Tag: Chaim Weizmann

Avaricious Imperialists or Nation Builders? The Middle East, 100 Years On

Avaricious Imperialists or Nation Builders? The Middle East, 100 Years On

Middle East, Made and Unmade

“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.”…

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Winston Churchill was Not a Zionist?

Winston Churchill was Not a Zionist?

The Churchill Soci­ety of Israel serves Israelis with an inter­est in Sir Win­ston Churchill, accord­ing to Rus­sell Roth­stein, quot­ed in the Jan­u­ary 9th Dai­ly Tele­graph: “Churchill’s long-stand­ing sup­port of Zion­ism and friend­ship with the Jew­ish peo­ple make it par­tic­u­lar­ly appro­pri­ate that the mod­ern state of Israel have a local organ­i­sa­tion devot­ed to his mem­o­ry and to pre­serv­ing his thoughts, words and deeds for future generations.”

Sir Mar­tin Gilbert, Churchill’s offi­cial biog­ra­ph­er, added: “Churchill was very famil­iar with the Old Tes­ta­ment. He wrote about the Chil­dren of Israel who “under­stood and adopt­ed ideas which even ancient Greece and Rome, for all their pow­er, failed to com­pre­hend.…

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Churchill and the Holocaust

Churchill and the Holocaust

In the Jan­u­ary 2009 issue of Com­men­tary, Hil­lel Halkin penned an inter­est­ing piece, “The Jew­ish State & Its Arabs,” which result­ed in a flur­ry of read­er com­ment on the Com­men­tary web­site.

One read­er had the impres­sion that Churchill “over­re­act­ed” to the 1944 assas­si­na­tion of Lord Moyne by mem­bers of the Jew­ish Lehi (Stern Gang). Anoth­er wrote some­thing I just could not let pass with­out rejoinder:

…had Churchill giv­en an order to bomb Auschwitz, rather than sim­ply rec­om­mend that it be bombed, it would have been bombed. He did not do so, pre­sum­ably, because he was loath to quar­rel with his gen­er­al staff and did not wish to stand accused of risk­ing British pilots and air crews in order to save Jew­ish lives that had no mil­i­tary value.…

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