Zionism & the Manchester Connection
Zionism & the Manchester Connection
The victorious British imperial general Sir Edmund `Bull’ Allenby strode into Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate on 11 December 1917. It was a highly choreographed entry, designed to allay historical memories of Crusader conquest and upstage the pre-war visit of the Kaiser, who had ridden in triumph. The British wished to affect the profile of liberators of the Holy Land from Ottoman oppression, and to provide a morale boosting Christmas present to the British people, who like their evangelically raised war leader, the `Welsh wizard’ David Lloyd George, were more agreeably familiar with the names of the battlefields of biblical antiquity than those of the foreign fields of the Western Front. As such, Lloyd George was a strategic `Easterner’, who hoped to effectively bypass the stalemate in the trenches. Zionist hopes of British imperial patronage in Palestine were high, not least among the Jewish minority there, promised a `national homeland’. Many of them hoped to translate this concept into statehood, although Lloyd George had been thinking in terms of sanctuary in a protectorate rather than sovereignty.
With the ink of the Balfour Declaration barely dry, the press propaganda machine swung into action. As early as January 1918, journalist Herbert Sidebotham published under the pen name of `Student of War’ England & Palestine: Essays towards the restoration of the Jewish State. Oxford educated Sidebotham was an enterprising scion of the lower middle class from the Manchester locality of Salford, which had contributed a regiment of local `pals’ to the carnage on the Somme in 1916. Since 1914 he had edited a current history of the Great War for CP Scott’s patriotic Manchester Guardian. In England & Palestine he managed to propose the Zionisation of Palestine without mentioning the indigenous Palestinians, as if the country were terra nullius.
Scott and Sidebotham were extremely well connected locally and nationally. The chief of British Zionists was the illustrious, Manchester based biochemist Chaim Weizmann, who was owed political favour by Lloyd George. The `wizard’ had been called in in 1915 as Minister of Munitions to boost British shell production given a shortage which had blunted a British offensive on the continent. Weizmann had developed the industrial process of synthesizing acetone for use in cordite. In return he asked that `something’ be done for `the Jewish people’. He was not disappointed. Zionist lobbying has always partaken of the open conspiracy which is routine oligarchic elite politics.
Dr David Faber Historian AFoPA Executive