A luncheon meeting of Northern California Churchillians will be held at Lara’s Fine Dining, 1900 Esplanade Drive, Richmond, California, starting at 11am. This wonderful location is far from the untidiness of SF and right on the water. It is next to the Rosie the Riveter Museum and the former Kaiser World War II manufacturing site, which attendees may wish to visit after our event.

Richard Langworth, Churchill historian and Senior Fellow of the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, will speak and answer questions on “Churchill and Palestine, 1917-1948.” The nearby Kaiser factory is a happy coincidence: Richard’s first book, Kaiser-Frazer: Last Onslaught on Detroit, began with Henry Kaiser building Liberty and Victory ships during the Second World War. (See “Kaiser-Frazer and the Making of Automotive History.”)

How to register

We will hold a social hour at 11 am followed by lunch at noon and the discussion at 1pm. If you wish to attend, please mail a check for $60 per person (made out to CBTB or “Churchillians by the Bay”) attending to Gregory B. Smith, 154 W. Spain St, Villa T, Sonoma, CA 95476. Be sure to include your menu choice of chicken, salmon, or ravioli from this menu. We hope to see you there for this important event. —Gregory B. Smith, Chairman, Churchillians by the Bay, telephone: (707) 974-9324, churchilliansbythebay@gmail.com.

Churchill and Palestine

Richard will review Churchill’s involvement with Palestine and Israel from the 1917 Balfour Declaration and 1921 Cairo Conference through the “Two-State Solutions” of 1937, 1938 and 1947, and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. Churchill’s views and comments will be discussed.

Churchill and Palestine had a long association, spanning two world wars and thirty years. It began when British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour declared Britain’s support for a “Jewish National Home” in Palestine. Almost simultaneously, T.E. Lawrence was promising the Arabs sovereignty over Middle Eastern lands ruled for nearly half a millennium by the Turks. In return, Jews and Arabs fought with the Allies in the First World War. A reluctant Britain accepted responsibility for the Mandate of Palestine after the war. East Palestine, 6/7ths of the Mandate, became Arab-ruled Jordan. West Palestine, a tiny sliver the size of Massachusetts, became the source of conflict that has now lasted over a century.

“You deal with it”

Churchill and Palestine were thrown together because Turkey was on the wrong side in the First World War. By its end, the former Ottoman Empire was a shambles. Revolutions and conspiracies were suspected among Arabs, Bolsheviks, Jews and recidivist Turks. The only significant military force left was a British army of about one million. No other power was present in force.

“At this truly horrendous moment,” wrote the historian David Fromkin, “Prime Minister Lloyd George in effect turned to his Colonial Secretary Churchill and said, ‘You deal with it.’”

Churchill expanded his Middle East department with some of the most capable people, including T.E. Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell. They convened in Cairo with Arab and Jewish delegates to redraw the borders of the expired Turkish empire.

Remember that for Britain at least, despite what you may have heard, oil was not the objective. Churchill had secured the Royal Navy’s oil by founding the Anglo-Persian Oil Company before the war. It later became known as BP. It was suspected that Iraq had oil; but Britain had no need for it, and France did not begin thinking about oil until later.

Chapter 1…

The 1921 Cairo Conference created the same Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon that are there today. The French received League of Nations “mandates” over the last two. The British were handed Iraq and Palestine—east and west. In Iraq and East Palestine (Jordan), the conference placed Arab kings—Hashemites, who were not indigenous. This marked Chapter 1 in the story of Churchill and Palestine.

A frequent question is: Why did Churchill put foreign kings in charge of Iraq and Jordan? David Fromkin replied:

Because, in the world in which Churchill grew up, that’s what you did. When it was decided, just before the First World War, to create an independent state of Albania, an intrinsic part of the thing was to find it a king. In the Middle East in 1921, the same thinking applied.

Remember, the Ottoman Empire had no nationality. It was a Turkish-speaking Muslim empire. It was very difficult to establish ethnicity and loyalty since it was only based on religion. Thus, any Muslim government was pretty much acceptable to people of the area.

The scene was now set for generations of strife….

More on Churchill and Palestine

“When Did Churchill Become a Zionist?” 2022.

“Q&A: Churchill at the Stroke of a Pen, Jordan and the Indian Army,” 2021.

“Churchill and Lawrence; A Conjunction of Two Bright Stars,” 2020.

“Avaricious Imperialists or Nation Builders? The Middle East, 100 Years On,” 2020.

“Churchill, a Zionist, was first to call for the creation of  Israel in 1905.” Where and when in 1905 did he say that? —G.H., New York City

A: Date undetermined

Churchill was probably a Zionist by 1905. Reader Gene Kopelson (Comments, below) notes Michael Makovsky’s evidence of young Winston’s early respect for Jews and many Jewish friends. This didn’t make him a Zionist per se, but he certainly had become one by the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. But I can find no public statement calling for an independent Israel until 1948. Until then he called for a “Jewish National Home.” With his characteristic optimism, he believed Arabs and Jews in Palestine could coexist. He pointed to the talent of the Arabs. And he praised the Jews for their horticulture and irrigation projects. Indeed in today’s Israel, Arabs comprise 20% of the population.

Cairo, 1921

Headed by Churchill in 1921, the Cairo Conference set the borders of the modern Middle East. There he opted for the Zionist idea, what he called a “Jewish National Home” within Britain’s Palestine Mandate, roughly coinciding with what is now Israel. The rest of the Palestine Mandate became the Arab state of Jordan. To a delegation of Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem on 28 March 1921 Churchill declared for a Jewish National Home:

And where else could that be but in this land of Palestine, with which for more than 3000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated? (Churchill by Himself, 175)

Churchill’s impressive achievement at that time was to convince two Arab potentates, King Abdullah in Jordan and King Feisal in Iraq, to tolerate a Jewish Homeland in their midst. This situation prevailed until Britain gave up the Palestine Mandate (without resolving the tensions) after World War II. In the 1948 war Israel secured independence.

A world war later…

…on 10 December 1948, Churchill spoke in the House of Commons. He regretted that Britain and the West had lost the opportunity to make a permanent settlement in the Middle East. This is the first admission that I can find that he accepted partition and an independent Zionist state:

I always had in my mind the hope that the whole question of the Middle East might have been settled on the largest scale on the morrow of victory and that an Arab Confederation, comprising three or four Arab States—Saudi-Arabia, Iraq, Transjordania, Syria and the Lebanon—however grouped, possibly united amongst themselves, and one Jewish State, might have been set up, which would have given peace and unity throughout the whole vast scene of the Middle East. As to whether so large a policy could have been carried into being I cannot be sure, but a settlement of the Palestine question on the basis of partition would certainly have been attempted, in the closest possible association with the United States and in personal contact with the President, by any Government of which I had been the head. But all this opportunity was lost. (Churchill by Himself, 176-77)

Hopes and regrets

Churchill supported the Zionist state, declaring in the House of Commons in 1949: “…the coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years.” (Churchill by Himself, 175)

But in 1951 he deplored British policies after the Second World War. These, he said, “led to the winding up of our affairs in Palestine in such a way as to earn almost in equal degree the hatred of the Arabs and the Jews.” (Churchill by Himself, 439).

Many who still have hope for Churchill’s optimism accept a “two state solution” for Palestine and Israel. But the two separate Palestinian entities, Gaza and the West Bank, subdivide the latter’s population. A solution with a chance of success might contemplate a shift of peoples to create a contiguous state. No one seems to want to grasp that nettle (which caused havoc in India in 1947). Even in 1948, Churchill recognized that it would not be easy.

Further reading

“How Winston Churchill Preserved the Dream of Israel, July 1922” (2018)

“Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia: A Conjunction of Two Bright Stars” (2020)

“A Century Ago, the Modern Middle East Was Born,” announced The New York Times in December. A colleague asks: “Are you not struck by how difficult (impossible?) it is to encapsulate history in an op-ed? Is that really how and when the modern Middle East was born?”

Good questions. The Times’s idea is that after World War I, avaricious imperialists moved in to enslave Turkey’s former slaves. This familiar theme will dominate through the centenary of the Cairo Conference in March 2021. It’s been around at least since 2001, when Osama bin Laden referred to 9/11 as payback for what he then called “eighty years of injustice.”

Herewith some contrarian, revisionist and politically incorrect thoughts. Among the World War I victors, only France among the Western allies saw much worth having in the defeated Ottoman Empire. Great Britain, by contrast, saw little there for colony-grabbing. One theory is that Britain wanted Iraqi oil. But Britain had had an independent oil supply since 1913. That was when the Admiralty, under Winston Churchill, purchased controlling interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. (Churchill needed to supply his new oil-fired Royal Navy, free from reliance on Standard Oil or Royal Dutch Shell.)

In the Middle East, Britain found herself playing referee between contentious factions.  The situation militated against a peaceful outcome. Appropriately, David Fromkin entitled his book on the subject A Peace to End all Peace. Churchill at the time saw a Middle East “stocked with peppery, pugnacious, proud politicians and theologians, who happen to be at the same time extremely well armed and extremely hard up.”

Sykes, Picot…and Sazonov

Frequently cited in the standard critique of Western avarice is the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916. This allocated British control of Palestine (including today’s Jordan and Israel), southern Iraq, and Mediterranean ports of Haifa and Acre. France would get southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Along came Sergei Sazonov, Czar Nicholas II’s foreign minister. Russia, third member of the Triple Entente, demanded Western Armenia, Constantinople (now Istanbul) and the Dardanelles. The last two had already been promised to the Czar in a 1915 agreement.

Now all this sounds like—and was—power politics of the worst sort. The Entente negotiators paid no attention to the wishes of native populaces. And “Sykes-Picot” (always omitting “Sazonov”) is still a rallying cry for critics of the West.

The problem is that Sykes-Picot was pure wishful thinking. It occurred when nobody knew who would win the war or dictate the peace. It was obsolete almost from the moment of signing. Moreso when the Czar abdicated in 1917, and Soviet Russia left the war in March 1918.

* * *

Prime Minister Lloyd George believed Sykes-Picot was “a fatuous arrangement judged from any and every point of view.” It was inexplicable, he wrote later, “that a man of Sir Mark Sykes’s fine intelligence should ever have appended his signature.” Sykes himself preferred France “to clear out of the whole Arab region except the Lebanon.” He urged soothing the Arabs by giving them a Mediterranean port. The French refused to waive any of their “rights” in the region. Sykes also fervently believed in Jewish-Arab friendship, and on that ground alone wanted the Agreement to go away. The French remained adamant, and the British Foreign Office refused to consider the Arabs capable of self-government. (See Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 344-45.)

Enter Churchill

David Stafford never wrote a bad book. His Oblivion or Glory: 1921 and the Making of Winston Churchill, sheds light on subsequent events. (Review upcoming by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project). Churchill became Colonial Secretary in February 1921. Among his first challenges was remaking the Middle East. It was now five years since the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Britain, if not France, recognized the principle of self-determination. During the Peace negotiations it was part of President Wilson‘s Fourteen Points. In Europe, new states were born in the Baltic and Balkans. Why not the Middle East?

In March, Churchill convened a conference in Cairo to create nations from the Ottoman corpse. His Pan-Arabist advisors, Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence, urged installing Arab Hashemite kings in Jordan and Iraq. Britain took on a League of Nations “Mandate” in the rest of Palestine (what is now Israel) with desultory guarantees to maintain an Arab majority there. France continued to exert its claims for Syria and Lebanon.

By summer, Palestine arrangements threatened to fall apart. Chaim Weizmann’s Zionists demanded that Britain allow a Jewish majority in its Palestine Mandate. This, they said accurately, had been promised in 1917 by the Balfour Declaration. Next came a delegation of Arab Christians and Muslims, demanding repeal of the Balfour Declaration. Both sides resisted all offers of compromise. Churchill was by nature an optimist, but now he seemed to despair. Stafford writes:

He confessed to the Cabinet that the situation in Palestine was causing him “perplexity and anxiety. The whole country is in ferment,” he lamented, “both Arabs and Jews are arming, ready to spring at each other’s throats.’”He could barely conceal his exasperation with the Palestinian demands. “I do not think things are going to get better, but rather worse,” he told the Cabinet.”

Upshot

The deals made at Cairo lasted a remarkably long time, given its ramshackle hodgepodge of compromises. The French proclaimed republics in Lebanon and Syria, but more or less ran those places until France fell in 1940. In 1946 the two became independent. That part of Palestine governed by Abdullah, the British-installed king (Jordan), survives to this day, with his descendant on the throne. The other part became Israel in 1948, when Britain gave up its Mandate and Arabs rejected a UN plan of partition.

In Iraq, Churchill concluded that the only affordable way to maintain order was air power. He advocated dropping tear gas on recalcitrant tribes—and is forever blamed for wishing to gas them to death. But to do that the RAF needed King Faisal’s permission, hardly necessary were he just a puppet. He’d been “elected” by a 90% vote, though he was an outsider. The British Iraq Mandate ended in 1932 by terms of the Anglo-Iraq Treaty. This allowed for British oil interests which had grown more important than they were in 1921.

I remember asking Professor Fromkin, at a Churchill seminar, why the Cairo Conference installed non-native kings in Jordan and Iraq. “Because,” he replied, “in 1921, that was what you did. With all the rival allegiances, an outside king with no history on any side would tend to unify the multiple populations.” Read: it seemed a good idea at the time.

* * *

Who then made the modern Middle East: avaricious imperialists or idealistic nation-builders? Some, but not all of the above. Reading deeply into the works of Fromkin and Stafford, one realizes just how difficult a job it was.

Churchill, for one, does not come off as an empire-builder. Frustrated, he tried to please all sides. In September 1922 he wrote Lloyd George: “We are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.”

Primarily, Churchill seems to have thought of the job as a burden of the victors, a vast population left rudderless by the First World War. If some of the decisions had been different, would the outcome have been? Possibly. But hindsight is cheap, and far too easily indulged.

Herein, some edits of the edits, which diverged slightly from the draft. The published subtitle was, “Here’s betting he would have loved America’s new embassy.” (Never bet on what Churchill might love or not love.) It’s worth noting that the U.S. Embassy is in West Jerusalem. In a settlement, there could also be an Arab seat of government in East Jerusalem. RML

Britain and Israel

Prince William landed in Israel June 25th for the first royal visit to the country. In many respects this marks a historic British recommitment. Churchill’s resolve nearly a century ago ensured that an Israel would exist.

British support of Israel is largely attributed to Arthur James Balfour, for whom the Balfour Declaration is named. By it, Britain backed a “Jewish national home” after the end of World War I. But few know or note that Winston Churchill contributed more to what became Israel than Arthur Balfour. His words to the House of Commons, spoken on American Independence Day, 1922, saved the national home from extinction.

Controversy over the creation of a Jewish state had been building for several years before Churchill made his case on the 4th of July. The Zionist movement, founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897, strove to reestablish a Jewish community in that part of Palestine which was the ancient homeland of the Jews. In 1920, Churchill wrote that if “there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State…an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial.”

Not everyone agreed. Britain had fought the war in part to defeat the Ottoman Empire. Arabs, many argued, should rule there exclusively.

Mandate of Palestine

In the peace that followed World War I, the new League of Nations provided legal status, called “mandates,” for territories transferred from the control of one country to another. The League defined mandates as “waypoints toward independence.” Cynics said it was a polite term for colony-building. Britain received the Mandate of Palestine, including what is now Jordan and Israel. Its capital was Jerusalem.

As colonial secretary in 1921, Churchill established Jordan in six-sevenths of the Mandate and backed a Jewish homeland in the remainder, where the Zionists had largely settled. “One principle of the Balfour declaration,” he told a Jewish delegation, “is that the process of the establishment of a national home for the Jews is to be without prejudice or unfairness to the Arab and Christian inhabitants.” (See Warren Dokter, Churchill and the Islamic World.) Many in Parliament objected. In 1922, they tried to cancel the Balfour Declaration — with warnings that sound remarkably familiar.

In 1922, two-thirds of the House of Lords voted to reject Balfour’s promise, declaring that a Jewish homeland was unacceptable “to the sentiments and wishes of the great majority of the people of Palestine.” The Arabs, said Lord Sydenham, a former colonial administrator, “would never have objected to the establishment of more colonies of well-selected Jews; but, instead of that, we have dumped down 25,000 promiscuous people on the shores of Palestine…. What we have done is… to start a running sore in the East, and no one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

Pushback

In a bravura performance in the House of Commons on 4 July 1922, Churchill turned things around, hurling the earlier words of doubters back at them. Lord Sydenham, he noted, had earlier hoped “…to free Palestine from the withering blight of Turkish rule, and to render it available as the national home of the Jewish people, who can restore its ancient prosperity.”

The Conservative stalwart Sir John Butcher, Churchill said, “has just addressed us in terms of biting indignation.” Then he quoted what Butcher had said in 1917: “I trust the day is not far distant when the Jewish people may be free to return to the sacred birthplace of their race, and to establish in the ancient home of their fathers a great, free, industrial community….”

Sir William Joynson-Hicks, a popular Tory and future government minister, had led the attack on the Balfour Declaration. Churchill flung back at “Jix” his words from 1917: “I will do all in my power to forward the views of the Zionists, in order to enable the Jews once more to take possession of their own land.” Churchill concluded: “If, over the portals of the new Jerusalem, you are going to inscribe the legend, ‘No Israelite need apply,’ then I hope the House will permit me to confine my attention exclusively to Irish matters.”

Turnback

It was, as the historian Paul Johnson wrote, “one of [Churchill’s] greatest speeches.” And it had the intended effect. The House of Commons voted 292-35 to continue Balfour’s Palestine policy, reversing the House of Lords. Johnson considers the speech a watershed: “Without Churchill, it is very unlikely that Israel would ever have come into existence.”

In 1922, Churchill rejected a demand by Arabia’s King Ibn Saud to stop Jews from settling in Palestine. He proposed a compromise, allowing immigration based on Palestine’s economic capacity. As a result, 400,000 Jews escaped from Europe before World War II.

In 1939 Churchill opposed a British white paper again attempting to slow immigration. In 1941, he exempted Palestine from the Atlantic Charter. This declared the right of all peoples to the government of their choice. He explained to President Roosevelt that the Arabs would claim a majority and block Jewish immigration.

Aftermath

Churchill retained sympathy for Arab aspirations and was not unafraid to criticize Jewish extremism. Outraged when his friend Lord Moyne, British minister of state in Cairo, was killed by Stern Gang (Lehi) militants in 1944, he urged Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann to suppress extremism, lest Zionism only produce “a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany.” Weizmann agreed.

Churchill’s speeches after the founding of Israel were consistently supportive. On his 75th birthday, he received a message from David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister: “Your words and your deeds are indelibly engraved in the annals of humanity. Happy the people that has produced such a son.”

In 2015, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Museum of Tolerance in New York celebrated Churchill’s

everlasting love and affection for the Jewish people.… Over 600 people watched with an awe that transcends generations…. [This] signaled gratitude to a family that bore much criticism, heartache and professional consequence for its steadfast support of our people and our national home.

Nearly 110 years ago, Churchill said, “Jerusalem must be the [Jews’] only ultimate goal. When it will be achieved it is vain to prophesy… That it will some day be achieved is one of the few certainties of the future.”For Britain as for America, it looks as though that day has arrived. But let us remember to whom we are really indebted for these achievements.