Churchill, Palestine and Zionism, 1904-1922 - Douglas J. Feith

212 DOUGLAS J. FEITH
In the last quarter of the century, intensified violence against Eastern
Jews impelled millions of refugees westward, aggravating the Jewish problem
in the West. More than 2 million Jews moved out of Russia alone in
the period between the Russian pogroms of 1881-2, which devastated the
Jewish Pale of Settlement, and the beginning of the Great War. In the
mid-1890s, the Dreyfus affair spawned large-scale antisemitic street demonstrations
in France and French Algeria, leading to rampages against
Jewish-owned property and the beating and occasional random killing of
Jews.
These attacks, particularly those in Paris, inspired the Jewish journalist
Theodor Herzl to write his pamphlet The Jewish State (1896), which
advocated a guaranteed refuge for persecuted Jews. Herzl in 1897 organized
the first World Zionist Congress, which declared: "The aim of Zionism
is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by
public law.,,2
In solitary grace:
It cannot quit its place of birth,
It will not live in other earth.
But we must wander witheringly
In other lands to die;
And where our fathers' ashes be,
Our own may never lie:
Our temple hath not left a stone,
And Mockery sits on Salem's throne.
George Eliotgave passionate expression to her Christian Zionism in the 1876 novel
Daniel Deronda, in which one of the Jewish characters declares, "There is store of wisdom
among us to found a new Jewish polity .... Then our race shall have an organic centre
... ; the outraged Jew shall have a defence in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishman
or American. And the world will gain as Israel gains. 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 ....
"Let the reason of Israel disclose itself in a great outward deed, and let there be another
great migration, another choosing of Israel to be a nationality whose members may still
stretch to the ends of the earth, even as the sons of England and Germany, whom enterprise
carries afar, but who still have a national hearth and a tribunal of national opinion .
. . . Who says that the history and literature of our race are dead? Are they not as living
as the history and literature of Greece and Rome, which have inspired revolutions, enkindled
the thought of Europe, and made the unrighteous powers tremble? These were an
inheritance dug from the tomb. Ours is an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in
millions of human frames." George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers,
1888),492-3,495-6 (bk. VI, ch. 42). Echoes of Eliot are distinctly detectable more than
three decades later in the comments on Zionism of its most important Gentile sympathizers,
including Balfour, Lloyd George, and Churchill.
2 John Norton Moore, ed., The Arab-Israeli Conflict, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1974), vol. 3,4 (hereafter Documents). The Congress chose the term "home"
rather than "state," despite the title of Herzl's historic pamphlet, hoping Ottoman officials
would not view Zionist settlement as a threat to Turkish sovereignty in Palestine. See
Christopher Sykes, Two Studies in Virtue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 160 n. 1.