Charles Henry Churchill

Colonel Charles Henry Churchill (1807 – 1869) was a British Army officer, diplomat and writer who served as a British consul in Ottoman Syria. Churchill was one of the first individuals to draw up political plans for the creation of a Zionist state in the region of Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire.

British Consul in Ottoman Syria

In the early 1840s, as British consul in Damascus responsible for Ottoman Syria (including today's Lebanon, Israel and Palestine) under Lord Palmerston's Foreign Office, he proposed the first political plan to create a Jewish State (Israel) in Palestine.

The proposal correspondence with Sir Moses Montefiore, the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, in which Churchill proposed a strategy for the creating of a Jewish state, pre-dating formal Zionism by approximately half a century. The correspondence came in the wake of the Oriental Crisis of 1840, the Damascus affair of 1840 and the acceleration of the Eastern Question by the successful Greek War of Independence against Ottoman rule which had concluded ten years earlier.

On 14 June 1841, Churchill wrote to Montefiore:

I cannot conceal from you my most anxious desire to see your countrymen endeavour once more to resume their existence as a people.

I consider the object to be perfectly attainable. But, two things are indispensably necessary. Firstly, that the Jews will themselves take up the matter universally and unanimously. Secondly, that the European Powers will aid them in their views. It is for the Jews to make a commencement. Let the principal persons of their community place themselves at the head of the movement. Let them meet, concert and petition. In fact the agitation must be simultaneous throughout Europe. There is no Government which can possibly take offence at such public meetings. The result would be that you would conjure up a new element in Eastern diplomacy — an element which under such auspices as those of the wealthy and influential members of the Jewish community could not fail not only of attracting great attention and of exciting extraordinary interest, but also of producing great events.