Palestine in the Victorian Age

Reviewed by: Ibrahim Hewitt, Leicester, UK

Published by: I. B. Taurus, London, 2022, 253pp. ISBN: 9780755643134.

Have you ever wondered why Evangelical Christians in the West have such disregard for Palestinian Christians? And why they are so keen to see the State of Israel thrive? Neither of these questions is new. The roots go back to Victorian times, and even earlier, as Gabriel Polley tells us comprehensively in this book.

It is easy to blame “Zionists” for the ongoing conflict in occupied Palestine, especially the father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl. It was, after all, his book The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat) which most people associate with the creation of the Zionist state of Israel in 1948, fifty-two years after the book’s publication.

However, as Polley writes in his introduction, “The colonization of Palestine has its roots deep in the nineteenth century with Western Evangelicals who first cast the Holy Land as an area to be possessed by empire, then began to devise schemes for its settler colonization, and finally started to implement them” (p. 2). It was, he adds, “the Peaceful Crusade”.

Peaceful, that is, unless you were, or are, a Palestinian.

Go back even earlier, and Polley points out that the “doctrine of the Jewish Restoration [to Palestine]” saw “seventeenth century Puritan England” undergoing a “Hebraic revival”, the belief that “for the Bible’s prophecies to be fulfilled, the entirety of the Jewish people had to be ‘restored’ or ‘returned’ to Palestine, and embrace Christianity” (p. 3). Polley quotes Susan Meyer who says about the Victorian era covered by his book, “It was the English gentiles… not the Jews, who were fascinated with the idea of the Jewish return” (p. 3).

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we can see American Evangelicals carrying this fascination – by now an obsession – to get all Jews “returned” to the Holy Land for everything to be in place for Armageddon and the End Days. The late Grace Halsell wrote about this in her book, Forcing God’s Hand: Why Millions Pray for a Quick Rapture and Destruction of Planet Earth. The evangelicals, specifically Protestant Christians, of course, support the occupation state of Israel for purely selfish reasons, not out of love for the Jewish people and their welfare. A number of the Zionist myths about Palestine – “a land without a people for a people without a land”, and “Israel turned the desert green”, for example – originated with Meyer’s “English gentiles”. Polley points to Europeans’ “amazing ability to discover the land without discovering the people” (p. 10). He also reminds us that, “All instances of settler colonialism, not only Zionism, have thus been presaged on the destruction of a previously existing indigenous society, to create a society for immigrants and their descendants that resembles the Europe from which they departed” (p. 14).