Wednesday, October 03, 2018

So Said the Lord Archbishop of York

During the House of Lords Debate of April 7, 1948, Cyril Garbett spoke.

Garbett was the Lord Archbishop of York.

As I learned, The Archbishop of York is a senior bishop in the Church of England, second only to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

And here is what he said, in part:

The Mandate has failed through the inveterate hostility shown towards it by the Zionists, and by the acquiescence of the Agency in their violence. We went there to form a home. The Jews demanded a State, and they followed up their demands with crimes of violence. Remember, the crimes of violence started with the Jewish terrorists. There was the blowing up of the King David Hotel and the hanging of those two young boy sergeants. Murder after murder has followed and, side by side with these murders, there has been carried on a campaign of what I can describe only as venomous slander against this nation and those who attempted to carry out the Mandate...

...[the] Jews felt that the Arabs could be ignored, and they declared that Arab opposition was simply a bluff. The result is they now have the Arab nation in full hostility towards them. It is no good disguising that the Jews have lost the friendship of this country, which for centuries has been their friend. These events have started in this country a dangerous and deplorable movement of anti-Semitism. Now it look as if the Jews might easily lose the friendship of the United States...

... I feel that if we have failed out there it has been due to the actions of the Jews themselves, and to the failure of the Agency to recognise their responsibility towards the Mandatory Power. It is no good merely looking back upon the past. I know, of course, that the noble Viscount and a great number of the Jews in this country deplore as strongly as any of us here what has been happening in Palestine, but we have to think of the future. What is to happen in the immediate future? Here we come to the anxiety which has been expressed already by those who have spoken—anxiety about Jerusalem.

I find it difficult to state fully how deeply anxious many of us are about the future of Jerusalem in the next few weeks. Jerusalem is in the very heart of millions of Christians. It is true that they may sometimes idealise it, more perhaps than they would had the circumstances there been different. It stands for them not only as a symbol; if there are doubts about the authenticity of some of the sacred spots, there is no doubt that it was on the spot where Jerusalem is built that the Saviour of the world died and rose again from the dead. It is for those reasons that the whole of Christendom—and I am not thinking of any particular Church—is deeply and profoundly concerned with what happens in Jerusalem...I cannot stress too strongly the urgency of this matter. If Jerusalem is destroyed, there will come from the whole of Christendom a cry of horror and indignation. Christendom will be grievously wounded,

And how did he come by these opinions?

From a Jew in part:

I prefer to answer in the words of a Jew, Professor Zander, who has quite recently written a most valuable pamphlet on the whole subject of the Jews in Palestine. Speaking of the White Paper he says:  It was impossible to pretend indefinitely that our right to enter the country was unlimited; that it was Britain's duty to enforce the admission of every Jew for whom we could provide a living until at last we reached the majority in the country. It was impossible to demand that Britain by this method should do just what she had refused to do from the beginning—that is to establish a Jewish State against the will of the Arab, and thereby run the risk of violence and even war. 

As as Zander's son has noted, Zander


was never a Zionist nor, at least until then, had he been especially religious. 

but he did become the Secretary of the Friends of the Hebrew University for 27 years.

^

1 comment:

YMedad said...

This was e-mailed to me:

Greetings from Pennsylvania.

Upon noting your most recent post, I did a little searching, and found the attached (PDF) item by Dr. Walter Zander, here:

Publications by Dr Walter Zander - Introduction
www.walterzander.info
THE WALTER ZANDER WEBSITE Introduction. The purpose of this website is to make available the writings of Walter Zander, who was born in Germany in 1898 and who died in London in 1993 aged 94.
"This is the official website owned by the Zander family and dedicated to the late Dr. Walter Zander. © Zander family 2004."

To be honest, I've not had the opportunity to fully read either the pamphlet or the material at the website.

However, I couldn't help but notice this statement, in the next-to-last paragraph of "Is This The Way":


"The eyes of the Jews are turned towards the future, and Israel can be fully understood only on the eschatological plane. As Dostoevski
said, in spite of their forty-century-old history, the final word about the Jews has not yet been spoken. Our history is not yet completed and a last and decisive event is still to come. Essentially, the Palestinian crisis is not political, but spiritual."

Also, Michael Zander's remarks about his father ("Remarks by Michael Zander, brother of Benjamin, on their father, Dr. Walter Zander"), concludes with this statement:

"Through thousands of years, Jewish life has seen the ultimate reality in the spirit and has found its deepest expression in religion. The restoration to the Holy Land must have its final meaning in our religious destiny. It must be more than the renascence of Hebrew as a living language and the birth of a new literature and art, more than the revival of an ancient and venerable national civilization, and even more than the creation of a new society. The return to Palestine is the precondition of a new era in our religious development–an era in which the present spiritual frustration will end and Israel will finds its redemption."

To me - (well, okay, I could be wrong) - these statements seem to echo of a curiously christological interpretation of Jewish history, and, the future of the Jewish people.