Sheba

22
SHEBA, ZIONISM, AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
cordite, from maize. Weizmann parlayed this good will into a British
commitment in 1917, the Balfour Declaration, to establish a Jewish
national home in Palestine. Many prominent British politicians had a strong
belief, subsequently proven unjustified, in the unity and power of World
Jewry and, having noted the role of Jews in revolutionary activities in
Russia and Germany, hoped to use Zionism to divert Jews from supporting
Communism. 7 Fifty-five thousand Jews in Palestine, many of them deeply
religious people sustained by charity from Eastern Europe. The Balfour
Declaration encouraged increased immigration intent on producing a viable
economic community. In 1925, thirty-four thousand Poles arrived, fleeing
anti-Semitism. By 1945 another three hundred and forty-five thousand Jews,
mostly Central European survivors of the Nazi holocaust, had poured into
Palestine. Relations between the settlers and British administration broke
down, the area was partitioned, and in 1948 the United Nations recognized
the independent state of Israel. Abba Eban, the Israeli United Nations
representative, estimated that eighty per cent of the half million Palestinians
living in Israel fled. Since then Israel has fought several major wars with its
Arab neighbors, and what was initially interpreted as a conflict between
Jewish settlers and Palestinians has become increasingly defined as the
symbol of a global struggle between Western society and Islam, between
the world’s rich and poor, be they nations or classes.
In Herzl’s day there was complete acceptance that Palestine was the
Promised Land of the Old Testament. Site identification had been
undertaken by the American biblical scholar Edward Robinson of the
Union Theological Seminary in New York. Robinson visited Palestine in
1837-8 and 1852. He used the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and his
knowledge of Arabic, which is closely related to Hebrew, to identify
probable Old Testament sites. Robinson reasoned that since place names
rarely change and Arabic was close to Hebrew, it was likely that if an
Arabic name of a modern settlement was similar to a Hebrew biblical name,
it marked the site of the location mentioned in the Old Testament. He never
challenged the authority of the Old Testament references, and his
unscientific haphazard conclusions formed the basis for much of what
followed when professional archaeologists took over.