What factors motivated the United Kingdom government to support Zionism ?
Over the last century, the British government’s motives and goals have been thoroughly investigated. Among its numerous motivations were a romantic, religiously inspired philo-Semitic compulsion to “return” the Hebrews to the land of the Bible, and an anti-Semitic desire to decrease Jewish immigration to Britain, attached to a belief that “world Jewry” possessed the ability to keep newly revolutionary Russia fighting and to draw the United States into the conflict. Apart from those impulses, Britain sought control of Palestine primarily for geopolitical strategic reasons that predated World War I, and were reinforced by wartime events. Regardless of the importance of the other intentions, this was the primary one: the British Empire was never driven by benevolence. Britain’s strategic interests were perfectly served by sponsoring the Zionist project, just as they were served by a variety of regional wartime endeavors. Among them were commitments made in 1915 and 1916 promising independence to the Arabs led by Sharif Husayn of Mecca (embodied in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence) and a secret 1916 deal with France: the Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which the two colonial powers decided to partition the eastern Arab countries.
The Zionist movement’s objectives were transparent: total sovereignty and control over Palestine. With Britain’s unwavering support, these goals became suddenly attainable. Some prominent British politicians expressed support for Zionism in ways that went beyond the declaration’s carefully phrased text. In 1922, at a dinner at Balfour’s residence, three of the era’s most renowned statesmen: Lloyd George, Balfour, and Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill, assured Weizmann that the concept “Jewish national home” , “always meant an eventual Jewish state.”Lloyd George persuaded the Zionist leader that Britain would never permit a representative government in Palestine for this purpose. Neither did it.
For Zionists, their enterprise was now bolstered by an indispensable “iron wall”of British military might, as Ze’ev Jabotinksy put it. Balfour’s precise, calculated prose was, in effect, a gun aimed directly at their heads, a declaration of war by the British Empire on the indigenous Palestinian population. The majority now faces the threat of being outnumbered by unrestricted Jewish immigration to a country whose population and culture were almost entirely Arab. Whether intentionally or not, the declaration precipitated a full-fledged colonial conflict, a century-long attack on the Palestinian people with the objective of promoting an exclusiveist “national home” at their expense.
For further reading on Christian Zionism: