"I do not take it that the prospered Israelites of other lands are to go there. They would be foolish to leave their prosperities in our American cities, where they are among our best citizens, and cross two seas to begin life over again in a strange land. But the outrages heaped upon them in Russia, and the insults offered them in Germany, will soon quadruple and centuple the procession of Israelites from Russia to Palestine. Jewish colonization societies in England and Russia are gathering money for the transportation of the Israelites to Palestine, and for the purchase for them of lands and farming implements, and so many desire to go that it is decided by lot as to which families shall go first. They were God's chosen people at the first, and he has promised to bring them back to their home, and there is no power in one thousand or five thousand years to make God forget his promises.

"Those who are prospered in other lands will do well to stay where they are, but let the Israelites, who are depreciated, and attacked, and persecuted, turn their faces towards the rising sun of their deliverance. God will gather in that distant land those of that race who have been maltreated, and he will blast with the lightnings of his omnipotence those lands, which have been the instruments of annoyance and harm to that Jewish race, to which belonged Abraham, and David, and Joshua, and Baron Hirsch, and Montefiore, and Paul the Apostle, and Mary the Virgin, and Jesus Christ the Lord."

The myth of the "Arab Revolt" lives on in Arab belief and that coffee-table movie, Lawrence of Arabia.

One need not be a Christian, a Jew, or a believer at all, to be moved and to want to assent to the words used by President Bush about the dead astronauts; it is the same with this passage from Reverend De Witt Talmage. Having reported earlier the barrenness and desolation that Twain and so many others had described, he yet was heartened by the sight of seeing all the roads he passed "lined with processions of Jews" who were there on "holy pilgrimage, or as settlers." He could see, feelingly, the horrors of what had happened over the centuries, and was happening still to the "Jewish race," whose members were "depreciated, and attacked, and persecuted." He foresaw, and not as some prophecy for a millennium hence, but as something soon to be made reality, that members of that tribe would return, that "God will gather them in that distant land."

Later, after the Balfour Declaration (which Lord Balfour always regarded as the most important achievement of his career), and the Mandate for Palestine, created in order to further the goal of a Jewish state, Christian Zionists discovered that other Englishmen, particularly those in the Colonial and Foreign Offices, and in the administration of Mandatory Palestine itself, were distinctly unsympathetic to the Jews, with many displaying outright anti-Semitism. Most seemed more intent on undoing, rather than furthering, the promises Great Britain had made in accepting the Mandate. Chamberlain, while he was appeasing Hitler, had been equally busy appeasing the Arabs, for as he famously put it, "If we must offend the Jews or the Arabs, let it be the Jews."

But there were also those with a keen sense of the duty to redress a great injustice, as well as a sympathy rooted in the Bible, who remained steadfast supporters of the Zionists. John Henry Patterson, who helped train the Jewish Legion during World War I, was aware of the vital Jewish contribution to the war effort, above all in dangerous intelligence work (as with the Nili spy network, whose members when discovered were tortured and killed). The British themselves knew perfectly well that the Jewish contribution during World War I far surpassed the negligible efforts of a few hundred horsemen under Feisal, who aside from harrying the Hejaz Railway had no discernible effect. Yet this "Arab Revolt" became, under the myth-making T. E. Lawrence (his mythomania was early revealed by his insistence that, while at university, he had read "50,000 books"), an exaggerated tale that was then believed by Lawrence's Arabs themselves. It was only when such historians as Richard Aldington and Elie Kedourie went to work in the diplomatic archives and military records that the true story came out; the myth of the "Arab Revolt" lives on in Arab belief and that coffee-table movie, Lawrence of Arabia, of David Lean. Colonel Patterson, however, did not forget the contributions of the Jewish Legion, or of the Jewish intelligence operations.

The same kind of double standard prevailed in World War II. During the war, over 100,000 Jews of Palestine volunteered to serve in the war effort. Many also volunteered for the most dangerous missions, in the Libyan Desert to the west, in Damascus to the north, in the oilfields of Mosul to the east -- missions from which no one was expected to return. The British handed out weapons to the Jews of Palestine, because it knew they could be counted on. Meanwhile, Egyptians including Anwar Sadat were caught and imprisoned for pro-Nazi activities, a pro-Nazi regime was established in Iraq, and the leader of the local Arabs in Palestine, the Mufti, spent the war years in Berlin, where he did all he could to aid Adolf Hitler. Yet, after the war, the British military seized the rifles it had allowed the Jews to possess (while still training the Arab armies in Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq), and forgot not only what the Mandate was about, but what had just been their wartime experience with Arabs, and with Jews.

Sometimes what changed a man into a Zionist was, finally, what he saw with his own eyes. In 1920, with Allenby's forces in Palestine, but the Mandate not yet

Outpost               - 6 -               March 2003