land. And turning up everywhere with their surveyors’ rods and tripods were little bands of British army engineers plotting the lay of the land.
Abdul Hamid tried to stem the tide. In 1887 he detached the sanjak of Jerusalem from the provincial governorship of Syria and made it directly dependent on the Palace. In 1885 the Porte announced that it would not permit formation of another Jewish colony and would enforce the edict against aliens’ holding or acquiring real estate. But the Sultan was by now a prisoner of the system of government-by-bribe that had corrupted his empire. His edicts stood little chance of enforcement by the venal corps of viziers and governors supposed to administer them and were, in fact, easily circumvented.
The early Jewish colonies founded by the Chovevé Zion societies, small, scattered, and feeble though they were, had gained a toehold in the Jaffa area. In spite of the Sultan’s edict they had acquired by 1889 a total of 76,000 acres scattered over twenty-two separate settlements with a population of about 5,000. The figures on paper appear more imposing than the true facts. Actually these Zionists beginnings were precarious and primitive in the extreme. Twenty families in 1882 established Rishon-le-Zion (“First in Zion”) on the sand dunes south of Jaffa to begin reclamation of the ancient homeland. Another colony was settled some sixty miles up the coast and a third, Rosh Pinah, far to the no
rth in the mountains above Galilee. Within a year they were floundering close to ruin. The little vanguard from the Russian Pale, fired by an ideal and a hope two thousand years old, had gone out with hardly a thought for the local conditions that they would meet and with little more than their railroad tickets provided. There was hardly a dirt farmer among them. They scratched into the wasted soil of Palestine the same corn and wheat crops that they had seen growing in the rich black earth of the Ukraine. The crops withered. Malaria forced the abandonment of a colony started by Jerusalem Jews at Petah Tikvah. The other colonies were on the verge of abandonment; some of the settlers had returned, the rest were starving.
A finger of rescue reached out in the form of a gift of 30,000 francs to Rishon-le-Zion from Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris. The finger grew to a hand. He sent further funds to the other colonies and helped to establish newcomers on lands that he acquired. So began the effort that was to keep going the little outposts of Jewish resettlement until, at the close of the century, the Zionist movement was mobilized.
But the difficulties that beset the attempt to revive a half-dead nation on the soil of a half-dead country were enormous and all but overwhelming. Quite apart from the external problems of climate and soil, the colonists’ own inexperience and above all the internal dissension that has been the curse of Jewish movements nearly ended Palestine’s resettlement then and there. While they were starving they were arguing whether they should keep the commandment of a Sabbatical year during which no work on the fields or among the livestock could be done. If this seems incredible, it is none the less literally true. The controversy reached furious proportions and consumed oceans of ink in every Jewish journal throughout Europe. It was actually provoked and encouraged by the rabbinical clique of Jerusalem, who were unalterably opposed to the whole restoration ideal of the Chovevé Zion and hoped to see the colonization scheme fail. Those of the colonists who resented dependence on Rothschild’s bounty (though they would unquestionably have starved to death without it) took up the Sabbatical issue as a flag of rebellion against Rothschild’s administrators. Constant quarrels only slightly less fantastic embittered the early years.
Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour Page 29