The Everlasting Hatred (26 page)

Indeed the one significant contribution of the Arab revolt was the capture of Aqaba. But Lawrence did not lead this campaign. It was led by Auda abu Tayi, the sheikh of the Howeitat tribe (played by Anthony Quinn in the movie). Lawrence was permitted by Auda to ride along with the Bedouin army. But by the time Lawrence returned to British headquarters, he was claiming a personal military triumph.

Nevertheless, it was not until 1955 that British writer Richard Aldington ultimately exposed the Lawrence myth, including the “key role” played by Arabs, as totally false.

Even though the English knew the Lawrence affair was a myth, the British Foreign Office used it for their own purposes. They pursued their imperial dreams for the Middle East based on a policy of befriending and rewarding the Arabs, which was based entirely on the myth. This erroneous policy ultimately laid the groundwork for the Muslims to claim more and more of the land that was originally given to the Jews for a homeland by the League of Nations at the Conference of San Remo in 1921-22.

Even though the general staff of the British army knew that the Arab revolt contributed little to their victory,
they allowed the British Foreign Office to negotiate with the Arabs on the basis that they had earned the right to have independent states under their control
. And all of this based on the myth of “their great contribution to the war effort.”

This policy caused enormous problems later when the Arabs pressed demands upon the British to stop Jewish immigration to Palestine. Incredibly, on the basis of the Lawrence of Arabia myth, most British Foreign Office officials thought they owed this favor to the Arabs. In fact, many Jews went to Hitler's gas ovens because of the immigration restrictions implemented on the basis of this myth.

The allied victory in World War I and the liberation of the Holy Land made it possible for the Jews to shake off the vestiges of dhimmi oppression and second-class citizenship in their own homeland. But in spite of their contributions to that victory, the Jews would face a myriad of problems that would lead to the Middle East crisis we see today. And we can thank the Middle East section of the British Foreign Office for the chaos that would follow.

“Where is your Christianity if you do not believe in their Judaism? On every altar . . . we find the table of the Jewish law . . . All the early Christians were Jews . . . every man in the early ages of the Church by whose power or zeal or genius the Christian faith was propagated, was a Jew. . . . If you had not forgotten what you owe to this people, you as Christians would be only too ready to seize the first opportunity of meeting the claims of those who profess their religion. . . . I will not take upon me the awful responsibility of excluding from the legislature those who are of the religion in the bosom of which my Lord and Saviour was born.”

—B
ENJAMIN
D
ISRAELI
, B
RITISH
P
RIME
M
INISTER
²⁰⁰

TO FULLY APPRECIATE
the miracle of Israel's rebirth in the modern world, it is necessary to have an understanding of the motivations of its on-again-off-again sponsor—England.

England has had a long fascination with the Holy Land, dating back to the earliest days of Christianity in Britain. Though we have Biblical records of how the Gospel was established in Rome and Spain by Paul and Peter, we have only extra-Biblical accounts of how the Gospel was first brought to Britain. The most reliable accounts contend that it was Joseph of Arimathea that first evangelized the British Isles. So an Apostle who had seen the risen
Lord Jesus and had first hand knowledge of Him founded the British Church. There is evidence that the Gospel spread very early to all of the Isles.

In search of their spiritual roots and, perhaps, their sense of nationality, the British spent several hundred years trying to conquer the Holy Land by brute military force in the name of Christianity. Generation after generation of England's best and brightest young men were sacrificed in a series of bloody Crusades determined to re-capture Jerusalem and the Holy Land.

But it wasn't until the seventeenth century and the early stirrings of the Puritan movement that attitudes toward the Jews began to change. For more than fifteen hundred years, most Christians were led to believe by the Church that Israel's special covenants with God were revoked and given to the Church because of rejecting Christ. However, one of the major contributions of the sixteen-century Reformation, was the recovery of the literal or “normal” interpretation of the Scriptures. This especially impacted the Puritans. But it took awhile for the theologians to begin to apply literal interpretation to Bible prophecy, as Jesus and the Apostles had done. As soon as Christian interpreters did, Israel and the Jewish people were seen in an entirely new light. In England, the Puritans were the first to diligently study Bible prophecy using the literal method of interpretation. Because of this, the Puritans began to understand the special relationship that exists between the Jews and their promised land.

In 1948, the Jewish state was physically reborn, due in large measure to the spiritual vision of British students of prophecy and the resulting Bible conferences they held that influenced the whole nation—including even members of Parliament.

In 1649, Jews were officially forbidden from residing in England, even though they had already been there some 350
years. But two English Puritans, Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright, got the idea to petition the government to repeal the ban and sponsor an effort to transport European Jews to the Holy Land for the purpose of restoring the nation of Israel.

“That this Nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Israel's sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for an everlasting inheritance [is our purpose],” they wrote.
²⁰¹

The Puritans took the Bible seriously—both the Old and New Testament. They were quick to see that the prophecies regarding the Second Coming of Christ all presupposed a reborn-Jewish nation comprised of people who had been scattered into “every nation throughout the world.”

As I said, there were no Jews in England after 1649 when they were driven out. So as a pre-requisite to the ultimate fulfillment of prophecy—the rebirth of Israel—the British Puritans believed it was first necessary to bring Jews back into England from Holland. Many Jews who had fled Spain and Portugal had settled and flourished in Holland.

But why bring Jews to England? Even the Puritans were not yet totally free of the prejudices and misguided ideas Crusaders had developed about the Jews. So they believed Jews first had to be converted to Christianity before England could take them to the Holy Land to fulfill the prophecies. The Puritans failed to see that prophecies like Ezekiel's clearly show that the Israelites would not fully come to faith in their true Messiah until
after
the state of Israel was miraculously reborn.

As Barbara Tuchman explains it: “The movement was not for the sake of the Jews, but for the sake of the promise made to them. According to Scripture the kingdom of God for all
mankind would come when the people of Israel were restored to Zion. Only then would the world see the advent of the Messiah or, in Christian terms, The Second Advent.”
²⁰²

The Puritans saw the return only in terms of an ethnically Jewish nation converted to Christianity. Therefore, the Jews must first come to England. The Puritans were certain that Jews exposed to Puritan teaching in England could be persuaded that Jesus was their Messiah. After all, the Puritans reasoned, they were fluent in Hebrew and the Old Testament traditions and rituals. How could they fail?

The English Puritans, a people who shared with the ancient Hebrews the experience of persecution, were indeed captivated by the Old Testament.

“They baptized their children by the names not of Christian saints but of Hebrew patriarchs and warriors,” wrote historian T. B. Macauley. “They turned the weekly festival by which the church had from primitive times commemorated the resurrection of the Lord, into the Jewish Sabbath. They sought for precedents to guide their ordinary conduct in the books of Judges and Kings.”
²⁰³

Imagine that! In England in the mid-seventeenth century names like Mary and John were considered passé, while Old Testament favorites like Enoch, Amos, Obadiah, Job, Seth, Eli, Esther, and Rebecca were all the rage! No Old Testament names were overlooked. There are records of English Puritans of the day named Zerrubabel, Habakkuk, and even Shadrack, Meshach, and Abednego.
²⁰⁴

These were serious Bible scholars. Some of them were said to rise at 3 or 4 a.m., eat a raw egg and study the Scriptures until evening. Not surprisingly, it was in this sober Christian environment that believers began to understand the prophecies of the End-times, especially those concerning Israel.

The Jews of the mid-1600s also began to think the time was right to live out that old hope: “Next year in Jerusalem.” Manasseh ben Israel, a respected rabbi in Amsterdam, became convinced that the first step toward the fulfillment of the rebirth of Israel was emigration to England. Like the Puritans, he believed the Jewish Diaspora had to reach every nation before the return to the Holy Land began.

Partly because he was caught up in the prophetic fervor, and partly for strategic and economic reasons over his war with Holland and Portugal, Oliver Cromwell exhorted his Parliament to aid in the restoration of the Jewish nation. He reasoned, “Truly you are called by God as Judah was to rule with Him and for Him. You are at the edge of the Promises and Prophecies.”
²⁰⁵

The Parliament, however, did not agree. Members couldn't have agreed, because it was not yet God's time. The rebirth of Israel was still several centuries away. It had to happen in concert with a whole predicted scenario, and that was not yet present.

However, all was not lost. Though Parliament refused to go along with Cromwell's whole program, the ban of Jewish emigration to England was tacitly disregarded. England proved a haven for Jews during and after England's war with Spain in 1656.

“There first stirrings in Puritan England of interest in the restoration of Israel were unquestionably religious in origin, born out of the Old Testament reign over the mind and faith of the party in power during the middle years of the seventeenth century,” writes Tuchman. “But religion was not enough.”

No practical results would have come out of the Puritans' sense of brotherhood with the children of Israel, or out of their ideals of toleration, or out of their mystical hopes of hastening the millennium, had not political and economic expediency intervened.

Cromwell's interest in Manasseh ben Israel's proposal was dictated by the same factor that dictated Lloyd George's interest in
Chaim Weizmann's proposal ten generations later: namely, the aid that each believed the Jews could render in a wartime situation. And from Cromwell's time on, every future episode of British concern with Palestine depended on the twin presence of the profit motive, whether commercial, military or imperial, and the religious motive inherited from the Bible.”
²⁰⁶

The great British scientist Sir Isaac Newton (A.D. 1643-1727) was one of those visionaries who initially got the literal interpretation of prophecy moving. He was one of the first scholars to study prophecy as something other than just a collection of allegories, symbols, poems, and meaningless metaphors that had already been fulfilled in past history. After a lifetime of study in Bible prophecy, he predicted,
“About the time of the End, a body of men will be raised up who will turn their attention to the prophecies, and insist on their literal interpretation in the midst of much clamor and opposition
.”

As one of those who has been part of the fulfillment of this prediction, I can testify that there is plenty of opposition to the insistence that Bible prophecy is going to be literally fulfilled—and sooner than you think!

No doubt the far-reaching revival of interest in prophecy that occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century greatly affected the general population of England. Even some of the aristocracy who later became high government officials were deeply affected. This revival was the direct result of the previous turn to literal interpretation of the Bible that began with the Reformation under Luther and spread to the Puritans. It took longer for this method to be applied to prophecy, but by the early eighteen hundreds, it was in full bloom.

Many annual camp meetings were set up to pursue and learn about Bible prophecy. Such articulate luminaries in this movement
as John Darby and Sir Robert Anderson spoke to large crowds about the sudden coming of Jesus Christ for His church. They also linked the return of God's ancient people to the Holy Land as an indispensable part of the final scenario of predicted events. They not only believed in a literal rebirth of the state of Israel, but also insisted that God's purpose for the Jews as a people and a nation, which was promised throughout the Old Testament, would then be fulfilled.

In an earlier chapter we discussed how England intervened with the sultan in 1840 on behalf of the Jews already living in the Holy Land. The decision to prod the Turks toward a more humane treatment and acceptance of the Jews was inspired by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, another Englishman who believed deeply in the promises of the Bible and their literal meaning.