A Durable Peace by Benjamin Netanyahu Read Free Book Online

more of the Great
Powers. 21
    To Claude Conder as well, it was clear that no other people would have the enthusiasm and energy for such a restoration; 22 and it was equally clear that once applied, such energy would bring the land back to life. Thus, for Jew and non-Jew alike,
scientific exploration made the promise of Zionism tangible and realizable.
    This scientific enthusiasm produced practical plans of settlement, such as Sir Laurence Oliphant’s 1879 proposal to settle
Jews in Gilead on the East Bank of the Jordan, a project that receivedthe support of the British prime minister, the British and French foreign ministers, and the Prince of Wales. In 1898, after
a century of religious and scientific attention focused on the land, Edwin Sherwin Wallace, the U.S. consul in Palestine,
captured the growing international mood:
    Israel needs a home, a land he can call his own, a city where he can work out his salvation. He has none of these now. His
present home is among strangers…. the lands in which he lives are not his own…. Israel’s hope of a homeland is possible of realization,
but it will be realized only in Palestine.
    He concluded:
    My own belief is that the time is not far distant when Palestine will be in the hands of a people who will restore it to its
former condition of productiveness. The land is waiting, the people are ready to come, and will come as soon as protection
of life and property is assured. 23
    The writings, philanthropic activities, exhortations, and explorations of non-Jewish Zionists, British and American, secular
and religious, directly influenced the thinking of such pivotal statesmen as David Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour, and Woodrow
Wilson at the beginning of the century. These were all broadly educated men, and they were intimately familiar with the decline
of Palestine and the agonized history of the Jews. “My anxiety,” wrote Balfour, “is simply to find some means by which the
present dreadful state of so large a proportion of the Jewish race… may be brought to an end.” 24 Thus, it was the non-Jewish Zionism of Western statesmen that aided Jewish Zionism in achieving the rebirth of Israel.
    But still another factor was even more important than biblical heritage, the scientific rediscovery of the land, and the awareness
of Jewish suffering in persuading these leaders of the justice ofZionism. The men of Versailles were first and foremost
political
thinkers, and it was primarily from prevailing political conceptions of national rights and the question of self-determination
that they addressed the problem of the Jewish restoration, just as they approached the problem of other national claims within
this framework. It was in these terms that the Jewish Zionists were able to appeal to them successfully.
    Indeed, the leaders of Zionism from Herzl onward formed a ready partnership with the leading statesmen of the day.(That partnership
in some cases developed out of earlier ties; well before becoming prime minister of the British Empire, Lloyd George had served
as Herzl’s lawyer, representing the Zionist movement in Britain, and he had drawn up its proposal to build a British protectorate.) 25 Herzl, Nordau, and their followers understood that if Zionism were to succeed in its extraordinary task of ingathering a
nation scattered in a hundred lands to a dusty corner at the edge of Asia, it had to have broad international support, and
it had to muster and deepen the widely held conviction of the historical justice and the political necessity of this remarkable
undertaking. The Jews, the Zionists said, must have a state of their own in Palestine, and the world’s leaders agreed, even
though they knew that such attempted re-creation of a state was unprecedented. Furthermore, they knew the effort might come
into conflict with the possible interests of the local population, which might make a political claim to that same land. Yet
at the beginning of the century,