Part one of the essay:
1. The rise of nationalism after the Dual Revolutions
2. The creation of Zionism as a nationalist movement
3. The anti-immigration law of Great Britain (1905)

Part two of the essay: (this part)
4. The Christian Zionist movement in Great Britain
5. World War 1 and the Balfour Declaration
6. The anti-immigration law of the United States (1924)
7. Naziism, World War 2 and the Holocaust
8. Conclusion

This is part two of this essay, which is divided in two for reasons of length.

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3.4 Christian Zionism in Great Britain

After one and a half essays, we finally return to the theme of the first essay: montheism and rigorism. It looks like Evangelical Britons were at the root of the promotion of Herzl's Zionism. Just like today's religious zealot nutbags, they drove the political agenda of a modern state based on questionable religious motives. I was not up on the latest research in this area. But, by reading the Wikipedia article on the Balfour Declaration (more on that later), I found a 2010 book that lays it out in some detail.

Donald M. Lewis, The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xiii + 365 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-51518-4.

Lewis situates Christian Zionism within the context of Protestant theology and evangelical philosemitism, and that philosemitism is further contextualized by Lewis in this manner: “Central to the argument of this book is the thesis that British evangelical interest in the Jews was part and parcel of a wider process of evangelical identity construction that took a decisive turn in the early nineteenth century” (p. 12). Why then did these British thinkers identify with and seek to protect Jews in England and elsewhere? Lewis links this sense of identification to two related ideals: first, that Britain needed to live up to its sense of self as a biblical, elect nation; second, that the Jews of the time provided a “visible historic link” to the biblical past (p. 13).

Chapter 2, “Shaftesbury and the Jews,” focuses on Lord Ashley, the Earl of Shaftesbury, “best remembered as Britain’s most prominent social reformer as well as its quintessential evangelical lay leader.” Lewis’s contribution to Lord Ashley’s story, a story already  told by many historians of nineteenth-century British political life, is to show us how he became “the leading proponent of Christian Zionism in the nineteenth century and the first politician of stature to attempt to prepare the way for Jews to establish a homeland in Palestine” (p. 107). Lewis reminds us that Shaftesbury’s Zionism sprang from evangelical philosemitism. He and his fellow evangelicals aimed “to establish as part of British national identity a unique responsibility toward ‘God’s chosen people’” (p. 188). A Tory member of Parliament for decades and later a member of the House of Lords, Shaftesbury was not a cabinet member and did not directly influence British foreign policy. But he was closely linked, by family and friendship, with an English statesman who had great influence in domestic and foreign affairs. This was Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston, foreign secretary from 1830 to 1841 and prime minister from 1855 to 1865. For political reasons more than for religious reasons, Palmerston too became an advocate for Jewish restoration. Among other factors that came into play in his deliberations about British support for Jewish return was “the view that the Jews could be useful in buttressing the collapsing Ottoman Empire, thus helping to accomplish the key object of British foreign policy in the area” (p. 185)...

Lewis makes the case that “both the religious and ethnic backgrounds of the British War Cabinet (of World War One) deserve far more attention than historians have hither to given” (p. 332). Lewis demonstrates that this cabinet, dominated by non-English members from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Cape Colony (South Africa), was deeply influenced by evangelicism: “The influence of the religious culture that had nurtured them disposed to think of the Jews as a ‘people’ a ‘race’ and ‘a nation’ and inclined towards the idea of a Jewish homeland.” More so, these cabinet members were influenced by the idea that “Britain had a special role in enabling this to happen” (p. 334). Against this background, the decision to issue the Balfour Declaration and later to assume the Palestine mandate, seem as firmly linked to religious history as to diplomatic history. 

Goldman on Lewis, 'The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland'

Another review of this book on the same website.

NOTE: These reviews are from H-Judaic, the Jewish Studies Network, an affiliate of Hebrew College and Shamash.

The bottom line here: there was a strong strain of religiosity behind the British elite's embrace of Zionism. And, by implication, that embrace was unique to Great Britain, which was looking to buttress its place as a unique and god-chosen country. (Gee, where have I heard that recently?)

3.5 World War 1 and the Balfour Declaration

As we have just seen, the "Jewish Question" was being considered in Great Britain decades before the Nazis proposed their Final Solution. However, World War 1 intervened. The Great War strained the societies of all countries involved. As it dragged on, increasingly bizarre and fantastical strategies for victory were bandied about. It was this atmosphere that brought forth the Balfour Declaration.

Thus the view from Whitehall early in 1916: If defeat was not imminent, neither was victory; and the outcome of the war of attrition on the Western Front could not be predicted. The colossal forces in a death-grip across Europe and in Eurasia appeared to have canceled each other out. Only the addition of significant new forces on one side or the other seemed likely to tip the scale. Britain's willingness, beginning early in 1916, to explore seriously some kind of arrangement with "world Jewry" or "Great Jewry" must be understood in this context.

At a War Cabinet meeting, held on 31 October 1917, Balfour suggested that a declaration favourable to Zionist aspirations would allow Great Britain "to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America." The cabinet believed that expressing support would appeal to Jews in Germany and America, and help the war effort;[46] they also hoped to encourage support from the large Jewish population in Russia.

According to James Renton, Senior Lecturer at Edge Hill University, and author of The Zionist Masquerade: the Birth of the Anglo-Zionist Alliance: 1914–1918, Prime Minister David Lloyd George of the United Kingdom supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine because "it would help secure post-war British control of Palestine, which was strategically important as a buffer to Egypt and the Suez Canal."

Goldman on Lewis, 'The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland'

3.5.1 Jewish objections to the Balfour Declaration

Edwin Samuel Montagu was the only Jewish member of the cabinet headed by David Lloyd George, to which Balfour belonged, and only the third Jewish minister in British history. Here is how he commented on the draft of the Balfour letter when he received it in August 1917: “I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic and in result will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world.”

Montagu commented that “it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the "national home of the Jewish people". I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine.”

He then added – ironically, as he probably believed it to be: “Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.” This last sentence proved prescient indeed, as the granting of citizenship in the state of Israel was to become inseparably linked with religious identification as Jewish.

Montagu was thus putting his finger on the complementarity between the anti-Semitic desire to get rid of the Jews and the Zionist project of sending all Jews to Palestine. He knew very well this fact...: that the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour himself was influenced by the anti-Semitic current known as “Christian Zionism”, the current that supports the “return” of the Jews to Palestine. The true goal of this support – undeclared in most cases but sometimes openly stated – is to get rid of Jewish presence in Christian-majority lands. Christian Zionists see in the Jews’ “return” to Palestine a fulfilment of the condition of the Second Coming of the Christ, which will be followed by the Last Judgment condemning all Jews to eternal suffering in Hell, unless they convert to Christianity. This same current constitutes nowadays in the USA the staunchest supporter of Zionism in general and of the Zionist right in particular.

The Jewish Minister was particularly aware of the fact that the Zionists were counting on the anti-Semites for the fulfillment of their project of establishing a Zionist state in Palestine.

- Gilbert Achcar, Zionism, anti-semitism, and the Balfour Declaration

NOTE: This is a Trotskyite website (yucch!), and the author is on many people's shit lists.

Here is the 1918 text of the objection from the Jewish Social-Democratic Organisation:

Jewish Social-Democrats and Zionism, The Call, 27 June 1918, p. 3

3.6. The anti-immigration law of the United States (1924) [Johnson-Reed]

Even though the door for Jewish emigration to the UK was closed, and the door to Palestine was open, most Jews preferred to go to the United States. (Bernie Sanders' father was one such emigre, arriving in 1921.) The closing of the US door was the final nail in the coffin of European Jewry.

The Immigration Act of 1924 [Johnson-Reed] limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia…. In all of its parts, the most basic purpose of the 1924 Immigration Act was to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity. (The act was revised in 1952.)

- The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act)

In its intention and effect, the law, which passed the houses of Congress with overwhelming majorities, blocked people from Southern and Eastern Europe, Catholics, Arabs, and Jews. A. James Rudin wrote in the WaPo in 2014:

The bill’s co-sponsor, U.S. Rep. Albert Johnson, R-Wash., said the law would block “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions…” from entering America. Sen. David Reed, R-Pa., the other co-sponsor, represented “those of us who are interested in keeping American stock up to the highest standard — that is, the people who were born here.” Southern and Eastern Europeans (many of them Catholics and Jews), he believed, “arrive sick and starving and therefore less capable of contributing to the American economy, and unable to adapt to American culture.”

- James Rudin, Hatred of Immigrants has a long history (Washington Post)

Not much new here: white supremacy, fear of infection/disease, enough racism to be praised by Hitler. As with Great Britain, the feared and hated "other" for a WASP country were Eastern European Jews and Italian Catholics. Unsurprisingly, Hitler praised the act as model legislation for keeping a population racially pure.

But the combined impact of closing the immigration door to the US and the UK was the crucial pivot on which the creation of the Jewish state turned.

Could the Holocaust have occurred if Jews had been free to move to America in the interwar period?...Had the surviving Jews of Central and Eastern Europe not become displaced by the Nazis because they had been living safely in America since the 1920s, the campaign for a Jewish State in Palestine would have certainly flopped. Think about it: No UN General Assembly recommendation for partition. No Nakba. No Palestinian refugees...

Not to put too fine a point on it, but we could blame...Woodrow Wilson. It was he who took the United States into World War I, ...Not a bad day’s work in the Oval Office. Let it sink in: without Wilson’s war, no Versailles Treaty; without the Versailles Treaty, no Hitler; without Hitler, no Holocaust; without the Holocaust, no State of Israel; without the State of Israel, well, you get the idea. I’m not saying everything today would be sweetness and light in the Middle East, of course. The Great Powers would have still wanted to control the oil, but the major source of strife and war in that region — not to mention immeasurable domestic political corruption — would not have materialized.

- Sheldon Richman, How an Anti-Semitic American Law Helped to Create the State of Israel and a Whole Lot of Trouble

NOTE: Richman is the Executive Editor of the Libertarian Institue.

One final point made by this Libertarian author reinforces my earlier comments about Zionism versus Bundism. That is, even in 1924, most Jews were not interested in Zionism and Palestine.

it must be recalled (if not learned) that in 1924 very few Jews had any interest in Palestine. The orthodox Jews, believing that God had expelled the Jews from the Holy Land (the Babylonian exile), thought it the height of impertinence for any mere mortal to decide when the Jews should return. That was up to God. They certainly were not going to take their lead from atheist so-called Jews from Eastern Europe, such as David Ben-Gurion. True, some old orthodox men went to the Holy Land to die (planning on resurrection later) or to await mashiach (messiah). But they did not seek the creation of a political entity — a Jewish State. That was the furthest thing from their minds. In (Shlomo) Sand’s words, it was a Holy Land, not a Homeland. “Next year in Jerusalem” was not a statement from a political program. It was a messianic hope.

On the other hand, Reform Judaism was organized in opposition to the then-small Zionist movement, which in the Reform view was counterfeit, idolatrous “Judaism” in which (purported) blood and soil replaced God, Torah, and the universalism of the great prophets. Reform Jews explicitly rejected that they were part of a Diaspora. They believed that Judaism in fact represented a worldwide religious community comprising many different citizens of many different countries of many different cultures — not a distinct racial or ethnic entity. (“Jewish blood” was of interest only to anti-Semites.) Indeed, earlier Reform Jews would have opposed the formation of the State of Israel even had Palestine been a “land without a people” — which of course it was not.

As the Reform founders put in the Pittsburgh Platform (1885): We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.

- Sheldon Richman, How an Anti-Semitic American Law Helped to Create the State of Israel and a Whole Lot of Trouble

3.7. Naziism, World War 2, and the Holocaust

Naziism was a giant historical contingency. It required a defeated Germany. It required that Germany to be wracked by hyperinflation (1924) and the Great Depression (1929). It required the bizarre Manichaean (there's that word again) theology of Ariosophy. Ariosophy was an offshoot of the equally bizarre Theosophy of Madame Helena Blavatsky , who introduced the Tibetan Buddhist symbol of the swastika to the West and invented the entire "root race" concept that finished up in the demonization of Jews. (Madame Blavatsky's particular brand of spiritualism played well among the American, British, and Czarist Russian elites.) Finally, it required a politically gifted, hysterical shaman - Adolf Hitler - who turned Ariosophy into Naziism. (You can think of Naziism as a pagan, Manichaean religious fundamentalist nationalism.)

Lacking these things, Naziism, and thus WW2 and the Holocaust would never have happened. And without the Holocaust, there would never have been enough collective Western guilt to support the Zionist plan to take over Palestine. Without the Holocaust murdering most of the organized opponents of Zionism and shaming those that survived, the argument over Zionism might have taken into account the tendency of a violent faction of Zionism to support anyone driving Jews to Palestine, be he Balfour or be he Mussolini.

In the 1930s, a growing rightwing Zionist movement latched onto Benito Mussolini for much the same reason – because he wished to purify Italy just as they wished to purify Palestine.  With Mussolini’s permission, a rightwing Zionist leader named Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky opened a training school in Civitavecchia, some 40 miles west of Rome. 

Mussolini praised Jabotinsky as a good fascist in 1935 while Abba Ahimeir, a leader of the Palestinian branch of Jabotinsky’s “Revisionist” movement, wrote a regular newspaper column entitled “Diary of a Fascist.” Ahimeir’s editor was Benzion Netanyahu, father of the current prime minister, who would later become Jabotinsky’s personal assistant.  In Poland, the leader of the Revisionists was a young man named Mieczslaw Biegun, better known by the Hebrew name Menachem Begin, who would serve as Israeli prime minister from 1977 to 1983.

When Begin embarked on a U.S. speaking tour in 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, and some two dozen other Jewish intellectuals sent a letter to the The New York Times denouncing his movement as “akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties,” one that “preache[s] an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.”

- Daniel Lazare, Netanyahu’s Tolerance for Anti-Semitism Goes Back 120 Years

The whole terrorism connection with the founding of Israel has certainly been shut down. Any mention of it brings shouts of "anti-Semitism". But it was quite real. The Irgun militants used Jabotinsky's doctrine. The even more radical Lehi (Stern Gang) went so far as to seek alliances with the fascists.

Lehi (Hebrew pronunciation: [ˈleχi]; Hebrew: לח"י – לוחמי חרות ישראל‎ Lohamei Herut Israel – Lehi, "Fighters for the Freedom of Israel – Lehi"), often known pejoratively as the Stern Gang, was a Zionist paramilitary organization founded by Avraham ("Yair") Stern in Mandatory Palestine. Its avowed aim was to evict the British authorities from Palestine by resort to force, allowing unrestricted immigration of Jews and the formation of a Jewish state, a "new totalitarian Hebrew republic". It was initially called the National Military Organization in Israel, upon being founded in August 1940, but was renamed Lehi one month later...

Lehi split from the Irgun militant group in 1940 in order to continue fighting the British during World War II. Lehi initially sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, offering to fight alongside them against the British in return for the transfer of all Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe to Palestine. Believing that Nazi Germany was a lesser enemy of the Jews than Britain, Lehi twice attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis. During World War II, it declared that it would establish a Jewish state based upon "nationalist and totalitarian principles". After Stern's death in 1942, the new leadership of Lehi began to move it towards support for Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. In 1944, Lehi officially declared its support for National Bolshevism. It said that its National Bolshevism involved an amalgamation of left-wing and right-wing political elements – Stern said Lehi incorporated elements of both the left and the right – however this change was unpopular and Lehi began to lose support as a result.

- Wikipedia, Lehi (militant group)

That's a bit of research that knocked me on my heels. I knew Premier Yitzhak Shamir was a member of the Stern Gang. I didn't realize that Netanyahu's father was Jabotinsky's PA. Wow.

I think we can all see where this went. The last 75 years of Israel were heavily determined by who survived the Holocaust, and that was a hard right faction that welcomed persecution of Jews so long as it happened anywhere but Palestine. And that Manichaean, tribalistic, bunch of rigorists who favored the ultra-Orthodox have just declared the country to be a racist theocracy. No wonder "Zionism" is on the Israeli "index".

3.8 CONCLUSION

Its impossible to sum up 13,000 words succinctly. So, here are some bullet points that are supported by the discussion and references in the five essays:

- In a nuclear age tribalist, rigorist monotheism is a danger to humanity.

- Judaism has all the issues that any monotheistic religion has, most prominently sects with rigorism and Manichaean theology.

- While the Dual Revolution emancipated Jews from the ghetto, it put them in an impossible bind with only emigrate or assimilate as choices.

- Zionism was one of many nationalist movements that was started during the period 1850-1900. It favored emigration.

- Zionism was supported by the white-supremicist Christian Zionists of Great Britain as a "solution" to their Jewish problem.

- There was much opposition to Zionism inside the Jewish community, from Bundists, from Reform Jews, from Orthodox Jews, and from thought leaders like Einstein and Arendt.

- This opposition proposed a "cultural" definition of Jewishness, as opposed to the Zionist territorial definition.

- The founders of Zionism were, by and large, atheists.

- The Jews were the victims of yet another Manichaean outburst - from Germans who bought into the racism inherent in Theosophy.

- There was a rightwing Zionism which actually encouraged countries to drive Jews out.

- The country of Israel has emerged from over 100 years of argumentation, going through several phases, including socialism, to arrive at its current rightwing, militaristic, and Manichaean anti-Islamic stance.

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I expect to get hammered for these essays, which are almost entirely historical in nature, and covering history that is at least 75 years old.

It really bothers me as a rational, fact-based person to be told that I can't use the word Zionism to describe the history of Israel. Despite the small tome I have just written, despite the fact the word has a Wikipedia entry , despite the fact there is World Zionist Organization, again cited uncontroversially on Wikipedia.

Must I conclude that Wikipedia is anti-Semitic?

And with that question, this pile of reference material just ends. Its just too messy to wrap up. If you persevered through all five essays, I hope you learned something. I sure did.