Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour [Paperback]

How did the Jews ever end up in such a situation? Where they really offered the land because of the guilt that was felt after the second world war? What was our role in it all? and while were on the subject what is anti-semitism all about anyway? Thank you B.T. this impartial account realy helped!

This book, Barbara Tuchman's first, is ancient; it first appeared in 1956. So, you might ask, what does an ancient tome like this have to teach the modern reader? Answer, a surprising amount. I had always thought that the story of the State of Israel started with the Dreyfus Affair and Theodor Herzl and his Zionist movement. How wrong I was. Mrs. Tuchman tells how, far from being merely a gesture to US financiers to get money to finance an enormously expensive war or as a thank-you for Zionist founder Chaim Weizman's acetone process (essential for cordite manufacture), the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was the culmination of centuries of British idealistic dreaming of bringing the Jews back to Palestine. It was fascinating to read of a sort of proto-Zionism 80 years before The Real Thing.

The British motives were mixed. Initially, they were completely religious (that a return would bring about the coming of the Messiah, naturally after the Jews had all converted to Anglicanism), but later became mixed with political (to guard the other side of the Suez Canal and the route to Empire). However, and I found this Mrs. Tuchman's most fascinating conclusion, the religious aspect never went away. Palestine was never a simple grab for empire; it was always combined with the concept that this new bit of Britain's overseas empire would be a homeland for a people who hadn't had one for nearly 1900 years. In addition, they thought that the energy and financial acumen of the Jews would transform the Middle East. This would naturally be to the advantage of the British, but it wasn't the only or even the main reason.

The problem was that the Balfour Declaration spoke of "a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine". Nobody said anything much about an independent state, and that is ultimately where the whole thing was to go off the rails. Herzl wanted such a state of course, but didn't say so too loudly, because the British, ultimately his most powerful backers, didn't want to hear it. In addition, most influential Jews on both sides of the Atlantic wanted assimilation and were often passionately anti-Zionist.

In the end, the Declaration was only ever a statement of policy, which could have been ignored. The thing that caused the problems was the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, and that couldn't be ignored. The British wanted it, got it, were stuck with it and in the end walked away from it. The Jews in Israel had to take matters into their own hands, with consequences that echo right down to the present day. Does Israel exist because of or in spite of the British? The verdict is open.

The book is typical Tuchman, an enjoyable, witty, informative, lively read, which passes on a good deal of information very pleasantly and painlessly. Mrs Tuchman is also refreshingly honest. She makes plain her pro-Israel sympathies (she contemplated continuing to 1948, but was so outraged by what she sees as British betrayal that it became a polemic and she tore it up). It is anyone's guess what she would think of the neighbourhood bully that is the present-day Israel, the one that totally ignores the other bit of the Balfour Declaration "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine".