Oct. 15, 2024: Biden Is Still Protecting Iran

Jacob Siegel on managed democracy; Treasury designates Samidoun; Kamala's struggle with Black men

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The Big Story

A Tuesday report in The Washington Post suggests that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is willing to do a political favor for U.S. President Joe Biden—and, by extension, Vice President Kamala Harris. According to the Post, Israel has agreed not to strike Iranian nuclear or oil facilities in retaliation for Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel earlier this month, despite warning Tehran that it would do exactly that if the mullahs struck Israeli territory. 

Why would Israel walk back from its own threats? Well, due to heavy U.S. lobbying, sold as an effort to avoid a “regional war.” Those who have been following along may note that “regional war” was the precise excuse cited by the White House for a year to explain why Israel simply could not escalate against Hezbollah—only to be proven wrong when Israel decapitated nearly the entirety of the terror group’s leadership without igniting World War III. Indeed, what happened instead was that Israel functionally crippled Iran’s main deterrent and exposed Tehran as unwilling to, or incapable of, meaningfully defending its allies. Iranian military sources are now venting to The Atlantic that “We don’t have a fucking air force,” while rumors swirl in Iran and across the Arab world that the feared Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is shot through with Israeli spies, possibly including the commander of its external operations unit or his staffers. Nevertheless, this fearsome Persian lion must not be provoked.

The Post cites a second reason for Israel not to hit Iran where it hurts, which at least has the virtue of sounding more plausible:

The retaliatory action would be calibrated to avoid the perception of “political interference in the U.S. elections,” the official familiar with the matter said, signaling Netanyahu’s understanding that the scope of the Israeli strike has the potential to reshape the presidential race.

That’s very nice of Bibi, even if it does sound a bit like the “quid pro quo” that Trump was impeached for the first time. So what is he getting in return?

Not much, by the look of it. Also on Tuesday, Axios reported that U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken had sent a letter to their Israeli counterparts warning of a potential U.S. arms embargo unless Israel “takes steps within 30 days to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza,” per a national security memorandum issued by Biden in February. Simultaneously, Washington is working to rein in the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, despite blowing a lot of smoke over the past week about the newfound opportunity to “sideline” Hezbollah by electing a new “president” of “Lebanon.” Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati told Al Jazeera Tuesday that he had “received American guarantees” that Israel will reduce its strikes on Beirut—a revelation that followed Israeli media reports about an American pressure campaign to force Israel to cut back on strikes against Hezbollah targets. The kayfabe about UNIFIL, which we covered in our two most recent editions, is part of the same play. 

If Washington was merely telling Israel not to spike oil prices three weeks before an election—and offering to throw Israel a bone in exchange for the favor—we might be able to believe the U.S. posture was about domestic politics. What we’re seeing instead is a desperate, three-front American effort to protect Iran and its proxies from Israeli military pressure, while simultaneously trying to take retrospective credit for that pressure . It’s the Obama-Biden policy as it has been pursued consistently across two administrations, irrespective of public opinion or elections, and as it will no doubt be pursued under a potential Harris administration. The details change, but the story is always the same: The United States acts as a protector of Iran’s regional empire so that Tehran can serve as Washington’s partner in managing the Middle East. That Iran has thus far proved both inept and uncooperative has not dimmed American enthusiasm for the policy in the slightest. On the contrary, as with all utopian schemes, failure only proves we haven’t worked hard enough.

Israel would be smart to refuse to go along with this policy, regardless of the potential effect on the U.S. election, since it’s disastrous for Israel and bad for America, too. But if, by pursuing Israel’s own interests, Bibi could help deliver the coup de grâce to a tottering Obama-Biden regime … well, that would be the icing on the cake. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Shalom Goldman on the Catholic Zionism of G.K. Chesterton and Jacques Maritain

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The Rest

→Quote of the Day: 

The Democratic Party’s strategy to win the presidency in 2024 hinges in large part on preventing a normal election from taking place. Procedural and voting irregularities that would have triggered alarm across the political spectrum until recently have become an accepted feature of the landscape. The party has pursued this strategy since 2016, when the Obama White House and the Hillary Clinton campaign worked with U.S. intelligence agencies to frame Trump falsely as a Russian agent. The strategy aims to preserve the ceremony of voting, while constraining its influence, in the same way ideologically motivated bans on “hate” and “misinformation” uphold the appearance of a right to speak, while dictating what can or can’t be said.

That’s from a new essay by Jacob Siegel in City Journal on “The Plot to Manage Democracy,” which provides an overview of the party state’s four lines of effort—lawfare, censorship, institutional interference and targeted policy, and information operations—to control electoral outcomes while preserving the illusion of “free and fair” elections. But the managers don’t always get what they want, so you should still vote. 

Read it here: https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-plot-to-manage-democracy

→On Tuesday, the United States and Canada designated regular Scroll content generator Samidoun as a “sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.” We told you so roughly a year ago, but still, it’s nice to be vindicated! In a press release, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that its Office of Foreign Assets Control was designating Samidoun and Khaled Barakat, a Samidoun leader and Canadian citizen who also serves as a member of the PFLP’s leadership abroad, under Executive Order 13224, thus preventing all U.S. persons and entities from transacting with them. Canada has also listed Samidoun as a “terrorist entity,” effective Oct. 11. 

As we’ve reported at The Scroll, Samidoun is a fiscal sponsorship of the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ), a left-wing 501(c)(3) that has received millions in funding from George Soros, the Tides Foundation, the New Venture Fund, and other left-wing dark-money groups since 2021. According to IRS rules, a fiscal sponsorship arrangement means that the sponsorship is legally indistinguishable from its parent nonprofit, which technically means that AFGJ has been acting as a money-laundering front for a terrorist group. Barakat and his wife, Charlotte Kates, were also regulars on the campus protest circuit this spring; both, for instance, spoke at a “Resistance 101” seminar in March hosted by Columbia University Apartheid Divest, during which Barakat praised plane hijackings to the assembled Ivy League undergrads.

We don’t expect much in the way of consequences for Samidoun’s various collaborators, but the acknowledgement of reality is appreciated, however belated it may be.

→The White House may be threatening an arms embargo unless Israel commits to the resupply of Hamas, but Hamas does not appear to be especially grateful for the charity. Here was Hamas Politburo member Osama Hamdan on a Friday appearance on the “SamsaQuds” podcast, translated and transcribed by the Middle East Media Research Institute:

If our Lord allows us to live that long, I do not think that Israel will be on the map of the region in 10 years. The people will then say, “May Allah be pleased with the people who launched the Al-Aqsa Flood, because they wrote the first line in the story of the end of Israel.”

In response to a question from the interviewer asking whether the “cost” of Al-Aqsa Flood had been “higher than expected,” Hamdan asked, “How much are Palestine, Jerusalem, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque worth to you? With these issues, if you start putting a price on them, you’d better stay home.”

→In February, we ran a Big Story on Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), a highly selective specialty public high school in Alexandria, Virginia, that had innovated a new technique for racially discriminatory admissions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling. Last Thursday, TJ was back in the news with a new innovation: selling its intellectual property to China via a nonprofit scam. National Review reported indicating that a nonprofit affiliated with the school received $3.6 million from Chinese entities, including institutions connected to the Chinese military and the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, in exchange for “curriculum, syllabi, and floor plans” to allow the Chinese to build a chain of 20 replica schools in China. The scheme was uncovered by the watchdog Parents Defending Education (PDE), which obtained internal documents showing that Chinese “donations” to the school’s fundraising nonprofit, were in fact disguised payments for the school’s intellectual property, which also allowed the school to avoid paying taxes on the money. According to follow-on reporting from The Daily Wire, the Fairfax County public school district attempted to conceal the arrangement by charging PDE $35,900 in public records request fees to release the relevant documents. PDE forked over $18,000 for a portion of them, which was enough to reveal the scam. 

→With three weeks to go until the election, polls suggest that Kamala Harris is struggling with Black voters, particularly young men. (According CNN’s Harry Enten, Harris’ margin among Black men aged 18 to 44 is currently 40 points lower than Barack Obama’s margin in 2012.) In an attempt to staunch the bleeding, the vice president on Monday released a five-point “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,” which proposed forgivable $20,000 small-business loans for Black entrepreneurs and unspecified protections for cryptocurrency investments “so Black men who make them know their money is safe.” The one that raised the most eyebrows, however, was proposal number five: “Legalize recreational marijuana and create opportunities for Black Americans to succeed in this new industry.” As political writer Wesley Yang noted on X, this isn’t the first time Harris has flirted with marijuana legalization. In an interview with the radio show “The Breakfast Club” during her 2020 primary campaign, Harris cited her own Jamaican ancestry to explain why she favored legalization. That didn’t go over well with at least one prominent Jamaican: Harris’ father, Stanford economics professor Donald Harris. In a statement to a Jamaican newspaper, Harris Sr. wrote that his ancestors must be “turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation, and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker in the pursuit of identity politics.” 

→On the subject of Harris’ waning Black support, here’s today’s Shot—a report from The Washington Free Beacon that the “Yacht Killer,” aka John Jacobson Jr., a California murderer who killed a married couple to procure money for a sex change, received taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgery thanks to policy changes overseen by Harris during her tenure as California attorney general. 

Here’s the background: In 2015, a California judge ruled that the state was obligated to pay for the sex change of another male murderer (Jeffrey Bryan Norsworthy) claiming to be a woman. Harris promised to appeal the ruling but never did, and then Gov. Jerry Brown paroled the inmate. When yet another convicted murderer (Rodney James Quine) sued to obtain a sex change, Harris negotiated a settlement that saw the state pay for the operation and for Quine’s legal fees. California announced the settlement alongside a “wholesale policy change” in which it promised to provide, and pay for, sex-reassignment surgery for prison inmates. During her 2019 presidential run, Harris even apologized for initially opposing Norsworthy’s operation, which she said was a position of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that was “contrary to my beliefs,” and lauded the state’s sex-changes-for-murderers policy as “an issue of humanity.” 

Jacobson, a former child actor and cross-dresser who developed a fixation on cutting off his own genitalia, was convicted in 2004 of luring a wealthy married couple, Thomas and Jackie Hawks, onto their yacht, forcing them to sign over their bank account information, and then tying them to an anchor and throwing them overboard before “grabbing a beer from the fridge and starting to fish,” according to the Beacon. In a letter to the publication, Jacobson confirmed that he had received “gender-affirming surgery and breast augmentation” last year and was awaiting a transfer to the women’s prison at San Quentin. 

Read the full report here: https://freebeacon.com/elections/transgender-yacht-killer-serving-life-sentence-is-now-eligible-for-taxpayer-funded-sex-change-surgery-thanks-to-kamala-harris-he-killed-my-daughter-and-son-in-law-and-now-he-gets-what-he-wants/ 

→And here’s the Chaser, from Charlamagne Tha God of “The Breakfast Club”:

→In yesterday’s edition, we reported on new research from OpenTheBooks.com showing that federal Foreign Language and Area Studies grants are supporting anti-Israel radicals on college campuses. Due to an editorial oversight, we forgot to include a link to the “Open The Books” Substack, where the report will appear later this week. That link can be found below:

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

A New Chapter in an Old Story, by Judy Bolton-Fasman

With a new anthology, author and publisher Zibby Owens brings together dozens of writers to talk about Jewish life after Oct. 7

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Israel as the Jesus Among Nations

How G.K. Chesterton and Jacques Maritain led the Catholic Church to reject the myth of Jewish wandering and recognize the Jewish state

By Shalom Goldman

In 1904, a few months before his death at the age of 44, Theodor Herzl met with the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Merry del Val. Herzl asked for Vatican diplomatic support to further the international recognition of the Zionist cause. In response, the cardinal said: “I do not quite see how we can take any initiative in this matter. As long as the Jews deny the divinity of Christ, we certainly cannot make a declaration in their favor. Not that we have any ill will toward them. On the contrary, the church has always protected them. To us they are the indispensable witnesses to the phenomenon of God’s term on earth. But they deny the divine nature of Christ. How then can we, without abandoning our own highest principles, agree to their being given possession of the Holy Land again?”

Despite its harsh tone, this well-known statement by the Vatican secretary of state did not indicate implacable hostility toward Jews. In fact, Cardinal Merry del Val’s declaration that the church has always protected the Jews had a degree of historical validity that was given credence by his actions a few years after his meeting with Herzl. With the revival of European blood libels at the beginning of the 20th century, Cardinal Merry del Val labeled the libels “an incredible myth.” He reminded Catholics that between the 13th and 18th centuries the popes had rejected again and again the veracity of claims that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood in religious rituals.

Israel, the land of Christian origins, where Jesus walked and preached, had always been a place of pilgrimage for Christians. What then should Christians make of Jewish claims to the Holy Land? On the question of a Jewish return to Palestine, the religious and political issues were radically different for Catholics and Protestants. Generally, Catholics, until Vatican II, upheld the teaching that the Jews were guilty of “deicide,” and that the punishment for their crime was eternal exile. In keeping with that view, one Vatican official wrote that “Zionism must therefore be regarded as an arrogant presumption, in opposition to the will of God, who has punished His people, condemning them to exile and wandering.”

Concerning Zionism, there is a significant difference between Protestant and Catholic views. In contrast to the diversity of Protestant responses to Zionism, some of which were positive and some negative, the official Catholic response was clearly negative. The Protestant focus on the Bible as the sole source of authority, led to a reevaluation of the Jewish aspiration to return to the land. For the Protestant reformers, the people of Israel were historically relevant. The Vatican opposed Zionism in both its political and cultural manifestations. The prospect of a Jewish state in the Christian Holy Land was threatening to the Vatican, because Zionism, and later the State of Israel, presented the church with a challenge to established doctrines. Renewed Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, and the possibility of a Jewish cultural and religious renaissance in the reclaimed land, challenged the Catholic Church’s view of Judaism as a superseded religion, and its view of Jews as a people condemned to permanent wandering, exile, and powerlessness.

With the advent of political Zionism in the late 19th century, Rome’s necessary yet deeply uneasy relationship with the Jewish people, marked by frequent persecution and humiliation of Jews in Catholic lands, was intensified by the addition of a Jewish territorial claim—a claim that many in the church hierarchy mocked. In the words of mid-20th-century historian Jules Isaac, the essence of Christian anti-Judaism had been “the teaching of contempt.” According to that teaching the old or “carnal” Israel had forfeited its claim to chosenness—and by extension its claim to what the Catholic Church deemed the Christian Holy Land. Why, then, should the church support Zionism, a political movement that aimed to end the exile to which the Jews had been justly condemned, and restore Jewish territorial sovereignty?

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Yet after a century of steadfast opposition to Zionism, the church changed its approach to the issue. This radical shift in attitude took place over the course of the 20th century. It culminated in the Vatican’s diplomatic recognition of Israel in 1993 and Pope John Paul II’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 2000.

Following the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel and its inclusion in the United Nations—both acts that the Vatican opposed—there was a series of low-level diplomatic conversations between Israeli officials and Vatican officials. The church was concerned about both its real estate holdings and its flock in the Holy Land. Contacts between Israel and the Vatican waxed and waned over the subsequent 45 years; it was not until 1993 that the Vatican granted Israel diplomatic recognition.

Two of the most influential Catholic thinkers of the 20th century, G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) and Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), were deeply engaged in reshaping the Catholic Church’s relationship to Judaism and Zionism. These writers and their Jewish interlocutors helped the church and the Zionist leadership arrive at an uneasy but slowly evolving understanding—one that would lead, at the end of the 20th century, to full Vatican diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. The process that led to the transformation of the Vatican’s attitudes toward Israel was complex and burdened by the historical past.

Maritain, like Chesterton, was a Protestant convert to the Roman Catholic Church. He was brought up in a secularized Protestant family and joined the Catholic Church as a young man. As the author of many philosophical works and a scholar of St. Thomas Aquinas’ works, Maritain wielded great influence. By the 1950s and 1960s Maritain’s influence extended to the Vatican and the papacy. His teachings were decisive in changing both official and unofficial Catholic views of the Jews. Maritain helped formulate the Vatican II response to the Shoah and influenced the Vatican’s reformulation of attitudes toward the State of Israel.

Both Chesterton and Maritain also exerted considerable influence on Catholic intellectuals in the United States, particularly on the issue of Zionism. Chesterton, who lived in England, visited the United States in the 1920s and recorded his impressions in What I Saw in America. His influence in the United States has grown greatly in the post-World War II period. And his books for a general readership, such as the Father Brown series, remain popular. Maritain, who was born in France, lived in the United States for long periods between 1940 and 1960, part of that time as a professor at Princeton University. In his long teaching career he made a dual contribution to Catholic intellectual life, first in the more narrowly focused area of the history of ideas, particularly Aquinas studies, and then in the more general liberalization of Catholic attitudes toward other religions, a change reflected in the innovations of Vatican II.

Of those two literary and theological masters, Maritain’s influence on Vatican attitudes toward Jews and Zionism was more direct. While Chesterton exerted his influence through the popularity of his many books, Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, foremost among them, and through his wide readership among the Anglican and Catholic laity and clergy, Maritain influenced directly the Vatican hierarchy. Two popes, Paul VI and John Paul II, called Maritain their teacher.

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The antagonistic response that the Vatican secretary of state gave Herzl in 1904 was not the first indication of Catholic displeasure with Zionism. Seven years earlier, the Vatican press had greeted Theodor Herzl’s announcement of the First Zionist Congress with scorn. The newspaper Civiltà Cattolica condemned Zionism in theological terms:

1,827 years have passed since the prediction of Jesus of Nazareth was fulfilled, namely that is the Jerusalem would be destroyed ... that the Jews would be led away to be slaves among all the nations, and that they would remain in the dispersion till the end of the world. ... According to the Sacred Scriptures, the Jewish people must always live dispersed and wandering among the other nations, so that they may render witness to Christ not only by the Scriptures ... but by their very existence. As for a rebuilt Jerusalem, which would become the center of a reconstituted state of Israel, we must add that this is contrary to the prediction of Christ Himself.

This article, which summarized the theological grounds for the Vatican’s opposition to Zionism, appeared in Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit newspaper known for its antisemitic tendencies. Founded in 1850, “it came to be regarded as the unofficial voice of the pope himself.” Informed readers understood what it had to say about Zionism as the official Vatican response to Herzl’s request for Vatican support for a Jewish state.

A few weeks after the 1897 condemnation of Zionism in Civiltà Cattolica, Herzl met with the papal nuncio in Vienna. For Herzl, the results of the meeting were discouraging. He recorded the following in his diary: “Result of the conversation: I believe Rome will be against us, because she does not consider the solution of the Jewish question in a Jewish state, and perhaps even fears it.”

Although he was pessimistic about Catholic support for Zionism, Herzl remained optimistic about Anglican and Protestant support. He had been in close contact with Protestant clergymen since the preparations for the First Zionist Congress of 1897. Anglican clergyman Rev. William Hechler, who had articulated support for the restoration of the Jews as early as 1883, helped Herzl obtain an audience with the Duke of Baden and his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm. Other Protestant clergymen and laymen, including a number of Americans, were associated with the seemingly contradictory 19th-century combination of Protestant missions to the Jews and support for a Jewish home in Palestine. In the late 19th century, Christians assisting in the restoration of the Jews to their land were for the most part Protestants of the various denominations; Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians were, for the most part, hostile to Zionist aims.

After Herzl’s 1897 meeting with the papal nuncio, the vexed question of the Christian holy sites came to the fore. If a Jewish state were established, who would control the Catholic shrines? Aware that, aside from its theological resistance to the notion of a Jewish state, the church was deeply concerned about its role in Jerusalem as protector of the Catholic laity and clergy and the Catholic holy sites, Herzl explained to the nuncio that Zionists aimed to make Jerusalem “extraterritorial.” To which the nuncio replied, “You propose, then, to exclude Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, and set up the capital, I take it, more to the north?” To this comment Herzl gave a vaguely affirmative reply, which seemed to mollify the nuncio. If Zionists did not claim the Christian holy places, thought Herzl, perhaps the Vatican might consider Zionist aspirations more positively. But Herzl’s vague assertion did not satisfy Vatican officials, who wanted firm assurances that Christian holy places would not be under the direct control of Jewish authorities.

Seven years after his 1897 meeting with the papal nuncio in Vienna, a meeting at which the topic of control of the Christian holy places dominated the conversation, Herzl obtained an audience with Pope Pius X. This audience, held three days after his discouraging meeting with Cardinal Merry del Val, was equally disappointing. Pius X told Herzl: “We won’t be able to stop the Jews from going to Jerusalem, but we could never favor it. ... The Jews have not recognized our Lord, and so we cannot recognize the Jewish people. ... The Jewish faith was the foundation of our own, but it has been superseded by the teachings of Christ, and we cannot admit that it enjoys any validity.”

When Herzl asked about the church’s attitude toward control of Jerusalem, the pope replied: “I know it is not pleasant to see the Turks in possession of our holy places. We simply have to put up with that. But to support the Jews in the acquisition of the holy places, that we cannot do.” Herzl’s hope that the Vatican would prefer Jewish rule in Jerusalem to Turkish rule was dashed. As distasteful as it was for the Catholic Church in Jerusalem to be subject to the dictates of the local Muslim authorities, it was less objectionable than reversing the church’s age-old relationship with the Jews, a relationship in which Judaism was understood as vanquished.

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In the 1920s, Zionist leaders recognized that some Catholic intellectuals might be sympathetic to Zionist aspirations, despite the official position of the Vatican. One dissenter from the then dominant Catholic view of Zionism was G.K. Chesterton. As historian Patrick Allitt has noted: “Among the English Catholics whose work was widely read in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nearly all were converts. ... Chesterton was widely recognized in his day and since as a master of English prose, and he gave to this convert generation much of its distinctive voice and mood.” Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, Chesterton’s ideas and attitudes have influenced Americans of all religious traditions.

Chesterton’s early books are sprinkled with derogatory comments about Jews. Today, Britain’s G.K. Chesterton Institute is very sensitive to charges that Chesterton was an antisemite. On its website the institute directors note that the author “certainly made anti-Jewish remarks. ... These need to be understood in their social and historical context, not in order to whitewash Chesterton, but to see how they do not invalidate his entire intellectual or spiritual legacy.”

Yet Chesterton’s The New Jerusalem, an account of his 1919 tour of Palestine, concluded with a spirited defense of Zionism. That within the very same book Chesterton made antisemitic remarks should not surprise us. Chesterton admired the “new Jew” of Palestine and hoped that British Jews would move to Palestine and transform themselves into the Middle Easterners they really were. It was the “old Jews of Europe” that he disdained.

The New Jerusalem, published in 1920, was a very popular book in both England and the United States. On one level, it is an extended meditation on the history of the monotheistic religions, composed on the eve of Chesterton’s conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism. Chesterton stated that Jews, caught between the idea of chosenness and the harsh reality of exile, can be redeemed only by a return to their homeland. His condemnation of the old “ghetto Jew” and his praise of the “new Jew” exemplified by the Zionist pioneers, endeared Chesterton to Chaim Weizmann and other Zionist spokesmen, who also valorized the emergence of the “new Jew” and the decline of the “old Jew.” In this formulation, Jews, freed from the burdens of exile, would no longer exhibit the traits that made them objectionable to Christians. Thus through Zionism, the “Jewish question” would be solved to the satisfaction of both Christians and Jews (Muslims were never brought into consideration in this European-oriented calculus.)

Chesterton found support for his critique of Jews in the Zionist analysis of Jewish life in exile. Zionists, he noted, offer “a diagnosis and a remedy.” The diagnosis is that “any abnormal qualities in the Jews are due to the abnormal position of the Jews ... for exile is the worst kind of bondage.” The remedy, for Zionists as for Chesterton, is a return to the land and to physical labor. For Chesterton, this return to the land might not bring Jews to Jesus, but it would “cure them of their attachment to urban landscapes, scholarly pursuits, and financial chicanery.”

The remarkable context of Chesterton’s advocacy for Zionism was that in the early 1920’s, the years in which he published The New Jerusalem and wrote pro-Zionist articles, the Vatican was engaged in a vigorous diplomatic campaign to stop the League of Nations from assigning to Britain the Palestine mandate, a mandate that the Vatican feared would enable the emergence of a Jewish state. In a May 1922 letter to the League of Nations, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, the Vatican secretary of state, wrote, “The Holy See is not opposed to the Jews in Palestine having civil rights equal to those possessed by other nationals and creeds, but it cannot agree to the Jews being given a privileged and preponderant position in Palestine vis-à-vis other confessions.” In contrast, Chesterton, who had recently converted to Catholicism, advocated giving Jews a privileged position in Palestine. The Zionist movement welcomed his support warmly.

Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/israel-as-the-jesus-among-nations