Abstract
The Balfour Declaration was only considered to be a first step that would enable the British Government to entreat the sympathies of world Jewry, for the Entente war effort and a British Palestine. To that end, the Government quickly embarked upon an elaborate and extensive propaganda campaign. This endeavour was undertaken with the ever present advice and work of Britain’s Zionist supporters in London. Together, British officials and Zionists sought to create and disseminate the myth that the Jewish nation was about to be reborn in Palestine under British auspices, which would capture the Jewish imagination but would in no way commit the Government to anything beyond the vague terms of the Balfour Declaration. This was the sum of British policy towards the Zionist movement for the remainder of the war and the extent of the Anglo-Zionist alliance, as it was originally conceived by the British Government.
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Notes
Albert Hyamson, British Projects for the Restoration of the Jews (London: The British Palestine Committee, Publication No. 1, 1917).
See, for example, Albert Hyamson, Palestine: The Rebirth of an Ancient People (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1917).
Meiron and Susie Harries, The War Artists: British Official War Art of the Twentieth Century (London: Michael Joseph in association with The Imperial War Museum and the Tate Gallery, 1983), p. 7.
On the response of the Bolshevik leadership to British efforts at Zionist propaganda in Russia, see Ran Marom, ‘The Bolsheviks and the Balfour Declaration 1917–1920’, The Wiener Library Bulletin, 29, 37/38 (1976), pp. 20–29.
David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 5.
On the Zionist invention of the Jewish past as a means of endorsing Zionist ideology, see Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 13–36; Uri Ram, ‘Zionist Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish Nationhood: The Case of Ben Zion Dinur’, History and Memory, 7, 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 91–124
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, ‘Exile within Sovereignty: Toward a Critique of the “Negation of Exile” in Israeli Culture’ [Hebrew], Theory and Criticism, 4 (Fall 1993), pp. 23–55
Eli Lederhendler, ‘Interpreting Messianic Rhetoric in the Russian Haskalah and Early Zionism’, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 7 (1991), pp. 14–33
Albert Hyamson, Great Britain and the Jews (London: The Edinburgh Press, 1918)
On the widespread use of this analogy by Zionists in the wake of the Declaration, see Yaacov Shavit, ‘Cyrus King of Persia and the Return to Zion: A Case of Neglected Memory’, History and Memory, 2, 1 (Fall 1990), pp. 51–83.
See Asli Çirakman, From the ‘Terror of the world’ to the’ sick Man of Europe’: European Images of Ottoman Empire and Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth (New York and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002)
The irony of this development was that Herzl had publicly downplayed Ottoman persecution of the Armenians in his attempt to gain Ottoman support for Zionism. Edward Timms, ‘Ambassador Herzl and the Blueprint for a Modern State’, in R. Robertson and E. Timms, Theodor Herzl and the Origins of Zionism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 17–20.
See James Renton, ‘Changing Languages of Empire and the Orient: Britain and the Invention of the Middle East, 1917–1918’, The Historical Journal, 50, 3 (2007), pp. 645–667.
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© 2007 James Renton
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Renton, J. (2007). The Anglo-Zionist Propaganda Machine. In: The Zionist Masquerade. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286139_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286139_6
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