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on 18 January 1895. Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist and playwright, was pressed against the railings of the Ecole Militaire listening to the antiSemitic shouts of the crowd as they watched Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, being publicly humiliated after a false accusation of treason. Dreyfus was to spend four years on Devil’s Island before being re-tried and eventually exonerated. In that time Herzl had written Der Judenstaat, gained international attention for the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine and held the first Zionist Congress in Basel. Herzl then proceeded personally to plead the Zionist cause with world leaders, the Czar, the Kaiser and the Sultan. He received offers of land for the Jewish people from the Sultan – Mesopotamia (if they paid off the Turkish National Debt); and from the British Colonial Secretary – El Arish in Egypt; the offer was later changed to Uganda. Herzl and the Zionists refused anything but Palestine. Exhausted by his work, Herzl died at the age of forty-four and was accorded virtually a state funeral in Vienna. With the idea of a Jewish homeland at least established, the progress of political Zionism continued. As Herzl had realised, this could only be achieved with the backing of a great power. In the closing years of World War I, it was the British who became the inheritors of this historic burden. Chaim Weizmann, Herzl’s successor, had gained the ear of xii
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rthur Balfour, the British foreign minister, and persuaded him of the righteousness of the Zionist cause. In his turn Balfour persuaded the prime minister, Lloyd George, and in November 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration which gave its slightly ambiguous promise of ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. In 1918, at the head of a British army which had defeated the Turks, General ­Allenby marched into Jerusalem. In the wake of the war, the Ottoman empire was finally divided up and Britain given the Mandate for Palestine. It was to take another thirty years, another World War and a Holocaust for a ‘national home’ to become an independent state. If the backing of one great power in the form of Britain was essential to the establishment of the Jewish homeland, the support of another, the United States, has remained crucial to its survival ever since. After thirty stormy years of administering the Mandate, the British were more than happy to get rid of it. America then became the protector of the new State of Israel for a variety of reasons – humanitarian sympathy for the Jews after the Holocaust, support for a strategically placed ally during the Cold War, and most recently the dictates of the War on Terror. Yet alongside these diplomatic and military motivations stood an important religious factor – not Jewish, but Christian Zionism. xiii

on 18 January 1895. Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist and playwright, was pressed against the railings of the Ecole Militaire listening to the antiSemitic shouts of the crowd as they watched Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, being publicly humiliated after a false accusation of treason. Dreyfus was to spend four years on Devil’s Island before being re-tried and eventually exonerated. In that time Herzl had written Der Judenstaat, gained international attention for the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine and held the first Zionist Congress in Basel. Herzl then proceeded personally to plead the Zionist cause with world leaders, the Czar, the Kaiser and the Sultan. He received offers of land for the Jewish people from the Sultan – Mesopotamia (if they paid off the Turkish National Debt); and from the British Colonial Secretary – El Arish in Egypt; the offer was later changed to Uganda. Herzl and the Zionists refused anything but Palestine. Exhausted by his work, Herzl died at the age of forty-four and was accorded virtually a state funeral in Vienna.

With the idea of a Jewish homeland at least established, the progress of political Zionism continued. As Herzl had realised, this could only be achieved with the backing of a great power. In the closing years of World War I, it was the British who became the inheritors of this historic burden. Chaim Weizmann, Herzl’s successor, had gained the ear of xii

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