33. The Promised Land

Balfour Declaration

Poale Zion was active in Britain during the war, and influential on the drafting by Sidney Webb and Arthur Henderson of the Labour Party’s War Aims Memorandum, recognizing the “right of return” of Jews to Palestine, a document which preceded the Balfour Declaration by three months.[1] Sidney Webb (1859 – 1947), a co-founder of the London School of Economics, was an early member of the Fabian Society, the British socialist organization founded in 1884, along with his wife Beatrice, H.P. Blavatsky’s successor Annie Besant, and George Bernard Shaw. The Fabian Society was as a splinter group of the Fellowship of the New Life, composed of artists and intellectuals, which included Annie Besant and also members of the Society for Psychical Research. Fellowship members included Shaw, Besant, Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, Walt Whitman’s homosexual lover Edward Carpenter, and Havelock Ellis. Leading Fabians included Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells and Aldous’ brother Julian Huxley. Sidney and Beatrice Webb set up the Coefficients, a society which included Leo Amery and Alfred Milner, two core members of the Round Table, who would play a formative role in authoring the Balfour Declaration.[2]

The Zionists were willing to not only tolerate anti-Semitic attitudes, but even exploited them to advance their goals. In particular, they were disposed to encouraging the perception that, in return for support for the Zionist colonization of the Holy Land, that they could be expected to exercise their enormous behind-the-scenes political influence—the kind of insidious power outlined in the Protocols of Zion—to induce the United States to enter the war, and the Russians to drop out of it. As historian Jonathan Schneer explained, “Zionists did not take this argument seriously. However, they encouraged the British governing elite in its belief that Jewish influence was a global force.”[3] Therefore, the Balfour Declaration, issued by the British Government on November 2, 1917, and promising the land of Palestine to the Zionists, was, effectively, according to Schneer, in “How Anti-Semitism Helped Create Israel,” a bribe.[4]

In July 1914, war broke out in Europe between the Triple Entente (Britain, France, and the Russian Empire) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and, later that year, the Ottoman Empire). With the British offensive from Egypt under General Allenby had moved into Palestine, and the German-Ottoman position in the Middle East was on the verge of collapse by the summer of 1917, many Zionists began looking to Great Britain for the fulfillment of their hopes. The German Zionist Richard Lichtheim (1885 – 1963) observed:

We owed Germany very much, but the course of events in the war compelled Zionism to seek a connection with and help from the Anglo-Saxon Powers… In 1917 the center of gravity of Zionist policy was moving more and more toward London and Washington. This was the necessary result of military and political developments, as well as the evident readiness of the British and American governments to support Zionist wishes.[5]

On October 4, 1917, United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour spoke to the War Cabinet in London, arguing that Germany was seeking to enlist the support of the Zionist movement, and proposed urgent the need to prepare an official British declaration of support for the Zionist cause. Much of Palestine had already been overrun by General Allenby’s army and his Arab allies, and Jerusalem was to fall in a month. On December 9, Balfour wrote the declaration, addressed to a close friend to Weizmann, Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, and the son of Baron Nathan Rothschild, who supported the Round Table, founded by Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner, W.T. Stead. The declaration, which was intended for transmission to the British Zionist Federation, stated:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

Britain, in fact, had realized what might be gained by a declaration of support for Zionist cause in Palestine.[6] All earlier Zionist efforts had limited success, as only 24,000 Jews were living in Palestine just prior to the emergence of Zionism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.[7] As explained by Nahum Sokolow (1859 – 1936), an associate of Weizmann and a journalist and executive of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), in his History of Zionism: 1600–1918 (1919), “Many of the most important Jewish scholars arriving in England, and becoming in course of time the pride of English Jewry, were much attracted by the idea that England was the classical soil for a fruitful work in Palestine.”[8] Among them was Moses Gaster, who had been a central figure of Hovevei Zion in Romania before he moved to England where he became chief Rabbi of the Bevis Marks Synagogue and helped establish the British Zionist Federation in 1899. Rising in worldwide Jewish affairs, he became vice-president of the First Zionist Congress in Basel, in 1897, and was a prominent figure in each succeeding congress. Visitors to Gaster’s home in London included Winston Churchill, Sigmund Freud and his friend Vladimir Lenin.

When Herzl’s attempts to gain the support for a German protectorate in Palestine from the Kaiser Wilhelm II had failed, he turned to Great Britain in the same year, thereby creating the pro-British faction that was soon to be led by Chaim Weizmann, and result of the Balfour Declaration. In 1900, Herzl declared at the Fourth Zionist Congress, held in London, “England the mighty, England the free, will understand us and understand our aspirations. With England as starting point we could be certain that the Zionist idea will grow mightier and rise higher than ever before.”[9] In 1901, on instructions from Herzl, Joseph Cowen, a founder and leader of the Zionist movement in Great Britain, asked Stead to intercede with Cecil Rhodes for a meeting, highlighting his excellent relationship with Kaiser Wilhelm II. When Kaiser Wilhelm II asked Theodor Herzl what he wished him to ask of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Herzl answered “A Chartered Company–under German protection,” to be modelled on the African country of Rhodesia, established by his idol Cecil Rhodes.[10]

Herzl believed that Rhodes could secure the funds necessary for his attempt to offer Sultan Abdul Hamid II to pay off the debt of the Ottoman Empire in return for surrendering Palestine.[11] In 1901, Herzl met again with the Abdul Hamid II, who turned down his offer to consolidate the Ottoman debt in exchange for a charter allowing the Zionists access to Palestine.[12] The Sultan said:

Please advise Dr. Herzl not to make any serious move in this matter. I cannot give up even one small patch of land in Palestine. It is not something that I own as a part of my personal estate. Palestine in fact belongs to the Muslim Nation as a whole. My people have fought with their blood and sweat to protect this land. Let the Jews keep their millions and once the Caliphate is torn apart one day, then they can take Palestine without a price. To have the scalpel cut my body is less painful than to witness Palestine being detached from the Caliphate state and this is not going to happen…

During his talks with the sultan, Kaiser Wilhelm II spoke favorably of Zionism, its efforts to secure a homeland for the Jews in Palestine and the potential economic benefits that Jewish settlement of Palestine could produce for the Ottoman Empire. And, after the Sultan rejected Herzl’s offer, the Kaiser immediately lost his initial enthusiasm for Zionist cause, and the German Foreign Office concluded that the matter should be officially dropped so as not to alienate the Ottoman government. The Germans were not convinced by the Zionist argument that Germany’s strategic interests in the Middle East were best served by the realization of Zionist aims in Palestine. As early as December, 1898, Herzl had indicated in a letter to his friend the Grand Duke of Baden that the Zionist movement might seek the support and protection of Great Britain.[13]

When Herzl’s initial attempts frustrated, the Round Table embarked on a plan to use British imperialisms during War World I to appropriate the Holy Land for Zionist settlement. Immediately following their declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, the British War Cabinet began to consider the future of Palestine. Baron Edmond James de Rothschild’s son, James de Rothschild (1878 – 1957), requested a meeting with Weizmann on November 25, 1914, to enlist him in gaining influence over those within the British government who might be receptive to their Zionist agenda.[14] Through James’ wife Dorothy, Weizmann was to meet Rózsika Rothschild, who introduced him to the English branch of the family, in particular her husband Nathaniel Charles (1877 – 1923) and his older brother Walter, a former Member of Parliament. Zionism was first discussed at the British Cabinet level on November 9, 1914, four days after Britain’s declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire. David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, “referred to the ultimate destiny of Palestine.” A decade before, Lloyd George’s law firm Lloyd George, Roberts and Co had been engaged by the British Zionist Federation to work on the Uganda Scheme.

In a discussion after the meeting with Herbert Samuel, Lloyd George assured him that “he was very keen to see a Jewish state established in Palestine.”[15] On December 10, 1914, Weizmann met with Samuel, who believed Weizmann’s demands were too modest, and “that perhaps the Temple may be rebuilt, as a symbol of Jewish unity, of course, in a modernized form.”[16] Two days later, Weizmann met Balfour again, for the first time since their initial meeting in 1905. A month later, Samuel circulated a memorandum entitled The Future of Palestine to his Cabinet colleagues, in which he declared that that incorporation into the British Empire would be the solution “which would be much the most welcome to the leaders and supporters of the Zionist movement throughout the world.”[17] In a discussion after the meeting, Lloyd George assured Samuel that “he was very keen to see a Jewish state established in Palestine.”[18] It was the first time in an official record that enlisting the support of Jews as a war measure was proposed.[19] Samuel discussed a copy of his memorandum with Nathan Rothschild in February 1915, a month before the latter’s death.[20] Many further discussions followed, including the initial meetings in 1915–16 between Lloyd George and Weizmann, which Lloyd George later recalled being “fount and origin” of the declaration.[21]

In terms of British politics, the Balfour Declaration resulted from the coming into power of Lloyd George and his Cabinet, which had replaced the H.H. Asquith led-Cabinet in December 1916. Lloyd George and Balfour, who was appointed as his Foreign Secretary, favored a post-war partition of the Ottoman Empire as a major British war aim.[22] Lloyd George’s War Cabinet included only four other members: Andrew Bonar Law and Arthur Henderson, and Garter knights George Curzon and Alfred Milner. The British military was represented by Leo Amery (1873 – 1955), an original member of the Round Table, who as a parliamentary under-secretary in Lloyd George’s national government. Amery, who was of Hungarian Jewish descent, was also an active Freemason.[23] Amery and Milner had been a member of the Coefficients, set up in 1902 by the Fabian Society founders Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Members included Halford Mackinder, Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells. It was Amery, acting on behalf of Milner, who recruited Mackinder (1861 – 1947), the father of geopolitics, to conduct research into imperial matters.[24] Amery was also a member of the “X Committee,” a secret organization set up to keep Milner as the de facto member of the inner-circle of decision-makers, when he became Secretary of War during World War II. The committee, who met regularly to decide war policy, maintained contact with the British War Cabinet and included Lloyd George, Henry Wilson and Amery as secretary.[25]

Following the change in government, Mark Sykes (1879 – 1919) was promoted into the War Cabinet Secretariat with responsibility for Middle Eastern affairs. By the end of the month, he had been introduced to Weizmann and Sokolow. The first negotiations between the British and the Zionists took place at a conference on February 7, 1917, at Moses Gaster’s home in London and included Sykes, Weizmann, Nahum Sokolow, Baron Walter Rothschild, Herbert Samuel. It was Sykes’ idea that the Zionists draft a declaration that would be sent to Lord Rothschild, who would then recommend it Balfour, who in turn would reply to Rothschild on behalf of the British Government.[26] Sykes concluded, “With ‘Great Jewry’ against us,” he warned, there would be no possibility of victory, as the power of the Zionists was “atmospheric, international, cosmopolitan, subconscious and unwritten, nay often unspoken.”[27]

Balfour met Weizmann at the Foreign Office on 22 March 1917. Weizmann explained at the meeting that the Zionists had a preference for a British protectorate over Palestine, as opposed to an American, French or international arrangement; Balfour agreed, but warned that “there may be difficulties with France and Italy.”[28] Following the United States’ entry into the war on April 6, 1917, the Balfour led a mission to Washington, DC and New York, where he discussed Zionism with President Wilson’s ally, Louis Brandeis, who had been appointed as a Supreme Court Justice a year previously.[29] By June 13, 1917, it was acknowledged by Ronald Graham, head of the Foreign Office’s Middle Eastern affairs department, that the three most relevant politicians Lloyd George, Lord Balfour, and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Robert Cecil, were all in favor of Britain supporting the Zionist movement. On the same day, Weizmann had written to Graham to advocate for a public declaration.[30] Six days later, at a meeting on June 19, Balfour asked Lord Rothschild and Weizmann to submit a formula for a declaration. The decision to release the declaration was taken by the British War Cabinet on October 31, 1917. Also consulted was President Woodrow Wilson. Amery and Milner were among the authors of the Balfour Declaration. Amery helped draft the Balfour Declaration, an idea proposed by Milner. Weizmann helped to draft the declaration, along with the assistance of Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and Rabbi Stephen Wise, all leading Zionists and known Sabbateans.[31]

Young Turks

According to Gerald Henry Fitzmaurice (1865 – 1939), who was appointed British consul to Constantinople and served as a British dragoman before the war, the Dönmeh Jews—descendants of the followers of Shabbetai Zevi who feigned conversion to Islam—now controlled the Ottoman government, and their goal was to hand Palestine over to the Zionists. Fitzmaurice therefore proposed that, Britain should promise Palestine to the Jews immediately, in return for the Dönmeh withdrawing their support from the Ottoman government, which would then inevitably collapse. Fitzmaurice, then attached to the intelligence division at the British Admiralty, lobbied Hugh James O’Bierne, an experienced and well-respected British diplomat, who responded positively. On February 28, 1916, O’Bierne composed the first Foreign Office memo linking the fate of Palestine with both Zionist interests and British chances of victory in World War I.[32]

From the middle of the nineteenth century, the British had worked to develop an alliance between several leading Sufi orders in Turkey, such as the Bektashi who had strong associations with the Dönmeh, as well as the Naqshbandi, and the Scottish Rite Freemasons of Afghani and his followers.[33]Afghani also had been part of the creation of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)—a Masonic political party, also known as the Young Turks—who carried out a military coup against the crumbling regime of Abdul Hamid II, the Ottoman Sultan, who was overthrown, and the Young Turks ultimately seized power over the Ottoman Empire in 1908. The failure of the Young Ottoman policies in reversing the decline of the Ottoman Empire led groups of intellectuals to search for other means. One of these groups was the Young Turks The Young Turks regarded themselves the heirs of the secret organization known as the Young Ottomans, formed in 1865, which drew its inspiration from the Carbonari societies founded by Mazzini, like Young Europe, Italy, Spain and Poland. The Young Turks regarded themselves the heirs of the secret organization known as the Young Ottomans, formed in 1865, which drew their inspiration from the Carbonari societies founded by Mazzini, like Young Europe, Italy, Spain and Poland.

The Young Turks were created in the 1890s by a prominent Sephardic Jewish family in Ottoman Salonika (modern Thessaloniki, Greece) and an official of the Italian B’nai B’rith, named Emmanuel Carasso. Carasso was also the grand master of an Italian masonic lodge there called “Macedonia Resurrected.” The lodge was the headquarters of the Young Turks, and all the top Young Turk leadership were members. The Italian masonic lodges in the Ottoman Empire had been set up by a follower of Mazzini named Emmanuel Veneziano, who was also a leader of the European affiliate of the B’nai B’rith, as well as the Alliance Israëlite Universelle.[34] The Zionist leadership also hoped that the influence of the Young Turks within the Ottoman government would demonstrate greater sympathy for Zionist aspirations in Palestine.[35] In 1908, the Berlin Executive office of the WZO, sent Jabotinsky to the Ottoman capital Constantinople where he became editor-in-chief of a new pro-Young-Turkish daily newspaper Le Jeune Turc (“Young Turk”) which was founded and financed by Zionist officials like WZO president David Wolffsohn and his representative in Constantinople Victor Jacobson.[36]

The Young Turks were largely comprised of the Dönmeh—the crypto-Sabbateans of the community of secret Jews descended from the followers of Shabbetai Zevi who converted to Islam. In The Dönmeh: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries and Secular Turks, Professor Marc David Baer wrote that many Dönmeh advanced to exalted positions in the Bektashi and Mevlevi Sufi orders.[37] Writing in 1906, H.N. Brailsford said of the Bektashi, “their place in Islam is perhaps most nearly analogous to that of Freemasonry in Christianity and noted that “Bektashis themselves like to imagine that the Freemasons are kindred spirits.”[38] Richard Davey, author of The Sultan and His Subject, published in 1897, wrote “[The Bektashi] are even said to be affiliated to some of the French Masonic Lodges. One thing is certain; the order now consists almost exclusively of gentlemen of education, belonging to the Liberal, or Young Turk party.”[39] According to historian Marc David Baer, the Young Turks “wholeheartedly embraced theories of race, although they rearranged the hierarchies to place Turks on top. By 1906, Turkish nationalism based on the pseudoscientific race theories of Europe had become the guiding ideology of the CUP.”[40]

Through the influence of the Bektashi Sufis, the Young Turks adopted an ideology of Pan-Turkism, which aspired towards reviving shamanism as the true religion of the Turkish heritage. Pan-Turkism was developed by Arminius Vambery, a friend of Theodor Herzl and a source for Golden Dawn member Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Vambery was inspired by Alexander Csoma de Körös (1784/8 – 1842), who was an important source for Blavatsky, and the first in the West to mention Shambhala, which he regarded as the source of the Turkish people, and which he situated in the Altai Mountains and Xinjiang. In Turkish nationalist mythology, Ergenekon, which is related to the synarchist myth of Agartha, is the name of an inaccessible valley in the Altai Mountains of Central Asia, where the remnants of a number of Turkic-speaking tribes regrouped following a series of military defeats at the hands of the Chinese and other non-Turkic peoples, where they were trapped for four centuries. Under the leadership of Bumin Khan (died c. 552), they expanded and founded what has come to be known as the Göktürk Empire. According to legend, they were able to leave Ergenekon when a blacksmith created a passage by melting rock, allowing the grey wolf named Asena to lead them out.[41]

Among the favorite European authors of the Pan-Turkists were Nietzsche and Gobineau.[42] According to historian Marc David Baer, the Young Turks “wholeheartedly embraced theories of race, although they rearranged the hierarchies to place Turks on top. By 1906, Turkish nationalism based on the pseudoscientific race theories of Europe had become the guiding ideology of the CUP."[43] Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks expanded on the ambitions of Pan-Turkism and tried to replace the lost legacy with a new Turkish commonwealth. The legend of Agartha was therefore promulgated by Kemal Ataturk (c. 1881 – 1938), the founding father of the Republic of Turkey, who sought to create a sense of nationalism to replace the religion of Islam as the primary identity of the new Turkish secular regime.[44] In Salonika, Greece, the heartland of the Dönmeh community, Turkish Freemasonry and the Young Turks, many Jews claimed that Ataturk was a Dönmeh.[45]

Mandatory Palestine

From without, the final dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate was accomplished by exploiting the treachery of the Arab Muslims of the Hijaz, who rose up in a large-scale insurrection, known as the Arab Revolt. Based on the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence, exchanged between Henry McMahon of the United Kingdom and Hussein bin Ali of the Kingdom of Hejaz, the rebellion against the Ottoman Empire was officially initiated at Mecca on June 10, 1916. The British government had promised to recognize an independent and unified Arab state stretching from Aleppo to Aden. Led by Hussein and the Hashemites with backing from the British, the Arabs successfully fought and expelled the Ottoman military presence from much of the Hejaz and Transjordan. By 1918, the rebels had captured Damascus and proclaimed the Arab Kingdom of Syria, a short-lived monarchy that was led by Hussein’s son Faisal I. However, the British betrayed their Arab allies, having secretly signed the Sykes–Picot Agreement with France. Instead, the Arab-majority Ottoman territories of the Middle East were broken up into a number of League of Nations mandates, jointly controlled by the British and the French. The agreement allocated to the UK control of what is today southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq, and an additional small area that included the ports of Haifa and Acre to allow access to the Mediterranean. France was to control southeastern Turkey, the Kurdistan Region, Syria and Lebanon.

The British Foreign Office had set up a special branch for Jewish propaganda within the Department of Information, under the direction of an active Zionist, Albert Montefiore Hyamson (1875 – 1954). In April 1917, Hyamson was made the editor of The Zionist Review, the newspaper published by the British Zionist Federation. In October of that year, Jabotinsky proposed a Jewish Bureau for the UK government’s Department of Information, however as Jabotinsky was occupied with organizing the Jewish Legion, the role fell to Hyamson. His work at the Bureau involved distributing propaganda materials to Jewish communities around the world through local Zionist organizations and other intermediaries, while leaflets containing the text of the Balfour Declaration were dropped over German and Austrian territory. After the capture of Jerusalem in December, 1917, pamphlets were circulated among Jewish troops in the German and Austrian armies, which read:

Jerusalem has fallen! The hour of Jewish redemption has arrived… Palestine must be the national home of the Jewish people once more… The Allies are giving the land of Israel to the people of Israel. Every loyal Jewish heart is now filled with joy for this great victory. Will you join them and help to build a Jewish homeland in Palestine?... Stop fighting the Allies, who are fighting for you, for all Jews, for the freedom of all small nations. Remember! An Allied victory means the Jewish people’s return to Zion.[46]

Jabotinsky’s main demand was the creation of Greater Israel, which the Revisionists equated to the whole territory covered by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, including Transjordan. In its early years, under Jabotinsky’s leadership, Revisionist Zionism was focused on gaining support from Britain for settlement. Jabotinsky expressed this ideology as “every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only active retaliation would deter the Arab and the British; only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state.”[47] Jabotinsky openly acknowledge his Zionist agenda as a colonial one:

[It is the] iron law of every colonizing movement, a law which knows of no exceptions, a law which existed in all times and under all circumstances. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else–or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempts to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not “difficult,” not “dangerous” but impossible!... Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot—or else I am through with playing at colonization.[48]

Leo Amery encouraged Jabotinsky in the formation of the Jewish Legion for the British Army, a group primarily of Zionist volunteers, assisted in the British conquest of Palestine. In November 1914, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi proposed to the Ottoman commander in Jerusalem that a Jewish Legion could be raised to fight with the Ottoman Army. The proposal was approved and training began but was soon cancelled by Djemal Pasha, who became known for persecuting Zionists. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi were among thousands of Jews deported. In February 1915, a small committee in Alexandria approved a plan of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Joseph Trumpeldor (1880 – 1920) to form a military unit from Russian Jewish émigrés from Palestine that would participate in the British effort to seize Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. The British commander General Maxwell said he was unable, under the Army Act, to enlist foreign nationals as fighting troops, but that he could form them into a volunteer transport Mule Corps. Jabotinsky rejected the idea and left for Europe to seek other support for a Jewish unit, but Trumpeldor accepted it and began recruiting 650 volunteers from among the local Jews in Egypt and those who had been deported there by the Ottomans in the previous year, which the British Army formed of them into the Zion Mule Corps. 562 served in the Gallipoli Campaign. Almost all the members of the Jewish regiments were discharged immediately after the end of the First World War in November 1918. Some of them returned to their respective countries, others settled in Palestine to realize their Zionist aspirations, among them the future first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion.

On 25 April 1920, the Principal Allied Powers agreed at the San Remo conference to allocate the Ottoman territories to the victorious powers and assigned Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq as Mandates to Britain, with the Balfour Declaration being incorporated into the Palestine Mandate. The leaders of the Zionist Commission, founded in 1918 and headed by Weizmann, had contributed to the drafting of the Mandate.[49]Arab opposition to British rule and Jewish immigration led to the 1920 Palestine riots and the formation of a Jewish militia known as the Haganah (“The Defense”), from which the Irgun and Lehi paramilitaries would later split off. In 1922, the League of Nations granted Britain the Mandate for Palestine under terms which included the Balfour Declaration with its promise to the Jews, and with similar provisions regarding the Arab Palestinians.

The Haganah came under the control of the Jewish Agency for Israel, formerly known as the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the largest Jewish non-profit organization in the world. It was established in 1929 as the operative branch of the World Zionist Organization (WZO). Chaim Weizmann was the leader of both the WZO and the Palestine Zionist Executive until 1929. The Palestine Zionist Executive was charged with facilitating Jewish immigration to Palestine, land purchase, and planning the general policies of the Zionist leadership. It ran schools and hospitals, and formed the Haganah. In 1921, Jabotinsky was elected to the executive of the agency, but he resigned in 1923, accusing Weizmann of not being vigorous enough with the Mandatory Government.[50]

After his split with Weizmann, Jabotinsky established a new revisionist party called Alliance of Revisionists-Zionists and its Zionist youth paramilitary organization Betar. From 1923, Jabotinsky was editor of the revived Jewish weekly Rassvet (“Dawn”), published first in Berlin, then in Paris, where he served as a column writer at the Posaldina Novosti, the most popular Russian exile newspaper in Paris, where he worked closely with some of the members of the Northern Star Masonic lodge. Following the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, all the Masonic lodges in Russia were closed and their members were exiled or fled from Russia. Members of Northern Star lodge met again in Paris and were part of the Russian exile community in Paris. Jabotinsky was asked to join and he agreed.[51]

Jewish National Council (JNC)

The Jewish National Council (JNC), also known as the Jewish People’s Council, was the main national executive organ of the Assembly of Representatives of the Jewish community (Yishuv) within Mandatory Palestine. The Assembly of Representatives was the elected parliamentary assembly of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine, established on April 19, 1920. The Assembly met once a year to elect the executive body, the Jewish National Council, which was responsible for education, local government, welfare, security and defense. Since 1928, the JNC was also the official representative of the Yishuv to the British Mandate government. It operated until 1948, when its functions were passed to the newly-established state of Israel.

The first chairman of the Jewish National Council (JNC) was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865 – 1935), the spiritual father of Religious Zionism, and the first Chief Rabbi of Mandate Palestine. Kook’s maternal grandfather was a follower of the Kapust branch of the Hasidic movement, founded by the son of the third rebbe of Chabad, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (1789 – 1866), also known as the Tzemach Tzedek, and the third rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic movement. The ideas of Rabbi Luria, explain Shahak and Mezvinsky, also greatly influenced Rabbi Kook and his son Zwi Yehuda Kook (1891 – 1982), who also became a prominent ultranationalist Orthodox rabbi. Kook was a mystical thinker who drew heavily on Kabbalistic notions through his own poetic terminology. His writings are concerned with fusing the false divisions between sacred and secular, rational and mystical, legal and imaginative. Kook drew heavily on Kabbalistic notions through his own poetic terminology. His writings are concerned with fusing the false divisions between sacred and secular, rational and mystical, legal and imaginative.

Rabbi Kook, who is considered one of the first exponents of Religious Zionism, justified Zionism according to Jewish law, and urged young religious Jews to support efforts to settle the land, and the secular Labour Zionists to give more consideration to the religion of Judaism. Religious Jews tended to disapprove of the Zionists because many of them were secular Jews or atheists, taking their cue from Marxism. Religious Zionists believe that the real justification for the colonization of Land of Israel is God’s promise to the ancient Israelites. The ideology of the Rabbi Kook and his son Yehuda, which is both eschatological and messianic, resembling similar expectations among Christians and Muslims, assumes the imminent coming of the Messiah and asserts that the Jews, aided by God, will thereafter triumph over the non-Jews and rule over them forever. All current political developments will either accelerate his arrival or postpone it. The sins of the Jews, particularly a lack of faith, could postpone the advent of the Messiah. That delay, however, will be brief in duration, because even the worst sins of the Jews will not deter the course of Redemption. The two world wars, the Holocaust and other calamities that have recently afflicted the Jews are examples of punishment. The elder Rabbi Kook did not withhold his approval over the loss of lives in World War I, explained that the death toll was necessary “in order to begin to break Satan’s Power.”[52]

Wahhabism

In an additional act of treachery, the British also intended to remove Sharif Hussein and have the Hijaz ruled instead by their long-standing Wahhabi ally Ibn Saud, who had no interest in the Caliphate. While the Hashemites, Hussein, Faisal and Abdullah, were backed by the Arab Bureau, their enemy Ibn Saud was also receiving British backing. The first formal treaty between Ibn Saud and the British had been signed in 1915. Although the Saudis present themselves to the world as Sunnis and defenders of the Islamic faith, they are in fac followers of a deviant set known as Wahhabism, founded in the eighteenth century by a British agent name Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab (c. 1703 – 1792), who colluded with Ibn Saud’s ancestor, also known as Ibn (1687 – 1765), to create the First Saudi State, which was defeated by the forces of the Ottoman Empire in 1818.

The US Department of Defense released a translation of an Iraqi intelligence document in September 2002, titled “The Emergence of Wahhabism and its Historical Roots,” which indicates that Abdul Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, and his sponsor ibn Saud, who created the Saudi dynasty that now rules Saudi Arabia, were reported by several sources as being secretly of Jewish origin.[53] The Iraqi intelligence documents also resort to the Hempher Memoirs, and, citing numerous Arabic sources, connect Wahhab and Ibn Saud with the Dönmeh of Turkey. Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, wrote Dr. Mustafa Turan in The Dönmeh Jews, was a descendant of a family of Dönmeh.[54] Turan maintains that Abdul Wahhab’s grandfather, Sulayman was actually Shulman, having belonged to the Jewish community of Bursa in Turkey. From there he settled in Damascus where he feigned Islam but was apparently expelled for practicing sorcery. He then fled to Egypt, where he again faced condemnation and so made his way to the Hijaz, in the western portion of the Arabian Peninsula, where he got married and fathered Abdul Wahhab’s father. The same is claimed in The Dönmeh Jews and the Origin of the Saudi Wahabis, by Rifat Salim Kabar.[55]

The Aniza tribe—to which the Saudis as well as the ruling Sabah family of Kuwait belong—originally issued from Khaybar in Arabia, which was initially inhabited by Jews before Islam. A report of the Saudi family also being of Jewish ancestry was published by Mohammad Sakher, who, it is claimed, was ordered killed by the Saudi regime for his revelations. The Wahabi Movement/The Truth and Roots, by Abdul Wahhab Ibrahim al-Shammari, relates a similar account to Sakher’s according to which Ibn Saud is apparently descended from Mordechai bin Ibrahim bin Mushi, a Jewish merchant from Basra. Apparently, when this Mordechai was approached by members from the Arabian tribe of Aniza, he then claimed to be one of them and traveled with them to Najd where his name became Markhan bin Ibrahim bin Musa.[56]

British collusion in Wahhab’s mission is detailed in a work that appeared in the 1970s entitled Memoirs of Mr. Hempher. The work has been dismissed by critics as a hoax, but already in 1888, Ayyub Sabri Pasha, a well-known Ottoman writer and Turkish naval admiral who served the Ottoman army in the Arabian Peninsula, recounted Abdul Wahhab’s association and plotting with a British spy named Hempher, who “inspired in him the tricks and lies that he had learned from the British Ministry of the Commonwealth.”[57] Whatever the case may be, the absurdity of Abdul Wahhab’s claims and the direction and ramifications of his pronouncements point to the fact that he was, in one way or another, in the service of British colonialism. Most importantly, despite their fervent disavowals, the mission of the Wahhabis only managed to survive against adversity from other Muslims through British support.

Muslim Brotherhood

Assigned to assist him was Harry St. John “Jack” Philby, a protégé of E.G. Browne. Philby, who made a feigned conversion to Islam, taking on the name “Abdullah,” was responsible for conveying to Ibn Saud his monthly retainer of £5,000. Philby also escorted Ibn Saud’s teenage son, the future King Faisal, on a tour of London, including a visit to E.G. Bowne and Scawen Blunt, who worked closely with Jamal ud Din al Afghani.[58] Then, assisted with British support, Ibn Saud defeated Hussein in 1924. The conquest of Arabia by the Wahhabis, however, came at the cost of 400,000 killed and wounded. Cities such as Taif, Burayda, and al Hufa suffered all-out massacres carried out by the Ikhwan, Ibn Saud’s notorious Wahhabi henchmen. The governors of the various provinces appointed by Ibn Saud are said to have carried out 40,000 public executions and 350,000 amputations. Ibn Saud’s cousin, Abdullah ibn Musallim ibn Jilawi, the most brutal among the family, set about subjugating the Shia population, by executing thousands.

Afghani and his disciple Mohammed Abduh had long supported the plan of the British to create an Arab Caliphate to replace the Ottoman one. Rashid Rida, another Freemason who after the death of Afghani in 1897, and Abduh in 1905, assumed the leadership of the Salafi movement, had also supported the plot. Therefore, after a visit to the newly conquered Arabian Peninsula, Rida did his part to legitimize Ibn Saud’s criminal usurpation of power in the eyes of the world’s Muslims, by publishing a work praising Ibn Saud as the “savior” of the Holy sites, a practitioner of “authentic” Islamic rule and two years later produced an anthology of Wahhabi treatises.

The organization primarily responsible for the perpetration of most acts of terrorism in the name of Islam in the twentieth century, the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan al Muslimeen, was created in 1928 by Hassan al Banna (1906 – 1949), a student of Abduh’s pupil, Rashid Rida, in reaction to the 1924 abolition of the caliphate. As discovered by John Loftus, former US government prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer, when he was allowed to peruse CIA archives, al Banna had been recruited in the 1930s by Hitler to establish an arm of German intelligence in Egypt.[59] Banna’s Brotherhood was also established with a grant from England’s Suez Canal Company in 1928, and over the following quarter century would be at the disposal of British diplomats and MI6 as a tool of British policy.[60] To get the Brotherhood started, the Suez Canal Company helped Banna build a mosque in Ismaillia, that would serve as its headquarters and base of operations, according to Richard Mitchell’s The Society of the Muslim Brothers. The Suez Canal was pivotal to the British as the route to its prized colony, India, and in 1928 Ismailia also housed not only the company’s offices but a major British military base built during WWI.

In 1933, Ibn Saud negotiated a sixty-year contract that allowed California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC), an affiliate of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of California (SOCAL), to have exclusive rights to explore and extract oil.[61] The deal was negotiated with the assistance of the future head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, while at Sullivan & Cromwell, and Jack Philby.[62] According to John Loftus and Mark Aarons, Dulles and Philby, together with Ibn Saud, “were the secret source of oil, wealth, and international influence that worked behind the scenes to put Hitler onto the world stage.”[63] In 1924, Dulles had spelled out in an official State Department communication his interest in making use of oil exploration as a cover for intelligence gathering. In 1936, Socal and Texaco created a partnership which would later be named the Arabian-American Oil Company, or Aramco. To Socal and Texaco were later added Exxon and Mobil. Together, with the remaining partners of the Seven Sisters, this cartel controlled the price of oil, along with the Saudi royal family, who managed the world’s largest source of petroleum. Being a country that is said to “belong” to the royal family and is named for them, the lines between state assets and the personal wealth of senior princes are often blurred.

[1] Joseph Gorny. The British Labour Movement and Zionism: 1917–1948 (London: Frank Cass), Ch.1.

[2] Walter Nimocks. Milner’s young men: the “kindergarten” in Edwardian Imperial affairs (Durham: Duke University, 1968), p. 145.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Lichtheim. Rückkehr, pp. 366ff. Cited in Nicosia. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 4.

[6] Nicosia. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 3.

[7] William L. Cleveland & Martin Bunton. A History of the Modern Middle East (Avalon Publishing, 2016), p. 229.

[8] Nahum Sokolow. History of Zionism: 1600–1918 (Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1919), p. xxxix.

[9] Cited in Josef Cohn. England und Palastina (Berlin, 1931), p. 69.

[10] Dan Cohn-Sherbok. Introduction to Zionism and Israel: From Ideology to History (A&C Black, 2011).

[11] Theodor Herzl. The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl. Ed. Raphael Patai (New York: The Herzl Press, 1960).

[12] Isaiah Friedman. “Herzl, Theodor.” Encyclopaedia Judaica. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik. 2nd ed. Vol. 9.

[13] Nicosia. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 3.

[14] Jonathan Schneer. The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Random House, (2010), pp. 129–130,

[15] History of Western Civilization II. Ch. 31 The Middle East after the Ottoman Empire. Retrieved from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldhistory2/chapter/the-united-kingdom-in-the-middle-east/

[16] Chaim Weizmann. The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann: August 1898 – July 1931 (Transaction Publishers, 1983), p. 122–124.

[17] John Bowle. Viscount Samuel: A Biography (V. Gollancz, 1957), pp. 168–175.

[18] Sahar Huneidi. A Broken Trust: Sir Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians (I.B.Tauris, 2001),, p. 261.

[19] Ibid., p. 83.

[20] John Cooper. The Unexpected Story of Nathaniel Rothschild (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), p. 148.

[21] David Lloyd George. War Memoirs of David Lloyd George: 1915–1916. Vol. II (AMS Press, 1933), p. 50.

[22] Danny Gutwein. “The Politics of the Balfour Declaration: Nationalism, Imperialism and the Limits of Zionist-British Cooperation.” Journal of Israeli History. 35: 2 (2016), pp. 117–152.

[23] “Famous Freemasons.” Blackpool Group of Lodges and Chapters. (December 10, 2015). Retrieved from http://blackpool.westlancsfreemasons.org.uk/about-freemasonry/famous-masons/

[24] Walter Nimocks. Milner’s young men: the “kindergarten” in Edwardian Imperial affairs (Durham: Duke University, 1968), p. 145.

[25] John Grigg. Lloyd George: War Leader, 1916-1918 (Faber & Faber, 2013).

[26] Michael D. Berdine. Redrawing the Middle East: Sir Mark Sykes, Imperialism and the Sykes-Picot Agreement (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), p. 173.

[27] Schneer. “How Anti-Semitism Helped Create Israel.”

[28] Ibid., p. 209.

[29] Jacob de Haas. Louis D(embitz) Brandeis (Bloch, 1929), pp. 89–90.

[30] Maryanne A. Rhett. The Global History of the Balfour Declaration: Declared Nation (Routledge, 2015), p. 16.

[31] Burton A. Boxerman. The United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia. Anne Cipriano Venzon (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 800.

[32] Schneer. “How Anti-Semitism Helped Create Israel.”

[33] Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini, p. 140.

[34] Joseph Brewda. “Palmerston launches Young Turks to permanently control Middle East.”

[35] “Zeev Jabotinsky.” Jabotinsky Institute in Israel. Retrieved from http://en.jabotinsky.org/zeev-jabotinsky/life-story/public-activity/

[36] Joseph B. Schechtman. The Life and Times of Vladimir Jabotinsky: Rebel and statesman (SP Books, 1986), p. 150.

[37] Baer. The Dönme.

[38] H. Brailsford. Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future (Methuen & Co., London, 1906) p. 244 Retrieved from http://www.promacedonia.org/en/hb/hb_8_4.html#Bektashis

[39] Richard Davey. The Sultan and His Subjects [1897] (Gorgias Press LLC, 2001), p. 65.

[40] Baer. The Dönme.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Luhrssen. Hammer of the Gods, p. 53.

[43] Baer. The Dönme.

[44] Gareth Jenkins. “Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation” (Silk Road Studies, August 2009).

[45] Livingstone. Terrorism and the Illuminati, p. 178

[46] Ingrams. Palestine Papers, p. 19. Cited in Nicosia. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 5.

[47] Howard Sachar. A History of the State of Israel, pp. 265–266

[48] Lenni Brenner. The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir (London, Zed Books, 1984), p. 78.

[49] Theodor Herzl. The Jewish State (New York: Dover Publications, 1988).

[50] “Pre-State Israel: Palestine During World War I.” Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/palestine-during-world-war-i

[51] Daniel Galily. “Zionist Political Philosopher Ze’ev Jabotinsky as a Freemason.” 3rd International e-Conference on Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. Retrieved from http://centerprode.com/conferences/3IeCSHSS.html

[52] Shahak & Mezvinsky. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, p. 65.

[53] Federation of American Scientists. Retrieved from http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/iraqi/wahhabi.pdf

[54] Correspondence, dated 24 Sep 2002, within the General Military Intelligence directorate (GMID), regarding a research study titled, “The Emergence of AI-Wahhabiyyah Movement and its Historical Roots.” Defense Intelligence Agency. Document #: ISGQ-2003-00046659.

[55] Ibid.

[56] “The Saudi Dynasty: From where is it? And who is the real ancestor of this family?” Retrieved from http://www.fortunecity.com/boozers/bridge/632/history.html

[57] Ayyub Sabri Pasha. Part Two: The Beginnings and Spread of Wahhabism.

[58] Ibid., p. 41.

[59] “Islamic Terrorism’s Links To Nazi Fascism.” AINA, July 5, 2007. Retrieved from http://www.aina.org/news/2007070595517.htm

[60] Dreyfuss. Devil’s Game, p. 49 and 51.

[61] John Loftus & Mark Aarons. The secret war against the Jews: how western espionage betrayed the Jewish people (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994). p. 38.

[62] Ibid.

[63] Ibid.