The Political geography of the Middle East in the time of Ezekiel

In January 2016, I wrote Part One of this series on Ezekiel 38 in the EJournal. This set out to expose the prophecy’s historical background, logic of potential interpretation, and, hence, its present-day application. My final paragraph, in January, explained that there were several “Jigsaw pieces” which required slotting into place properly to provide the background to this work. Part 1 of that background was entitled “How the Middle-Eastern world of c.1900 became the Middle-Eastern World of post-1945.” I wish to thank readers for their patience, and to assure them that my thoughts on Part 1 are, with this current piece, complete.

The January 2017 contribution (D.V.) will begin to look directly at the political geography of the Middle East in approximately 600 B.C., [when the prophet Ezekiel was working], and will attempt to apply the resulting analysis to the national and/or regional boundary-lines of the same area, on a present-day map, and thus begin to see how the foreground of this story sits into the background established above.[1]

[f] Dr. Chaim Weizmann [1874 – 1952], academic, Jewish nationalist and first Israeli President

Chaim Weizmann, a Beyelorussian Jew, emigrated from a small town, then named Motol, near Pinsk, via work in University research in Germany and Switzerland, [where he studied Chemistry to PhD level], and came to Britain to teach Chemistry. Weizmann also worked as both a teacher and researcher in Chemistry at Manchester University, from 1904, where he eventually became Senior Lecturer in Chemistry. In those roles, Weizmann developed a new synthesis for acetone.

Because of his skills, bridging Organic and Inorganic Chemistry, Weizmann was appointed, by David Lloyd-George, to be Director of the British Admiralty Laboratories, [1916 – 1919], in charge of producing acetone for the further production of cordite, a military propellant:

“[he] set out to discover some means of preparing acetone synthetically. He worked night and day. Within a month he did it.”[2]

It should be explained that L-G multi-tasked in WW1, being, during 1916, Minister of Munitions, from May; Secretary of State for War, from June; and Prime Minister, from December of that year.

Weizmann’s initial successes, and later his fame, arose from his discovery of how to use bacterial fermentation[3] to produce large quantities of “acetone – butanol – ethanol”. Today, Chemists consider him to be the Father of Industrial Fermentation.[4]

As with previous articles in this series, historians are faced with the dilemma of interpreting yet another serendipitous coincidence – Weizmann being in the right place at the right time. Was it pure happenstance or providential provision?

In his Memoirs, L-G made his views clear about the good evidence he felt he had for relying absolutely on the veracity of his close friend, and political colleague, C. P. Scott, Liberal MP, Editor and sometime Owner of the Manchester Guardian. Scott had told Lloyd-George:

“[He] could guarantee that…Weizmann was thoroughly devoted to the cause of the Allies”.[5]

In Part Three of this series, paragraph [e], I referred to the part played by C. P. Scott, in introducing L-G to Weizmann, a mutual friend. If Scott’s recommendation of Weizmann to the Prime Minister was very fulsome, L-G’s own assessment was no less glowing:

“I took to him at once. He is now a man of international fame. He was then quite unknown to the general public, but as soon as I met him I realised that he was a very remarkable personality. His brow gave assurance of a fine intellect and his open countenance gave confidence in his complete sincerity”.[6]

C. P. Scott had told L-G:

“There is a very remarkable professor of chemistry in the University of Manchester willing to place his services at the disposal of the State.”[7]

These remarks were true, as stated; yet, in other circumstances, Weizmann could be outspoken against the Brits, and in favour of the Yishuv. So, for instance, Weizmann’s opposition to the British Government’s 1939 Palestine White Paper was total and unrelenting, because he believed it, in its totality, to be misbegotten.

President Harry Truman had views about Weizmann’s probity and integrity similar to those of Lloyd-George. In 2009, Steve Hunegs, quoted from Truman’s 1955-6 Memoirs:

“I surely wish God Almighty would give the children of Israel an Isaiah, the Christians a St. Paul, and the sons of Ishmael a peep at the Golden Rule.”[8]

Such an individual being unavailable, Truman found, in Weizmann, the next best thing:

“Truman admired Weizmann’s life’s work and willingness to speak honestly and eloquently … Truman’s trust in Weizmann was reinforced by the latter’s recognition of certain truths in the Palestine conflict, including the reluctant recognition that the dream of a Jewish state in all of Palestine was not realistic, and that instead the Jewish people should accept partition.”[9]

Despite being surrounded by the strong pull from tides of contrary opinions, not the least amongst his own advisors, President Harry Truman recognised the State of Israel minutes after the Declaration of its Independence in the night-time of the 14^th of May, 1948. This action relied in no small measure on his trust in Dr. Chaim Weizmann.

The German U-boat blockade of Britain during WW1, had been effective in denying Britain access to her traditional sources both of gunpowder itself, and the acetone from which its accelerant was derived. Not only so, but, according to Dr. Amanda Mason:[10]

“The [U-boat] campaign intensified over the course of the war and almost succeeded in bringing Britain to its knees in 1917”.[11]

Of Chaim Weizmann’s single-handed role in reversing this looming disaster, David Lloyd-George, in his War Memoirs, said:

“When our difficulties were solved through Dr. Weizmann’s genius, I said to him: ‘You have rendered great service to the State, and I should like to ask the Prime Minister[12] to recommend you to His Majesty for some honour.’”[13]

[g] The 1930s Jewish cultural hegemony in Europe, and the effects upon it of Nazism

There is a whole range of literature, on this subject, as on others, under the rubric of ‘Faction’[14] available today. Of the material under this heading, perhaps the most well-informed, wide-ranging and clearest is being written by the novelist Colin Falconer [1953-]. A whole range of material exists cataloguing the successes enjoyed by Jewish academics. Here is a list of a few, from the many:

1. The Jewish Almanac, (eds. R. Siegel & C. Rheins, [New York, 1980] ). Siegel & Rheins list, for example, the Nobel prize-winners, to date, of Jewish extraction, pp. 495-496.
2. The Jewish 100, Michael Shapiro, (New Jersey, 1994). This work, of almost 400 pages, enters into much more detail than do Siegel & Rheins about Jewish leaders of thought, from Religion to Physics.
3. Jewish Writing and Identity in the Twentieth Century (L.I. Yudkin, London, 1982).
4. Cult, Ghetto and State (M. Rodinson, translated from French by Jon Rothschild, London, 1983). A judicious and energetic application of the Index to the text needs to be exerted in this work, fully to derive matter relevant to the current topic.
5. The Holocaust Museum at the Holocaust Memorial Centre, 39 Pava utca, Budapest. This is visitable online at www.hdke.hu/en/ and contactable by e-mail at info@hdke.hu. I had a close working relationship with the Director, April 2004 on, and have always found the Centre to be very obliging and helpful. One feature of the Centre’s array of material is the vast range of Hungarian Jewish talent, butchered in the period September 1944 to the end of WW2. Because of the Centre’s narrow, national, focus, it is able to provide detail in a depth not available elsewhere. The resultant detailed impact of variably-illuminable maps, biographical ‘periscopes’, with many hundreds of biographies available, at the press of a button, and the like, is historically breath-taking, and emotionally devastating.

Of Colin Falconer’s (pen-name) historical novels on the Middle East, the first, Fury, was written in October 1993. Three other titles in a series have followed this first effort, thus far, but it is Fury with which I am concerned here. Fury parallels personal developments between a German Jew and a Gentile in Inter-war Germany with a potential personal relationship between a Palestinian Arab and a Jewish Kibbutznik. After 1945, the two strands of the story are woven together, when the central characters emerge together in the modern State of Israel. The issue in the 1930s, for the successful German Jew, Josef Rosenberg, and his persistent and increasing blindness towards the direction of policy towards which the Nazi Party was trending, is most poignantly portrayed.

On a History course for teachers of undergraduates and ‘A’-level pupils, in London, in the 1990s, Israeli Historians clearly taught that, in their view, there would have been no state of Israel, were it not for the viciousness of the Nazis, in driving out of Europe the German Jewish Bourgeoisie. These and related issues are currently being explored by historians such as Yehuda Bauer [1926-].[15]

It is these issues of German Jewry’s commitment to a luxurious lifestyle in Europe, based on esteem and recognition by their Gentile contemporaries versus the emotional/spiritual/existential issues involved in a [contrary] commitment to Zion, which Falconer exposes in the starkest of realities in Fury.

On September 28^th, 2016, Michelle Collins, the lead actress in Jewish writer Diane Samuels’ play Kindertransport [1993], was interviewed on Radio 2, about the substance of and the background to the play. Interested parties, with a knowledge of the background to the events in question, were then invited to phone-in their reflections. Against the background of the story that a grief-stricken Jewish mother, unable to separate herself from her beloved baby daughter, and to place her on a Kindertransport Train, at a German Railway Station, had the decision taken from her hands by SS troops, who laughingly snatched the baby from her agonising mother, tossed her into the air, and caught her on their bayonet-tips, another lady contributor, who was living in Germany in the 1930s, said, par contre, that she believed German Jews were well able to see increasingly, but long before Kristallnacht in November 1938, [possibly even as early as the dual elections in 1932], the direction in which events would unfold.

Falconer’s work is much more nuanced than this Radio discussion, showing how, however foolhardy this might now seem, with the perfect vision of hindsight to assist us, those then with so very much – a whole way of life – to lose, blinded themselves against believing that the country of Schiller, Beethoven and Goethe, would allow itself to descend to the depths which the Nazi Party envisaged.

Conclusions

Once again, as in previous EJ instalments of this story, we are confronted with the ‘Accident v Providence’ dichotomy.

This final part offers raw material for such consideration, including the following:

1. A man, becoming a leading Chemist, ‘Father of Industrial Fermentation’, indeed, arrived on British shores from over 1100 miles away at the very time Britain found itself facing the build-up to WW1 – a World War in which Britain, a leading protagonist in the War, became severely inconvenienced by a total shortage of cordite, and bereft both of the materials and means to rectify its embarrassment.
2. The Chemist in question happened to be Jewish, and presented himself in Britain at a time of extreme sensitivity, as regards the Jewish people.
3. The Chemist was known to, and trusted by, confidants of the then Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George.
4. The Chemist found himself, thus, in a position of saving his newly-adopted country from total calamity in a World War.
5. The Chemist had no desire to recoup any personal aggrandisement out of the success of his efforts.
6. The Chemist was a committed Zionist.
7. The Chemist had a great deal of desire to extract benefit for the Jewish people out of the gratitude expressed to him by Lloyd-George, the then Prime Minister of his adopted country, Britain.
   As has already become apparent, from earlier instalments in this EJ series, at precisely the same period as the above seven variables, other matters were trending in the same direction. For example:
8. Britain was, at this point, also in train of establishing the Balfour Declaration.
9. General Allenby was imminently about to capture Palestine, and Jerusalem from the Ottomans.
10. European Jews, despite much success in that Continent, as measured academically, and in many other ways, were pressurised, very much against their will, and to the severe detriment to their standard of living and status, into an urgent desire to leave Europe, to save themselves from the Nazis, even though this required them to leave behind all their sophisticated and successful way of life in the West, and to roll their sleeves up, encouraging the Desert to ‘blossom as the Rose’. This was far less romantic than it might be made to sound – given, for instance, that, in the draining of Lake Huleh alone, many $ millions, and the even more painful giving of emigres’ lives, were spent.
11. Under Israel’s Law of Return [1950], consolidated by the Nationality Law [1952]: “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh”.[16]  In that way, a frightened and bewildered tide of Jewish humanity, desperately exiting from holocaust in Europe, had a Home ready and willing to receive them.

Thus, the challenge, at this point, for the reader – William Paley-like[17] is simply this:

“How complex does a proposition need to become before the concept of design [and, hence, a Designer] in its workings becomes inescapable, whilst any ‘coincidental’ analysis is rendered demonstrably facile?”