American Journalists, Artists, and Adventurers and the Zionist Movement (1917–1947)

Beginning with the “reconquest of Jerusalem” of the British over the Turks, this chapter details the transition to British rule and the seeds sown for future conflict. The Balfour Declaration served as a clarion call both to Jews and American Evangelicals, for whom the obsession with a Jewish return to Jerusalem resounded with Biblical import. The chapter also details opponents of Zionism, such as Joseph P. Kennedy, appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as ambassador to Great Britain during the transition to British rule in Palestine. Further, it accounts for the two main branches of political belief in the Yishuv, Palestine’s Jewish community: Labor Zionism, embodied by David Ben Gurion, and Revisionism, embodied by Vladimir Jabotinsky. Finally, the chapter explores Ghandi’s relationship to Israel, the rise of the Nazi state vis a vis British Palestine, and American pro-Israel activism and fundraising in New York City and on Broadway, by such champions as Ben Hecht.