Political Zionism and the Armenian Question

By Ara Khachig Manoogian

About the Book

Faith is one of the most powerful forces in human life. It teaches compassion, sacrifice, and justice. It can also be borrowed, packaged, and sold to people who never learn what it is being used for.

Political Zionism and the Armenian Question is the story of how that happened, and of who has paid for it. The story does not begin in a synagogue. It begins with the statesmen and preachers of Protestant England and America, who wanted the Jews returned to Palestine decades before most Jews did. In 1840 Lord Shaftesbury urged the British government to sponsor Jewish settlement there. In 1891, 413 prominent Americans, among them John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, signed a petition asking the president to work for the return of Palestine to the Jews. Many Jews of that time, including the leading Reform rabbis, rejected the idea outright.

When Theodor Herzl founded political Zionism in 1896, he built a secular nationalist movement and then reached for the authority of scripture to sell it. His own diaries show him bargaining with an Ottoman sultan, shopping for any land a government would sign over, and offering to help silence a persecuted Christian people in return for the sultan’s favor. The book follows the money, oil, and weapons that moved alongside the sermons. American bankers and promoters sought railway, mining, and oil concessions across the Middle East. A president’s family held a stake in one of those concessions. That president’s grandson later directed the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s elected government for the sake of oil.

The book shows how an ancient command to destroy a people called Amalek has been turned into a license to kill civilians. It traces weapons sold into wars from Central America to Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Caucasus, and shows how American evangelicals were organized into a political base. It describes how Christians in the Holy Land itself, including priests spat on in the streets of Jerusalem, live with what believers abroad were taught to support. Muslims are not spared either: their faith, too, is used to set them against Christians and Jews.

This is not a book against Jews, Christians, or Muslims. It is written for them, for the believers whose sincere devotion is being used for someone else’s gain. It is also written for everyone who has paid the price: Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, and the ordinary Jews, Turks, and Azeris whose names are invoked to justify what is done.

The book draws on the founders’ own papers, government archives, court rulings, and ship-tracking records, and includes full footnotes, original documents, a chronology, and an index. It closes with what the law already requires and what citizens can do to make their governments honor it. It asks every reader one question: when your faith is used to send others to war, who benefits?

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