t Ali was driven out
of Palestine and Syria by the Powers, the future of Palestine was open
for discussion.[115] The country, with all its Hebrew and Christian
shrines, was in the hands of Christendom, who could have done with it as
it pleased. Not a voice was raised among the Jews for the restoration of
the land to them. And this, be it remembered, was when Sir Moses
Montefiore and M. Cremieux were busy in the East in connection with the
Damascus Blood Accusation, and when Lord Palmerston was proposing to
take the Jews under British protection as a separate nationality.[116]
Instead of championing the national aspirations of the Jews, they
contented themselves with obtaining the famous Hatti-Humayoun, or
Charter of Liberties for the Jews of Turkey, by which they were more
nearly assimilated to Turkish Nationals.[117] In the following year the
Powers were actually discussing the future of Palestine, but the Jews
again made no move. Even while the negotiations were in progress, a
scheme for restoring the Jews as the political masters of the country
was drawn up by a Christian, Colonel Churchill, then British Consul in
Syria, and submitted by him to Sir Moses Montefiore and the Board of
Deputies. Its reception was curiously frigid. Whilst piously blessing
Colonel Churchill's proposals, the Board declined to take any
initiative.[118] It was the same in 1878 when Lord Beaconsfield annexed
Cyprus and secured a British Protectorate over Asiatic Turkey. No
opportunity could have seemed better for the promotion of Zionist aims,
but when Laurence Oliphant pointed this out he found scarcely an echo
beyond a small circle of obscure Jewish dreamers in Southern
Russia.[119] Indeed, until the time of Herzl all the most prominent
protagonists of Zionism were Christians. The Dane, Holger Paulli, who in
1697 presented a Zionist scheme to King William III of England with a
view to its submission to the Peace Conference of Ryswick, was a
Christian,[120] and even the notorious Jewish pseudo-Messiah, Sabbathai
Zevi, who raised the flag of Jewish nationality in Syria thirty years
earlier, owed more of his inspiration to English Fifth Monarchy teaching
than to Jewish tradition.[121]

Nevertheless, there were two occasions on which the Jewish aspects of
the Palestine question did enter the field of practical international
politics.

The first was in 1799, when Napoleon carried out his audacious raid on
British interests in the East by his ex