Churchill and the Jews [Hardcover]

From the vast materials that he has accumulated about Churchill, Sir Martin Gilbert has now selected material relating to Churchill's relationship with the Jews. Throughout his life, Churchill was a staunch supporter of the Jews and of the Zionist cause. His father had many friends among the wealthy leaders of Anglo-Jewish society - Lord Rothschild, Sir Ernest Cassel, Baron de Hirsch - friendships which his son inherited. Churchill entered Parliament in 1901, where he strongly opposed both the Conservatives' Aliens Bill of 1904 and the Liberals' Aliens Act of 1906. At the 1906 General Election he had become MP for North-West Manchester, where a third of the electorate was Jewish (and where he first met Chaim Weizmann, who had settled in Manchester in 1904.) Long before the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, Churchill spoke up in favour of Zionism, and he was of course an enthusiastic supporter of that document. When he was made Colonial Secretary in 1921, he became responsible for Mandate Palestine.

At that time Arab opposition to the Balfour Declaration and to Jewish immigration into Palestine was already very strong, and in Britain also there were second thoughts about the wisdom of the Declaration and attempts to undo it. Churchill vigorously opposed these, admired the contribution the Jews had already made to Palestine, and insisted that the Arabs would themselves benefit from this. He had no intention of limiting immigration or of allowing any representative institutions to Palestine as a whole because the Arabs would have a majority there. The Churchill White Paper of 1922 reaffirmed this policy, but also said that `the Jewish National Home in Palestine is not the imposition of a Jewish nationality upon the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole'. Gilbert quotes from a letter of gratitude from Weizmann soon afterwards, but does not mention that actually many Zionists, Weizmann included, felt let down by the White Paper, because they in fact hoped that Palestine as a whole would eventually become a Jewish State. But Churchill, now in opposition, attacked the Passfield White Paper of 1930, which recommended restrictions on Jewish immigration into Palestine.

Churchill - out of office in the 1930s - early saw the danger that Hitler's accession to power represented; and among the articles he wrote and the speeches he made on the subject, the Nazi persecution of the Jews was always among the items he singled out. There was an increase in Jewish immigration, which in turn contributed to the Arab Revolt of 1936. The Peel Commission in 1937 eventually came out with a Report recommending that no more than 12,000 Jews should be admitted to Palestine in any one year. Giving evidence before it, Churchill thought that it would be wise for tactical reasons temporarily to limit immigration somewhat (later in 1937 he proposed a figure of between 30,000 and 35,000 a year - comparable to the increase of the Arab population); but in principle he maintained that Britain should admit as many Jews as possible, and he envisaged the possibility that one day in the distant future they might indeed be the majority in Palestine. He expressed some contempt for the Arabs, and some of his answers to the questions he was asked (unpublished at the time) make for crude and intemperate reading today for anyone who is not an insensitive Zionist. The Peel Commission also proposed the partition of Palestine between an Arab state and a tiny Jewish state about a third of the size of Israel of 1948. Weizmann reluctantly accepted this, but Churchill, siding with Jabotinsky, vigorously opposed it on the grounds that such a small state could not defend itself against Arab attacks. And he made a blistering speech against the government's adoption of the MacDonald White Paper in May 1939 which effectively was a repudiation of the Balfour Declaration.

When Churchill became Prime Minister, he pressed repeatedly for a change of policy embodied in the MacDonald White Paper: for arming the Jews in Palestine, for admitting illegal immigrants, for ignoring Arab objections; but he could not get this through Cabinet against the stubborn resistance from the Foreign Office, and the War Office and the administration in Palestine. Only in September 1944 did he get his way to the extent that the War Office agreed to the formation of a Jewish Brigade with its own Star of David flag.

There were Zionists who had long regarded the British government as hostile to their aspirations, and, with the MacDonald White Paper still in force, the fact that the British prime minister was personally pro-Zionist cut little ice with some of them. The Irgun and the Stern Gang fought British troops in Palestine, and in November 1944 the Stern Gang assassinated Lord Moyne, a personal friend of Churchill's. (A month later, during the trial of Moyne's murderers, it even considered assassinating Churchill himself.) But Churchill remained committed to the Zionist cause, in the teeth of his Cabinet's opposition, which, to Weizmann's despair, made it impossible for him to abolish the White Paper immediately after the surrender of Germany and the liberation of the concentration camps.

But then he lost office in 1945 and had to watch the events in Palestine from the sidelines. From the Opposition benches he continued to make powerful speeches against the `squalid' war which the British were fighting against the Jewish militants; rather than that, he suggested the surrender of the Mandate which in due course the government was forced to do.

Right at the end of his second premiership, in 1955, Churchill supported the idea that Israel might join the Commonwealth; and when, soon after his retirement, the Suez War broke out, he publicly supported the actions that Eden's government had taken and justified the participation of Israel, which had acted `under the gravest provocation'.

Throughout this comprehensive account, the superb eloquence of Churchill sparkles magnificently against Gilbert's sober prose.

A pivotal and scholarly study by one of the greatest historians of the 20th century and official biographer of Winston Churchill into Churchill's very special relationship with the Jewish people and his support for the Jewish cause and the Jewish national liberation movement- Zionism.
Churchill's father Randolph was himself berated by associates because of his friendship with individual Jews.
Winston Churchill would take this friendship further into the public domain and was a supporter of the Balfour Declaration promising a restoration of the Land of Israel to it's ancient inhabitants the Jews.
Churchill saw the evils of both Bolshevism/Communism and Nazism and led the fight against both diabolical systems.
He rightly pointed to the cruel excesses carried out by Bolshevik commissars and foresaw the great struggle for the soul that would last to the current day between Zionism and Communism. The fact that the Zionist cause would distract young Jews from advancing Communism and give them an alternative focus-that of rebuilding the Jewish ancient home in their ancient homeland- the drive of Communism for world domination, is in my opinion the real root of the hatred of Leftist Jews for Zionism and Israel.
Churchill endorsed Zionism and charged Jewish Bolsheviks with engineering a world wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization'. While Churchill was correct to condemn Bolshevism and Jewish-born Bolshevik criminals, his description of Bolshevism as a 'Jewish movement' was an anomaly in his usual friendly attitude to the Jewish people, and was a gross exaggeration and generalization.

In 1921 Churchill visited 'Palestine' and at Gaza was greeted by howling mobs crying 'Death to the Jews: Cut their throats", part of the very early hostility shown to the Jewish people by the Arabs of the area, and fanned by the Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini.
Churchill was determined that British commitment to Jewish statehood and immigration into the Land of Israel would not be compromised by the drive to appease Arab rage as exactly would be done with the White Paper of 1937 by the great appeaser of 20th century history, Neville Chamberlain. Churchill pointed out that the Jews in pre-state Israel at the time were under unprovoked deadly attack in the 1920s and 1930s by Arab mobs, and urged the British authorities to protect the Jewish people of the Levant.
These attacks grew more intense in the 1930s with the fifth aliyah of hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution to pre-state Israel, as well as the radio broadcasts from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany which blew the flames of Arab rage against the Jews into an inferno.

Churchill was up against the machine of the British establishment in his campaign for Jewish rights in Palestine and was opposed by most of the British Cabinet at the time. Chamberlain said 'if we have to offend either the Arabs or the Jews, let it be the Jews' and Anthony Eden's secretary wrote that Eden was immovable on the subject of Palestine as he 'loves Arabs and hates Jews'.
It was Churchill who drew attention to the large scale immigration into Palestine of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, leading to a tripling of the Arab population in the first two decades of the British Mandate,
In 1938 quoting from the official British mandate census figures in Parliament at Westminster Churchill noted that 'in the past 15 years between 1923 and 1938 there had been according to the official figures an increase of 300 000 in the Arab population and 315 000 in the Jewish population.
Churchill opposed the infamous white Paper of 1937 that gave the Jews only a third of Western Palestine , a fraction of land [promised by the Balfour Declaration.
"Therefore it would seem to me, having regard to our wartime pledges, that it would obviously be right for us to decide now that Jewish immigration shall not be less in any given period than the growth of the Arab population arising from the animating and fertilising influence of the Jews'

Churchill warned against Nazi persecution of the Jews from 1933 and when the news of the mass slaughter of Jews during the Holocaust by the Nazis became apparent he warned that the Nazis responsible for these horrors should be put to death.
He also endorsed the call by Zionist political leader Moshe Shertok (later Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett) for the Allies to bomb the railway tracks to Auschwitz, which was not ultimately carried out.

Roosevelt I learned here wished to qualify Churchill's statements on the Nazi atrocities with the word 'alleged' and Roosevelt too was talked out of supporting a Jewish national home in Israel by the Saudi King.
Churchill opposed as leader of the opposition Britain's senseless 'squalid war against the Jews' in Palestine carried out by the Attlee and Bevin government , and seems to be aware that this was the most shameful and despicable moment in Britain's proud and illustrious history .
He spoke against the British governments aid of the Arab aggression with arms and officers after Arab armies attacked Israel in 1948 and urged Britain to recognize the fledgling state of Israel.

On Churchill's 80th birthday on 30 November 1954, Foreign Minister of Israel Moshe Sharett wrote to Churchill "Your staunch advocacy of the Zionist idea, your belief in justice and ultimate triumph and your joy in it's consummation with the rise of an independent Israel have earned you the everlasting gratitude of the Jewish people."

An interesting aside in this book is that is that Churchill's father Randolph was greatly influenced by the Jewish Prime Minister of Britain, Benjamin Disraeli,.
Oner November evening in 1947 Churchill had fallen asleep while painting and dreamed that he was talking with his father. During the conversation Lord Randolph said "I always believed in Dizzy, the old Jew. He saw into the future, We had to bring the English working man into the picture"

Churchill would have urged Britain to stand by Israel while it is under genocidal attack by terror and world radicalism and also would have urged a better deal for Britain's indigenous working classes.

OF COURSE YOU CAN GET NO-ONE BETTER THAN MARTIN GILBERT TO WRITE ABOUT CHURCHILL, SO IT HAD TO BE GOOD AND WELL SOURCED.

I WAS YOUNG WHEN CHURCHILL WAS A YOUNGER MP BUT REMEMBER HIM
AND UPON READING THIS BOOK LEARNED QUITE A LOT ABOUT THE TIMES
THAT THIS PIECE OF HISTORY HAPPENED.

IT ONLY PROVES WHAT AN AMAZING MAN CHURCHILL WAS AND DID NOT DO
WHAT HIS PEERS WANTED BUT HE HAD THE STRENGTH OF CHARACTER AND STRONG BELIEFS AT WHAT WAS RIGHT AND STUCK TO HIS GUNS.

A WONDERFUL READ, I WAS SORRY WHEN IT ENDED.
WISH WE HAD ANOTHER CHURCHILL TODAY.