National Space and the Narrative of a New Epoch in Palestine

Abstract

The British occupation of Jerusalem and southern Palestine at the end of 1917 was the great coup for the Anglo-Zionist propaganda effort. Sykes confidently remarked, ‘Palestine and our Zionist declaration combined gives us and the Entente as a whole a hold over the vital, vocal and sentimental forces of Jewry.’¹ In and of itself the capture of Jerusalem suggested that the future of Palestine and Zionism were now in the hands of the British Government. The promise of the Balfour Declaration thus had a very real chance of being realised. However, the precise meaning of this promise and the implications of British success in the Holy Land had to be crafted and communicated by British and Zionist propagandists. The goal was to convince Jewry that a tremendous victory had been won for the Zionist cause, and that a new epoch for the Jewish nation had been inaugurated. In addition to the medium of history, the geography of Palestine was used to this end. Within both Zionist and British imperial culture, depictions of landscape and society were well established as important means of projecting ideology and rhetoric.² Before the war, visual and textual representations of Palestine were used by the Zionist movement to show the Jewish Diaspora that a new Jewish national society had been established, one that was busily redeeming the land and the nation.