Eastern vacuum with German imperial power. As early as 1895 Herzl had written to Reichskanzler Otto von Bismarck a letter in which he said: "If my program is too premature, I put it at the disposal of the German government. May it use it when it sees fit to do so."
During his visit to Turkey and the Holy Land, Kaiser Wilhelm, on horseback, received Herzl near the Jewish village of Mikve-Israel, on the road from Jerusalem to Jaffa, on November 2, 1898. Herzl asked the Kaiser to become the patron of the Zionist settlement organization in Palestine and Syria. Wilhelm did not commit himself, but expressed his appreciation of both the German and the Jewish colonies established in the country. "Your movement," he said, "is based on a sound idea."
What could be more suitable than to offer the German Kaiser the prospect of a European community established in Palestine at the crossroads of the Orient as an outpost of German interests and culture? Herzl was quite certain that German would be the language of the new community anyhow. (He did not believe in the extraordinary experiment of resurrecting the Hebrew language, dead for two thousand years; that miracle, no part of the Zionist plan, became a major ingredient of the movement only when the new settlers in Palestine, eager to begin a life in the footsteps of the ancient Israelites, shed their old languages, including Yiddish, which symbolized life in the Diaspora. Hebrew, the language born in the country, so similar to the Arabic spoken there, was the ideal symbol of all they were striving for.) The Kaiser, a pathetically inadequate figure, given to fad and fashions and to diverse extravagant poses, toyed for a time with the idea of becoming the patron of the new Temple, the saviour of the Jewish race, but he was an anti-Semite at heart and saw himself as a potential Sword of Islam, so the fancy quickly passed.
In desperation Herzl turned to the British. The man who lent him an ear was the very archetype of the British