Photo Credit: Itzik Bellenitzki/TPS

“It is shocking how many people are just waking up to the Islamic takeover of the West! (It seems many of you were too busy calling us “Islamophobes” over the past decade),” declared Amy Mek, an investigative journalist. She said that “In London this weekend armies of Muslims have once again taken to the streets to show their support for the Muslims who slaughtered Israelis and are hunting Jews…Without firing a shot, British cities and boroughs have been conquered! Their future is an Islamic one….”

According to The Telegraph, the Met Police said 300,000 demonstrators participated in the march from Marble Arch to Nine Elms demanding an end to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Whether the British have the resolve to confront their growing Muslim problem might well determine the future of the country.

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Contrast this frenzied hatred with support by Gentile Christians of England for a national Jewish home for the Jewish people when Jews needed their help the most.

The Importance of the Balfour Declaration for the Jewish People

On November 2, 2017 British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour sent a letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, which read: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

For the Jews, this meant the British were supporting their dream of reestablishing a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. At the San Remo Conference in San Remo, Italy in April 1920, the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers delineated the exact boundaries of the countries they had conquered at the end of World War I, and resolved that the Balfour Declaration would be incorporated in The Treaty of Peace with Turkey

When the League of Nations formally confirmed the Mandate for Palestine on July 24, 1922, this acknowledged a pre-existing historical right of the Jews to the land of Israel that they had never relinquished as former Israeli ambassador Dore Gold noted. The Jewish people had been sovereign in the land for a thousand years until many were driven into exile. When the Muslims invaded Palestine in 634, ending four centuries of conflict between Persia and Rome, Israeli diplomat

Yaacov Herzog noted they found direct descendants of Jews who had lived in the country since the time of Joshua bin Nun, the man who led the Israelites into the Land of Canaan. This means that for 2,000 years Jews and Christians constituted the majority of the indigenous population of Palestine, while the Bedouins were the ruling class under the Damascene caliphate.

The Unique Nature of Zionism

On September 20, 1918, Balfour explained the unique nature of Zionism: “Zionism differs in kind from ordinary philanthropic efforts and that it appeals to different motives. If it succeeds, it will do great spiritual and material work for the Jews, but not for them alone. …It is, among other things, a serious endeavor to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. Surely, for this if for no other reason, it should receive our support.”

“The ultimate end,” of British support, Lord L.S. Amery a leading Conservative politician and Cabinet Minister wrote in July 1928, “is to make Palestine the centre of a western influence, using Jews as we have used the Scots, to carry English ideal through the Middle East and not merely to make an artificial oriental Hebrew enclave in oriental country. Secondly that we Palestine in some way or other to remain within the framework of the British Empire….”

As Lord Arthur Balfour stated in a speech to Parliament on November 17, 1919, “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

The Case For a Jewish Home

On July 30, 1919 he said to Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, a former Chief Political Officer in Palestine Most-favoured Nation in Palestine and Syria on General Allenby’s staff, that the Zionists were “the Most-favored Nation in Palestine,” and concurred that President Woodrow Wilson’s principle of the right of nations to self-determination to ensure international order did not seem practical if arbitrarily applied throughout the world. “Palestine was “a case in point and a most exceptional one!”

At the end of WWII, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, the chief political officer for Palestine, summed up the case for the Jews. He observed that all the countries in Asia and Europe had sacrificed considerably including Britain, which was now exhausted. Only the Arabs had not had to give up anything.

During both World Wars, the Arabs had “gained everything and contributed nothing….” “Why,” he asked, “should not the Arabs give up something to suffering humanity? Palestine is but a small part of the Arab countries. On the other hand, the Jews have contributed a great deal during both wars and have suffered more than any other nation. It is gross injustice that they should be refused a home which once was theirs. This simple act of justice is held up for fear of the Arabs and hatred of the Jews. A policy of fear leads nowhere; it is no policy.” To those who suggested that Jews immigrate to countries other than Palestine, he responded: “Zionism without Zion is nothing at all. The Jews want a Home, not an Apartment.”

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George declared, “The Jews surely have a special claim on Canaan. They are the only people who have made a success of it during the past 3,000 years. They are the only people who have made its name immortal, and as a race, they have no other home. This was their first; this has been their only home; they have no other home. They found no home in Egypt or in Babylon. Since their long exile… this is the time and opportunity for enabling them once more to recreate their lives as a separate people in their old home and to make their contribution to humanity as a separate people, having a habitation in the land which inspired their forefathers.”

A Final Note

In 1917-1922 no one had to debate the aboriginal rights of Zionism. It was a given that there was a unique connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel. They are forever linked with its name. The International leaders, who were overwhelming Christian, grew up knowing about the Holy Land as the Jewish homeland through Jesus, the Bible and Christian missionaries. In the British war cabinet of 1917, three of the five members were sympathetic to Zionism–Lloyd George, Alfred Milner and Jan Smuts. Lord Arthur James Balfour served as foreign secretary, Sir Mark Sykes and Leopold Amery were assistant secretaries to the cabinet.

The Gentile Zionists of England respected this historical bond of the Jews to their ancient homeland land. They fought within their government to secure the right of Jews to return to their ancestral home, but as events in Palestine led to strained relations between the Jews and the British, the need to present the Jewish case to the international community became even more urgent.

When David Ben-Gurion spoke as representative of the Jewish Agency before the UN Special Committee on Palestine in Lake Success, New York in July 1947, he outlined the rationale for a Jewish state: “We claim our rightful place…as human beings and as a people, the same right as other human beings and peoples possess, the right to security, freedom, equality, statehood and membership in the United Nations. No individual Jew can be really free, secure and equal anywhere in the world as long as the Jewish people as a people is not again rooted in its own country as an equal and independent nation.”


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Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew university of Jerusalem. He lives in Jerusalem.