No Sale of Palestine - Is This Another Reason Czar Nicholas II and His Family Were Murdered? (Updated)

Above - A small article from the St. Paul (Minnesota) Globe, November 10, 1902. 

The link to this old newspaper page can be found here. 

The 1902 article states that a Rabbi Rypins of the Mount Zion Temple, Minnesota synagogue was shown a cablegram stating that France and Russia have blocked the sale of Palestine by the Sultan of Turkey.  Czar Nicholas II was ruler of Russia from 1894 until his abdication in 1917.  He and his family were murdered in 1918.  The Balfour Declaration was hatched in 1917.

The article also goes over statements by Rabbi Rypins of efforts to move Jews out of New York into different sections of the US.  Rabbi Rypins states that he has been instrumental in finding homes for some of them in Minnesota.

He also states that there are Zionists who do not want Palestine as a place of return to a religious center - instead they want it "for the purpose of colonization".

The following clip from this page at The Times. (Richmond, Va.) December 21, 1902 states that the Czar's interests in Palestine have to do with maintaining control of Russian monasteries in the area which are actually forts.  According to Wikipedia, The Russian Orthodox Church is one of the largest owners of property in Israel and the West Bank, and has had a presence there for nearly two centuries.  France and Russia both had extensive property and missions in Palestine and were laying in wait hoping for the demise of the Ottoman Empire. 

After the rejected sale in 1902, Russia had a series of anti-Jewish pogroms starting in 1903: 

"This pogrom was instrumental in convincing tens of thousands of Russian Jews to leave to the West and eventually to the land of Israel.  As such, it became a rallying point for early Zionists, especially what would become Revisionist Zionism, inspiring early self-defense leagues under leaders like Vladimir Jabotinsky." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishinev_pogrom

Above clip from The San Francisco Call, June 16, 1903

The Kishinev pogrom took place in Chişinău, then the capital of the Bessarabia province of the Russian Empire. This area was located in the original "Pale of Settlement".

Pavel Aleksandrovich Krushevan, the original publisher of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (first publication 1903), is credited with being the main catalyst behind the Kishinev pogrom.

Krushevan's Russian-language anti-Semitic newspaper Бессарабец (Bessarabetz, meaning "Bessarabian") insinuated that a local Christian boy was murdered by the Jews.  The murder took place on April 6th, 1903, riots broke out on the same day, according to sources, and lasted three days. 

The Kishinev pogrom is noted as a main turning point in Jewish history.  It also captured the attention of the world community and was mentioned in the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine as an example of the type of human rights abuse which would justify United States involvement in Latin America.

Contemporary with the Kishinev pogrom was the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  From August 26-September 3, 1903, it appeared in abbreviated form in the Russian language paper  Znamya, a Black Hundreds newspaper owned by Pavel Krushevan, as a serialized set of articles. It appeared again in 1905 as a final chapter (Chapter XII) of a second edition of Velikoe v malom i antikhrist (The Great in the Small & Antichrist), a book by Serge Nilus.  In 1905, Sergei Nilus published the "full" version as an appendix to his book Velikoe v Malom ("The Great in the Small").   In 1917, Nilus, who had already published the Protocols two more times, produced yet another edition, this time attributing them to Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the founder of modern political Zionism.

Both Czar Alexander I in November 1818 and Napoleon (somewhat earlier) had promoted Palestine as a Jewish colony. More at this link
http://www.reflectingonjudaism.com/content/napoleon-czar-alexander-1st 
(note:  copy and paste above link if it does not redirect)
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_and_the_Jews

This pro-Zionist article goes over how Jacob Branfman, a Jew, began spreading "false accusations" about the Jews in Russia in 1858 (maybe they were true?): 

At the height of Russification and conscription during the reign of Czar Nicholas I, Jacob Brafmann aspiring for advancement into the Orthodox Theological Seminary, published a series of articles in the Vilna Messenger.

After the death of Nicholas I, Brafmann sent a memorandum to his successor Czar Alexander II in 1858 with false accusations against the Jewish community. Brafmann tried to prove that the executive organ of the Jewish community had formed a 'state within a state.'

Even though Czar Alexander II continued to grant positive rights to the Jewish community, Brafmann's false accusations were published in two volumes he authored in 1869 and 1871 called, Book of the Kahal. The book was instrumental in spreading anti-Judaism in the Russian Empire.

With Brafmann's false accusations in publication, the State Council appointed a special commission of representatives in 1870 that created a ten year study group that focused on the elimination of the fabled power held by the heads of the Jewish community and on the extension of the Pale of Settlement.

As an interesting side note, the Wikipedia article goes over an eviction of nuns from a Russian Orthodox monastery (nuns?)  by the Palestine Authority in the year 2000.  This became an international incident.  It states: Further media attention became focused on the event when it was discovered that one of the nuns was Maria Stephanopoulos the sibling of George Stephanopoulos the former advisor to U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Related:

The Russian Crown Jewels and Angela Lansbury