Recognising the Hand of Judgment. Ch.23

 

The House of Windsor, Balfour, Allenby, 1917

 

     In  writing  this chapter I have before me  two  photographs,  the first showing King George Vth with the Czar of Russia in 1913. The Czar was King George's cousin.  The second photograph shows King George Vth with the Kaiser of Germany, also taken in 1913. And the Kaiser was also his  cousin.  In  that year the King was not to know the  fate  that would overtake his family and Europe in just a short while.

 

     King  George's  cousin  the Kaiser was to become  his  (political) enemy,  which  was very hurtful to the King.  But this family  tie  was insufficient to prevent hostilities.  In 1917 the Kaiser abdicated.  It was the end of a dynastic era,  where the rulers of Germany and Prussia had used, in the title “Kaiser” the modern form of the ancient title "Cæsar".

 

     And the King felt that the Czar of Russia could not be offered sanctuary in  Britain  at the time of the Bolshevik revolution and Communist take-over in 1917.  He  later regretted  this,  when  the  Czar  and his  family  were  assassinated the following year.  It is recorded that the King said,  "I had tears in my eyes - and still have - when he spoke of the vindictive and unnecessary murder of the poor Czar,  and I was moved to deepest admiration by  his revolt  over  this  alien  stunt." And so yet another  title, “Czar”,  that  was derived from "Cæsar" vanished from national usage.

 

     In that same year,  1917,  King George realised that his family connections with the Kaiser of Germany, and the title of his own house, "Saxe-Coburg-Gotha",  with its Teutonic ring, was causing bad reactions in Britain, due to the war. He called in the heads of the Royal College of Heralds,  who advised him that the choice of a new title lay between "Wipper" and "Wettin".  Happily he rejected both!  Instead he chose the title WINDSOR,  and so a new dynasty began on 17th day of July 1917, THE HOUSE OF WINDSOR.

 

     Later  in  that  year  three other events  of  great  significance occurred.  The  first  was on the 2nd of  November,  when  the  Foreign Secretary,  Arthur Balfour,  sent a letter to Lionel Walter,  2nd Baron Rothschild,  chairman of the British Zionist Federation,  declaring the government's  official  recognition  of  the  Zionist  aspirations,  in establishing  Palestine  as a national home for the  Jews.  The  letter promised  British  aid  to Zionists. The actual wording of the letter contained this sentence –

            “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. ”

 

     The letter was issued through the continued efforts of Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, Zionist leaders in London, but it fell short of what they had asked for, namely the reconstitution of Palestine as “the” Jewish national home.

 

     Balfour’s objective was written into the League of Nations Mandate  for Palestine  (dated 24th July 1922) and which was formally implemented on 29th September 1923. And so, nearly 20 years after the death of Theodor Herzl in 1904, his dream looked as though it was being established as fact.

 

     The  second important factor occurred on December 9th  1917,  when General  Edmund  Allenby entered Jerusalem and took the city  from  the Turk,  without a single shot being fired.  The following year he won  a sweeping  victory over the Turks at Megiddo.  He said that he wanted to present  Jerusalem to the British as a "Christmas present."  From  that day until May 1948,  Palestine became a British mandated territory, and all  the promises made earlier by Balfour were wiped away at a stroke. What at first appeared as a great victory, was seen in another light by some observers.  I have already mentioned that the date was significant according to Daniel's prophecy of the 1335 days,  in that 1917 was also the 1335th year of the Moslem calendar.

 

     These two events, being just a few weeks apart, caused a new surge of  Zionist nationalism amongst Jewish people the world over.  The  war had  taken its toll of Jews,  like everyone else in Europe.  The  total number  of Jews killed in the war has been estimated  at  140,000,  the majority being Russians.

 

     The third event was,  of course, the Russian revolution, dated 7th November  on the Gregorian calendar, but called the “October Revolution” because in Russia they still used the Old Style Calendar.  Now Lenin was deeply sensitive to the sufferings of Russian Jewry under the Czarist regime,  and when the revolution   broke,   all   restrictive  and   oppressive   anti-Jewish legislation was swept away at a stroke.  This was of course welcomed by Jews  of  all persuasions.  Even the Bolshevik seizure of  power  eight months  later  was  not  at first perceived  as  a  danger,  since  the Bolshevik leaders had affirmed their sympathy for the Jews,  and indeed some  of  them  were  Jews themselves.  But the  new  party  failed  to eradicate anti-Jewish prejudice in Russia,  and to it  they added their own ideologically motivated persecution of the Jewish religion, and the "counter-revolutionary" Zionist movement.  Hence the great contribution to  Russia,  brought  about by the loss of  patriotic  Jewish  manpower during the war, was not remembered with sympathy, but swept away in the rising tide of the new communist oppression.

 

     1917  appeared  therefore as a year of release for the  Jews,  and Britain  was in the lead of the countries favouring the  settlement  of the  Jews in Palestine.  But in Arthur Balfour's day it didn't  produce insuperable problems for the government. It was an idea, a declaration, that envisaged action at some future time. When that time came, Britain behaved in a manner that caused permanent shame to the nation.