The United Kingdom and the Palestine Question Before 1917

British historical involvement in Palestine is often framed within the years 1917–1948. These dates coincide with Britain’s occupation of Palestine, followed by the Balfour Declaration, and the departure of British troops and administrators after the termination of the British Mandate. However, this period was preceded by decades of British activity in Palestine, attempts to increase British influence, and settler-colonial plans and contact with Zionist groups. British foreign policy reflected London’s concern for its imperial interests, but also a Christian Zionist ideology widespread among Victorian Protestant Evangelicals. British activity in this period foreshadowed the Balfour Declaration and pro-Zionist policies of the Mandate era.

Cultural and Political Considerations

For centuries, particularly after the Puritan Revolution in the seventeenth century, cultural notions connected Britain with Palestine in the English imagination. These included the concept of Britain leading the “Restoration,” or “return,” of the world’s Jewish population to the Holy Land, as prophesied in the Bible (or rather, Evangelicals’ literalist reading of it). In the extreme case of the British Israelites movement, some non-Jewish Victorian Britons believed they were the true genetic descendants of the Biblical Hebrews.

Britain’s policy toward Palestine was closely connected to its relationship with the Ottoman Empire as a whole, yet also bore distinct features due to Britain’s particular ambitions toward the Holy Land. Britain had trade relations with the Eastern Mediterranean under the Ottoman Empire since the late sixteenth century, notably through the Levant Company; however, political activity was limited until the 1830s. The nine-year occupation of Palestine and Syria by the Egyptian dynasty of Mohammed Ali and his son Ibrahim Pasha (1831–40), more amenable to European influence than their Ottoman predecessors, provided a space for increased Western diplomatic and missionary activity in Palestine.

During the Egyptian occupation, construction began on Britain’s consulate and Christ Church, Jerusalem, the first Protestant church in the Middle East, initially shared with Britain’s fellow Protestant power, Prussia. In the same area, inside Jaffa Gate, was the Palestine office of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, founded in 1809, which sought (without significant success) to convert Jews to Protestantism. Over the decades, British institutions such as more Anglican churches, missionary stations, schools, and hospitals were established around Palestine, some of which provided services to Muslim and Christian Palestinians. A notable example of British property in Jerusalem was St. George’s School, founded in 1899 and later attended by the young Ibrahim Tuqan, Edward Said, and other children of the Jerusalemite middle class and Palestinian elite. The school and other British institutions remained under British control until 1914, when they were seized as enemy property by the Ottomans upon the outbreak of war.

Ironically, while benefitting from the Egyptian occupation, Britain supported the Ottomans to regain control of the Eastern Mediterranean in 1840 (just as they had supported the Ottomans against Napoleon Bonaparte in the siege of Acre in 1799). Britain and France provided military and financial support to the Ottoman Empire for several decades, particularly against its main foe, the Russian Empire. In return, the European powers expected a greater freedom of action within Ottoman territory, in addition to privileges they already enjoyed thanks to the Capitulations system. After Britain and France came to the Ottomans’ aid during the Crimean War of 1853–56, European powers lobbied for the Reform Edict of 1856, part of the Tanzimat reforms, which provided increased rights to non-Muslim minorities. Their interests were not merely altruistic. Britain sought to exercise increased influence in Palestine through being recognized as the legal “protector” of the Jewish community, while France was the protector of Catholic Christians. Such European interference contributed to sectarian violence in Lebanon and Syria in the 1860s, but Palestine was largely unaffected by this strife.

Britain’s “pro-Ottoman” policy of backing the empire, while gradually undermining its sovereignty, persisted until 1880 with the end of the premiership of Benjamin Disraeli, Britain’s first prime minister of Jewish origin. Disraeli had travelled in Palestine in his youth and authored several novels set in the Holy Land. The subsequent administration of William Gladstone initiated a much colder relationship with the Ottomans under Sultan Abd al-Hamid II (r. 1876–1909), who was a more conservative ruler and less tolerant of non-Muslim minorities; this relationship continued until the start of open hostilities between Britain and Turkey in 1914, within the frame of World War I.

The policies of all the major European powers were driven by their belief that the Ottoman Empire was the “sick man of Europe,” bound sooner or later to disintegrate, following which there would be a scramble by the surviving empires to inherit its territories. This imperial rivalry was termed the Eastern Question. Palestine was particularly coveted by Britain, partially because of the prestige of possessing the Holy Land and partially because of Palestine’s geopolitical location. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, securing the Eastern Mediterranean became key to Britain’s maritime connections with India. Britain occupied Egypt, still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1882, leading to the imposition of a border between Egypt and Palestine.

Palestine was also feted as a desirable territory for other reasons. Highly biased reports by ideologically motivated travellers claimed that Palestine’s agricultural potential was currently squandered by the indigenous peasantry or filahin, and under a colonial project, it could be transformed into a hugely productive “breadbasket” for Britain. This was sometimes coupled with the suggestion of a British-supported Jewish settler colony in the area.

From the mid-nineteenth century until 1914, thousands of European and North American travellers visited Palestine annually. Travellers included diplomats, missionaries, and the personnel of the Palestine Exploration Fund, military officers who produced maps later used by the British Army in World War I. Many also travelled for their own pleasure, some producing accounts of their journeys, fuelling a huge genre of Holy Land travel literature presenting a Eurocentric and Orientalist view of Palestine. In 1868 Thomas Cook, a Baptist preacher from northern England, led the first “Cook’s Tour” to Egypt and Palestine, inaugurating the modern tourist trade in the region.

Britain and Zionism

Belief in the British role in the Jewish Restoration to Palestine was not merely an abstract idea. Throughout the nineteenth century, British figures devised plans for small- or large-scale colonization of Palestine by Jews. By the early twentieth century, the British government was in serious conversation with the Zionist movement about establishing a “national home” for Jews within the British Empire. Such proposals were now largely divested of overtly religious rhetoric. However, beliefs with their origins in the Bible were integral to the views of British elites and decision-makers, such as the wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George and his Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, that Zionists’ argument of a Jewish claim to Palestine was valid.

Britain’s decision to establish a consulate in Jerusalem may have been influenced by Anthony Ashley-Cooper (1808–85), the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (commonly known as Lord Shaftesbury), who was close to Lord Palmerston, British Foreign Secretary between 1830 and 1841. A prominent social reformer, Shaftesbury was also a Christian Zionist who passionately believed in the Jewish Restoration and donated to proto-Zionist causes over decades.

The position of Lord Palmerston is also revealing of British plans for Palestine. On 11 August 1840, after the successful withdrawal of Egyptian troops from the Levant, Palmerston sent a letter to the ambassador in Istanbul, Lord Ponsonby, stating: “There exists at present among the Jews dispersed over Europe, a strong notion that the time is approaching when their nation is to return to Palestine […] It would be of manifest importance to the [Ottoman] Sultan to encourage the Jews to return to, and to settle in Palestine.”

Most British support for Zionistic notions came from those who, like Palmerston and Shaftesbury, were not Jewish. British Jews were more concerned with securing political rights in the country where they lived, something Shaftesbury opposed at the time of the 1858 Jews Relief Act. However, some took a close interest in Palestine. Most notable was the Italian-born financier Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885) who visited Palestine several times and made donations to the Jewish community there, including an agricultural school for Jews near Jaffa. Montefiore was also the first to propose the construction of a railway line from Jaffa to Jerusalem in 1838, expressing readiness to contribute financially to the project until the mid-1860s. The railway was eventually built in 1890–92, with Europeans hoping it would bring Western-style “progress” to Palestine’s interior.

The British consul in Jerusalem from 1846 to 1863, James Finn, worked particularly vigorously to establish links between Britain and Jews in Palestine. A devout Evangelical with no Jewish ancestry, he was nevertheless known as “king of the Jews” in Jerusalem. Jewish reaction against his continual interference in the city’s Jewish community led succeeding British consuls to take a more circumspect attitude toward their “protégés.” During the Crimean War, Finn and his wife Elizabeth Anne Finn established a farm for Jewish laborers near Jerusalem, in what is now the Kerem Avraham neighbourhood of West Jerusalem, prefiguring Zionist agricultural colonies.

Sir Lawrence Oliphant did much to connect early Zionist settlers with British elites. After a career as a colonial official, parliamentarian, novelist, and a mystic of some notoriety in Britain, Oliphant visited Palestine in 1879, hoping to identify land where a Jewish colony could be established. With Palestine too densely inhabited and cultivated, he believed that “Eastern Palestine,” the Victorians’ term for present-day Jordan, was best suited for this. Oliphant’s lobbying efforts with Ottoman officials and Abd al-Hamid II himself were unsuccessful. However, he returned to Palestine and settled near Haifa, establishing close relations with Zionist agricultural colonies and channelling British funding to them until his death in 1888.

In the early twentieth century, British politicians began to take more interest in the early Zionist movement, and gaining influence among Jewish communities by offering them a “homeland” in areas within the British Empire. Britain’s ruling class also hoped to dissuade Jewish refugees from Russia from arriving in the country, hence the support of then-Prime Minister Arthur Balfour of the 1905 Aliens Act, which placed restrictions on Jewish immigration from Russia. After meeting with Theodor Herzl, the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain made offers of territory in El Arish in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula in 1902, and in British East Africa (the “Uganda Scheme,” although the actual territory was in modern-day Kenya) in 1903. These offers were rejected by the World Zionist Congress, as well as facing opposition by British colonial administrators. However, a strong relationship was established with British officials, which would bear fruit when Chaim Weizmann negotiated the Balfour Declaration for the Zionist movement.

The Palestine Question in World War I

In November 1914, Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Britain’s attempts to increase its influence in Palestine thus shifted from cultural, diplomatic, and missionary methods to a military campaign, aiming to defeat the Ottomans in Palestine and occupy their territory. This goal was advocated by Herbert Samuel, who would become the first High Commissioner for Palestine, in a memorandum to the British Cabinet entitled “The Future of Palestine,” written in January 1915.

Britain made three conflicting promises during World War I. To Arab elites, notably the family of Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, the McMahon-Hussein correspondence in 1915 and early 1916 appeared to promise support for the establishment of independent states in the Arab region, including Palestine. In the Sykes-Picot Agreement secretly negotiated in November 1915 and January 1916 among Britain, France, and Russia, Britain partitioned the Ottoman Empire’s Eastern Mediterranean territories between the European empires, with Palestine intended to fall under “international administration.” The Balfour Declaration, published 2 November 1917, marked Britain’s official recognition of Palestine as a Jewish homeland. With the Hussein McMahon correspondence, Britain hoped to win Arab support for its war aims, while with the Balfour Declaration, it sought Jewish backing; when the Balfour Declaration and Sykes-Picot Agreement became known, however, there was significant Arab disquiet and a sense of betrayal.

Throughout the war, Palestinians suffered from Ottoman military conscription, political repression (particularly of Arab nationalist sentiment), famine exacerbated by food requisitioning and a devastating plague of locusts in 1915, and the arrival of displaced people, especially Armenians escaping the Armenian Genocide. Most fighting in Palestine occurred in 1917–18, during Britain’s Sinai and Palestine Campaign. British, Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), and Indian troops advanced on Rafah, Gaza, and subsequently Bir al-Sabi‘/Beersheba, causing heavy damage to Palestinian locales, notably the Omari Mosque in Gaza. Jerusalem was captured in December 1917, with General Edmund Allenby triumphally entering the Old City on 11 December 1917. Fighting against Ottoman troops elsewhere in Palestine continued until the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918. Battalions of the Jewish Legion, formed by Britain with the Zionist movement’s support for Jews who wished to fight the Ottomans, participated in the Palestine campaign. In British legal terms, British rule over Palestine remained a military occupation of enemy territory until the awarding of the British Mandate for Palestine by the Allies at San Remo Conference in April 1920, later confirmed by the League of Nations in July 1922.