The Bible and the Flag
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrow of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I shall not cease from mental fight:
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
from the preface to ‘Milton’, William Blake
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, few
scenarios seemed as improbable as the Jews of the Diaspora regaining
Palestine. Stateless since the Romans had forced them out of
Jerusalem 2,000 years earlier, they prayed to ‘return to Zion’. This
yearning to turn the clock back was and still is expressed by the
Jews in many ways. They finished the annual Passover seder and the
Yom Kippur service by reciting ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’ and three
times a day they face Jerusalem and pray. In the long interval since
their exile, the hilly strip on the eastern Mediterranean, through
which the River Jordan slowly winds its way,1 had become a crumbling
backwater. With low rainfall, an inhospitable terrain, no oil
resources and little industry, most of the people were poor.
Prospects, too, were few. Apart from increasing tourism, there was
little trade other than the export of a small amount of grain,
sesame seed, olives from the groves in northern Galilee and oranges
from around Jaffa. Despite these drawbacks, for two millennia
Palestine has enjoyed an almost universal appeal. Measuring just 290
miles long and 85 miles at its widest point, it is one of the
pivotal places in history. Religious significance has made it
coveted, fought over and cursed.
The birthplace of two monotheistic religions,
Judaism and Christianity, and a holy place for Islam, Palestine’s
parched soil is sacred to three faiths, three worlds and three
dissimilar ways of life. Different though these religions are, they
have one thing in common, a deep respect for the Old Testament,
which includes the ancient texts of the Torah, comprising the five
books of Moses2. They also share an empathy with this land, where
much of the Old Testament was written, as a place of the source of
truth, the inspired Word of God.
There was nothing new in the concept of the
‘Restoration of the Jews’. Since the seventeenth century there had
been initiatives in England. In 1840 The Times even ran an
editorial supporting the idea, which gained wide currency after the
publication of George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda. This
novel concludes with the hero returning to Palestine to give ‘a
political existence to my people, making them a nation again’. But
it is unlikely that the Jews would have been able to establish
themselves in Palestine during the three decades after 1918 had it
not been for David Lloyd George. Nor would they have established
their official footing there without support from President Woodrow
Wilson. With all the determination in the world they would not have
been in a position to expand their hold on its worn-out land if they
had not first had this strong backing from the British and, later,
the government of the United States of America. Quite simply, Israel
might never have existed.
It is always difficult to prove what elements
shape a decision, but in this case a pattern emerges of politicians
with Nonconformist or Evangelical backgrounds in which the Old
Testament had been a major early influence. And it was these men
who, through their decisions, provided the Jews with a platform, a
springboard,3 on which to rebuild their sovereignty – and thereby
unwittingly laid the foundations of one of the most protracted
conflicts of the twentieth century.
The motives behind the British push to create a
Jewish homeland in Palestine have never been fully explained. Nor
has a reason been given as to why the discussions leading up to it
were never debated in the House of Commons, or whether Britain’s
adoption of Zionism was an incidental corollary to the main purpose
of the British offensive. To decide to bring Palestine into the
British Empire was one thing; to make it also a haven for Jews was
another. Despite frequent articles and letters in The Times,
the Sunday Times, the Manchester Guardian and other
newspapers in 1917, and frequent discussions with the Foreign Office
and Jewish leaders, especially between the Foreign Secretary, Arthur
Balfour, and Lord Rothschild, the head of the dazzling Jewish
banking family and leader of the Jewish community in Britain, the
final discussions took place behind the closed doors of 10 Downing
Street. Here, and, occasionally, in two temporary wooden buildings
in its leafy walled garden, members of the War Cabinet discussed how
to create a homeland for the Jewish people. The policy was not
formalized into a declaration until British guns were poised on
Gaza, on the eve of the British army entering the Holy Land in
November 1917 – just before the anniversary of Lloyd George’s first
year as prime minister. Because this declaration bears the name of
the Foreign Secretary, Balfour, it is usually his name alone which
is associated with the formation of the Jewish homeland, yet,
significant though his rôle was, he only took up the idea after it
was accepted by Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, of which he was not a
member.
The thesis of this book is that the long-held
Jewish dream of a homeland in Palestine became a reality as a result
of a remarkable military, political and theological confluence. This
is reflected in the three words in the title, God, Guns and
Israel: the word ‘God’ is a reference to the Old Testament;
‘Guns’ refers to the Jewish Legion, the Haganah and the wars which
accelerated the establishment of the Jewish homeland, and,
eventually, Israel which owed so much to American politics.
Among the many influences behind the decision of
the British War Cabinet in 1917 to take the unprecedented step of
forming a Jewish homeland within the British Empire, was the Bible.
The following chapters could almost be the biography of the Old
Testament itself. They show how its influence went full circle, from
Palestine to England and back to Palestine. It was as if the pages
of the Old Testament were scattered to form the sections of a
temporary bridge between Britain and the Holy Land. During that
brief time, the Bible became an invisible aid in helping the Jewish
people fulfil their wish to achieve their almost unquenchable
desire, ‘the hope’ for Israel, Tikveh Yisroel. For centuries
they had been persecuted in the name of Christianity, but 1917
briefly changed all that.
While looking at the circuitous journey of the Old
Testament, some unexpected facts have emerged. It played a large
part in the lives of a number of British and American government
officials who assisted the Jewish people in their quest to establish
themselves in Palestine. A sound knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures
can be firmly placed beside gunpowder, as an ingredient that led to
the momentous decisions and actions. This fits with Thomas Carlyle’s
hypothesis that ‘the three great elements of modern civilization’
were ‘Gunpowder, Printing, and the Protestant Religion’.4
The Bible was the ‘book of books’ on which
generation after generation of British people were brought up. Lord
Macaulay, the most popular historian of the Victorian era, said that
the English Bible, apart from being the core of Christianity, was
the ‘book which if everything else in our language should perish,
would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and
power’. Since the Reformation no other book in British history has
been so universally read or so carefully studied.
Of the ten men who, at some stage, were members of
Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, seven had been raised in Nonconformist
families and one, although Church of England, had come from one with
a strong Evangelical leaning. Three – Lloyd George, Andrew Bonar Law
and Lord Curzon – were the sons or grandsons of church ministers.
Jan Christian Smuts, the Defence Minister of South Africa who joined
in June 1917 as a representative of the Dominions, would have been
ordained as a minister in the Dutch Reform Church in the Cape Colony
had he not chosen to study at Cambridge. Arthur Henderson, the
leader of the Labour Party, was such a committed Christian that he
continued working as a Methodist lay preacher until his death.
A close acquaintance with the Old Testament had
given more than half the members of the War Cabinet a feeling of
familiarity with the Holy Land. This intimacy also predisposed them
to listen sympathetically to Zionist arguments. Many of them could
quote lengthy passages including the Psalms – the poetry of the
Bronze Age – by heart. Like a large number of British people during
the nineteenth century, and indeed the early twentieth, they came
from homes where the Bible had few competitors.
Enthralled during their childhoods with stories
set in Jerusalem, Jericho, Jaffa, Gaza and other places in the Old
Testament some exhibited a lifelong fascination with the Holy Land,
others with the Bible itself. Lloyd George said he preferred the Old
Testament to the New, and once remarked that he knew the names of
the towns in the Holy Land better than those on the Western Front.
On another occasion he explained that he had learnt the names of the
rivers, valleys and mountains of the Holy Land long before those in
either Wales or England. For him and others, drawing up plans for
the Jewish people to ‘return’ to a place which the Bible had made so
familiar had a particular appeal,5 especially as the Jews were seen
not only as the ‘people of the Book’,6 but as a downtrodden people
and a worthwhile cause. There was also the age-old problem in Europe
of anti-Semitism and the need to find a home for displaced Jewish
refugees fleeing from Russia.
The fact that Nonconformists, with their drumbeats
of moral discipline and self-improvement, helped to shape British
politics during the last half of the reign of Queen Victoria and the
early twentieth century is usually forgotten, as is any
acknowledgment that ten out of the nineteen prime ministers who came
to power in the twentieth century had been raised as Nonconformists.
Only nine had been brought up in the Established Church, although
the number is reduced to seven if Stanley Baldwin and Harold
Macmillan are counted. Both Baldwin’s parents were Methodists who in
adult life were rebaptised into the Church of England. Macmillan,
too, was partly of Nonconformist stock: his mother until her
marriage was staunchly Methodist.7 (For details of the religions of
England’s prime ministers see Appendix 2.)
The Russian-born lecturer in biochemistry at
Manchester University, the charismatic Dr Chaim Weizmann, who became
the main Zionist link with the cabinet, remarked in his
autobiography on the religious sentiment and romantic idealism which
brought converts to Zionism among British leaders, ‘. . . men like
Balfour, Churchill, Lloyd George, were deeply religious, and
believed in the Bible . . . to them the return of the Jewish people
to Palestine was a reality, so that we Zionists represented to them
a great tradition for which they had enormous respect.’8
With the exception of Smuts, these politicians
were a mixture of Liberal, Conservative and Labour, and the majority
had little in common except that they were all accustomed to
simplicity rather than pomp in worship and came from backgrounds
which were either Nonconformist – that is Wesleyan Methodist,
Primitive Methodist, Baptist, Unitarian, Presbyterian or
Congregationalist – or Anglican with strong Evangelical leanings.
With two exceptions the Bible was the thread of continuity linking
them together. Some were rich, others were struggling. Only one was
an aristocrat; the parents of three were working class, the rest a
melange of rising lower middle and middle class. Three had been born
in England, two in Scotland, one in Germany, one in South Africa,
one in India, one in Ireland and one in Canada. (Lloyd George was
born in Manchester, but had Welsh parents and was brought up in a
Welsh-speaking home in Wales.)
The religious backgrounds of these politicians
would have had little effect without either the earlier precedent of
the British government’s attempt to form a Jewish homeland within
the British Empire or the forceful arguments put forward by Jewish
intellectuals. Leaders among these were Sir Herbert Samuel, who was
the first Jew to become a cabinet minister in Britain, and Weizmann,
who was said to be able to charm the spots off a leopard. The first
practical steps towards forming a Jewish homeland had begun in the
middle of the nineteenth century with Lord Shaftesbury and gathered
momentum with the offer, in 1903, by the British Colonial Secretary,
Joseph Chamberlain, to Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), the founder of the
Zionist movement, of a large part of Kenya (usually referred to as
‘the Ugandan offer’) which was to be called ‘New Palestine’. Lloyd
George, then one of the rising stars of the Liberal Party, had been
closely involved in this scheme. Indeed, he was employed in a
private capacity as a solicitor by the newly formed Jewish Colonial
Trust in London, which chose him because as an MP he could consult
the Foreign Office to find out in advance what would be acceptable
for such a settlement. But after the complicated legal papers he
drew up on behalf of the Zionists were presented to the British
government, both sides cooled. The project itself came to nothing.
* * *
It was ironic that a Welshman, let alone the
British government, made a cradle in Palestine in which the Jews
could create their own state. Britain, one of the last countries in
which Jewish people settled in Europe, was also the first European
country which forcibly expelled Jews en masse. Jews had not
begun migrating to the British Isles until the reign of William the
Conqueror, in 1066. Then, only two centuries after they had begun to
put down roots, King Edward I threw out every Jewish man, woman and
child from his kingdom. Total expulsion was then unprecedented in
continental Europe, but the persecution of the Jews was not. The
last English with a foothold in the Holy Land had been the
Crusaders. They had attacked and killed all the Jews they
encountered with such ferocity that 10,000 had been killed in the
first month of the First Crusade alone during the journey to
Palestine. Death and destruction came also to thousands of other
Jews in the Holy Land itself. Edward had become king of England in
1272 when, accompanied by his wife Eleanor of Castile and Leon, he
was fighting his way unsuccessfully into Jerusalem on the eighth and
last major crusade.
On his return to England in 1274, the new king’s
first ruthless act was a series of incursions against the Welsh,
during which Llewelyn, prince of Gwynedd and Prince of Wales, was
forced to surrender Criccieth Castle. Eight years after Edward’s
final subjugation of the Welsh in 1282, the Jews became his target.
His expulsion in 1290 of every Jewish man, woman or child from the
kingdom, under the pain of death, was so merciless that he could
have earned the title of ‘Hammer of the Jews’ as well as the ‘Hammer
of the Scots’ – the faded Latin inscription above his coffin at
Westminster Abbey which reads ‘. . . Scotorum Malleus . . .’. All
Jews left the country before the Feast of All Souls; none were
formally permitted to live in England again for nearly four
centuries, until the time of Oliver Cromwell.
Despite this record, it was Britain, the country
which set such a cruel example of anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages,
that 627 years later conquered the Holy Land and created a safe
haven for the Jews under the red, white and blue British flag.
Edward would have been infuriated: his descendant’s army had
achieved what he had failed to do in the name of England but was
preparing to hand the newly conquered territory back to the Jews,
the very race he had turned into exiles. To add to the poignancy,
their return was made possible by Lloyd George, who had been brought
up in Criccieth on the Welsh coast. The childhood home of this son
of Gwynedd was less than two miles from the very castle that had
borne the brunt of Edward’s army.
Lloyd George’s policy towards the Jews, which was
the start of so much heartache to some and consolation to others,
was one of the most controversial outcomes of the First World War.
But despite his close involvement, in his War Memoirs Lloyd
George gave just two reasons for ‘the fount and origin’ of the
setting up of the Jewish homeland. The first was a reward to
Weizmann for his invention of synthesizing acetone, which had been
the key in maintaining a high output of explosive during the war.
The second was the need to ‘enlist Jewish support in neutral
countries, notably in America . . .’. By implying that his initial
contact with Zionism was during his term as Minister of Munitions in
1915, soon after Weizmann had started research, Lloyd George created
a myth that placed the initiative with the Jews rather than with the
War Cabinet or himself. He declined to mention anything about the
first papers submitted to the Foreign Office for a Jewish homeland
which had been drawn up by him or the fact that he had changed the
direction of the war in Middle East within days of taking office.
Ignoring the earlier failed invasions into Turkey on the Gallipoli
peninsula in 1915 and the Siege of Kut in Mesopotamia in 1916, he
had immediately intensified the British campaigns against the Turks.
Until then operations beyond the Suez Canal had been essentially
defensive in principle.
Ignoring the fierce reluctance on the part of the
generals, Lloyd George stepped up invasions into Turkish territory.
The Sinai offensive grew into the Palestine campaign and General
Stanley Maude’s invasion up the Tigris to Baghdad was expanded.
Lloyd George’s actions would later alter the map of the Middle East
and make Britain the unwelcome godmother of the future states of
Israel and Iraq. Indeed, Lloyd George, who inherited William Ewart
Gladstone’s bitter and entrenched prejudice against the Turks, would
become the main player in the final act in what nineteenth-century
politicians called ‘the Eastern Question’, which began in 1821 with
the beginning of the Greek War of Independence, and developed into
one of the great diplomatic preoccupations of the nineteenth
century. Attitudes were complicated after the 1890s by the discovery
of large deposits of oil in Mesopotamia and Iran, making covetous
Western eyes gaze at Ottoman territories. But while the First World
War saw Britain taking over Turkey’s dominant role in the Middle
East, during the Second World War the United States took over by
expanding her share of Middle Eastern oil and becoming the power
behind the transformation of the Jewish homeland into the state of
Israel.
* * *
The First World War was not the first war to have
been a watershed for the return of the Jews to Palestine: the
Crimean War (1854–6) and the Boer War (1899–1902) also acted as
turning-points. In each case a politician sympathetic to the Jewish
people had managed to tie a few Jewish needs to British imperial
interests. Just as the battles between Persia and Media against
Babylonia had led the Persian King Cyrus to permit the Jews to
return to Samaria and to Israel in 538 bce, the prospect of British
victory in the First World War added a new dimension to the Zionist
dream and led Lloyd George, Balfour and the members of the War
Cabinet to throw open the doors of the Holy Land to the Jews. Their
offer was made before the Allies had conquered any of it, when the
crescent moon and star flag of the sprawling Ottoman Empire was
still fluttering over Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia, as it had
for four centuries. The sultan, from his palace in the Bosphorus in
Constantinople, controlled a vast empire in the sands that had once
included much of North Africa. In the previous fifty years his
empire had shrunk considerably, but still contained ten legendary
and ancient cities of the Orient: Damascus, Baghdad, Jerusalem,
Gaza, Jaffa, Jericho, Bethlehem, Amman, Mecca and Medina.
The majority of British generals were
‘Westerners’, believing that Allied forces and effort should be
concentrated in the main theatre of war, the Western Front in France
and Belgium. The ‘Easterners’, led by Lloyd George, favoured staging
smaller campaigns against the enemy’s weakest points, in places such
as the Balkans and the Middle East. He wanted more men and more
money to be thrown into the war against Turkey. This would prove
less costly in soldiers’ lives, weaken the underbelly of Germany and
give Britain the trump card during future negotiations when the
Ottoman Empire finally collapsed and was carved up between the Great
Powers. The generals did not agree. Sir Douglas Haig (of the
distilling and whisky family), the dour, uncommunicative commander
of the British armies in France, was opposed to any operations that
might deflect British resources from the main theatre of war in
France and Belgium. Lloyd George’s bête noire, General Sir
William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial Staff, had a similar
attitude. This favourite of the king who looked like a gruff old
sergeant-major was the only soldier in British history to rise from
footman to private to field marshal.
* * *
The high-point of Nonconformity and Evangelism in
politics had peaked in the years after the 1868 election with the
establishment of the first unequivocally Liberal government with
Gladstone as prime minister.9 The three Liberal prime ministers of
the twentieth century, Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith and Lloyd George,
had been brought up as Nonconformists in lower middle-class and
working-class families. Just how informal and incomplete the
connection was between the Liberal Party and the Nonconformists can
be seen by the fact that their two predecessors as Liberal prime
ministers, Gladstone and Lord Rosebery, were Old Etonians and
members of the Established Church. Gladstone had been a devout
member of the Church of England (even though his Scottish father was
Presbyterian and his Scottish mother had been Episcopalian until
they converted after their marriage). But all the main supporters of
the Liberals were the Nonconformist industrialists and artisans of
the north of England, Scotland and Wales. Unlike the Conservatives
who had grown out of the old Tory Party, the Liberal Party was much
more than just a transformed Whig party; it was a merger between
Peelites, radicals and other pressure groups. This new party was now
repaid in kind for the courageous support given by the Whigs for the
religious and other rights of the Nonconformists since the
seventeenth century.
Nonconformist opinion was significant. In a survey
on one Sunday in 1851, Nonconformists claimed that about one in two
of the population had attended a chapel or kirk. Even after the
religious revival which had swept through Victorian England and
occupied so large a part of the nation’s life had begun to decline
from 1880 onwards, it was very much alive. The Nonconformist
conscience continued to dominate public morality, together with
Temperance, Sunday observance and Gladstonian rectitude.
* * *
By the time of the First World War, Kirk, Chapel,
Church and organized religion were no longer central to as many
communities or families as at the end of the previous century.
Religious bodies often did not have such a robust hold on their
members, so when Members of Parliament came from a Nonconformist
background they were often not as steeped in the Bible as their
predecessors had been. The temper of the age was changing socially
and economically. Now the Victorian Sabbath was giving way to the
one-and-a-half day secular weekend with cycling and train
excursions, motoring and motorcycling, hiking and golf competing
with hymns, prayers and sermons. An investigation by the Daily
News in London between November 1902 and November 1903 showed
that out of London’s population of 6.25 million, only 1.25 million
attended church regularly, with the majority belonging to the lower
middle class. Noticeable though the decline was, religion remained
powerful in many families, particularly in rural areas where places
of worship and Sunday schools had higher attendance rates. As in the
nineteenth century, many children stared at maps of Bible lands and
looked at life-like illustrations of shepherds in flowing white
attire, biblical towns, hills, deserts, lakes, wilderness and the
Dead Sea shimmering in a haze of heat. Scenes were often as real as
were some biblical epics and battles from memories of flickering
lantern slides on a sheet pinned up on Sunday school walls. Stories,
such as the passionate tale of Samson and Delilah, had been learned
in Christian communities everywhere, from the Welsh valleys to the
Gothic chapels of England’s public schools, and from weatherboarded
farmhouses on the plains of America to the halls of Princeton
University.
The elections in January 1906 had brought 185
Nonconformists into parliament and the affinity between
Nonconformists and the Liberal Party, although weakening, continued.
At that time, with few exceptions, the majority of Nonconformists
voted for Liberal candidates. But Nonconformists were turning
increasingly towards the new Labour Party and, to a lesser degree,
to the Conservatives. Because of loss of faith and social changes,
along with the declining church attendance numbers, the differences
between Church and Dissent were becoming less marked.
Denominationalism ceased to be a determining factor in people’s
lives at the same time as the Liberals entered into their rapid
decline.
The First World War coincided with the eve of the
death of Nonconformity as a political force. In the postwar 1918
election only eighty-eight Non-conformist MPs were elected. The
underlying affinity between Nonconformists and Liberals in British
politics was dead. Votes were picked up by the Labour Party, which
had its own Welsh Methodist base. The Liberal Party has been out of
office since 1922. Lloyd George’s War Cabinet was the swansong of
the party and, paradoxically, also the most internationally powerful
hour of Nonconformists in British politics. Palestine and Israel are
the legacy.
The impact of Nonconformity stretched to the
United States. A Jewish homeland would have not have become a
reality without a nod from President Woodrow Wilson. The son and
grandson of Presbyterian ministers, he had been steeped in Bible
study as a child and was constant in his habit of reading the Bible
daily throughout his life. His first wife, Ellen, was the daughter
of yet another Presbyterian minister.
Other Nonconformists also helped make the Jewish
homeland viable. The influence peaked in May 1948 with President
Harry S. Truman. So dramatic was his participation that he could
have been on a stage accompanied by the rousing chorus of the Hebrew
slaves from Verdi’s Nabucco. Like Lloyd George (and Warren
Harding, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) he was a Baptist. And like
Lloyd George, Truman acted as a midwife to the birth of Israel.
Although not a lay preacher he had read the Bible from beginning to
end five times before he was fifteen. Truman’s message from the
White House in Washington to the United Nations building in New York
arrived within minutes of the British pulling out. It announced to
the world that the United States recognized the new state of Israel
and thus its survival was assured.
* * *
In Britain the Bible is no longer central to most
people’s lives and Christianity is usually assumed to have lost its
influence on politics. But this is not the case in the United
States. Here the Bible has retained its position. A staggering 86
per cent of the population in the US practise a religion. In
contrast, a report in the year 2000 found that in the UK the figure
is only 48 per cent.10
In the 1970s the United States experienced a
religious revival, which accelerated the rise of Christian Zionism.
Evangelical and Charismatic movements became the fastest growing
branches of American Christianity. When Jimmy Carter, a Southern
Baptist Sunday school teacher, became President in 1976 Time
magazine declared that year ‘the year of the Evangelical’. This
trend continued to increase following the election of Ronald Reagan,
a committed Christian Zionist, in 1980. Once again the Bible became
a force in shaping international attitudes to Israel.
Many Evangelicals and ‘religious conservatives’
regard the creation of Israel in 1948 as proof that biblical
prophecies are coming true.11 Strong backing12 is shown by both
groups rallying to the cause of Israel and by voting for pro-Israel
politicians.13 Indeed, supporting Israel brings many votes from
Conservative Protestants, the Moral Majority or Christian Coalition.
Christian Zionists, especially the Southern Baptists and other
members of the Christian Coalition of America, comprise, according
to London’s Guardian of 28 October 2002, ‘between 15 and 18%
of the electorate’. In contrast, the 6 million US Jews constitute
only around 2.5 per cent of the American population.
Evangelical Jerry Falwell has said, ‘Right at the
very top of our priorities must be an unswerving commitment and
devotion to the state of Israel.’ Pat Robertson, another leading
Evangelical, says, ‘The future of this Nation (America) may be at
stake, because God will bless those that bless Israel.’
Reared in the centuries-old tradition of
Evangelical thought, which stresses that Jews should be restored to
Zion, such men believe that the return of the Jews to their Promised
Land is a fulfilment of biblical prophesies and a portent of the
Second Coming of Christ (which for the Jews would be their
long-awaited and only Messiah).
Support for Israel is publicized by press
releases, tele-vangelists, conferences and rallies with cheer
leaders, especially by the Conservative Fundamentalist Church. But
such assistance is double-edged: Evangelicals also hope to convert
Jews, and with slogans such as ‘Jews for Jesus’ try to awaken them
to an acceptance of Jesus.14 Evangelicals want every inch of the
Holy Land for Israel. Some also believe that one of the
preconditions for the Second Coming is for the Jewish people to
return to their homeland. Others insist that Jews need to be
converted first and so vigorously strive to win them over – a
formidable task. The seventeenth-century English poet Andrew Marvell
used the difficulty of turning Jews into Christians as a metaphor
for his doubtful chance of seducing his imaginary mistress, while he
used ‘the flood’ to refer to Noah in the Bible.
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews . . .
‘To His Coy Mistress’, Andrew Marvell
Conservative America continues to rally to Israel.
In his book The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W.
Bush,15 David Frum said that Evangelical Christianity sits at
the core of George W. Bush’s own reformed personality. According to
Frum, an intellectual Jewish Canadian neo-conservative, who was with
Bush for thirteen months as a speech-writer, every cabinet meeting
at the White House now begins with a prayer. He stresses that Bush’s
confidence stems from his belief that ‘the future is held in
stronger hands than his own’.16
Bush, though brought up in Presbyterian and
Episcopalian churches, has been an active Methodist since quitting
alcohol and finding God in 1985. He is believed to be strongly
influenced by Oswald Chambers, an obscure Scottish preacher who was
born in 1874 in Aberdeen and died in Cairo in 1917. Every morning,
before Bush brings his wife Laura her cup of coffee, he sits in a
quiet corner to read a devotional text from Chambers’ My Utmost
for His Highest. With two million copies sold in the USA since
1991, this Christian classic has been continuously on sale in the
United States since 1935 and keeps its place in the top ten titles
of the religious best-seller list. The president’s faith,
articulated by Chambers, now permeates the White House, yet the
coincidence is seldom noticed that Chambers wrote this text mostly
in the Middle East, during his years at the YMCA at Zeitoun in Egypt
during the First World War when he was ministering to Australian and
New Zealand troops in the Palestine and Syrian campaign. It will be
seen in the following pages that in contrast to Bush’s overt and
publicly avowed religious beliefs, the religious influence on the
policy-makers in the Middle East in the First World War was
indirect, understated and behind the scenes. Because this influence
was not usually acknowledged there, it is seldom associated with the
present Christian American religious focus. But no decisive reason
has ever been given as to why Britain found it expedient to create a
Jewish homeland in Palestine within the British Empire. Suggested
motives are scattered throughout the text in this book and range
from Lloyd George’s attraction to Weizmann’s saying that Palestine,
like Wales, was ‘a little mountainous country’ to safeguarding the
Suez Canal, to the protection of trade and empire, to the
pre-empting of French claims in Palestine by giving an altruistic
pretext for control, to the rallying of Jews worldwide to the Allied
cause, especially in Bolshevik Russia and the United States.
