Such adversaries as Pat Buchanan, Gore Vidal, Louis Farrakhan, Ramsey Clark, and Noam Chomsky would be deeply contemptuous of, and likely dismiss, as "primitive religiosity," the very idea of Christian Zionism.

Secondly, once these travelers arrived, they could confirm for themselves what only the occasional European traveler from earlier times, Volney in the 18th century, and Chateaubriand and Lamartine, early in the 19th, had reported: that the Holy Land, over many centuries of Moslem rule, had fallen into a state of ruination and desolation. The soil was unfertile and virtually untillable, although in Biblical times it had supported millions; the forests had disappeared. The countryside was racked by Bedouin marauders, who lived largely by such raids. There were also a few mournful and squalid villages. The total population of Palestine at mid-19th century was estimated at between 50,000 and 100,000. Only Jerusalem attained to the size of a town, with about 40,000 inhabitants at mid-19th century, though it too was in a wretched state. Half were Jews, the other half consisted of dozens of discrete communities: Armenians and Arabs (both Sunni and Shi'a), Ethiopian Copts, Egyptian Copts, Chechens, Circassians, Samaritans, Turcomans, Franciscan monks and nuns of various orders from Italy, France, and Spain, German Lutherans, American Protestant missionaries, Syrian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and many others. Outside of Jerusalem, everyone brought back the same report: desolation, emptiness, mournfulness. This dismal state of the land made clear to visitors (the reporters of their day) that the Ottomans were not much interested in this ill-considered backwater of their empire, which provided them with so little in revenue.

Visitors who came and saw the desolation reacted in one of two ways. Mark Twain visited Palestine in 1867: "Desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds -- a silent mournful expanse. A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We reached Tabor safely. We never saw a human being on the whole route. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country." No wonder Twain concluded that "Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. Palestine is desolate and unlovely. Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition, it is dreamland."

But exactly one hundred years after he visited, the Israeli Defense Forces would manage to enter and retake, to the benefit of those who wished to visit or worship there, the Old City of Jerusalem, and to reunite Jerusalem within a Jewish sovereignty that had already been in existence for twenty years, had reclaimed the soil and reforested the land, built a modern economy, gathered in as many persecuted and stateless Jews, especially the survivors of Hitler and the Arab countries, as it could, and re-established a Jewish commonwealth in their ancient homeland.

In nineteenth-century England, Christian Zionism had attracted the influential and important. In the American experience, the ancient Israelites were present even before Jews arrived, in Nieuw Amsterdam, in 1654. The early settlers, both the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, so closely identified with the history and religion of the ancient Israelites that they considered themselves, in a sense, those very Israelites. They brought with them in their intellectual baggage much that was, through the Old Testament, Hebraic. They had an intimate knowledge of the writings, history, moral teachings, and even the very names and manner of expression, of the ancient Israelites. Matthew Arnold once described Hebraism and Hellenism as the two poles of Western civilization. America has been most inclined to the first, Europe to the second. It is not a necessary, nor a sufficient condition, to have such knowledge to feel keenly the necessity, the justice of the rebirth, after 2000 years, of the Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel. But it helps.

And it is those who are most indifferent to the Old Testament, and to the Israelites of old, who so often seem least sympathetic, even hostile, to descendants of those Israelites, and to modern Israel. Such adversaries as Pat Buchanan, Gore Vidal, Louis Farrakhan, Ramsey Clark, and Noam Chomsky would be deeply contemptuous of, and likely dismiss, as "primitive religiosity," the very idea of Christian Zionism. So would many others, for whom

Outpost               - 4 -               March 2003