History
What came to be known as “Christian Zionism” emerged in England in the early 19th century when Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land and futuristic interpretation of apocalyptic texts merged. In 1839 the evangelical Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury called Westminster Parliament to support creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. During the 1840s Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston supported a “Jewish entity” allied to the Ottoman Empire as a counterweight to Egypt.
British Journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes that perhaps the “first lobbyist on behalf of the land of Israel” was Theodor Herzl who, after publishing his book The Jewish State in 1896, and organizing the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897, met in person British Cabinet ministers and other European officials. Russian Zionist Chaim Weizmann began the process of convincing Arthur James Balfour, a British Lord, that Palestine should be the Jewish national home and the “British Zionist movement began actively lobbying the British government.” The British Palestine Committee in Manchester also “lobbied for the mandate and Jewish rights in Palestine.”
Some groups like the influential Board of Deputies of British Jews and Anglo-Jewish Association were the “institutional stronghold of the anti-Zionist camp” and formed a lobby committee to oppose the efforts of Weizmann and his allies. In 1917 Weizmann and a small group of Zionists "in a brilliant exercise of sustained persuasion, lobbying, and influence" persuaded the British government to create the “Balfour Declaration” which supported "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." (Weizmann later became the first President of the State of Israel.) However, leaders of Board of Deputies of British Jews and of the Anglo-Jewish Association (who at the time were non-Zionist) considered the Balfour Declaration a “veritable calamity” that would stamp "the Jews as strangers in their native lands."
According to the author Ritchie Ovendale, Britain, which held the British Mandate of Palestine ratified by the League of Nations after World War I, abandoned its Zionist sympathies "which had been secured by the Zionist lobby” because of fears of coming war with Nazi Germany. In 1939 Britain limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, thereby becoming to Zionists "the principal enemy." In 1942 Zionists shifted their focus to influencing the United States through use of the "Zionist vote."
Read more about this topic: Israel Lobby In The United Kingdom
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)