What led the Jews and the British into Palestine?
From Mules to a Jewish Regiment; The Long Road to Jerusalem – Part 3
80,000 Jews in Palestine
The migration of Jews from Europe to pre-mandated Palestine began two thirds of the way through the 1800’s. In 1878 a census was taken whilst the region was still under Ottoman rule. Arabs made up 85.5% of the population, indigenous Jews represented 3.2% and foreign born Jews 2.1% (total jewish population 5.3%). The remaining 9.2% were Christian. By the outbreak of World War I the Jewish population numbered around 80,000. To compare, over 2 million Jews migrated over the same period to the United States. According to records from leaders of the World Zionist Organisation (WZO), the Turks were accepting of this new influx of immigrants.
Russian Pogroms between 1881 and 1903 were responsible for displacing between 20,000-30,000 Jews to Palestine. This was followed with more progroms and displacement between 1903 to 1914 of another 35,000-40,000. Between 68% to 87% of all Jewish inhabitants of Palestine were Russian by birth. Herbert Samuel’s memorandum ‘The Future of Palestine’ was circulated in the House of Commons after its publication in January 1915. This was just before Britain and allies started the Gallipoli campaign. In it he mentions that Jerusalem is already 2/3 Jewish, mostly immigrants. Herbert Samuel was Post Master General at the time and used this memorandum of January 1915 to propose the idea of a home for displaced Jews in Palestine.
Therefore, as Britain entered a war in a Triple Entente with France and Russia against the German, Austro-Hungarian (Central powers) and Ottoman Empires, a big wave of strongly anti-Russian Empire, Russian Jews were heading straight to the centre of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. As we will see further on, the fallout from the Pogroms would cause significant problems.
In the book ‘Pogroms, anti-Jewish violence in modern Russian history’, Klier et al (2004) suggests that the Pogroms were a response by landowners and middle classes to the relaxation of official controls by Alexander II. Some new rules relaxed the limits on the level to which Jews could become involved in Russian life. The explanation seems to make sense, but it is possible that there was a much broader purpose related not to Russia’s expansion, but to the expansion of the Prussian-led German Empire.
Catherine the Great and Alexander I had encouraged the settlement of German immigrants in the Odessa and Mariupol areas, in the same way they encouraged the Russian Mennonites (radical baptist reformists) to settle to the north of the Caucasus that flanked the Black Sea and Sea of Azov.
A Pogrom wave swept first over Germany in the 1860’s and 1870’s and then in to Prussia and Southern Russia in the 1880’s. When Alexander II, the reformist Tsar, was assassinated by the ‘People’s Will’ or Narodnaya Volya Revolution group in 1881, pogroms were triggered in Odessa and other settlements with Jewish populations. Odessa was home to a number of wealthy German landowners, who were known as Black Sea Germans, and it was the landowners and other middle class groups who were said to be responsible for planning Pogroms.
Could the pogroms have been fomented by agents as a means of deflecting blame for the assassination on to the Russian Jews, whilst potentially the architects were using it to hide a broader political and territorial aim. Was the German Empire under the leadership of Prussia, already working on conquering Russia by stealth in 1881 even before they sponsored the Bolshevik’s installation in Petrograd? There seemed to be a deliberate political aim to the pogroms, and they occurred with greater frequency after Prussia had formed the German Empire with Germany. Revolutions don’t happen overnight.
Similarly there were a number of distractions in 1905, the year that Russia went to war with Japan. A Menshevik Revolutionary group attempted and failed to topple the Tsar and there was another Pogrom again in the south, but this time in Kiev. An area whose land had been fought for over the centuries between the Ottomans, Russians and Cossacks due to it’s strategic position on the Dnieper River.
Germany, Jihad and counter Jihad
At the beginning of World War I the German Empire asked their allies, the Ottomans to encourage Muslims to wage a Holy Jihad against enemy colonies (British, French and Russian). At this point the German Empire were largely running the Ottoman administration through ‘advisers’, in a similar way to the modern day advisers allocated to client regimes by the Soviet Union and now Russia. (p. 8 The Bastard War - The Mesopotamian Campaign of 1914-1918, A.J. Barker, 1967). The Fatwa for the Jihad was declared on 14th November 1914.