Historical Ignorance and Popular Perception: the Case of U.S. Perceptions of Palestine, 1917

The phenomenon of selective perception shapes life. We see what we want to see, what suits our interests to see. And we act accordingly. This is obviously true on a personal level, but no less so on the community and national scale. Bounded by past history as well as present perceived needs, the group and its representatives often stereotype their world, omitting the inconvenient, so that the future can be shaped according to their desire. It is a dangerous game for it leads to judgments based on much less than the truth and can result in significant distortions of reality.

This paper will examine one such case of distortion, the historically inaccurate view held by many Americans, their leaders and their press of the land of Palestine in 1917- the year of the Balfour Declaration. In the course of this examination an effort will be made to show how a Western, stereotyped picture of the "Holy Land" replaced the reality of Palestine. Various factors contributed to this distorted picture, including historical ignorance, selective perception, Christian fundamentalist ideology and Western imperialist assumptions about the Near East. The cumulative effect was to negate Palestine's Arab history and culture and render its majority Muslim population largely invisible. This is a phenomenon that I will call "perceptual depopulation." Rendered empty in this way, Palestine in 1917 was ready to be "repealed" by a group sharing in Western religious and cultural traditions. Thus it was that Americans would find it easy and logical to support the Zionist movement.

THE HISTORICAL SETTING

On November 2, 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jewish people a "national home" in Palestine. The promise was a product of a British wartime policy that sought to win the support of those groups whose aid was considered important to the allied war effort. British leaders, including Prime Minister Lloyd George, saw the Jews as such a group.1 The Declaration also reflected British imperial interest in Palestine. Some officials in the British government saw the war against the Turks as a chance to extend the British Empire from Egypt into Palestine in order to create a buffer protecting Egypt and the Suez canal from attack from the east. In this effort Zionist Jews were envisioned as a reliable, potential client people.2 The desire to ally the Jews with the Entente war effort, along with imperial strategic interests were, in their tum, underpinned by broader cultural and religious emotions at play among the British leadership. Men like Lloyd George and his foreign minister, Arthur Balfour, were also moved to conquer Palestine as a way of championing their Western Christian heritage. To do so would wrest the Holy Land from Muslim hands, thus redeeming the "birthplace of Christianity" and the "ancient homeland of the Jews."3 In this effort as well, the Zionist movement was seen as an ally with a common biblical link to the area.

There was, however, an important countervailing fact that had to be faced, or alternatively just ignored, if Palestine was to be won for the Christian West and the alliance between British wartime and imperial needs, and the Zionist movement was to go forward. That fact was a demographic one. As the British well knew, Palestine was populated by 722,143 inhabitants, only 38,754, (or approximately 5.3 percent) of whom were Jewish.4 There were those among the British leadership who knew that this meant future trouble for any British-Zionist alliance, and said so. As Lord Curzon, one of the four ministers composing the war cabinet, put it at a British Cabinet meeting on October 4, 1917, "How was it proposed to get rid of the existing majority of Mussulman inhabitants and to introduce the Jews in their place?"5 The question was never answered. Rather, it was ignored because within the religious and imperialist worldview that was now guiding men like Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, the political rights of the indigenous Arab majority were irrelevant. As Balfour explained in a confidential memorandum written on August 11, 1919,

The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.6

Balfour's perception of Palestine found a popular reception not only in England, but also in the United States. With the exception of any real concern for British imperial interests, Americans shared Balfour's conviction that Palestine was a land well fit for Jewish colonization. Underlying this attitude was the fact that most Americans were quite familiar with the Holy Land of Bible stories and Sunday sermons, but few knew anything about Arab history and culture in Palestine. Thus, for the Americans of 1917, the Arabs of Palestine were either invisible or easily viewed as barbarians with no history worth consideration. How did Americans come to see Palestine in such a distorted way?

Although Americans had developed diplomatic and commercial contact with the Middle East almost from the founding of the Republic, these had not been intense or pervasive enough to shape public perceptions of the area.7 As a consequence America's traditional perception of Palestine as the Christian Holy Land, remained unchanged. This view was presented to the public throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the works of energetic American Protestant missionaries, and the occasional romanticized travelogues and novels. Those who, like Arab Muslims, did not fit well into this picture were ignored or cast negatively in the role of out-groups.8

American Protestant missionary activity was particularly important in shaping this view for both the general public and the Washington leadership. The missionary effort was led by devout Protestants such as James L. Barton and Cleveland H. Dodge. As we will see, both men were close to President Woodrow Wilson. The missionaries they sponsored were well aware that Palestine was populated predominately by Muslims with an ancient yet still viable religion and culture. They disapproved of both and resented Islam's persistent resistance to Protestant proselytizing efforts. That resistance had had a deflecting effect on missionary activity in the area. From the 1830s onward, Protestant missionaries from the United States had largely given up trying to convert Muslims and instead concentrated their efforts on the evangelizing of what they called the "degenerate churches of the East."9 This shift in tum shaped what sort of picture of the area these missionaries presented to their congregations and the public in general back home. The indigenous Muslim population (representing a failure of missionary efforts) was of necessity simultaneously demonized and deemphasized. Non-Muslim groups, such as Armenians, Arab Christians and Jews, all seen as people of biblical origins, received more attention, which reinforced the perception that they were the only groups of the region meriting serious consideration. In other words, the minority groups of the Ottoman Empire commanded the attention of interested Americans while the reality of millions of Muslims receded to an increasingly hazy and distorted background.10

This process, in tum, fed into a widespread conviction that the Holy Land was really an extension of the West's biblical religious patrimony that had been usurped by an alien power.11 This too encouraged a dismissal of the Arab past and condemnation of the present situation which had left this hallowed place in a ''wretched state.''12 The result was a religiously prescribed picture of the Holy Land that in effect emptied it of its Islamic history and, when it addressed the Arab Muslim population at all, viewed them as an unfortunate impediment to be dismissed for the sake of redemption and progress.13 Furthermore, this collective act of "perceptual depopulation" of Palestine created the psychological conditions to support the remaking or repopulation of the area along an outline consistent with the notion of Palestine as a part of the West's religious birthright, that is, along lines compatible with those put forth by the Zionist movement. This scenario was encapsulated for the American public by the British when they put forth the Balfour Declaration. Subsequently, the Declaration was interpreted for Americans by their press (an interpretation that ignored the Declaration's reference to "the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine"). Thus, evidence that the American public in 1917 saw Palestine in this prescribed and distorted way can be found most readily in what was said, and not said, by the press during that year.

THE PRESS AND THE PERCEPTUAL DEPOPULATION OF PALESTINE

For this paper some 150 articles in four newspapers, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, were examined for the year 1917. The newspaper writing of the day was different from modem reporting. The language used tended to be both flamboyant and sometimes racist. Story content was often indistinguishable from opinion. In the case of Palestine in 1917, some of this bias and distortion may have been encouraged by wartime fervor and propagandizing. However, as will become apparent, much of the opinionated content of articles and stories also reflected the fact that reporters and editors, while having access to information about Palestine's majority Muslim population, could not see it or interpret it any more accurately than the Protestant missionaries of their day. Almost to a man they were wedded to a Christian Weltanschauung and a set of complementary nineteenth-century imperialist assumptions that ordered the world by selective perceptions, the nature of which made it easier for the newspapers to ignore or denigrate the "natives." Thus what was missing from the reporting were accurate demographic details for the Palestine of 1917. Who were the Palestinians? Who among them constituted the majority? What was their religious affiliation? How long had they been there? What was the nature of their culture and civilization? Hardly anyone broached these questions. It is the lack of such detail that allowed for inaccurate, incomplete, yet traditionally acceptable, perceptions of the Holy Land to emerge from the coverage.

The basic outline picture of Palestine offered by the press coalesced around two themes:

1) Contemporary Palestine was the same Palestine of the Bible. It was the ancient home of the Jews and Jesus and the birthplace of the Christian religion. Therefore, it properly belonged to the "civilized" Western Christian world.

2) While Palestine had long suffered under the yoke of "uncivilized" Turkish/Muslim oppression, it was now being redeemed by a "modem crusade." British forces were literally crusaders picking up where Richard the Lion-Hearted had left off.

Of the 35 descriptive articles on Palestine published in the two final months of 1917 (the only time period during which much reporting from Palestine went beyond war news), 13 used the crusader analogy, while 15 described the area in biblical terms. Thus did the press at once reflect and define American images of the Holy Land. Palestine was always interpreted as a part of the Christian patrimony.

A good example of the crusader theme that emerges from the press coverage was pictorially displayed by a large (5 x 6.5 inches) front-page drawing appearing in The Chicago Tribune on November 18, 1917.14 Under the title "The Holy City," there appears a two-story building in Jerusalem, beyond which the Turkish and British forces battle. In front of the building stands a Turkish soldier armed with both rifle and sword. At the balcony window on the second story of the building there is a woman leaning out with her right arm extended and an anguished look on her face. She wears a flowing scarf on which is written "Christianity." One is left with the impression that, in Jerusalem, there are three main constituents: the Turks, the British and the Christian population whom the British have come to the rescue. The Muslim population is omitted or, at best, subsumed into the image of the Turk. Pictorially (and equal to a thousand words) the message is clear: the "Holy City" is a Christian place. A month later a similar message was given by yet another large front-page drawing (5 x 9 inches) appearing in The Los Angeles Times of December 23, 1917.15 In this picture, which bears the title "Christmas Greetings," we see a brick wall with Middle-East-style buildings visible beyond. On the wall is printed in capital letters the word "Jerusalem." Standing on top of the wall is the oversized figure of a knight in armor blowing a long horn and carrying a great shield bearing the sign of the cross. In front of the wall carrying a Turkish flag are diminutive figures with long hooked noses each wearing a fez. They are all slinking away. The story told here is that the capture of Jerusalem is not a victory of the Entente over a Central Power. It is rather the victory of Christianity over an alien people. The aliens are the Turks, and Christianity is the knight victorious upon the wall. Again, the only Muslim presence shown is that of the Turks.

These messages, that Palestine is an extension of the Christian world, that the war in the Near East is a fulfillment of the crusades and that the only significant Muslim presence in the Holy Land is an enemy of the civilized world, were reinforced by numerous articles appearing in all four papers. The following quotes, while selective, are typical of the overall reportage. An October 28 editorial appearing in The Washington Post stated that "some of the greatest nobles of France and England have sought service there [Palestine]... in emulation of their crusader forebears."16 In the November 20 issue of the same paper, we learn that ''millions of ardent Christians are fervently hoping that the near future will witness the Holy Land reclaimed from the control of the Moslem who for centuries has held uninterrupted sway over the birthplace of the Christian religion. . . . That event will be the cause of general rejoicing throughout the civilized world."17 Again on December 11, the Post editorialized, ''Jerusalem has been wrested from the Turk, and Christendom once more possesses its holy city. To millions of devout worshippers this triumph is the greatest fact of the war.''18

On December 24, the same paper quoted Speaker of the House Champ Clark, as saying: ''So far as war operations are concerned, the one thing that pleases most people most is the capture of Jerusalem, 'The Holy City.' After these hundreds of years the dream of Peter the Hermit, Richard Coeur de Lion and their fellow crusaders is an accomplished fact."19 On November 11, The Los Angeles Times reported that ''today the British forces are traversing the same territory over which Richard Coeur De Lion fought in the crusades of old." The British are then characterized as "the twentieth-century crusaders." Their goal is Jerusalem, and soon the "holy city of the Jewish and Christian religions alike" will be "delivered from the thousand-year dominion of the infidel. ..."20 On December 12, the same paper told in an editorial that for "twenty centuries the conquering Moslem left the trail of his bloodstained sandal in cruel patterns on every road of that sacred soil. . . . and now for all mankind a great light has suddenly dawned. The dream of centuries has been realized. Jerusalem has been redeemed.... Never again will its sacred stones be defiled by the rule of the infidel and pagan."21 The Chicago Tribune of November 27, 1917, took a similar, though somewhat less vitriolic tack, explaining to its readers that Entente military action in Palestine was designed, in part, to "liberate Jerusalem from Mohammedan rule."22 In an editorial on March 9, 1917, The New York Times wrote in reference to Jerusalem, "the grievance that so moved the crusaders-the ruling of the city considered holy by more people than any other by a race to whose members its associations are subjects of scorn-would at last be removed if the Turks were expelled."23 The New York Times would end the year describing the British campaign in Palestine this way, "So, first under Maxwell, and then under Murray, and now under Allenby, a new crusade to recover the Holy Sepulchre and all that it materially and symbolically stands for was conceived, put into execution and carried out."24

There are numerous additional examples of reporting in which similar descriptions of Palestine as an extension of the Christian world are given, while there is very little in any of the four papers to counterbalance this recasting of the area.25 Most references to Muslims generally associate them with enemy Turks, though there is the occasional exception. In an interesting piece on December 11, 1917, a New York Times reporter, referring to the British "crusade" in Palestine, commented: "Paradoxical as it may seem, the auxiliaries in this new crusade are coreligionists of the Turks-the fellahin of Egypt and the Arabs of the new Kingdom of the Hejaz, who, having recovered the Moslem holy places, are ready to aid Christians recover theirs."26 Here, once more, Palestine is characterized as a Christian holy place and the Arab Muslims, while differentiated from the Turks, are restricted to Egypt and Arabia. Other references produced the same effect, by placing Arabs within the context of the anti-Turkish revolt of the Sherif of Mecca carried on outside of Palestine.27

For readers whose knowledge of Palestine was limited to biblical references, missionary tracts and the occasional Christian travelogue, the result of reading the newspapers was a reinforcement of a stereotyped and inaccurate view of Palestine. This was so because the four papers under consideration followed a culturally acceptable "party line" on Palestine, presenting it primarily as a part of the West's biblical patrimony. The local Arab Muslims, and all they culturally and politically represented in 1917, were simply not there in the vast majority of coverage. Also, by concentrating on biblical and crusader analogies the press negated 1300 years of past Muslim civilization in the area, which enhanced the stereotyped picture. The overall result was that the newspapers drew a portrait of an area "perceptually depopulated" of its indigenous majority population. This effect became all the more significant when, in November of 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration. For, having subtly emptied Palestine of one people, these same newspapers were now poised to introduce into that land another people who were themselves compatible with the West's religious image of the area.

THE PRESS, ZIONISM AND THE PERCEPTUAL REPOPULATION OF PALESTINE

In the first ten months of 1917, only The New York Times had treated Zionism as a subject of interest. However, in the last two months of that year, after the Balfour Declaration had been issued and the British were securing their hold on Palestine, most of the four major newspapers under consideration began publishing pieces on Zionist aspirations in Palestine with increasing frequency.28 These articles sometimes tied Zionist aspirations, imperialism, the Entente's war efforts, American traditions and Wilsonian idealism all together. For instance, citing Rabbi Rudolph I. Coffee on November 24, The Chicago Tribune informed its readers that "Within a few days Jerusalem will fall into the hands of the British. Now comes the glorious news that Palestine will be given to the Jews. This is part of the plan to make the world safe for democracy."29 The Washington Post of November 29 quoted Jacob de Haas, a Zionist leader, as explaining that "The establishment of a Jewish state under the protection of the allies, will forever defeat the Kaiser's Berlin-to-Baghdad scheme and eject the Turk from civilized boundaries."30

On December 12 the Post carried a longer piece which described the "return of the Jews to Palestine after an enforced exile of nearly 2,000 years" as "one of the wonderful romances of all history.'' The story also connects a Jewish Palestine to U.S. history and character, a point which suggests that Americans from the very beginning linked the Zionist .. pioneer character" with America's own pioneer traditions: " ... It is believed that thousands more American Jews will go [to Palestine]. These will be Jews who have immigrated into our own West and who are expected to carry with them into Palestine the American spirit and the characteristics of American settlers.'' Later this same article displays the imperialist attitude of the day while at the same time evoking a biblical analogy in its description of the return of some 9,000 Palestinian Jews who had, at the beginning of the war, fled into British Egypt:

These 9,000 children of Israel are now ready for the second exodus....This time the British government will be the Moses who will... give to a people without a land a land without a people....All that region that is to millions of Christians a Holy Land, whose history is part of the knowledge of every cultivated mind... is, in the year 1917, a field for the pioneer home seeker as the primeval forests of equatorial Africa. 31

The redefining of demographic reality is continued in The New York Times. Here the coverage was much more extensive. The war in the Palestine region and Zionist activities were covered in nearly 100 articles in 1917. The picture painted by the Times was somewhat different from that of the other newspapers in that the Jewish population of Palestine was given greater emphasis, even more than the Christian. Also, as we have seen, The New York Times recognized the Arab nature of surrounding areas of the Near East, particularly in its coverage of the Arab rebellion in Arabia.32 Yet Palestine, and especially Jerusalem, were different. Typical of the distinction is the March 9, 1917, editorial which described Baghdad as "the city of the Caliphs."33 A week later, in an editorial on March 18, Jerusalem is described as "the city of Abraham, of David, of Solomon, and of Jesus; the city too of Titus and Tancred."34 Baghdad is conceded to the Moslems, but Jerusalem is a city of the Judeo-Christian world.

The only exception to this pattern is an article printed in The New York Times of December 12, 1917, describing a speech given in Manchester, England, by Sir Mark Sykes, an important adviser to the British Foreign Office and the man who had signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement dividing the Middle East between Britain and France.

In this piece, Sykes is cited as explaining that it was "vital for the success of the Zionist plan that it should rest upon a Jewish, Armenian and Arab entente." Sykes therefore warned the Zionists "to look through Arab glasses" as they sought to be "bona-fide colonists" in Palestine. He drew special attention to Jerusalem, which he described as "inflammable ground" where "a careless word or gesture might set half a continent aflame. . . . Cooperation and goodwill from the first is necessary or ultimate disaster would overtake both Jew and Arab."35 Unfortunately The New York Times reporters and editors did not investigate further Sykes's prescient warnings and the inherent recognition of the Arab presence in Palestine that they implied. Thus, in the overall coverage, Sykes's position, like the Arab presence itself, could make little impact against the multitude of articles that contradicted his message.

As mentioned above, The New York Times tended to magnify the Jewish presence in Palestine. One way this was done was by concentrating on the wartime suffering of the Palestinian Jews to the exclusion of other segments of the population. Throughout the months of May and June 1917, the Times devoted 13 articles to the deteriorating condition of the Jewish population.36 By contrast, the suffering of the Christian and Muslim citizenry can only be inferred from scattered and very general references. According to this coverage (some of it reprinted from another paper, The Jewish Chronicle), the Jews of Palestine were in imminent danger of eviction, starvation and "wholesale massacre." On June 9, after building expectations of such disasters, the Times momentarily reversed itself by reporting that Abram I. Elkus, the returning U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (who was himself Jewish), had informed "Rabbi Messinger, Second Chairman of the Swiss Zionist Society. . . that, according to his reports, no massacre had taken place up to the present, the rumors that massacres had accompanied the Jaffa evacuation being untrue."37 In truth, wartime conditions had deteriorated for the entire population of Palestine. Turkish authorities had become increasingly arbitrary and oppressive toward everyone, particularly those whose loyalty was judged suspect. This included not only many Jews, but also elements of the Arab Muslim population.38 Only twice, in an entire year's coverage did the Times allude to this fact as when, for example, on June 19 it reported Ambassador Elkus explaining that, "The Jaffa massacres... were exaggerated. The whole population of Jaffa-Moslem, Christian and Jew-was moved away for military reasons, then moved back. There was much incidental suffering, but no deliberate massacre."39 Elkus's disclaimer did not prevent the Times from printing numerous additional later pieces which continued to give the impression that the Jews of Palestine were the principal sufferers.40 When it became apparent that attacks upon Jews had been exaggerated, the reporting began to focus more on the issue of hunger. Again, the Jewish population was depicted as the one in most distress. Sometimes this appeared to be confirmed by official sources. For instance, on December 10, 1917, the Times quoted the Reverend O.A. Glazebrook, the U.S. consul in Jerusalem, as stating, "In the Holy Land the burden of misery will fall upon the Jews who predominate. They are in no danger of guns or persecution from the Turks. They are in danger only of starvation and that danger becomes greater every day."41

The truth, however, was again to be understood in a more general context. There was hunger in Palestine, and the Jewish population, particularly in Jerusalem, was hard hit because traditionally they existed on subsidies from abroad, much of which came from countries no longer having ready and reliable ways of sending help. But the general conditions affecting food supplies described by Glazebrook, such as "the complete and ruthless sacrifice of needs of the civilian population, to those of the army"42 affected everyone, though one has to read carefully and analytically to understand this. Finally, it is hard to know what to make of the consul's assertion that the Jews "predominate" in the Holy Land. It was a factually incorrect statement which should have been obvious to someone resident in Palestine. Yet Glazebrook was not only the U.S. consul but also a Protestant clergyman and missionary. He may have been speaking from the missionary point of view described earlier. Those who "predominate" are those for whom the missionary has a special professional, proselytizing interest.43

When all was said and done, The New York Times presented Palestine as seemingly populated by what was in reality a small Jewish minority. Why did the Times give such play to Palestine's Jews? As we have seen, this was not as much the case with the other three papers, all of which stressed the Christian nature of the Holy Land. In the case of The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune, coverage came almost exclusively from reporters traveling with the British army. There are many references to Turkish brutality but they are general, with only occasional details about oppression directed against specific groups. Only The New York Times concentrated on a particular segment of the population-the Jews. Perhaps this can be explained by the paper's location. New York's Jewish community was much larger than those of the three other cities hosting newspapers under consideration. It was also the place of residence of many American Zionist leaders who, anxious to disseminate information about the Jews and Palestine, doubtless made themselves available to the city's newspapers. Also, as has been noted, the Times reprinted stories from other papers having a particular interest in Jewish affairs, such as The Jewish Chronicle.

Whatever the circumstances that led to the makeup of The New York Times reportage, the result was that Palestine's Arab Muslim history, culture and people were again overlooked. The Turks were the principal Muslims mentioned in the vast majority of stories, but they were alien outsiders and the enemy.44 Britain's victory meant the expulsion of the Turks. No Turks, no Muslims worth mentioning. This depiction did nothing to challenge or historically update the biblical view of Palestine held by many of the paper's readership. On the contrary, the paper's coverage confirmed that view.

Against this background, The New York Times began, as early as April 1917, reporting on Zionist plans for Palestine. Some 18 pieces would appear by the end of the year with 13 of these concentrated in November and December.45 The coverage showed the Zionists shaping their claims to the style and temper of the day. As Rabbi Coffee had described, in The Chicago Tribune, a Jewish Palestine as "part of the plan to make the world safe for democracy," so now a convention of Zionists meeting in Baltimore on June 24, 1917, were reported by the Times to have announced "The [U.S.] government will be asked to recognize the Jewish nation as one of those oppressed smaller nationalities which must have an opportunity to assert themselves after the war."46 That is, the convention was anticipating what would soon be one of President Wilson's Fourteen Points, which in tum would constitute an American war aim-the right of self-determination of peoples. However, the Zionist claim ignored the identical right of self-determination of the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. Yet, to those readers of The New York Times who were ignorant of contemporary Palestinian realities, or saw them in terms of biblical analogies, and whose newspapers had not informed them of those realities, no inconsistency would be apparent.

Subsequent articles covered efforts by various Zionist organizations to organize support for a Jewish Palestine47 and, in addition, the considerable effort of these groups to raise money for both war relief in the Holy Land48 and for future use in "the creation of the Government in Palestine. "49 The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune paralleled this reporting. On November 25, for example, the Post reported on a meeting of Zionist societies in Washington, DC, celebrating the issuing of the Balfour Declaration. The article states that ''the ideal of a Palestine nationalized by the Jewish race has already received the approval of Italy, France and the Holy See. . . . Zionists of Washington confidently expect an official utterance by Congress similar in purport to that of Great Britain."50 On November 29, the same paper headlined an article, "Asks D.C. Jews to Give $1,000,000," which reports, in part, "an appeal to the Jews of Washington for $1,000,000 toward the $100,000,000 fund to be raised by the Jews in the United States to establish Palestine as a Jewish state."51 Some 11 additional articles in a similar vein were published by The Washington Post in November and December.52 Typical of six Chicago Tribune pieces on Zionist plans for Palestine was the Coffee article mentioned earlier, which, in addition to linking a Jewish Palestine with Wilsonian ideals, predicted that "in Palestine Jews can set an example of high ideals in government looking among other things to the abolition of poverty." Additional Tribune pieces bore such headlines as "Back to Jerusalem" and "For New Zion."53

Toward the end of 1917, The New York Times continued its reporting by covering several mass rallies held by American Zionists. Returning to Baltimore on December 16, "an historic gathering" of the Confederation of American Zionists was held during which various resolutions were passed. One thanked the British government for issuing the Balfour Declaration and called upon "the Jews of the world to unite in the face of the eminent (sic) realization and the great hope for the restoration of Israel to its own land." This was then followed by another resolution which read, "The American Zionist Confederation congratulates the Arab people on the splendid achievement which they have made in the direction of an independent national life." 54

That this was reported by The New York Times with no sense of irony demonstrates that the paper's reporters and editors shared with their readers the same historical and religious blind spots. No doubt the reporter and his editors realized that the latter resolution referred to the British promise of an independent Arab state as a consequence of the Arab revolt in alliance with the British war effort. Yet, the assumption that Palestine was an extension of the Western biblical patrimony allowed for an automatic exclusion of the Holy Land from any future Arab nation. 55

On December 23, at another rally covered by The New York Times, "thousands of New York Zionists packed Carnegie Hall'' to celebrate ''the British promise to restore Jerusalem and the Holy Land to the Jewish people." Among them were the Rev. Otis A. Glazebrook and Abram I. Elkus. Again, the war aims of the allies and the post-war aims of the Zionists were tied together. Stephen Wise, the American Zionist leader, told the crowd, " ... This meeting has been called in order to reaffirm the faith of every living American Jew not only in the certainty of the triumph of our arms, but in the righteousness of our aims." One of those aims, he pointed out, was represented by the Balfour Declaration. Other speakers using more sweeping terms, but also echoing popular perceptions, described the Declaration as not just " ... an act of politics or diplomacy, but something far deeper, a stage in the development of history which in effect added another chapter to the Bible, a modern chapter by which the Jews of today could link something of their own time to the story of the old Jewish Kingdom.''56

Finally, there was a New York Times op-ed piece of December 2, 1917, written by Henry Morgenthau, another former U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (1913-1916), who was also Jewish. This piece bears close reading, for Morgenthau had served in the Near East and, as was the case with the British, knew the realities of contemporary Palestine. Yet much of what he says displays an ingrained stereotyping typical of both European and American views of the non-Western world at this time. Morgenthau begins with an acknowledgement that Jerusalem and the Holy Land had been for the last ''twelve centuries" under "almost uninterrupted Mohammedan rule." However, he dismisses this period as an uncivilized time, when he characterizes the British victory in the region as follows: "Christians everywhere will rejoice that the Holy Land, so well-known to them through both the Old and New Testaments, has been restored to the civilized world.'' Here he pinpoints the main source of American knowledge of Palestine, the Bible, and combines it with a standing prejudice, particularly popular as a rationalization for nineteenth century European imperial expansion: the West, as the seat of civilization, has not only a right, but a duty to take control, or at least influence the fate of non-western lands. This was also an explicit rationale for the mandate system created after World War I under which Palestine was turned over to the British.

Given that "Mohammedan rule," which he also equated with the "curse of Turkish misgovernment," was by definition not civilized, no mention had to be made of what else "twelve centuries of almost uninterrupted Mohammedan rule" might have wrought in Palestine. Had these long centuries created a viable, living Arab culture? Were not the political rights and expectations of the majority Muslims, built up over such a long time, worth consideration? 57 All this was absent not because bringing them up to the audience he was addressing would have been impolitic. As we are about to see, Morgenthau did not refrain from pointing out that Palestine was of importance to more than the Jews. Rather, like almost all of his contemporaries, he just disregarded the Palestinian Arabs.

Yet, Morgenthau was quite aware that the Jewish claim to Palestine had to be viewed within a larger context. Thus he goes on to tell his readers: "But not only the Jews are interested in Palestine.... and this is what I beg my Jewish fellow religionists not to lose sight of for a moment, all Christendom too, looks upon Palestine as the Holy Land, in which every believing Christian has a deep religious interest and a right to share." 58 Clearly, for Morgenthau as for Balfour, the Holy Land is a part of the Judeo-Christian birthright. Unlike Sir Mark Sykes, it is not "Moslem glasses" that the Zionists must look through, but rather Christian ones. On this basis he concludes that the setting up of a "limited nationalist state" would be an "error" and advocates that Palestine be administered "under an international and inter-religious commission." It was a suggestion that the Zionists would ignore. Later, Morgenthau would find himself in disagreement with many Zionist positions. Morgenthau's ambivalent attitude toward Zionist goals reveals that not all Jews favored a Jewish Palestine. The New York Times was the only one of the four papers to report Jewish opposition to the Zionists. However, as it turned out, this opposition was not based on any recognition of the Palestinian Arabs, nor, with the one exception given below, did the Times coverage of this opposition shed any greater light on Palestinian realities.

The first hint of Jewish opposition to Zionism in The New York Times (no non-Jewish opposition was reported in 1917) came on May 24, 1917. The story came not from the United States but from Britain, and concerned English Jews. The Joint Foreign Committee of two British Jewish organizations, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association, had issued the following statement:

The feature of the Zionist program objected to proposes to invest Jewish settlers in Palestine with special rights over others. This would prove a calamity to the whole Jewish people, who hold that the principle of equal rights for all denominations is essential. The proposal is all the more inadmissible because the Jews probably will long remain in the minority in the population of Palestine, and because it might involve them in most bitter feuds with their neighbors of other races and religion. 59

Here we see a small group of British Jews taking note of the minority status of the Jews in Palestine and pointing to the consequences of asserting special rights stemming from national claims. This issue and its negative possibilities were never broached again by the Times, notwithstanding relatively extensive coverage of Jewish doubts about the Zionist program. Also, The New York Times did not follow up on the story by reporting the fate of those who put forward these objections. The above statement calling into question aspects of Zionist ambitions was signed by David L. Alexander, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. On June 18, 1917, The London Times reported that he and other officers of the board had been forced to resign because the membership of that organization (including Lord Rothschild, to whom Balfour would later address his Declaration) expressed "profound disapproval of such views." 60

The American Jewish opposition, as reported by The New York Times, was not concerned with the demographic realities of Palestine or the displacement of the non-Jewish population. Rather, it was concerned with the effects of a racially based nationalism on the Jewish people. In a long op-ed piece by Henry Moskowitz, printed on June 10, 1917, the author asked:

What are the serious moral dangers in this nationalistic point of view from the standpoint of the Jewish soul? Here are some of them: First it is apt to breed racial egotism.... The establishment of the Jewish state may coarsen the quality of Hebrew spirituality and result not in a pure but in an alloyed idealism.

With hindsight, one might judge this statement prophetic. Nonetheless, its focus is on the fate of the Jews and not on the rights of non-Jews in Palestine. Indeed, the author finds acceptable "the encouragement and financial support. . . given to Jewish colonies in Palestine" because they "help solve the problems of those Jews who have sought a refuge from persecution." 61 As so many non-Zionist Jews did, Moskowitz favored cultural and religious settlement while trying to avoid its inevitable political connotations. What these critics failed to realize was the disruptive potential in any mass influx of Western immigrants into Palestine, no matter what their motives. Was this the result of historical ignorance of Palestine's Arab Muslims, or a racial egocentricism not uncommon among all peoples, though particularly manifest among the Western nations at this time? The evidence provided by press reporting in 1917 suggests both.

Other Jewish critics of Zionism published in The New York Times reflected a widespread fear that a national home for the Jews in Palestine would weaken the citizenship rights of Jews elsewhere. Rabbi Samuel Schulman, in a piece the Times picked up from The American Hebrew, writes that "the Jews in the Western lands cannot conceal from themselves the sinister possibilities that may result from the emphasis of Jewish nationality. Anti-Semites all over the world may seek maliciously to emphasize for them their hyphenated nationality."62 This was the same argument that Lord Edwin Montagu, the highest-ranking Jewish member of the British government, had unsuccessfully employed against the Balfour Declaration.

In nearly 100 articles the Palestinians had been mentioned only a very few times and never in such a way as to be accorded serious rights, with the result that the [New York Times] reporting had rendered their society and history nearly invisible.

The New York Times brought out its own editorial on Zionism on November 24, 1917. It emphasized that many Jews were wary of Zionism either because they were Orthodox Jews who "still cherish the belief that the return to Zion is to be preceded by the coming of Elliah," or because "they fear that the Zionist project might involve the possibility of a recurrence of anti-Semitism." The editors concluded that a study of ''the practical working of attempts at repatriation wherever they have been made would serve as a safeguard against errors which might be committed under the guidance of yearning and idealism." 63 What errors did the New York Times editors have in mind? Certainly there is no evidence pointing to any concern over the possible violation of the rights of the indigenous majority population. In nearly 100 articles the Palestinians had been mentioned only a very few times and never in such a way as to be accorded serious rights, with the result that the paper's reporting had rendered their society and history nearly invisible. By concentrating on the Zionist movement, the paper had simultaneously emphasized the possibility and legitimacy of repopulation through ''repatriation'' even while belatedly suggesting that the process needed study to avoid the unspecified "errors" of "idealism."

The only other of the four newspapers to editorially call into question Zionist plans for Palestine was The Los Angeles Times. The editors brought out two editorials about Palestine and the Zionists in November and December of 1917. The first was an editorial published on December 24, 1917, entitled "Will the Jews Return?" and asked the question, "What of Jerusalem? The question that gave much concern to David, the psalm-singer of Israel, is today uppermost in the minds of the Christian world. Will the Jews return to the land of their fathers? Only time will tell....The Jewish state in Palestine may become one of the notable examples of democracy in the world of popular governments. 64

By December 27, however, the Los Angeles Times editors were having second thoughts. Now, in an editorial entitled, "What of Jerusalem?" we read:

... an independent and unguarded Hebrew nation, occupying Palestine would not last long. It would soon be the prey of greedy neighbors as in ancient days. The United States should not be asked to alone play big brother to the resurrected Jewish nation. . .. It appears to the Times that at present we have too much on our hands to embark on the colonization of Palestine and rebuilding and repeopling of Jerusalem.65

In 1917-1918 the British periodically suggested that the United States accept a mandate over Near Eastern territory. It may have been knowledge of this effort that scared the Los Angeles Times editors into believing that the United States could end up with responsibility for a Jewish Palestine. Since the editors' isolationist leanings seemed to have been even stronger than their interest in reviving biblical Israel, they backed away from any endorsement of Zionism. Once again, however, the reasons have nothing to do with Palestinian rights. Indeed, it is important to note that the Los Angeles Times editors use such terms as "colonization," "rebuilding" and "repeopling." Such language could only be used by people working from within an imperialist worldview that rendered the Palestinian Arab population irrelevant.

It is apparent that, in 1917, there existed plenty of misgivings about Zionism.66 What is important to note, however, is that most of it was expressed in language as ethnocentric as Zionism itself. Most of the Jews in America knew no more of the demographic and cultural realities of Palestine than did their Christian compatriots. What the Christians learned in Sunday School and the New Testament, the Jews learned with a different theological emphasis and more immediate emotion in Hebrew School and the Old Testament. In both cases the "twelve centuries" of Arab cultural, religious and political existence in Palestine were absent. And at those rare times when it did intrude, as in Henry Morgenthau's observations, it was quickly set aside as an uncivilized hiatus. The Zionist leadership, on the other hand, in contact with Jewish communities in Palestine, may well have had a clearer and more accurate picture of Holy Land demographics. But they certainly were not going to make a point of it. And when, as in the case of the British Joint Foreign Committee, other Jews pointed out that the presence of a non-Jewish Arab majority was bound to bring "bitter feuds," the message was immediately stifled. In any case, most of those who did object to Zionist aspirations in Palestine did not do so out of concern for the rights of indigenous non-Jewish peoples. The general prevailing ignorance of Arab Palestine, operating within the context of a colonialist mentality, allowed objections to the "repeopling" of Palestine to focus almost exclusively on possible negative consequences for the Jews themselves.

THE PERCEPTUAL DISTORTIONS OF WILSON

Were the distorted perceptions of Palestine held by the American public shared by their leaders? The evidence suggests that some top officials, such as Secretary of State Robert Lansing and his staff, and perhaps Colonel House, the president's personal adviser, were better informed about the demographic realities of Palestine. Both men expressed misgivings about Zionism, and by the time of the Paris Peace Conference, argued against it because "a Jewish homeland implied the rejection of Wilsonian self-determination concerning Arabs."67 President Wilson's awareness of the realities of Palestine, at least before the peace conference is more questionable. Wilson bypassed Lansing and the State Department when it came to a decision on the Balfour Declaration, and the president ignored House's cautionary advice on the matter. Neither man served as Wilson's principal adviser on the Ottoman Empire. Who was the president listening to when it came to the Near East? His principal advisers here were the Protestant missionary leadership, in particular James L. Barton, head of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, and Cleveland H. Dodge, head of the Phelps-Dodge Corporation, as well as president of the Board of Directors of Robert College, one of the Protestant missionary schools in Istanbul. Dodge was also one of Wilson's oldest and best friends. Both men supplied Wilson with information about the conditions in the Holy Land throughout the war, using missionary sources of information, which naturally emphasized the needs and point of view of the American Protestant establishment in the area.68 Until the peace conference, Protestant missionary goals in the Holy Land were not seen as conflicting with the Zionist program for Palestine. Thus, in 1916 the Presbyterian General Assembly had passed a resolution endorsing a Jewish homeland in Palestine.69 President Wilson, himself a religious Presbyterian engaged in daily Bible reading, would certainly have been aware of this fact. In truth Wilson's attitude toward Palestine paralleled, in part, that of Balfour. It was not shaped by any interest in the area's real culture and demographics, but rather by a perception of Palestine as Christendom's biblical patrimony. The Jews too had a biblically derived place in this religiously inspired picture and, within this context, the Zionists won the support of the president, just as they had won that of the American press.

In the end, then, it did not matter if some government leaders were less ignorant about Palestine than the general public. The demographic realities of Palestine had to contend with the religious idealism resonating in both the mind of the president and the collective consciousness of the public. This idealism was rooted in a powerfully alive Judeo-Christian heritage which Jed Wilson to believe that the "rebirth of the Jewish people" would result in the production "of new ideals, new ethical values, new conceptions of social justice which shall spring as a blessing for all mankind." 70 It was not so far-fetched a vision for the son of a Presbyterian minister, fervently religious, schooled in the Old as well as New Testament, and a true believer in "Divine Providence." As the historian Richard Lebow once observed, "Zionism was, in fact, tailor-made to fit the president's personality and ideology." 71 Indeed, Wilson's relationship with the Zionists led him to see himself as helping in the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. As he told Rabbi Stephen Wise in 1916, "To think that I, a son of the manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people!"72

On the other hand, this devotion to Zionism was overshadowed by the press of wartime events, which left Wilson with little time except for the most immediate of issues. Palestine and Zionism were often pushed into the background. It took Wilson over a month before replying to a British request of early September 1917, for his opinion of a Balfour Declaration draft, and he did so only after being reminded of it by Colonel House. Even then the reply to the British was almost off-hand and directed through House on October 13. "I find in my pocket the memorandum you gave me about the Zionist movement. I am afraid I did not say to you that I concurred in the formula suggested by the other side. I do, and would be obliged if you would let them know." 73

Along with the distractions of a wartime presidency, there were also countervailing arguments significant enough to cause him to temper the way he expressed his support for Zionism. Some of these were coming to him from his secretary of state, Robert Lansing who, more than once during the year 1917, warned the president to "go very slowly" in expressing support for Zionist ambitions in Palestine, primarily because "we are not at war with Turkey and therefore should avoid any appearance of favoring taking territory from that Empire by force." Lansing made other arguments as well, such as "many Christian sects and individuals would undoubtedly resent turning the Holy Land over to the absolute control of the race credited with the death of Christ." 74 This latter point would not have impressed Wilson, who according to his most recent biographer, was devoid of religious or sectarian bigotry.75 The former plea, however, would have appealed to the president's sense of principle and, importantly, tied in with other concerns close to the heart of the Protestant missionary leadership.

Men like Barton and Dodge had no love for the Ottoman Empire, yet their attitude toward the war being waged against it was ambivalent. Barton once remarked that "what the Christian world has been unable to accomplish among Muslims during the last hundred years of missionary endeavor, is now being achieved by the army of Christian heroes, heroines and martyrs backed by the great Christian heart of America and England." 76 On the other hand these leaders used all of their energies to prevent any declaration of war by the United States against Turkey. In this they had an ally in President Wilson, who wrote to Dodge that "I sympathize with every word of your letter. . . about war with Turkey and am trying to hold the Congress back from following its inclination to include all the allies of Germany in a declaration of a state of war." 77 Why should Wilson care to prevent war with the Turks? In a message to Senator William King of Utah, the man who had introduced a war bill against Turkey in the Congress, Secretary of State Lansing explained one of the principal reasons. "The primary result" of a declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire, he wrote, "would be confiscation of church, school, and humanitarian institutions set up by American Protestants in the Near East." 78 This would prove to be a disaster not only in the eyes of Dodge and Barton, but Wilson too, whose belief was that "it would be a real misfortune... if the missionary program for the world should be interrupted. . . That the work undertaken should be... at its full force, seems to me of capital necessity." 79  To protect the American Protestant establishment in the Holy Land and elsewhere in the Ottoman realm it was necessary that the United States stay clear of war with Turkey, and also avoid any overt association with efforts that implied the partition of the Ottoman Empire.80 Zionism was one of these  efforts. Thus, a key factor in Wilson's apparent reticence to openly endorse Zionism was his concern for the fate of American Protestant missionary work in the Ottoman Empire.

At the peace conference, Wilson would not have to worry about offending the Turks. By that time it was clear that, as he once put it to Colonel House, "there ain't going to be no Turkey." 81 Yet while the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire ultimately opened the way for the fulfillment of Zionist ends, it also presented Wilson (if not the American press) with a more clearly delineated contradiction between that fulfillment and point 12 of his Fourteen Points-the implementation of self-determination. In January of 1919, David Hunter, the legal adviser to the American Peace Commission, taking note of the Arab Muslim majority in the area, told Wilson directly, "The rule of self-determination would prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine." 82 Wilson was now faced with a dilemma.

Further complicating matters for Wilson was the attitude of the Protestant missionary leader, Howard Bliss. Unlike Barton and Dodge, Bliss was resident in Beirut and president of the Syrian Protestant College. He was the person one historian of the period has called "the most influential American in the Near East." 83 Bliss sought to use that influence with the American Peace Commissioners, including Wilson. On February 13, 1919, officially appearing before the Paris Peace Conference as part of a joint Syrian-Lebanese delegation, he formally asked for an inter-allied commission to go to the area, including Palestine, to ascertain the will of the people. This request, and the subsequent pressure Bliss maintained, would eventually result in the King-Crane Commission. Bliss naively hoped the result would be a greater Syria under a United States mandate.84 One might surmise that here, finally, was an American who was not only aware of the Arab population in Palestine, but also anxious to see its political will honored. However, it is perhaps closer to the truth to see him as angling for ultimate advantage (a U.S. mandate controlled by a fervently supportive pro-missionary president) in what a Presbyterian missionary writer of the day, William S. Nelson, called the postwar "life and death struggle" between Syrian [Muslim] "superstition" and American [Protestant] "progress."85

The Zionists, of course, understood that a literal application of self-determination in Palestine was incompatible with their own aims. This knowledge, along with Wilson's public discretion when expressing himself on the subject of a Jewish Palestine, frustrated the movement's leaders. Nonetheless, though discreet in public, Wilson continuously reassured the Zionists privately of his devotion, telling them in no uncertain terms in March of 1919 that "in Palestine shall be laid the foundation of a Jewish Commonwealth,''86 and again in May of that year, in a letter to the Zionist leader Felix Frankfurter, that "I see no ground for discouragement and every reason to hope that satisfactory guarantees [for the Zionist program in Palestine] can be secured."87 What the arguments of Hunter, Lansing and Bliss did was to maintain the president's low key public posture on Zionism. They did not undermine his fundamental devotion to the movement.

By the end of summer 1919, Wilson had suffered a physical collapse which rendered him unable to continue personal negotiations in Paris. Back in the United States and fighting a losing battle against illness and national isolationism, he nonetheless found the time and energy to once more show his affinity for Zionism. In February 1920, the boundaries of the Palestine Mandate were being negotiated in Paris, and the Zionists sought the broadest possible lines. Brandeis asked for Wilson's support telling him that unless Palestine was given what the Zionists considered economically viable boundaries, distrust would be created between Christians and the Jews. Wilson, in tum, instructed the State Department to have the U.S. representative in Paris "use every means that is proper to impress this [the Zionist] view upon the French and English authorities. All the great powers are committed to the Balfour Declaration, and I agree with Mr. Justice Brandeis regarding it as a solemn promise which we can in no circumstance afford to break or alter." 88

Woodrow Wilson stayed loyal to the Zionists, though never expressing that loyalty as publicly as they would have liked. In the president's case, as in that of many of the American citizens he represented, this loyalty did not issue from political or geopolitical calculation, but rather from a devotion to a picture of Palestine as the biblical land of Christians and Jews. The picture of a revived Jewish civilization painted for him by men like Brandeis and Wise fit so well into that mindset that it soon constituted an ideological imperative. Thus the dilemma David Hunter had explained to the president in Paris, that there existed a contradiction between Zionist goals and the ''rule of self-determination," had to be resolved by granting the Zionists what amounted to an exemption from that rule. As with Balfour, Wilson saw a Jewish Palestine as "of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs."

Wilson's willingness to subvert the principle of self-determination in this case also brought him into greater conformity with many around him-a point made all the clearer when we realize that even those who sought to sway him against Zionism, men such as Howard Bliss or Secretary of State Robert Lansing, were not themselves persuaded by the principle of self-determination. Lansing was deeply suspicious of Wilson's idealism in this regard. He believed that if this principle were generally applied it would open up Pandora's box. It was, he concluded, "simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized." 89 Bliss and the other missionaries, as has been suggested, were moved not by any desire to see real self-determination come to a land that was, after all, predominately Muslim. Rather, they were driven by a different interpretation of the same Protestant religious idealism that moved Wilson. Where Wilson's vision would have given a European-born movement claiming validity from Old Testament history higher priority than a millennium's worth of Arab culture and history, the missionary vision ultimately sought the eradication of both Muslim and Jewish heritage through Christian conversion. In all cases, for the majority of Western Christians and Jews, be they Zionists or anti-Zionists, newspaper reporters, missionaries, government officials, a U.S. president, the imperialist-minded heads of the British Empire, or for that matter, the ordinary American citizen, the history and culture of the Arabs of Palestine, and particularly those who were Muslims, were unknown or irrelevant. Colonialist and religious ideology had combined to triumph over history.

CONCLUSION

In 1917 Palestine was a land filled with hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim men, women and children. West of the Jordan River, the land was dotted by hundreds of viable, productive villages, towns and cities.90 The existence of this society, in an area of long-standing interest to many Americans, was a hard, observable fact. Indeed, there were scores of American Protestant missionaries who had lived in this society for a century. These missionaries communicated regularly with their leadership in the United States, and that leadership was, in turn, influential with both the public and the government. Nonetheless, in the eyes of most of the American public and press, this Palestinian reality did not exist. This paradox was possible because the facts, though observed, were ignored and thus treated as if unseen. We are here brought back to the phenomenon of selective perception by which we focus our attention on what supports our cherished beliefs. That which does not is disregarded or devalued to the point where it can be ignored. Arab society in Palestine contradicted the Holy Land Weltanschauung of the American people and press in 1917. It therefore had to remain unseen or denigrated. To recognize it as real, vital and legitimate would have upset a religiously sanctified perception of the area that drew almost exclusively from the Bible, and to a lesser extent from the crusades. Although at least 1300 years out of date and distorted by historical ignorance, the biblical and crusader visions that abounded in the pages of U.S. newspapers were, in terms of ideas and perceptions, what General Allenby's troops were in terms of occupation forces. One held the ground in Palestine, the other reinforced an imaginary Palestine that ''held ground" in the American psyche. With the Turks gone, the indigenous Muslim majority invisible and the British "crusaders" in control, the idea of Palestine in the American mind was automatically the romanticized one of Bible stories and crusader adventure.

By the end of 1917, Palestine was in British hands. The "land of the Bible" was now under the rule of a Christian power. The question was being publicly asked, what would be done with Zion? From what has been postulated above, it follows logically that its future could only be one that was consistent with its status as an extension of the Western biblical patrimony. With Palestine "perceptually depopulated," the landscape was essentially rendered vacant. Further, its repopulation was to be made all the easier by the fact that the Western attitudes in 1917 were still very much influenced by nineteenth-century colonial thinking. Thus, Palestine became as much "a field for the pioneer home seeker as the primeval forests of equatorial Africa." But it was not quite equatorial Africa. It was a field for the pioneer home seeker who fit compatibly with the West's religiously stereotyped image of the Holy Land.

The Zionists had the virtue of being perceived by many Americans, their president and press as most compatible with the Holy Land Weltanschauung. Being simultaneously of the West and biblically identified with Palestine, they were, eminently, in the right place at the right time. Thus, the notion that the British would now give "a people without a land, a land without a people," made perfect sense to Americans in 1917, because it was seen as religiously and historically logical.

So it was that American perceptions of the Holy Land and Zionist visions of Palestine uniquely meshed. However, whether one approves of the result of this melding or not, there is something undeniably troubling about the process by which it was realized-something unsettling about the ability of beliefs, impoverished by historical ignorance, to shape policy and influence the course of events. The story of American popular perceptions of Palestine in 1917 is the story of how a collection of interests (both Christian and Jewish) succeeded in erasing another culture's history and, in its place, imposed a counter-history. This is certainly a phenomenon fraught with danger. In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries it constituted one of the psychological mainsprings of imperialism, and has fueled other tragedies since. For the historian, who seeks always the solid ground of historical awareness, the fact that facts do not always shape perception, policy or behavior is a sobering bit of history.

 

1 See David Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), vol. II, p. 1139. See also Winston Churchill's statement on the import of Jewish support (Parliamentary Debates [House of Commons] 5th series, vol. 156, July 4, 1922), col. 329. Finally, sec David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, (New York: Avon Books, 1989), pp. 267, 274. Fromkin tells us that Lloyd George was "brought up on the Bible," and therefore, "wanted to encourage the development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine." He had had a Jong association with the Zionists, becoming the movement's English solicitor in 1903.

2 A ··semi-official'• report issued by British forces in Egypt in April of 1917 and reported in The New York Times of April 15, 1917, Sec. I, p. 14, asserted, "Our invasion of Palestine is dictated by imperious strategical necessity.... the Syrian plateau has been rightly regarded as the strategic portal into Egypt, and no ruler of the latter country has felt safe with that portal in the hands of the enemy. . . . What should we do with Palestine thus liberated from the century old Turkish grip?... We should revive the Jewish Palestine of old, and allow the Jews to realize their dreams of Zion in their homeland." See also Ronald Saunders, The High Walls of Jerusalem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), p. 290.

3 See Fromkin, ibid., pp. 267-275 and also Sydney Zebel, Balfour, A Political Biography (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973) pp. 237-242.

4 Figures given are for 1914 and are cited in Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 10.

5 Cited in Saunders, ibid., p. 593.

6 Cited in William Polk, The United States and the Arab World, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 120.

7 See James Field, America and the Mediterranean World 1776-1882, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).

8 Joseph Grabill in Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East 1810-1927, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 38, noted that "alongside the Protestant establishment were various Americans, all curious about the physical habitat that nurtured the Christian scriptures." Publications that described Palestine in biblical terms, such as William Thomson's two-volume work The Land and the Book; or Biblical Illustrations Drawn from the Manners, Customs, Scenes and Scenery of the Holy Land (1859), went through multiple printings. Thomson's work sold some 200,000 copies which, Grabill tells us, "possibly sold more than any other American title of its time save Uncle Tom's Cabin," ibid., p. 39. For out-group images which portray Arabs as barbarians, see T. Hammous, A Wild Ass of a Man: American Images of Arabs to 1948, (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 1978), particularly chapters III and IV. Also, H. Kearney, American Images of the Middle East 1824-1924: A Century of Antipathy, (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester, 1976), particularly chapter V.

9 See Grabill, ibid., p. 8.

10 This comes through clearly throughout Grabill's book on Protestant diplomacy.

11 See Fuad Shaban, Islam and the Arabs in Early American Thought, (Durham, NC: The Acorn Press, 1991), pp. 89-92. This attitude persists into the modern era and is a major theme of a series of volumes entitled With Eyes toward Zion, edited by Moshe Davis and Yehoshua Ben-Arieh {New York: Praeger Press, 1991). The date given is for vol. III. See also Saul Friedman, Land of Dust, (Boston, MA: University Press of America, 1982).

12 See Shaban, ibid., p. 91.

13 Grabill, ibid., p. 158. Two books by Presbyterian missionary William Nelson written in 1913 and 1914 presented such a picture of struggle: Habech the Beloved: A Tale of Modern Syria, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1913) and Glimpses of a Missionary's Experiences, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1914).

14 The Chicago Tribune, November 18, 1917, p. l. (Hereafter written CT.)

15 The Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1917, p.1. (Hereafter written LAT.)

16 The Washington Post, October 28, 1917, p.4. (Hereafter written WP).

17 WP, November 20, 1917, p. 6.

18 WP, December II, 1917, p. 6.

19 WP, December 24, 1917, p. 4.

20  LAT, November II, 1917, p. 2.

21 LAT, December 12, 1917, p. 4

22 CT, November 27, 1917, p. 2.

23 The New York Times, March 9, 1917, p. 6. (Hereafter written NYT).

24 NYT , December 11, 1917, p. 2.

25 Additional articles from 1917 that mirror this stereotyped picture can be found as follows: For the LAT: November 22, (part II), p. 4; November 25, p. 2; November 27, (part II), p. 4; December 11, pp. 1-2 and (part II), p. 4; December 24, p. 4. For the CT: November 25, (part II) p. 7; November 27, p. 2. For the WP: November 16, p. 2; November 22, p. 3; December 11, pp. 6 and 11; December 21, p. I; December 23 (Sec. lll), p. 7; December 24, p. 4; December 26, p. 5. For the NYT: March 6, p. 10; March 18 (Sec. VII), p. 6; April 15 (Sec. I), p. 14; April 25, p. 2; May 29, p. 3; June 25, p. 20; November 9, p. 3; November 25 (Sec. VII), p. 8; November 30, p. 6; December 10, p. 4; December 15, p. 12; December 17, p. 5; December 19, p. 10; December 24, p. 9.

26  NYT, December 11, 1917, p. I.

27 Articles identifying Arabs as allies, associated with the Sherif Hussein's revolt appear in 1917 mostly in the NYT, and do so between the months of January and October. After that they disappear altogether. See NIT, January 13, p. 2; February 19, p. 4; March 4 (Sec. V), p. 10, a long piece on Hussein; March 10, p. 6; June 24 (Sec. I), p. 3; July 13, p. 2; October 5, p. 2. See also WP, September 2, p.1.

28 The one exception was the LAT which devoted only two pieces to Zionism: November 27 (part II), p. 4 and December 24, p. 4. The CT published five pieces: October 15, p. 2; November 9, p. 7; November 14, p. 9; November 24, p. 1, 2; November 26, p. 4; The WP put out 12 articles: November 9, p. 5; November 25, p. 15; November 28, p.11; November 29, p.2; November 30, p.6; December 12, two pieces both on p. 2; December 17, p. 4; December 23, p. 3; December 24, p. 7 and p. 9; December 30 (Sec. III), p. 3. Finally, the NIT published 13 pieces: November 9, p.3; November 14, p. 3; November 19, p.5; November 16, p. 22; November 30, p. 6; December 3, p. 4; December 6, p. 14; December 10, p. 4; December 15, p. 11; December 17, p. 5 and p. 11; December 21, p.6;December 24, p. 3.

29 CT, November 24, 1917, p. I.

30 WP November 29, 1917, p. 2.

31 WP, December 12, 1917, pp. 1-2; See also WP November 25, 1917, p. 15; November 28, p. 11; December 12, p. 2; and December 24, p. 9.

32 See NYT: January 3, 1917, p. 2; February 19, p. 4; March 4, (Sec. V), pp.9-10; March 10, p. 6; March 30, p. 4; July 13, p.2; October 5, p. 2.

33 NIT March 9, 1917, p. 6.

34 NIT , March 18, 1917 (Sec. VII), p. 6. See also November 25 (Sec. VII), p. 8.

35 N IT , December 12, 1917, p. 5.

36 See NIT: May 4, p. 7; May 6 (Sec. I), p. 3, 5; May 17, p. 5; May 19, p. 4; May 20 (Sec. I), p. 7; May 21, p. 12; May 22, p. 11; May 23, p. 5; May 27 (Sec. II), p. 5; May 31, p. 12; June 3 (Sec. II), p. 3; June 5, p. 3; June 13, p. 8.

37 N YT, June 9, 1917, p. 20. Four days (June 13, p. 8) later the NYT ran a repeat of this story under the misleading headline, "Jews Escape Massacre." How does one escape that which never took place? This sort of playing fast and loose with the facts, which today is largely the preserve of the tabloid press, was the average sort of reporting procedure found in all the four newspapers considered for 1917.

38 This fact was most explicitly reported by The Washington Post. On September 30, 1917, p. 11, the Post carried a story headlined "Turkey Hangs Arab Leaders," referring to the Turkish oppression of Arabs in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. A follow-up piece appeared on October 8, p. 1, entitled, "Asia Minor Turks Massacre Arabs."

39 NYT June 19, 1917, p. 11. See also July 18, p. 18, an article again dealing with Elkus's impressions, entitled "Found Turks Fair to Jews."

40 See NYT: June 19, p. 20; July 13, p. 9; September 2 (Sec. I), p. 12; November 2, p. 7; December 6, p. 2; December 25 (Sec. I), p. 4.

41 N YT December 10, 1917, p. 13. Just four days earlier, on December 6, the NIT ran a piece (p. 2) headlined, "Report Jews Driven Out of Jerusalem." One gets the distinct impression that the newspapers of the day would print uncritically any bit of rumor they felt eye-catching.

42 NYT, December 10, 1917, p. 13.

43 The Jews were a particular target of some Christian missionaries. See Naomi Shepard, The Zealous Intruders, (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), chapter III.

44 See NYT: March 18, 1917, p. 4; March 30, p. 3; August 24, p. 15; November 4, p. 2; December 11, p. I; December 13, p. 5; December 18, p. 2; December 20, p. I.

45 See footnote 28 above.

46 NIT , June 25, 1917, p. 20.

47  See NYT: May 7, 1917, p. 8; May 14, p. 9; May 29, p. 3; November 19, p. 5; November 30, p. 6; December 6, p. 14; December 10, p. 4; December 21, p. 6; December 24, p. 9.

48 A separate multi-million-dollar relief fund for Palestine had been established by a Jewish-organized relief effort. The N YT did report that the fund administrators were planning to deliver supplies to more than just the Jews. '"The decision to extend relief to Christians and Moslems as well as to Jews... indicates, according to officials in charge of the work, the determination to make urgency of need rather than religious affiliation the essential factor in the distribution of relief." NYT, December 15, 1917, p. 11. This report, placed as it was in an article dealing with Jewish relief, is one of the few times the NIT specifically mentions Palestine's Muslims.

49 NYT, December 13, 1917, p. 4. See also December 17, p. 5. This latter article describes a $100.million fund "for constructive and administrative work in the new Jewish state."

50 WP, November 25, 1917, p. 15.

51 WP, November 29, 1917, p. 2.

52 See footnote 28 above.

53 For the additional quote for Coffee see CT, October 15, 1917, p. 2. See also CT, July 14, 1917, p. 7 and November 14, p. 9.

54 NYT, December 17, 1917, p. 5.

55 The same convention was covered by The Washington Post which described it as "the first concrete step toward the achievement of the [Jewish] national character. . .. and intimation was given. . . that a practical reoccupation of the Holy Land would be under way within a month or two." See WP, December 17, 1917, p. 4.

56 NYT, December 24, 1917, p. 9.

57 There are those who argue the answer is no to all of these questions. The most startling example of this can be found in Saul Friedman's Land of Dust cited above. Here the title tells all. Friedman sees Palestine before the coming of Jewish settlers as literally a dust heap. However, his sources are mainly Western visitors whose attitudes match those of Henry Morgenthau. For a more positive, and more accurate view of pre-Israel Palestine see Walid Khaldi, Before Their Diaspora, (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991).

58 NYT , December 12, 1917, p. 14.

59 NYT , May 24, 1917. p. 16.

60 The London Times, June 18, 1917, p. 5.

61 N YT, June 10, 1917 (Sec. VI), p. 11.

62 NYT, November 2S, 1917 (Sec IX), p. 3. See also the views expressed by Ralph Boas in an op-ed piece printed in the NYT of December 16, 1917 (Sec. IV), p. 4, as well as the comments of Nathan Straus reported in the NYT of December S, 1917, p. 24. Similar sentiments were expressed by Rabbi Louis Grossmann of the Plum Street Temple in Cincinnati, Ohio, in a Jetter to President Wilson received at the White House in September 1918. Trying to warn Wilson away from Zionism, he writes "Nor may Christian romanticism which looks in this Zionistic Nationalism for a fulfillment of biblical prophecies delude you, Mr. President. . . . you know that prophecies and their theological implications are not historic fact. As the president of the United States, I am sure, you are not disposed to bend state policy to satisfy biblical hermeneutics.... Romanticism can have no standing in so sober a matter as the permanence and unassailability of citizenship." Records of the Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of Turkey 1910-1929. From record group 59, microfilm roll 79, 867n. 01/28. It is impossible to know if the president ever read this. However, the writer may have been wrong in his assumption that Wilson could keep his "Christian romanticism" out of politics. When it came to Palestine, the American public and press proved incapable of doing so.

63NIT, December 24, 1917, p. 12.

64 LAT, December 24, 1917, p. 4.

65 LAT, December 27, 1917 (part II), p. 4.

66 For evidence that such misgivings persisted right up to the founding of the state of Israel, see Thomas A. Colsky, Jews Against Zionism, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

67 Grabill, ibid., p. 126. See also Richard Ned Lebow "Woodrow Wilson and the Balfour Declaration" i the Journal of Modem History, no. 40 (December, 1968), pp. .501-523. It is also to be noted that Lansing and the State Department were receiving representations from an Arab-American group called the Palestine Antizionism Society, headquartered in New York City. This group, however, seems to have organized itself late in the game, in the latter half of 1918, and in response to the upcoming peace conference. In a letter to the secretary of state dated November 23, 1918, the group pointed out that Zionism usurped the rights of the indigenous majority population of Palestine. (Records of the Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of Turkey 1910-1929. From record group 59, [microfilm roll #79), 867n.01/ 37). Finally, one can consider this piece of information. Once, when Rabbi Stephen Wise asked President Wilson what he did with the protests he received against his support for the Balfour Declaration, the president answered in the following fashion. "He pointed to a large wastebasket at his desk. 'ls not that basket capacious enough for all their protests?"' Cited in Stephen Wise, Challenging Years, (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1949), p. 191.

68 As Grabill describes it, "Dodge was in a position to coach Wilson in Ottoman-American relations and until 1921, together with James Barton [would] guide Wilson in diplomacy with the Near East." Ibid., p. 89.

69 Grabill, ibid., p. 178.

70 Cited in Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era 1917- 1923, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946), p. 219. Balfour had expressed a similar sentiment when he declared, "The Jews are the most gifted race that mankind has seen since the Greeks of the fifth century. . . . if we can find them an asylum, a safe home, in their native land, then the full flowering of their genius will burst forth and propagate." Cited in S. Zebel, ibid., p. 241.

71 Lebow, ibid., p. 521.

72 S. Wise, ibid., pp. 186-187.

73 A. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. 44, p. 371, Woodrow Wilson to Colonel House, Oct. 13, 1917.

74 Ibid., vol. 45, p. 286, R. Lansing to Woodrow Wilson, December 14, 1917.

75 A. Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, (New York: Scribners, 1991), p. 277.

76 Cited in Grabill, ibid., p. 116.

77 Ibid., p. 93.

78 Ibid., p. 92.

79 Ibid., p. 116.

80 Even rumors to this effect had negative repercussions as Ambassador Elkus tried to explain to Justice Brandeis as early as October 1916, "I cannot adequately describe the unfortunate impression created here and in the government circles particularly by the remarks about buying Palestine.... The parting with territory is a crime for which no Turk will forgive an official and anyone whoever talks about it is regarded as a traitor. Altogether, besides the unfortunate effect upon Zionism and the Jews, these and similar alleged statements and speeches. . . have made my work very difficult and my position no easy one." Records of the Department of State, ibid., (microfilm roll #79), 867n.01/l 1-2.

81 Cited in Grabill, ibid., p. 90.

82 Cited in Zaha Bustami, American Foreign Policy and the Question of Palestine, 1856-1939, (Ph.D. Dissertation, Georgetown University, 1989), p. 200.

83 See Frank Manuel, The Realities of American Palestine Relations, (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1949), p. 223.

84 See Grabill, ibid., pp. 156-163.

85 Ibid., p. 158.

86 Cited in Heckscher, ibid., p. 540 (note).

87 Manuel, ibid., p. 242.

88 Ibid., p. 256.

89 Records of the Department of State, ibid., Record Group 59, (microfilm roll #79), 867n.01/16.

90 See Khalidi, ibid., p. 84.