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:

Works Churchill wrote several important (cultural) historical works on the Middle East, including a major biography of Abd el-Kader, whom he had met during his exile in Damascus.

Mount Lebanon: A Ten Years' Residence from 1842 to 1852, describing the Manners, Customs, and Religion of its Inhabitants with a Full and Correct Account of the Druze religion and Containing Historical Records of the Mountain Tribes from Personal Intercourse with their Chiefs and Other Authentic Sources. – 3 volumes. London: Saunders & Otley, 1853 The Druzes and the Maronites under the Turkish Rule from 1840 to 1860. – London: Bernard Quaritch, 1862 Life of Abd el-Kader: Ex-Sultan of the Arabs of Algeria: written and compiled from his own dictation from other Authentic Sources. – London: Chapman and Hall, 1867, 8 volumes