Britain and Palestine: A Curious History

A week or so ago, we received word of the announcement of a longer ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza to halt the ongoing Israeli massacre. Notwithstanding the ridiculousness itself of having a ceasefire between an oppressor and the oppressed, both sides claimed victory. From the Israeli standpoint, this is mere nonsense posturing, given the fact that they failed to end rocket fire into Israel or break the will of Palestinian resistance inside Gaza. Their much vaunted 'deterrence capacity' has flopped and this can't be painted as anything else but a strategic defeat. From the Palestinian perspective, while some measures of the blockade have been eased (for now), Gaza still remains a prison, and future promises of a seaport are unlikely to materialise given Israel's track record of deceit.

The timing of the conflict coincided with my reading of the book Bible and Sword by Barbara Tuchman, author of the famous Guns of August. The book explores the intriguing history of Britain's relationship with Palestine over the centuries, and the seeds to the conflict we seed unfolding today. Much of the history is quite revealing, though sadly it is colored by Tuchman's heavy Orientalist bias, her emphasizing exclusively the Jewish connection to the land, to the extent that the actual living residents of Palestine across eras hardly get much attention.

General Allenby entering a
conquered Jerusalem, 11 December 1917

Three seminal events define Britain's unique relationship with this sliver of Mediterranean land, according to Tuchman. The first is the bloody series of holy wars known as the Crusades. The second is the translation of the Holy Bible into the English language. And the third is the birth of the modern Zionist movement.

The Crusades were launched in 1095 under the call to reclaim Jerusalem by the head of Western Christendom, Pope Urban II. It was hardly a British affair; indeed, Britain as a nation-state didn't even exist at that point. Richard the so-called Lionheart is often painted as an English hero, but he hardly spent much of his life in the country. But the whole affair underlined a somewhat inexplicable obsession of the Western Church with the Holy Land that didnt resonate with Eastern Orthodox Christianity (no Byzantines were called to fight in the Crusades, only Europeans). Following countless massacres and defeats later, a truce allowed for  freedom of access to a steady stream of pilgrims from Europe to sites in the Holy Land, which remained under Muslim control.

This continued until the advent of the 16th century. Following the start of the Reformation, a drastic change began in England, with the diminishing of the papal authority and a process of secularization of many spheres of life. Part of this process was the translation of the Latin Bible in English, which took almost a century before culminating in the King James Bible in 1611. While the translation of a Bible may on the surface seem a rather mundane action, it had far-reaching consequences. Whereas previously there was an unassailable position of the clergy as intermediaries between the masses and the Latin Bible, translation the Bible represented a nationalisation of religion and emphasized a more private relation with God's Book.

An outcome of the translation of the Bible was to emphasize the Old Testament descriptions of the Holy Land and to lay special importance on the land itself, for example places such as Canaan and Jerusalem. For the follower of the English Bible, the traditional New Testament universalist message was somewhat downplayed for a new reverence towards sacred geography. The idea of the Jews as the special Chosen People of God was looked at in an almost literalist fashion. The rise of this new Protestantism coincided with the decision to allow the Jews, who had be expelled from England in 1290, to return.

Fast forward to 1897, and the first Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland chaired by Theodore Herzel. However, prior to this, there were consistent efforts from the Evangelical community in England in the 19th century to return to the Jews to their supposed Promised Land, without much avail. The birth of the Zionist Movement, an ostensibly secular pesudo-nationalist political project dedicated towards a Jewish homeland, cemented a curious Christian-Jewish alliance for the same objective after centuries of mutual hostility and distrust.


The British Empire, top dog of the competing global powers, became the vehicle for the realisation of the early Zionist agenda. The execution of Zionist goals was done through a sly mix of appealing to Evangelical Christian sentiments and baser imperial interests among the British political elites, of men like Balfour, David Lloyd George, and others. The culmination of the efforts was the securing of the famous Balfour Declaration in 1917, making the Jewish project in Palestine an official goal of British foreign policy. Lloyd George, British Prime Minister at that time, ordered the Commander in Egypt, Edmund Allenby, to secure "Jerusalem before Christmas" which he delivered with two weeks to spare.

Perhaps given the controversial implications, Tuchman as an author doesn't give much credence to the theory that British elites felt that by granting the Balfour Declaration, they would be able to curry favor with the influential American Jews and secure the military involvement of the US in World War I. Lloyd George himself though admitted to such a line of thinking in his own autobiography. The Declaration it cannot be denied came at a critical time in the war, with significant advances by the Germans and Britain on the back foot. President Woodrow Wilson, who had campaigned in 1916 on the platform of keeping the US out of the war, made a dramatic U-turn to join a conflict that his country had no direct stake in. It proved the turning point.

Much apologies if this article seems like a boring rehearsal of history, but for those who are fans of mystery novels, history often plays out in a similar fashion. It takes a trained eye to be able to connect the dots and trace the path to where we are now. Bible and Sword offered such interesting historical tidbits once you can get beyond the Eurocentric dross. History, even sad history such as this, continues to fascinate me. I wish it were the same for everyone.