By Vinod Moonesinghe
The history of Palestine is fraught with controversy, obscured by religion. Emigration and conversion to Christianity and Islam reduced the Jewish population: by the 1516 Ottoman Conquest, they comprised 2% of the population, with Muslims 85% and Christians 11%. Ottoman Palestine thrived, exporting soap, olive oil, sugar, barley, cotton and, from the 1840s, the iconic Jaffa Oranges. However, geopolitics began to affect the province, with the British role having especial significance.
The “Great Game”
The Treaties of Gulistan (1813), Turkmenchay (1828), and Adrianople (1829) gave Russia the Caucasus, and the 1833 Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, the right of passage through the Bosporus and Dardanelles. The last caused Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary to complain that the “Russian Ambassador becomes the chief Cabinet Minister of the Sultan.”
Paranoid regarding other powers gaining control of the route to India, the British Foreign Office (FO) began worrying about Russia taking over Türkiyeand Iran, and responding with the “Great Game”, a political and diplomatic confrontation. Following a Franco-Egyptian alliance in the late 1830s, the FO also worried about Egypt, via which the Peninsular and Orient (P & O) line began mail and passenger services between Britain and India in 1840. Palestine, lying next to Egypt, began looming large in British eyes.
Palmerston formulated a policy intended to buttress the weak Ottoman state against Russia, aiding Sultan Abdülmejid I actively in his reforms and intervening to force the Egyptian Pasha Mehmet Ali to return Syria to Türkiye. He also decided to set up a network of consular missions throughout the region, to defend British interests. Accordingly, he established a vice-consulate in Jerusalem in 1838, appointing William Tanner Young as Consul.
“Every just encouragement”
By the 1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, Russia had become the protector of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and used this to interfere. France had negotiated a similar position regarding Roman Catholics and Syriac Christians. Britain and Prussia now united as “protectors” of Protestants, establishing a joint Bishopric in Jerusalem in 1841, and appointing as Bishop, an Anglican convert from Judaism, Michael Alexander.
There being few Protestants to “protect” in the Levant, Britain turned to Armenian Christians and Jews. In 1839 Palmerston instructed Young that his duties included “affording protection to the Jews generally.” In 1847, the FO extended this to Jews “of all nationalities.”
The Jewish population in Palestine remained small (only 3%) so the British stood to gain by increasing it. Top establishment figure Lord Shaftesbury (who called Jews “a stiff-necked, dark-hearted people, and sunk in moral degradation”) presented a plan for Jewish settlement in Palestine, to Palmerston, who made the British Ambassador in Constantinople pressure “the Turkish government to hold out every just encouragement to the Jews of Europe to return to Palestine.”
Significantly, consul Young supported “British Restorationism”, believing that Jesus Christ’s “Second Coming” would result from “restoring” the “Holy Land” to the Jewish people, under British protection. This reflected the FO’s position, viewing Palestine as the scriptural ancient Israel. As Michael Talbot, Anne Caldwell, and Chloe Emmott show, the British made numerous maps of the province at this time, attempting to reconstruct Palestine in a Biblical image; echoing Zainab Bahrani’s observation, that the Europeans created a narrative of direct progression from the ancient Middle East to Western civilisation, denying links between the ancient landscape and its modern inhabitants. This historiography underlaid British attempts to colonise Palestine and marginalise its residents.
“The battlements of Zion”
In 1839, Consul Young received two visitors, travelling overland to Sri Lanka, possibly on an intelligence mission, who would influence the geopolitics of Palestine: Austen Henry Layard, later undersecretary of foreign affairs and Ambassador in Istanbul; and Edward Ledwich Osbaldeston Mitford, who joined the Ceylon Civil Service.
In 1845, in An appeal in Behalf of the Jewish Nation in Connection with the British Policy in the Levant, Mitford forecast future FO policy. His plan for a British-protected Jewish colony in a Palestine cleansed of Palestinians, “would retrieve our affairs in the Levant and place us in a commanding position… it would place the management of our steam communications entirely in our hands.”
He repeated this in his 1884 book, A Land March from England to Ceylon: “I trust the time is not far distant when the protecting banner of England shall wave from the battlements of Zion over the restored race of Israel.” Coincidentally, South Australian ex-governor George Gawler proposed a similar scheme.
In 1853, the geo-political struggle over religious protectorates in Palestine flared up. The FO encouraged the bellicose Abdülmejid, leading to the Crimean War, with Russia battling Türkiye, Britain and France; highlighting Palestine’s significance in the Great Game.
Young’s consular successor James Finn forwarded to the FO a scheme “to persuade Jews in a large body to settle here as agriculturists on the soil.” He established a training farm for Jews just outside Jerusalem, and another south of Bethlehem, funded by the Society for the Promotion of Jewish Agricultural Labour in the Holy Land. Finn’s endeavours led to the 1865 formation of the quasi-military Palestine Exploration Fund, which mapped the area and gathered intelligence. A founder-member, Austen Henry Layard pushed the Fund’s research towards a specifically Jewish history.
“A most lucrative property”
In 1869, the Suez Canal opened, increasing Palestine’s strategic importance. Hence, on taking office in 1874, prime minister Benjamin Disraeli began to strengthen Britain’s position in the Levant, appointing Layard as Ambassador to Istanbul in 1877, as the Russo-Turkish War broke out. Despite clandestine British assistance, Türkiye lost the war. Layard cautioning that an Ottoman collapse would enable Russian and French takeover.
Laurence Oliphant, son of a Chief Justice of Sri Lanka, proposed settling Eastern European Jews in Palestine, as a buttress against the Russians – while the Sultan would be ill-disposed towards penniless Christian or Muslim refugees, rich Jews would support restoration of the Biblical homeland. Although bearing endorsements from Disraeli, the FO and the French Foreign Ministry, and backed by Layard, he failed to persuade the Sultan to support the creation of a Jewish colony.
Oliphant reported to the FO from Palestine on available opportunities for Jewish settlement. Expanding on this, in his The Land of Gilead (1880), he put forward a practical blueprint for sustained Jewish immigration, rather than unviable, scattered settlement schemes. His blueprint, adopted later by the Zionists, projected advancing Jewish Palestine economically and politically, with industrial and agricultural development:
“The inclusion of the Dead Sea within [the Zionist state’s] limits would furnish a vast source of wealth, by the exploitation of its chemical and mineral deposits… The Dead Sea is a mine of unexplored wealth, which only needs the application of capital and enterprise to make it a most lucrative property.”
He not only advocated railways, but bought land for a railway terminus in Haifa, and mapped out and surveyed the route.
Eretz Yisrael
After the British defeated Orabi Pasha and took control of Egypt in 1882, FO enthusiasm for the Jewish Homeland declined. Of 2.5 million persecuted Eastern European Jewish refugees after 1878, most went to Ottoman Europe, the British Empire or the Americas. Very few chose Palestine, where the Jewish population only expanded from 3% to 5% between 1870 and 1915.
Wealthy British Jews, many being members of the Imperial forces or colonial bureaucracy, preferred settling Jewish refugees in the colonies, particularly Australia and South Africa. In 1903, Zionists Leopold Jacob Greenberg and Theodor Herzl discussed with the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain a Jewish homeland in Uganda. As in Herzl’s vision for Palestine, the indigenous people were to be shunted aside. The Zionist Homeland was to be a “settler state.” British zeal for an African Zion died, so the Zionists focussed again on Palestine.
The Royal Navy’s switch from coal to oil increased the importance of the Persian Gulf. In 1915 Britain promised Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, Arab sovereignty over their lands (including Palestine). The consequent Arab Revolt against the Ottomans alarmed the British. A Jewish settler-colony in close proximity became desirable once more. In 1917, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour promised the Jews their “national home” (“Eretz Yisrael”).
Jewish settlers in British-occupied Palestine increased from 76,000 in 1920 to 600,000 in 1948 (32% of the population), proving a bulwark against Palestinian unrest. British-trained Zionist forces expelled their erstwhile masters, creating an independent Jewish state. Thereafter, through a special geopolitical relationship with the United States, they began fulfilling the Zionist dream of Eretz Yisrael Ha-Shlema (“Greater Israel”).
Vinod Moonesinghe read mechanical engineering at the University of Westminster, and worked in Sri Lanka in the tea machinery and motor spares industries, as well as the railways. He later turned to journalism and writing history. He served as chair of the Board of Governors of the Ceylon German Technical Training Institute.
Factum is an Asia Pacific-focused think tank on International Relations, Tech Cooperation and Strategic Communications accessible via www.factum.lk.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the organization’s.
