Why did Britain support the Zionist movement?

Answer 1

Just as a point of clarity, the British Mandate for Palestine was a Mandate, not a colony, so purely from a terminology standpoint, Britain did not colonize Israel. Britain founded a mandate there. The difference between these two terms is very relevant and helps explain the "why" here. A colony is a territory distant from the central point of governance and without a direct land-route to the metropole within its borders. A colony is a long-term occupation of the territory and the attempt to acquire its resources and manpower for an unlimited period of time. By contrast, a mandate is a territory overseen by a metropole in order to promote its own self-governance and eventual independence.

The British Mandate for Palestine was designed in the early 1920s to provide British oversight for the development of an independent Jewish Homeland in the Middle East. The assumption was that Middle Easterners were not mentally and sociologically ready to govern a modern state and would, therefore, need British (or in the case of Syria and Lebanon, French) help in order to forge such a state. The British were only too happy to oblige themselves the control over the land because of its Biblical significance and the British Israelite phenomenon. As the Mandate become more violent, usually because of internecine conflicts between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs and their contemporaneous, but not joint, attacks on British leadership, the British decided that the Mandate was not worth the effort to maintain it and withdrew their troops in 1948, before a new government could effectively be molded.