The Myth of Return: How Palestine Was Chosen as the Jewish Homeland

This extra-long post was made possible by yesterday’s contribution from a student in my Wrecking Ball Writing Course on the sin of usury (and you should read it). So this article was two-days of work, and I hope you really enjoy it, because it covers a topic that most people are totally unaware of. The reason Palestine was chosen as a Jewish homeland really has nothing to do with their affinity for the land itself. And if that’s true of them, maybe this should shape the way evangelicals think about the land ourselves.

If you asked the average churchgoing evangelical why the modern State of Israel was planted in Palestine, you would probably get some form of the same answer: that it was the ancient homeland of the Jewish people, and that the Jewish yearning to return there had burned hot and unbroken for two thousand years. That answer is tidy, familiar, and completely misleading. The truth is that for most of Jewish history after the fall of Jerusalem, the “return” to Palestine as a political reality was not a constant drumbeat at all. It was a flicker in the background, preserved in prayers and liturgy among the few who still practiced the faith at all, but for nearly two millennia it did not drive Jewish political organization, fund-raising, or migration in any sustained or coordinated way.

The myth of an unbroken, worldwide Jewish mission to repossess Palestine is a product of the modern age. Before the nineteenth century, Talmudic Judaism generally understood the exile as something God alone would end in His time. The Messiah would bring it about, not committees or congresses. For the vast majority of Jewish communities scattered across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, survival meant finding stability under whatever host government they lived in, not plotting a mass political movement toward the Levant. A few messianic pretenders over the centuries tried to rally a return, but they were quickly suppressed, exposed, or dismissed by rabbinic authorities.

WHEN ZION COULD HAVE BEEN ELSEWHERE

What changed in the late nineteenth century was not the theology of the synagogue so much as the conditions of the world. The collapse of empires, the rise of nationalism, and the virulent antisemitism of the Russian Empire and parts of Europe combined to produce something that had not existed before: a secular political Zionism. Its leaders were often agnostic or openly nonreligious, and its aim was practical, not prophetic. They were not trying to make the Messiah come. They were trying to keep their people alive.

And here is where the story becomes unfamiliar, because Palestine was not the obvious or inevitable choice for these early Zionists. When pogroms drove waves of Jewish refugees out of Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1880s, the leading question in Jewish philanthropy and politics was not, “How do we get them to Palestine?” It was, “Where can we put them where they will be safe, self-sufficient, and welcome?” That meant scanning the globe for land.

The most famous of these early alternatives was the British Uganda Plan, which in reality was a proposal to settle Jews in a section of British East Africa in what is now Kenya. In 1903, Theodor Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, took the plan seriously enough to present it at the Zionist Congress. He faced uproar from delegates who wanted Palestine, but his willingness to consider it shows that, even at the highest levels, the location of a future Jewish state was negotiable.

Argentina was another contender. Baron Maurice de Hirsch, one of the wealthiest Jewish philanthropists of the era, poured his fortune into the Jewish Colonization Association, buying up vast tracts of land in South America. By the turn of the century, Jewish agricultural colonies dotted the Argentine Pampas. Some envisioned it as the nucleus of a self-governing Jewish commonwealth far from the reach of European hatred (many Jews were skeptical, because for more than a thousand years, Jews had been almost entirely urban, and they couldn’t picture themselves farming or doing manual labor that the agrarian experiment would require).

The United States had its own plan in the form of the Galveston Movement, which sought to redirect Jewish immigration from the crowded cities of the East Coast to the more open and economically promising interior states via the port of Galveston, Texas. The vision was not just dispersal, but the potential for concentrated settlement that could evolve into a political base.

The Galveston plan was not the only American scheme on the table. In the decades before the First World War, Jewish leaders and sympathetic philanthropists floated ideas for concentrated settlement across the continent. Some looked to the Dakotas and Nebraska, where railroads and land companies were desperate for settlers and willing to offer generous terms. Others proposed the San Joaquin Valley in California, where fertile soil and long growing seasons promised the chance to build prosperous agricultural colonies. There was even talk of parts of upstate New York and New Jersey, close enough to established Jewish populations to offer cultural familiarity, yet rural enough to create self-sustaining communities insulated from the pressures of crowded Eastern cities.

These plans had little of the messianic glamour that Christian prophecy-enthusiasts would later attach to Palestine, but they reflected the same practical impulse that drove early Zionist thinking: find a safe, stable place where Jewish life could flourish without fear of pogroms or persecution, wherever that happened to be on the map.

Then there was Birobidzhan, a bizarre and often forgotten Soviet experiment. In 1928, the USSR established the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Far East along the border with China, encouraging Jews to settle there as an officially recognized national homeland within the Soviet system. It was cold, remote, and inhospitable, but it was one more reminder that even in the twentieth century’s opening decades, the Jewish future could have been mapped far from Jerusalem.

PALESTINE AS ONE AMONG MANY

Even Palestine’s early appearances on the table were not the Palestine of romantic Christian imagination. Before the First World War, it was a neglected province of the Ottoman Empire, underdeveloped, malaria-ridden in parts, and politically unstable. A few small agricultural settlements had been founded by Jewish philanthropists and pioneers, but they were fragile and dependent on foreign support. Many Jews saw Palestine as a place of deep historical and spiritual significance, but also as a logistical nightmare for mass resettlement.

This is the point most modern readers are never told: the connection between the Jewish people and Palestine was never in question spiritually, but as a political project it was far from settled. There was nothing inevitable about the modern State of Israel’s coordinates on the map. In the 1890s and early 1900s, Jewish leadership circles were divided, experimental, and pragmatic. They looked to land where it could be found, from the Pampas to the Texas plains to the highlands of East Africa.

The picture that emerges is not one of a single-minded people chasing a two-thousand-year-old political blueprint, but of a scattered and embattled population exploring any refuge that might offer safety and permanence. Palestine was one option among many, and for a time, it was not even the most practical one.

For now, it is enough to understand that the modern myth of an unbroken, inevitable march back to Palestine is exactly that: a myth. The historical reality is far messier, and far more interesting, because it shows how nations are not merely born from ancient longing but are often shaped by the contingencies of politics, the urgencies of crisis, and the ideas of outsiders whose interpretations of prophecy can end up drawing the borders on the map.

THE DISPENSATIONAL TURN

The turn toward Palestine as the singular, non-negotiable home for the Jewish people did not happen in a vacuum. It was coaxed, prodded, and in some cases outright engineered by a religious movement that did not originate in Jewish communities at all. That movement was Dispensationalism, an interpretation of biblical prophecy born in the ferment of nineteenth-century British evangelicalism and exported, with great success, to the United States. To understand why Zionism came to center on Palestine rather than the Argentine Pampas or the highlands of Kenya, you have to understand how Dispensationalists read their Bibles.

In the early 1800s, the Anglican priest John Nelson Darby developed a system that divided history into distinct eras or “dispensations,” each governed by a different divine covenant. According to Darby, the Jewish people were still the rightful heirs to the promises God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and those promises included a literal return to the land of Israel. In this framework, the rebirth of a Jewish nation in Palestine was not merely possible, it was inevitable, and it would herald the approach of the end times. Darby’s eschatology gained traction in Britain and then crossed the Atlantic, finding fertile ground among revivalists and Bible teachers who were already inclined to take the prophecies of Ezekiel and Daniel at face value.

This theology did not remain an abstract matter of charts and sermons. It began to shape the political imagination of evangelicals, many of whom were influential in the British and American governments. British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, though not a Dispensationalist himself, was influenced by a rising tide of Christian restorationist thought. His tenure in the mid-nineteenth century saw the first stirrings of official British interest in facilitating Jewish resettlement in Palestine. This was not yet a state policy, but it planted seeds.

By the late nineteenth century, Dispensationalist leaders were organizing conferences, printing prophecy charts, and publishing study Bibles that emphasized the centrality of a Jewish return to Palestine. The most famous of these was the Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909. Scofield didn’t own the Bible. Oxford, then largely funded by British Zionists and the famous Rothschilds family, published and owned the work, and put Scofield’s name on it. Scofield’s annotated notes appeared alongside the biblical text, giving readers a ready-made interpretive grid. After Scofield died, the Zionists at Oxford continued to add his notes in regard to Israel, as though Scofield had never died. For millions of English-speaking evangelicals - thanks to the popularity of the “Scofield” Study Bible - the notion that God’s plan required the Jews to repossess Palestine became as unquestionable as the doctrine of the Trinity.

PROPHECY MEETS POLITICS

The timing of Dispensationalism’s rise coincided with the practical crisis facing Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. Pogroms, legal restrictions, and grinding poverty were driving mass emigration. Jewish leaders were exploring their options, weighing the merits of East Africa, South America, North America, and Palestine. What Dispensationalism offered was not simply another option, but a theological inevitability. The Jews must return to Palestine because God said so, and if that was true, then anything less would be settling for second best.

It is crucial to understand that many early Zionists were not swayed by this reasoning. Herzl himself was more concerned with safety than with prophecy (Herzl didn’t believe the Old Testament or hold to religious Judaism) . Yet the growing chorus of Gentile supporters who insisted on Palestine carried political weight. Wealthy British evangelicals lobbied their government to secure a foothold in the Levant. American revivalists preached to huge audiences that aiding a Jewish return to Palestine was a sacred duty. Missionary societies, Bible institutes, and Christian newspapers created a cultural climate in which Palestine became the only respectable answer to the “Jewish question” in Christian minds.

This shift had a feedback effect on Jewish opinion. Leaders who might once have settled for Uganda or Argentina began to calculate the advantages of having a vast, motivated base of Christian supporters. If the road to statehood ran through British influence in the Middle East, then aligning with restorationist expectations made strategic sense.

The First World War accelerated this convergence. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire put Palestine in British hands, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration announced that His Majesty’s Government viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Behind the language of diplomacy lay decades of evangelical agitation. The men who framed the declaration had been shaped, directly or indirectly, by Dispensationalism.

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A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

Here lies the irony that most churchgoers never see. The “return” to Palestine, presented today as the outworking of an ancient and uninterrupted longing, was in part the result of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Christians telling Jews that God required it. These Christians read the prophets through the lens of Dispensationalism and then acted on their convictions in the halls of power. Jewish leaders, facing existential threats and pragmatic calculations, responded by making Palestine the centerpiece of their strategy.

This was not a one-way imposition. Zionist thinkers like Chaim Weizmann learned to speak the language of prophecy when dealing with Christian audiences. They knew that by framing their cause in biblical terms, they could unlock resources, influence, and political commitments that might otherwise remain out of reach. In effect, they allowed Dispensationalist expectations to steer the movement toward Palestine, even if their private motivations were more practical than prophetic.

By the time the Second World War and the Holocaust obliterated the idea of scattered refuge, the link between Jewish statehood and Palestine was cemented in both Jewish and Christian minds. Other possibilities had faded into historical footnotes. The alternative homelands discussed at the dawn of political Zionism became curiosities for historians, while the public narrative hardened into a story of ancient longing fulfilled.

What makes this a self-fulfilling prophecy is that the Christian insistence on Palestine as the only legitimate homeland helped close off other options until Palestine was the only viable choice left. The theological vision drove political advocacy, which in turn reshaped Jewish strategy, which then reinforced the theological vision. To modern audiences, it appears seamless and inevitable, but the record tells a different story.

If you strip away the devotional rhetoric, what emerges is a fascinating example of how religious interpretation can alter geopolitical reality. Dispensationalism, a doctrine born in the study halls of British evangelicals, ended up guiding the location of a modern state. This is not the way prophecy is supposed to work in the Bible. In the biblical pattern, God speaks and history obeys. In this modern case, people read their Bibles in a certain way, convinced others to act on that reading, and history followed suit. The map of the Middle East was drawn not by divine fiat in that moment, but by the intersection of belief, persuasion, and political opportunity.

FROM BALFOUR TO BEN-GURION

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was not the end of the process. It was the starting gun for a scramble in which prophecy and politics sprinted together toward a contested finish line. Britain’s pledge to favor a Jewish homeland in Palestine was vague by design. It promised support “without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities,” a phrase that left ample room for interpretation and conflict. Surely they never thought their declaration would have led to 40k dead civilians, including 14k dead children, and Jewish settlers not letting food through a wall to starving indigenous inhabitants.

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