In 2008, Professor of Political Science and History at the University of California, Los Angeles, Anthony Pagden published one of the best books [2] concerning the history of the long and Manichean struggle between East and West, from classical times to the conflicts of the twenty-first century, including the protracted and seemingly insoluble Israeli-Arab and Israel-Palestine conflicts. Pagden points out that by the seventeenth century, with the decline of the Church, the contest (between Islam and Christianity) has shifted from religion to philosophy: the West’s scientific rationality in contrast to those who sought ultimate guidance in the words of God. Thus, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the disintegration of the great Muslim empires – the Ottoman, the Mughal, and the Safavid – and the increasing Western domination of the whole of Asia. The resultant attempt to mix Islam and Western modernism sparked off a struggle in the Islamic world between reformers and traditionalists which persists to this day.

The wars between East and West, Pagden concludes, “have not only been the longest and most costly in human history, they have also formed the West’s vision of itself as independent, free, secular, and now democratic. They have shaped, and continue to shape, the nature of the modern world”. In this long sequence of interaction between East and West, or Orient and Occident, Western powers – and Jewish Zionists following in their footsteps – have used the Bible (in both its Old and New Testament) profusely, for close to 2000 years, to justify the conquest of land in the Islamic world and everywhere else. In fact, a 2013 Pew Research Center survey even concluded that “twice as many white evangelical Protestants as Jews say that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God (82%vs. 40%).

So, after centuries of relentless preaching and planning on the part of Western Christian Evangelicals, the early twentieth century finally provided them with the Jewish cooperation they needed – mainly after the formation of the British Zionist Federation in 1899 – to fulfill their desire to see the Jews restored in Palestine, which represents the beginning of the “redemption” according to Protestant Restorationist Christianity. This is how Britain issued the ominous Balfour Declaration in 1917.
Lord Balfour himself, as we mentioned earlier, was a devout Christian, a racist and a Zionist. In 1906, as the then leader of the opposition, Balfour met with Chaim Weizmann – together with Jewish MP and Minister Herbert Samuels and banker Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild – who lobbied him to support the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.