Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic
Contents
Index analysis
The table below is an analysis of the terms used for lobby or Zionist organisations in the index of the book. In additio to the terms found in the book I have added most of the formal members of the Zionist movement as determined through their affiliation to the World Ziopnist Organisation either via membership of the US or UK Zionist Federations (the American Zionist Movement and the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland) or via those organisations which are members of a group that has a direct affiliation with the WZO. The table also shows which of the organisations are formal members of the Zionist movement and which are merely "Israel lobby" groups.
In alphabetical order
Index analysis in order of number of references
Mentions and conception of the 'Zionist movement'
There is no entry for the 'Zionist movement' in the index to the book. this in itself tells us something about the lack of attention to the term as a useful concept in the analysis. There are, however the following entries (with the page numbers on which the concept was discussed noted after the entry):
- Christian Zionist movement 94–6, 94–100, 124–6, 127, 511
- Revisionist Zionist movement 41, 139, 155
There are, however, some seventy seven mentions of the term 'Zionist movement' in the main body of the text itself (not including any references within quotations). The table below compiles each of these. The data show that the term Zionist movement is almost exclusively used in the context of the period before the creation of the settler colony in 1948. Of the 77 uses of the term Zionist movement only two could be read as referring to the period after 1948. One was a reference to the 'Christian Zionist movment', another characterised Poale Zion as "a Zionist youth movement".
| Chapter | Page number/mentions per page | Text mentioning ‘Zionist movement’ | Reference Pre or post 1948 or both | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Preface vii-xvii (10 pages) | x | “Lobbying for Palestine as a safe haven became more logical. But the Zionist movement did not act from pure humanitarian motives – they hoped the fleeing Jews of Europe would help them gain a demographic advantage in Palestine, meaning they could claim as much of Palestine as possible with as few native Palestinians as possible.” | Pre | |
| xi | Those who led the Zionist movement and later Israel were intuitively aware of the inherent injustice of the project, or at least the immoral dimensions of the seemingly ‘noble’ solution to the problem of anti-Semitism in Europe. | Pre | ||
| xii | My second hypothesis is that from very early on, because of its self- doubt, the Zionist movement dispensed with moral arguments and with engaging with societies at large and invested all its efforts in elites; an enterprise that required money, connections and efficient advocacy | Pre | ||
| Total references/number per page | 3/0.30 | Pre=3, Post=0, Both=0 | ||
| 1. The Christian Harbingers of Zionism 1-18 (18 pages) | 15 | Under his [Herzl] leadership and with the help of numerous Zionist organisations that mushroomed after the increase in anti-Semitism in Europe, Zionism began to gel as an institutional movement | Pre | |
| 15 | Even before convening the conference, the leaders of the new movement were looking for key leaders and political elites in both Europe and the Ottoman Empire to endorse the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. While the settlers were establishing facts on the ground, the leaders sought to create international legitimacy for them. | Pre | ||
| 15 | Christian Zionist sympathies fell short for these Jewish activists, as they seemed too remote from official government policy to make a difference. The founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, and his successors such as Chaim Weizmann, started the hunt for influential individuals, not movements or institutions, who could make the case for Zionism at a higher level. They found the man they were looking for in William Hechler. | Pre | ||
| 17 | Hechler was now the first lobbyist in a long line to be funded by the Zionist movement. | Pre | ||
| 17 | Herzl further explained that his movement wanted to ‘drain the surplus of the Jewishproletariat’,29and that Zionism would be an asset to the world the Grand Duke wished to preserve. He promised that Zionism would help to keep‘ international capital under control’.30 | Pre | ||
| 18 | he [Hechler] was praised as the guest of honour by Theodor Herzl at the inaugural Zionist Congress and attended subsequent ones. In recognition of his contribution, the Zionist movement provided him with a small pension up until his death. | Pre | ||
| Total references/number per page | 6/0.05 | Pre=6, Post=0, Both=0 | ||
| 2 Lobbying for the Balour Declaration 19-30 (12 pages) | 19 | The man in question [Sir Samuel Montagu] introduced him to some members of the Anglo-Jewish elite in London; however, they failed to be impressed by Herzl or his ideas. Herzl also failed to secure an interview with Lord Rothschild. He declared that he was willing to give up the leadership of the movement in return for such a meeting. | Pre | |
| 20 | In this Anglo-Jewish order, each member had to pledge his allegiance to the Zionist cause and pay a shekel for the expenses of the order and for funding the early colonisation of Palestine, or, in the words of its charter, it was a place for persons ‘of the Jewish faith who declare themselves adherents to the Zionist Movement’ or similarly minded, ‘non-Jewish honorary’ members. | Pre | ||
| 27 | Other notable leaders of the Zionist movement did not believe that the aim to obtain such a charter was the sole priority of an all-Zionist Congress. | Pre | ||
| 28 | Al-Khalidi had written a letter to the Chief Rabbi of France, Zadoc Kahn, in 1899, pointing out that the Jews would only be able to take over Palestine by force and suggesting that the Zionist movement should leave Palestine ‘in peace | Pre | ||
| 28 | Given Herzl’s lack of desire to visit Palestine, let alone live there, he might have genuinely meant this as well; he was willing to explore other options. But at the congress itself, he focused on Palestine as the exclusive destination of the Zionist movement and was happy to extol the virtues of the country. | Pre | ||
| Total references/number per page | 5/0.41 | Pre=5, Post=0, Both=0 | ||
| 3 The Road to the Balfour Declaration 31-54 (24 pages) | 33 | These meetings were prompted by Balfour’s wish to understand why, after Herzl’s death, the Zionist movement was unwilling to discuss locations other than Palestine for its colonisation project | Pre | |
| 33 | However, after the death of Herzl in 1904, any possibility of settling East European Jews elsewhere in the world was ruled out categorically and the movement was orientated exclusively, under Weizmann, towards the colonisation of Palestine | Pre | ||
| 34 | Weizmann seemed to be able to persuade Balfour to accept Palestine as the only destination for Jewish immigration.8 As a result of this change of aim within the Zionist movement, Balfour, whose key priority was most likely keeping Jews out of Britain, became a political Zionist by default. | Pre | ||
| 35 | In many ways, we can say that [Herbert Louis] Samuel was the self-appointed liaison between the Zionist movement and the British government. | Pre | ||
| 37 | The pinnacle of Herbert Samuel’s activity on behalf of Zionism was persuading the Cabinet to accept a memorandum he wrote on behalf of the Zionist movement as a basis for discussing future British policy towards Palestine. | Pre | ||
| 40 | According to one account, his change of heart had also to do with the influence he attributed to the Zionist movement in the United States – the US government had not yet entered the war in 1916. | Pre | ||
| 40 | This vague impression was bolstered by Sykes talking to two chief representatives of the Zionist movement in 1915, Nahum Sokolow and Chaim Weizmann; | Pre | ||
| 41 | This idea was enthusiastically propagated by Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Zionist who founded the Jewish Legion of the British Army and was the leader of the more extreme Revisionist Zionist movement (which bred the present-day Likud Party) | Pre | ||
| 51 | Just before the Declaration was made, the British government and the Zionist movement joined forces to propagate the new alliance among Jews around the world, so that it would gain wide support once it was declared. | Pre | ||
| 51 | The propaganda arm of the British government, the Ministry of Information, recruited one of the leading activists of the Zionist movement to help persuade Jewish people across the globe to support the Declaration. | Pre | ||
| 52 | But it seems to me the most important achievement of lobbyists such as Weizmann and Hyamson was the successful recruitment of Lloyd George to the Zionist cause, and persuading him that the strategic aims of the British Empire and that of the Zionist movement were one and the same. | Pre | ||
| 53 | A parallel document drafted by the Foreign Office was consigned to the dustbin of history as it did not satisfy the Zionist movement. | Pre | ||
| Total references/number per page | 12/0.50 | Pre=12, Post=0, Both=0 | ||
| 4 Lobbying in Britain During the Mandate 55-93 (39 pages) | 55 | Poale Zion was a Zionist ideological movement that tried to fuse Zionism with socialism, as advocated by its founding ideologue Dov Ber Borochov. | Pre | |
| 57 | Poale Zion’s founders became some of the leading thinkers behind the early Zionist project. Intellectually these pioneers gave birth to the leadership of the Mandatory Zionist movement and later the state of Israel, which included the indisputable leader of the movement and the state, David Ben-Gurion. | Pre | ||
| 57 | Later Poale Zion merged with other groups and founded Mapai in 1930, the ruling party in Israel until more or less 1977 (it would appear later with different names, such as the Labour Movement, the Labour Party and Maarach [the alliance] from the mid- 1960s) | Pre | ||
| 57 | By 1917, the Zionist movement had two sites of leadership: one in London, led by Chaim Weizmann, and one in Palestine, | Pre | ||
| 58 | Their [Ben-Gurion & Weizmann] rivalry concerned who would lead the global Zionist movement, not the movement’s objectives | Pre | ||
| 59 | From that period, we have an intriguing record of the Poale Zion meeting at which it was decided to pursue affiliation. The meeting was summarised by one of the leaders of the Zionist movement from Palestine, Moshe Sharett (a future foreign minister and prime minister of Israel); his notes reveal the methods deployed by the nominally socialist Zionist lobby at this early stage. | Pre | ||
| 61 | They either lost their land when it was sold by their landlords to the Zionist movement or had to seek a new future due to poverty in the countryside, caused both by Zionist settlements there and by British disinclination to invest in rural areas. | Pre | ||
| 63 | He [Lloyd George] was visibly moved not just by the honour of being invited to address the Federation but by a much more permanent tribute bestowed upon him by the Zionist movement: | Pre | ||
| 63 | This was the colony of Ramat David in Marj ibn Amir, which the Zionist movement renamed the Jezreel Valley. | Pre | ||
| 67 | The admixture of Marxism and Zionism did not appeal to the liberal Zionist leader of the world movement, Chaim Weizmann, but he recognised its utility in appealing to the Jewish working class. | Pre | ||
| 68 | But Weizmann never warmed to socialist Zionism. He ridiculed the new movement’s statements as ‘meaningless phrases and sheer stupidity’. | Pre | ||
| 69 | He [Weizmann] and other leaders gradually abandoned the early vocabulary of the founding fathers of the movement: phrases like ‘Jewish Colonies’, ‘Jewish Colonisation’ and ‘Jewish Colonialism’ no longer appeared in their speeches or writings. | Pre | ||
| 72 | In the name of Islam, he [Izz ad-Din al-Qassam] encouraged a large number of Palestinians who had lost their jobs and farms as a result of the increase in Zionist settlements and Zionist takeovers of the labour market in the towns, to take part in armed struggle against Britain and the Zionist movement. | Pre | ||
| 74 | … proposing the annexation of the ‘Arab parts’ of Palestine by the Hashemites in Transjordan and all in all expressing a strong anti-Palestinian-nationalist position and a prefer - ence for the ‘good Arabs’ (in the eyes of both the British and the Zionist movement) | Pre | ||
| 90 | Crossman portrayed Zionism as representing socialism in Palestine. This counterintuitive representation of affairs came directly from the propaganda of the Zionist Labour movement in Palestine, in which local land - lords and dignitaries were denounced as capitalist oppressors, unlike the new landlords and settlers | Pre | ||
| 91 | In 1947, this pro-Zionist lobby inside Labour publicly rebuked Ernest Bevin’s impertinent questioning of ‘the whole validity of political Zionism’. Like Crossman, they accused him of triggering Zionist violence, since his policies left the Zionist movement on the ground no option but to resort to terrorism against the Mandatory forces and government. | Pre | ||
| 92 | But the lobby was hopeful it [TUC] could be convinced, because the TUC had had strong and friendly ties with the Zionist movement in Britain and in Palestine, from the time of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. | Pre | ||
| Total references/number per page | 16/0.41 | Pre=16, Post=0, Both=0 | ||
| 5 Early Zionist Lobbying in the USA 94-127 (34 pages) | 94 | This constant dialogue between British and North American evangelical communities produced what would eventually constitute the ideological infrastructure for a potent American political Christian Zionist movement in the twentieth century. | Pre/Post | |
| 95 | later Darby’s successors would confer these prophetic promises on all the members of the Zionist movement and after 1948 on the Jews of Israel). | Pre | ||
| 96 | Darby and his friends influenced both the Christian and the Jewish Zionist movements. They inspired Jewish intellectuals seeking a remedy for anti-Semitism and contributed to the emergence of the Zionist movement in Eastern Europe. | Pre | ||
| 96 | Secondly, and probably more importantly, their theologies stimulated a more institutionalised restorationist movement which appeared in the USA in the 1880s. | Pre | ||
| 97 | These early notions paralleled those aired by the early Jewish Zionists whose movement began to flourish roughly at the same time. | Pre | ||
| 97 | Although coming from different angles, both movements interpreted Jewish prayers such as ‘next year in Jerusalem, the rebuilt’ as an indication that the Jews were a scattered nation working for their return to Palestine. | Pre | ||
| 100 | Brick by brick, Christian Zionists in America helped to concoct a historical narrative that would serve the broader Zionist movement in legitimising its right to colonise Palestine. | Pre | ||
| 101 | The next phase of building this kind of theological and ideological infrastructure was establishing early contact with the Jewish Zionist movement itself. | Pre | ||
| 101 | Blackstone became involved in the initial discussions with the Jewish Zionist movement and even tried to influence some of its decisions. | Pre | ||
| 101 | Herzl kept the Bible, and it is on display at the Herzl Museum in Jerusalem. This was the only correspondence between the two men, but as David Borg writes, it ‘provided a political entrée to a young movement that lacked it’. | Pre | ||
| 102 | Initially Scofield’s perspective, put forward mainly in a journal he edited, Our Hope (the successor to The Truth ), was to focus on Herzl as the new prophet. His colleague, William B. Riley, declared of Herzl’s movement that ‘I frankly confess it may shortly prove to be more significant than all the other movements’, | Pre | ||
| 104 | Today it is an American college and, around it and among the beautiful buildings left behind by the Anglicans, modern-day Americans have planted posters supporting the idea of a Greater Israel (that is, the claim that Israel has the right to annex both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied in 1967) and a Zionist Jerusalem, which would not have shamed the most ultra-Right Zionist settler movement in Israel. | Post | ||
| 116 | The Zionist movement aimed to build a democratic Jewish state. | Pre | ||
| 124 | When experts were asked by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide an assessment of the Zionist movement, they wrote: ‘It has never been considered [by the US government] that the realization of a Jewish National Home was connected with safeguarding American rights and interests. | Pre | ||
| 125 | The Zionist movement, similarly uninterested in the local population except for the inconvenience they represented, immediately won their support, although it would take years before this link became a solid alliance between Christian fundamentalism and the state of Israel - | Pre | ||
| Total references/number per page | 15/0.47 | Pre=13, Post=1, Both=1 | ||
| 6 American Zionists and the Holocaust 128-155 (28 pages) | 130 | This official position and the news from Europe gave a different momentum to the Zionist movement in America. The Zionist activist Stephen S. Wise urged the movement as a whole to take advantage of the new developments and used them to strengthen the lobby in North America. | Pre | |
| 130 | Like Gottheil, the first president of the Federation of American Zionists, he too was captivated and enthused by the new ideas of the movement as a young delegate at the first Zionist Congress in Base | Pre | ||
| 134 | It [Biltmore Conference] was a doubly formative event. First, it was a crucial moment in the history of the Zionist movement on the ground in Palestine | Pre | ||
| 136 | Alongside the old organisations representing Zionist factions on the ground in Palestine (such as Poale Zion and HaMizrachi, a religious Zionist movement organised under the slogan of ‘Torah and Labour’), a new lobbying group was born after the Biltmore Conference, named the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC, referred to in some sources as AZC). | Pre | ||
| 139 | However, the real mission was not so much suppressing right-wing Zionism but Zionising the faint-hearted Jews, who were still not convinced or enthused by the movement for a new Jewish state. | Pre | ||
| 152 | The Zionist movement in 1946 was willing only to negotiate about space and not sovereignty. | Pre | ||
| 155 | Such abrasive language, using the idiom of biblical condemnations (and evoking the Song of Solomon), was thus not only reserved for anti-Zionist Jews or Christians, but also for rivals within the movement itself. | Pre | ||
| Total references/number per page | 7/0.25 | Pre=7, Post=0, Both=0 | ||
| 7 Lobbying for Israel in Postwar Britain 156-217 (62 pages) | 159 | The Arab League and the Palestinian leadership categorically rejected the idea of partition, while the Zionist movement accepted it. | Pre | |
| 169 | The fact that Poale Zion, a pre-1948 organ of the Zionist movement, born of a now obsolete desire in the distant past to fuse Marxism and Zionism, a long-forgotten aim that had no relevance to the state of Israel, was still there in the 1950s is quite bewildering. | Pre | ||
| 186 | This was an absurd situation, as Poale Zion, which was founded before Israel existed and by this point functioned as a Zionist youth movement in Britain with no Israeli equivalent, remained on the Labour Party’s books as an affiliate organisation | Post | ||
| Total references/number per page | 3/0.05 | Pre=2, Post=1, Both=0 | ||
| 8 Lobbying for Israel in Twentieth-Century America 218-337 (120 pages) | 220 | The Truman administration, which until then had kept quite a low profile in the negotiations, was encouraged by the Zionist movement to put pressure on countries to vote in favour of the first option. | Pre | |
| 220 | The question facing the lobby was how the USA would help the Zionist movement in the crucial month of November 1947 to ensure. | Pre | ||
| 224 | This was not precisely the Zionist vision – the movement wished to build a state over a much larger part of Palestine and share the land, if at all, with Transjordan and not the Palestinians. The movement also rejected the idea of an international Jerusalem, which it wished to make the capital of the Jewish state | Pre | ||
| Total references/number per page | 3/0.02 | Pre=3, Post=0, Both=0 | ||
| 9 Lobbying for Israel in Twenty-First-Century America 338-404 (66 pages) | 0/0 | Pre=0, Post=0, Both=0 | ||
| 10 The War Against American Civil Society 405-430 (25 pages) | 0/0 | Pre=0Post=0, Both=0 | ||
| 11 Lobbying for Israel in Twenty-First-Century Britain 431-502 (72 pages) | 488 | Zionist lobbying always, from the very inception of the movement until today, targeted the corridors of power – governments, mainstream media and academia. | Pre | |
| 488 | Throughout its thirty-year rule (1918–1948), Britain also permitted the Zionist movement to build a state within a state and prepare militarily for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. | Pre | ||
| 494 | …the JNF was established in 1901 and was the principal tool for the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. It was an agency with which the Zionist movement bought land and profited from land purchase transactions. | Pre | ||
| Total references/number per page | 3/0.04 | Pre=3, Post=0, Both=0 | ||
| Conclusion, 503-516 (14 pages) | 503 | From the very start of the Zionist movement, Palestinians were at first ignored, and then in 1948 ethnically cleansed. | Pre | |
| 507 | After the Second World War, the lobby quickly understood that the colonialist vocabulary used freely by the early Zionist movement and the employment of colonialist practices on the ground contravened the emerging consensus approach to the new ethics of a decolonised world, one recovering from the dark days of fascism and Nazism. | Pre | ||
| 511 | The project of building a state in the twilight of colonialism through colonisation needed affluent, well-oiled and committed advocacy. The Zionist movement provided such an enterprise from its very beginning: | Pre | ||
| Total references/number per page | 3/0.21 | Pre=3, Post=0, Both=0 | ||
| Afterword: 7 October and the Future 517-521 (5 pages) | 0/0 | Pre=0, Post=0 | Both=0 |
