Abstract
History textbooks that deal with the birth of the Zionism repeatedly take for granted a major component of the movement's early success underlying British support. The beginning of the history of Israel is commonly preoccupied with Theodor Herzl or the Balfour Declaration, but very rarely is the question ever posed, why did the British ever even support Zionism in the first place? Pithy explanations are occasionally given that the British were the only powerful Europeans tolerant enough to accept Jews in the aftermath of dreadful pogroms and from there the Zionist movement was given freedom to flourish. However, such accounts do not fully explain what benefit Zionism would have provided to British policymakers. Conversely, explanations about the British maintaining interests in Egypt and the Suez Canal do not fully address the question of why it supported Zionism, specifically, in order to achieve these goals. Why not simply colonize the Palestinians directly if a buffer state was all that was desired? In light of these historical ambiguities, this paper will attempt to explore what exactly prompted Lloyd George's cabinet to support Jewish restoration to the Holy Land. However, the research focuses on a wide range of historical events and movements, and ironically, virtually no analysis of Lloyd George's cabinet was required to come to the final conclusions. Events of the nineteenth century played the most significant role, as the combination of a waning Ottoman Empire and a growing acceptance of Jewish culture in England coincided to allow the British to merge their ideological principles with the strategic interests of the Empire. The discussion will begin with an analysis of the latter half of this equation.
