From the nineteenth century on, modern Zionism thus enjoyed long, intimate, and ultimately successful support from powerful forces working within the non-Jewish world, support that expressed itself in the literature of the day in passages that are hauntingly prophetic of the ideals that would later be espoused by the Zionist movement. In 1876 the great English author George Eliot foresaw in these terms the rebirth of Israel in her influential novel of Zionism, Daniel Deronda:
There is a store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old—a republic where there is equality of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western freedom amid the despotisms of the East…. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom. 16
With this humanist stream converged another important current that became ascendant in the last century—that of Christian Zionism, a movement that promoted the belief that the spiritual redemption of mankind could occur only if it were preceded by the ingathering of the Jewish exiles, as foretold in the Bible. After all, to both Christians and Jews, Zionism was the fulfillment of ancient prophecy. “[He] will assemble the outcasts of Israel and gather together the dispersed of Judea from the four corners of the earth,” said Isaiah. “He that scattered Israel will gather him,” promised Jeremiah. “For I will take you from among the nations and gather you out of all countries and will bring you into your own land,” Ezekiel foretold. 17
Christian clergymen’s application of these verses antedates the modern Zionist movement by at least half a century. As early as 1814, a New York pastor named John MacDonald published a famous sermon demonstrating the central role that Isaiah had envisioned for the new American state in restoring the Jews to their land. “Rise, American ambassadors,” called the pastor, “and prepare to carry the tidings of joy and salvation to your Savior’s kinsmen in disgrace…. send their sons and employ their substance in his heaven-planned expedition.” In 1821, the missionary Levi Parsons averred: “There exists in the breast of every Jew an unconquerable desire to inhabit the land which was given to their Fathers…. Destroy, then, the Ottoman Empire, and nothing but a miracle would prevent their immediate return from the four winds of heaven.” And as Jewish settlement of Jerusalem, Safed, and Hebron increased, and international interest grew, so the unfolding prophecy became increasingly clear. By 1841, a full half-century before the First Zionist Congress, the Mormon leader Orson Hyde could declare: “The idea of the Jews being restored to Palestine is gaining ground…. The great wheel is unquestionably in motion, and the word of the Almighty has declared that it shall roll.” 18
Just in case it did not, some were ready to push the wheel along. In 1844, Warder Cresson became the American consul in Jerusalem and hoped to be able to missionize among Palestine’s Jews. Instead, he helped establish a Jewish settlement in Jerusalem’s Valley of Refaim, supported by a joint Jewish-Christian society in England. Half a century later, Christian Zionism had gathered considerable force. In 1891, after pogroms in Eastern Europe had led to mass Jewish emigration, the American evangelist William Eugene Blackstone was able to muster the support of over four hundred prominent Americans—including John D. Rockefeller, J. R. Morgan, and leading congressmen, jurists, and newspaper editors—for a petition to President Benjamin Harrison to work for the reinstatement of the Jewish people in their land. “For over seventeen centuries they have patiently waited for such a privileged opportunity,” wrote Blackstone. “Let us now restore to them the land of which they were so cruelly despoiled.” 19 So committed was Blackstone to the idea of the return of the Jews to their land that when the possibility of a Jewish national home in Africa was being discussed, he sent Herzl a copy of the Old Testament—with the prophetic references to the Jewish return to the Land of Israel clearly marked.
The rise of Christian activism coincided with the emergence of an entirely secular phenomenon in the non-Jewish world: a growing scientific interest in studying the biblical heritage. Throughout the nineteenth century the novel techniques of archaeology, philology, and cryptology were applied successfully in Mesopotamia and elsewhere in the Middle East. But the land of the Bible beckoned like no other object of study. Were the biblical accounts historical fact or fiction? Did the places mentioned in the text really exist? Where precisely were they located? What could be discovered by excavating them?
The scientific effort to answer these questions was international in scope. It involved ingenious pioneers, each expanding on his predecessor’s findings: the American Edward Robinson (surveying in 1837–38 and again in 1845–47), the German Titus Tobler (1845–46), the Frenchman H. V Guerin (1852–75), and the Englishman Claude Conder (1872–77). The American archaeologist Frederick Jones Bliss, who excavated in Palestine in the 1890s, summed up the pivotal contributions of these pioneers:
The work of these four men shows a logical progression. Robinson established the correct principles of research. Tobler applied these more minutely, but over a limited geographical range. Guerin endeavored with the same minuteness to cover the whole field—Judea, Samaria, Galilee * —but was subjected to the limitations of an explorer travelling singly and with straitened resources. Conder, heading a survey expedition adequately manned and splendidly equipped, was enabled to fill in the numerous topographical lacunae left by his predecessors. 20
Their ranks were joined by Sir Charles Wilson and Sir Charles Warren (who made important contributions to the archaeology of Jerusalem), Charles Clermont-Ganneau (who identified the biblical city of Gezer), and Flinders Petrie (who systematized the study of pottery as a means of archaeological dating).
Several European governments encouraged such surveys by their nationals, for under a scientific cover the potential military and political benefits of the land might also be explored. No government seized on biblical exploration with greater alacrity than Great Britain. On June 22, 1865, under the auspices of Queen Victoria, a distinguished array of British statesmen, scholars, and clergymen established the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), which was to have a decisive impact on the attitude toward Palestine evolving in Britain and elsewhere. It was the PEF that later commissioned many of the above explorers, but undoubtedly its most influential project was to dispatch Conder to carry out his monumental survey of western Palestine. Assisted by an able team that included the twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Horatio Herbert Kitchener (later Lord Kitchener, of Khartoum and World War I fame), Conder produced the first modern map of the country—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, from the consigned Lebanon to the Sinai.
The scientific exploration of the land had the important effect of demystifying its place in the international psyche. For if Palestine had hitherto been confined to the realm of biblical imagination, now it was made concrete and real again. Jerusalem was not in heaven but very much on earth. So were Bethlehem, Nazareth, Hebron, and Jaffa. These places may have become impoverished and pitifully underpopulated, but they did not have to remain that way. Studying the land, its climate, and the history of its deterioration, many of the researchers concluded that it could be restored to its ancient prosperity—provided that the Jews were permitted to return to it. Thus, in 1875 the archaeologist and explorer Sir Charles Warren published The Land of Promise, in which he proposed British colonization of Palestine, “with the avowed intention of gradually introducing the Jew.” To Warren it was obvious that the land could support the Jews. Therefore, he believed:
Israel are to return to their own land…. That which is yet to be looked for is the public recognition of the fact, together with the restoration, in whole or in part, of Jewish national life, under the protection of some one or more of the Great Powers. 21
To Claude Conder as well, it was clear that no other people would have the enthusiasm and energy for such a restoration; 22 and it was equally clear that once applied, such energy would bring
the land back to life. Thus, for Jew and non-Jew alike, scientific exploration made the promise of Zionism tangible and realizable.
This scientific enthusiasm produced practical plans of settlement, such as Sir Laurence Oliphant’s 1879 proposal to settle Jews in Gilead on the East Bank of the Jordan, a project that received the support of the British prime minister, the British and French foreign ministers, and the Prince of Wales. In 1898, after a century of religious and scientific attention focused on the land, Edwin Sherwin Wallace, the U.S. consul in Palestine, captured the growing international mood:
Israel needs a home, a land he can call his own, a city where he can work out his salvation. He has none of these now. His present home is among strangers…. the lands in which he lives are not his own…. Israel’s hope of a homeland is possible of realization, but it will be realized only in Palestine.
He concluded:
My own belief is that the time is not far distant when Palestine will be in the hands of a people who will restore it to its former condition of productiveness. The land is waiting, the people are ready to come, and will come as soon as protection of life and property is assured. 23
The writings, philanthropic activities, exhortations, and explorations of non-Jewish Zionists, British and American, secular and religious, directly influenced the thinking of such pivotal statesmen as David Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour, and Woodrow Wilson at the beginning of the century. These were all broadly educated men, and they were intimately familiar with the decline of Palestine and the agonized history of the Jews. “My anxiety,” wrote Balfour, “is simply to find some means by which the present dreadful state of so large a proportion of the Jewish race… may be brought to an end.” 24 Thus, it was the non-Jewish Zionism of Western statesmen that aided Jewish Zionism in achieving the rebirth of Israel.
But still another factor was even more important than biblical heritage, the scientific rediscovery of the land, and the awareness of Jewish suffering in persuading these leaders of the justice of Zionism. The men of Versailles were first and foremost political thinkers, and it was primarily from prevailing political conceptions of national rights and the question of self-determination that they addressed the problem of the Jewish restoration, just as they approached the problem of other national claims within this framework. It was in these terms that the Jewish Zionists were able to appeal to them successfully.
Indeed, the leaders of Zionism from Herzl onward formed a ready partnership with the leading statesmen of the day.(That partnership in some cases developed out of earlier ties; well before becoming prime minister of the British Empire, Lloyd George had served as Herzl’s lawyer, representing the Zionist movement in Britain, and he had drawn up its proposal to build a British protectorate.) 25 Herzl, Nordau, and their followers understood that if Zionism were to succeed in its extraordinary task of ingathering a nation scattered in a hundred lands to a dusty corner at the edge of Asia, it had to have broad international support, and it had to muster and deepen the widely held conviction of the historical justice and the political necessity of this remarkable undertaking. The Jews, the Zionists said, must have a state of their own in Palestine, and the world’s leaders agreed, even though they knew that such attempted re-creation of a state was unprecedented. Furthermore, they knew the effort might come into conflict with the possible interests of the local population, which might make a political claim to that same land. Yet at the beginning of the century, public opinion unhesitatingly adjudicated in favor of the Jews.
Why was this so? The Arabs now assert that at the time of Versailles, the Jews had no political rights over the land, that these developed upon the Arabs then inhabiting it—and that therefore the original sin in favor of Zionism was committed by the international community not in 1948 (the year of Israel’s founding) or in 1967 (the year Israel gained control over Judea, Samaria, and Gaza) but in 1917, when the British government endorsed the Balfour Declaration promising the Jews a national home in Palestine.
Yet clearly the leaders of the international community of the day viewed things differently. They believed the Jewish people enjoyed a unique historical and political right to the land, one that took precedence over any potential claim by the local residents in that small backwater of the recently defunct Ottoman Empire.
What were the sources of the widespread recognition of the Jewish people’s historical rights to the Holy Land? To answer this question, we must first examine the nature of such historical rights generally.
There are those who believe that a theoretical discussion of the rights of nations is meaningless, and that in practice the configuration of states is a product of many competing forces that ultimately settle themselves by means of a simple rule: The more powerful prevails. This may be true if the question is raised in purely empirical and not in moral terms. If might makes right, then the last conqueror is always right. Israel, by this definition, is therefore the rightful and undisputed sovereign in the land. But this is clearly not the criterion with which to address the Jewish national restoration. If, as Winston Churchill said in 1922, “The Jews are in Palestine by right, not sufferance,” 26 then it is crucial to understand the moral basis of the Jewish state.
In the case of the Jewish national claim, the central issue is this: Does a people that has lost its land many centuries ago retain the right to reclaim that land after many generations have passed? And can this right be retained if during the intervening years a new people has come to occupy the land? Advocates of the Arab case commonly present these questions, and they answer both of them in the negative. Further, they add, if the Jews have a historical “quarrel” with anyone, it is not with the Arabs but with the Romans, who expelled them from their land in the first place. By the time the Arabs came, the Jews were gone.
These arguments, forcefully and clearly presented by the Arab side, are seldom challenged by the Jews and their supporters, but they deserve to be addressed. Most people have some familiarity with the first millennium of Jewish history, the period described in the Bible: how the Hebrew slaves of Egypt were transformed into a nation by their flight to freedom and their adoption of the Law of Moses, and how they returned under Joshua to build their national home in the land of their fathers. Fused into a unified state by David in 1000 B.C.E., * they subsequently pursued their unique quest for political and religious independence against a succession of empires. The biblical historical account ends shortly after the restoration of Jewish autonomy under the Persian king Cyrus (“the Persian Balfour”) in 538 B.C.E. Alexander the Great, who took over the land from the Persians, did not grant the Jews sovereignty, but in 167 B.C.E., under the Hasmoneans, they successfully revolted against his successors, only to lose their independence once more to Rome in 63 B.C.E. 27 Yet while the Jews were subjugated for considerable parts of this first millennium and a half of their history and even experienced exile (the deportation of the northern ten tribes by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.E., and the Babylonian Exile in the sixth), they responded by driving their national roots deeper into the soil.
How, then, were the Jews finally forced off the land? The most prevalent assumption is that the Jewish people’s state of homelessness was owed solely to the Romans. It is generally believed that the Romans, who had conquered Palestine and destroyed Jewish sovereignty, then took away the country from the Jews and tossed them into an exile that lasted until our own century. However common this view, it is inaccurate. It is true that the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. was a highly important factor in the ultimate decline of Jewish power and presence in Palestine. But it was not the exclusive factor; nor did it depopulate the country of its Jewish inhabitants. Therefore, the common refrain about “two thousand years of exile,” uncritically repeated by many Jews and non-Jews alike, is misleading. The Diaspora did not begin with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem—vibrant Jewish communities in Alexandria, Babylon, and elsewhere had antedated the Roman conquest by centuries. Nor did the Romans end Jewish nationa
l life in Palestine. That did not come until many centuries later. Thus in 135 C.E., sixty-five years after the razing of Jerusalem, the Jews under Bar Kochba revolted once more against Rome, “until the whole earth seemed to have been stirred up over the matter,” according to the third-century Greek historian Dio Cassius. 28
Although this three-year Jewish revolt against Rome was also brutally crushed, the country remained primarily Jewish, and shortly thereafter the Jews were granted a considerable measure of autonomous power, an authority that was recognized by Rome and later by Byzantium. In 212 C.E., when the Roman emperor Caracalla bestowed Roman citizenship on most subjects of the empire, he denied that privilege to those who lacked a country of their own. The Jews were granted Roman citizenship, because they were recognized as a people with their own country. 29 This is not to say that they did not continue to rebel, attempting to expel Rome yet again in 351. And it should be noted, too, that the great Jewish legal works of the Mishna and the Jerusalem Talmud were composed in Palestine during the centuries of Roman and Byzantine domination, reflecting the dynamic Jewish intellectual life that persisted there even in the face of occupation. In 614 the Jews were, incredibly, still fighting for independence, raising an army that joined the Persians in seizing Jerusalem and ousting the Byzantines from Palestine. The size and vitality of the Jewish population at the beginning of the seventh century may be judged by the fact that in the siege of Tyre alone, the Jews contributed more than twenty thousand fighters. 30
But in 636, after a brief return of the Byzantines under Her-aclius, the Arabs burst into the land—after having destroyed the large and prosperous Jewish populations of the Arabian Peninsula root and branch. The rule of the Byzantines had been harsh for the Jews, but it was under the Arabs that the Jews were finally reduced to an insignificant minority and ceased to be a national force of any consequence in their own land. The Jews initially vested their hopes in the “Ishmaelite conquerors” as they called them in contemporary sources, but within a few years these hopes were dashed as Arab policy became clear. Unlike previous conquerors, the Arabs poured in a steady stream of colonists, often composed of military battalions and their families, with the intention of permanently Arabizing the land. In order to execute this policy of armed settlement, the Arabs relied on the regular expropriation of land, houses, and Jewish labor. In combination with the turmoil introduced into the land by the Arab conquest, these policies finally succeeded in doing what the might of Rome had not achieved: the uprooting of the Jewish farmer from his soil. 31 Thus it was not the Jews who usurped the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurped the land from the Jews.
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