1945: Churchill out, Labour in

Churchill’s responsibility for the Palestine Mandate ended with the Labour Party landslide victory in July 1945. The new Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, denied 100,000 Holocaust survivors entry into Palestine and rejected the idea of a Jewish state.

In early 1946, Jewish paramilitaries robbed a British payroll train and attacked RAF airfields. In April and May, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan achieved independence. On June 29th, the “Black Sabbath,” Britain arrested 800 Jews and confiscated arms caches in Jerusalem and Haifa. Retaliating, the paramilitary Irgun bombed Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, killing 91 Arabs, Jews and Britons.

An infuriated Stafford Cripps told Parliament that West Palestine had produced nothing but misery since 1922. Churchill retorted: “…it would hardly be possible to state the opposite of the truth more compendiously.” He called the years between the wars the  “brightest most hopeful” West Palestine knew. Meanwhile, Britain had treated the Arabs “very well.”  Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan (East Palestine) were all 100% Arab.

“Deep and bitter resentment”

Churchill then defended the Jews, whom the Labour government had ignored. The “months slipped by…. a deep and bitter resentment spread throughout the Jewish community…. He acknowledged, “the dark and deadly crimes [by] fanatical extremists…. It is quite clear, however, that this crude idea of letting all the Jews of Europe go into Palestine” was a mistake.

A Jewish MP, Sydney Silverman, interrupted. Should “any Jew who regarded a country in Europe as nothing but the graveyard and cemetery of all his relatives, friends and hopes be compelled to stay there if he did not want to do so?” Churchill replied:

I am against preventing Jews from doing anything which other people are allowed to do. I am against that, and I have the strongest abhorrence of the idea of anti-Semitic lines of prejudice. We have never sought or got anything out of Palestine. We have discharged a thankless, painful, costly, laborious, inconvenient task for more than a quarter of a century with a very great measure of success…. [It is] Great Britain alone, which has steadfastly carried that cause forward across a whole generation to its present actual position, and the Jews all over the world ought not to be in a hurry to forget that.

Sixth Two-State Solution

In 1946 Deputy Prime Minister Herbert Morrison and U.S. diplomat Henry Grady proposed the sixth Two-State Solution: an Anglo-American Trusteeship of West Palestine with autonomous Arab and Jewish areas. The boundaries were similar to prewar schemes. The Jewish Agency, by now determined on a State of Israel, rejected it. Now President Truman became frustrated. He wrote in his diary:

The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as Displaced Persons, as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political, neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog.

Quoting this, the fair-minded Martin Gilbert added: “Truman’s cruel comments were not limited to Jews. ‘Put an underdog on top,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist, he goes haywire. I’ve found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.’”

Churchill blasted the Labour government, which had also rejected Morrison-Grady:

This absence of any policy or decision on these matters…has allowed havoc and hatred to flare and run rife throughout Palestine… [N]o one knows where we are today….

[I]f we cannot fulfil our promises to the Zionists, we should without delay place our Mandate for Palestine at the feet of the United Nations, and give due notice of our impending evacuation of that country…..

To have a war with the Jews in order to give Palestine to the Arabs amid the execration of the world, appears to carry incongruity of thought and policy to levels which have rarely been attained in human history.

Toward a State of Israel

Violence mounted in 1947. In February Ernest Bevin announced that Britain would hand its Mandate to the United Nations  and evacuate West Palestine on 15 May 1948. The fixed date was as bad a mistake as the fixed date set for leaving India. All the contending sides had to do now was arm and wait. Churchill reacted in March:

£82 million since the Socialist Government came into power squandered in Palestine, and 100,000 Englishmen now kept away from their homes and work, for the sake of a senseless squalid war with the Jews in order to give Palestine to the Arabs, or God knows who.

‘Scuttle,’ everywhere, is the order of the day—Egypt, India, Burma. One thing at all costs we must preserve: the right to get ourselves world-mocked and world-hated over Palestine, at a cost of £82 million.

Seventh Two-State Solution

The United Nations, pressed by the pending British departure, now offered the seventh Two-State Solution—the most balanced yet. It awarded both sides equal coastlines on the Mediterranean, including Arab Gaza in the south and Arab Acre in the north. The Arab state, 99% Arab, would hold most of the West Bank and a substantial border with Sinai. The State of Israel, 55% Jewish, would include most of the Negev and the Red Sea port of Akaba, as Churchill had hoped. Jerusalem, with equal numbers of Arabs and Jews, would be a UN-administered international city. An economic union would enable commerce between the three.

On November 29th the UN General Assembly adopted the Plan 33-13. The United States and Soviet Union voted yes, nine Arab or Muslim states voted no, while Britain abstained. The next day, Churchill’s birthday, the Jewish Agency accepted.

The Arab League rejected the plan, claiming it left half of West Palestine to a State of Israel with only a third of the total population. (Ironically, at the Camp David Summit in 2000, the Palestinian delegation said they would be happy with 22% of the land.)

By early 1948, West Palestine was aflame. On May 14th Britain ended its West Palestine Mandate and David Ben-Gurion declared the independent State of Israel. The next day, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan and Syria invaded. To the Arab League, Azzam Pasha declared, “We will sweep them [the Jews] into the sea.”

War and aftermath

We lack time to recount the ups and downs of that war. You can find them on the Hillsdale Timelines. The State of Israel absorbed Acre, Jordan the West Bank & East Jerusalem, while Gaza went to Egypt. That lasted until the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Israel evacuated Gaza in 2006, the Gazans voted for Hamas, and the rest is history.

Some 711,000 Arabs left West Palestine. That’s a big number—but there were bigger numbers. To put this into perspective, consider the historian Andrew Roberts, reporting on the late 1940s:

In India, 16 million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus left their homes taking only what they could carry. Over 800,000 Jews from Arabia, who’d lived there for centuries, departed. Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush and Balkars were all ‘relocated’ (as Stalin called it). Newcomers ejected the Japanese and Korean Kuril and Sakhalin islanders and Italians of Istria. Three million ethnic Germans left Silesia and the Sudetenland. More recent were the Greeks of Turkey and Cyprus and the Vietnamese boat people.

Many of these refugees built new lives and a higher standard of living than in the lands they left. None are today actively demanding the right to murder people who have now lived in their former lands for over seven decades. The sole exception is Palestinian Arabs, whose leaders again and again chose to embrace fanatical irredentism and recurrent intifadas regardless of the interests of their people. The rubble seen in Gaza today is all they have to show for it.

The end of Britain’s role

Britain, which had military agreements with Egypt and Jordan, nearly went to war with the State of Israel during 1948. When London finally recognized Israel in January 1949, Churchill was magnanimous. “[T]he coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine,” he said. “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.”

But he was deeply critical of the postwar Labour Government. His daughter Mary always mocked claims that he was a manic depressive. She once said to me, “The things he went through would depress anybody.” Certainly West Palestine was one of those.

In mid-1946 Churchill had told the Government that if they could not solve the problem they should turn it over to the UN. It took them two years to do that, and a war resulted. He thought he could have done better:

We had the power and the chance to impose and enforce—I must use that word—a partition settlement in Palestine by which the Jews would have secured the National Home [while taking] into account the legitimate rights of the Arabs….

I always had in my mind…an Arab Confederation,  comprising three or four Arab States…however grouped…and one Jewish State…which would have given peace and unity throughout the whole vast scene.

Churchill’s verdict

“The idea that only a limited number of people can live in a country is a profound illusion,” Churchill went on. “It all depends on their cooperative and inventive power. There are more people today living twenty storeys above the ground in New York than were living on the ground in New York 100 years ago. There is no limit to the ingenuity of man if it is properly and vigorously applied under conditions of peace and justice.”

Alas, peace and justice were not to be. Churchill returned power in 1951, too late to affect anything. He could only reflect sadly on the mistakes of the past:

The decline of our influence and power throughout the Middle East is due to several causes. First, the loss of our Oriental Empire and of the well-placed and formidable of the Imperial armies in India.

Second, it is due to the impression which has become widespread throughout the Middle East that Great Britain has only to be pressed sufficiently by one method or another to abandon her rights or interests in that, or indeed any other, part of the world.

A third cause is the mistakes and miscalculations in policy which 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.

Q&A: Why the two kings?

Why in 1921 did the Cairo Conference put foreign kings in charge of Iraq and Jordan? David Fromkin offered the best reply I’ve heard:

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 Hashemites were brothers, but very different. Abdullah was part of the problem, so they made him part of the solution. He was already in Jordan. He had armed followers. For all the British knew, he might upset their tenuous rule.

It’s like deputizing a thief to sheriff because there aren’t any other deputies. It was logical to ask Abdullah to take charge—temporarily, they thought.” And as we now know, his descendant rules as King of Jordan today.

The King of Iraq was Faisal. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell were fond of him, and the British felt they owed him something. Faisal had fought the Turks.

It seemed like a very neat solution. By the way, they immediately repented of it. Faisal, once in office, became a nationalist. and Churchill feared that Faisal had betrayed them.

 Q&A: The Churchill solution?

What would Churchill do? We cannot speculate. He is not here to speak. He last spoke on this topic in 1958, after the deposition and execution of Faisal II in Iraq. Is there something here?

The Middle East is one of the hardest-hearted areas in the world. It has always been fought over, and peace has only reigned when a major power has established firm influence and shown that it would maintain its will.

Your friends must be supported with every vigour and if necessary they must be avenged. Force, or perhaps force and bribery, are the only things that will be respected.

It is very sad, but we had all better recognise it. At present our friendship is not valued, and our enmity is not feared.

Surely it is clear that the eight Two-State Solutions that have never satisfied the sides. What about a Three-State Solution? Gaza to Egypt, West Bank to Jordan—the 1967 borders before that Arab-Israeli war?

People will say, “But Egypt and Jordan don’t want them back!” That’s where Churchill’s idea comes in: force and bribery. The cost of bribery in lives and treasure is less than the cost of war. Back the deal with force through air power—and maybe Churchill was on to something.

Better yet, the words of a friend in a discussion on the woes of the British auto industry. “Go back to 1945 and start all over again.”

Palestine: “You deal with it.”

The best I can offer about Churchill and Palestine is what I learned from three great historians: David Fromkin, Martin Gilbert and Andrew Roberts. I also learned from King Ibn Saud of Arabia (not personally). I propose to quote all of them. And, of course, Winston Churchill. His knowledge and experience continue to instruct us across the decades.

David Fromkin was a leading authority on Churchill  and the Middle East through his book, A Peace to End All Peace. You should read it.  Twenty years ago during a Washington hurricane,  he lectured on Churchill and the making of the modern Middle East. Only fourteen turned up, and his talk was never published. I corrected that recently on the Hillsdale Churchill website. As Casey Stengel said, you can look it up.

*Churchill and Palestine had a long association, spanning two world wars and thirty years. It began in 1917, when British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour promised a “Jewish National Home” in Palestine. Almost simultaneously, Lawrence of Arabia was offering the Arabs sovereignty over  a Middle East ruled for nearly half a millennium by the Turks. In return, Jews and Arabs fought alongside the Allies in the Great War.

Churchill and Palestine came together because Turkey ended up on the losing side. By war’s end, its Ottoman Empire was a shambles. Revolutions and conspiracies were suspected among Arabs, Jews, Bolsheviks and recidivist Turks. The only significant military presence was a British army of about one million.

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

Decision at Cairo

Churchill energetically expanded his Middle East Department,  including T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell. They met in Cairo with Arab and Jewish delegates to redraw the borders of the former Turkish empire.

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. An unenthusiastic Britain accepted mandates for Iraq and Palestine. East Palestine, 6/7ths of Palestine, became the Arab state of Trans-Jordan, meaning “across the Jordan River.” West Palestine, “from the river to the sea” (and the Negev Desert)—slightly larger than Massachusetts—became a source of strife that has lasted a century.

Now for Britain at least, despite what you may have heard, oil was not the objective. Before the war, Churchill had secured the Royal Navy’s supply by founding Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP).  They thought Iraq had oil, but Britain had no need for it, and France did not begin thinking seriously about oil until later.

To run East Palestine (Trans-Jordan) and Iraq, the conference sent a Arab Hashemites, who were not indigenous. Dr. Fromkin explained: “The feeling at that time was that when you brought in a king for a new country, it ought to be somebody who is not from that country—not involved its internal feuds. You look for an outsider and a unifier.” His brother was sent to rule Iraq.

“Twice-promised land”

A mandate is sometimes said to be a polite word for a colony. That may have been how the French saw it, but for Britain, Iraq and Palestine were burdens. This is incidentally the origin of the myth that Churchill wanted to use poison gas on Iraqi rebels, which was cheaper than using troops. Actually he made a poor choice of words. He wanted tear gas, but his careless description of it  as “poison” has left him no end of grief.

Churchill would happily have washed his hands of “Messpot,” as he called Mesopotamia, or Iraq. In 1922 he wrote, but didn’t send, a note to 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.” (£8 million then equals $725 million today.)*

King Faisal’s Iraq achieved nominal independence in 1932. Emir Abdullah’s Jordan took charge of East Palestine. Britain was left with troublesome little West Palestine—today’s Israel, Gaza, Judea and Samaria (the last two known collectively as the West Bank). For most of two decades Britain kept the peace. Superpowers have a way of doing that.

West Palestine experienced relative prosperity between the World Wars. But Jews and Arabs, who had lived between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean for thousands of years, had fought with the British and expected payback. Britain had promised them both homelands. West Palestine, wrote the historian Isaiah Friedman, was the “Twice-Promised Land.”

Two-State Solutions

Worse, no one at Cairo in 1921 anticipated the massive Jewish influx to West Palestine over the next 20 years. The causes were fivefold: drastic reduction of American immigration quotas; pogroms or expulsions of Jews in Poland, Russia and Arab countries; the great depression of 1929, Jewish persecutions in Nazi Germany, and powerful Zionist recruiting of Jews to the Holy Land.

Until 1937 Britain had promised only a Jewish homeland, not a state. London’s idea was an Arab-run West Palestine with freedom of religion and Jewish autonomous districts.  But the sides could never reach agreement, and the Jewish population soared. In 1936 the Arabs began what they called “the Great Revolt,” three years of uprisings against British authority.

In 1937 William Peel (grandson of Sir Robert, founder of the Metropolitan Police) chaired a Palestine Royal Commission. It abandoned the former one-state solution. “There can be no question of fusion or assimilation  between Jewish and Arab cultures,” Lord Peel declared. So the Peel Commission proposed the first of at least eight two-state solutions. (The eighth by my count was at Camp David in 2000.)

Peel proposed a Jewish state in the west and north, comprising 20% of West Palestine. The Arab state, linked to Jordan in the east and south, included the West Bank and the Negev Desert. Jerusalem, with a corridor to the sea, would be a British-administered international city.

The Jewish leaders Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion convinced the Zionist Congress to accept this. Both believed the area offered was too small, and hoped it could be expanded by negotiations. The Arabs, for whom any idea  of a separate Jewish state was anathema, rejected the Peel proposal unanimously.

Economics trumps religion

Three more two-state solutions were advanced in 1938 by another commission under Sir John Woodhead, a civil servant. Weizmann offered a fifth solution, leaving the Negev in the Mandate, which Churchill approved. The Jews, said, had “a way of making the desert bloom.”

No one was satisfied. Woodhead had divided areas  by majority population, but the average Jew was three times as productive and paid three times the taxes of the average Arab. The Jewish areas were the backbone of the economy. Most of the Arab wealth lay in largely Jewish areas. This is important for us to understand. The quarrel then was at least as much economic as it was religious. Another conference in 1939 made no further progress.

In May 1939, four months before war, the Chamberlain government issued a Palestine White Paper. It restricted Jewish immigration to West Palestine to 75,000 for the next five years, after which the Arabs were to decide on future numbers. This of course inflamed the Zionists, including Churchill. Two years earlier, Churchill had made one of his most criticized statements:

I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time… I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia…that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

King Saud: follow the money

Churchill has been excoriated for those words, and again his vocabulary didn’t help. For Churchill, “race” meant a nation or group of people. Indeed some African Jews were darker than Arabs. Churchill was saying the skills of what he called the “Jewish race” were superior to those of the Arabs. For example, the irrigation schemes of Jewish engineers brought productive agriculture to a long-barren land. Again, the argument was economic: follow the money.

One major Arab leader agreed with him. King Ibn Saud of Arabia said the Arab-Jewish conflict was not religious. What changed everything, he told President Roosevelt in 1945, was “the immigration of people who were technically and culturally on a higher level than the Arabs, [who] had greater difficulty in surviving economically. [That these] energetic Europeans are Jewish is not the cause of the trouble. It is their superior skills and culture.”

Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, later echoed the King: In Arab Palestine, he said,  the Jews may be “as Jewish as they like. In areas where they predominate, they will have complete autonomy.”  Whether he meant that you must judge for yourself.

“All legitimate interests are in harmony”

“Churchill,” he wrote, “continued to seek a Zionist solution whereby the 517,000 Jews, just under a third of the Arab population, would have their own State in which they would not be at the mercy of a hostile Arab majority, but able to govern themselves, albeit in only about a third of the area they had hoped for.”

Sir Martin quoted King Saud’s words to Churchill: “I have continually advised moderation to the Arabs with regard to Palestine, but fear that a clash might come.” When the war ended, Churchill replied,  good arrangements can be made so that “all legitimate interests are in harmony.”

King Saud remained pessimistic. West Palestine Jews, he told Churchill, “intend to create a form of Nazi-Fascism within sight of the democracies and in the midst of the Arab countries…. Joshua captured the land of the Canaanites—an Arab tribe—with great cruelty and barbarity…. [They were] aliens who had come to Palestine at intervals and had then been turned out over two thousand years ago.”

A better scholar than I is needed to judge who was there first, or who turned out whom, but if Jews were expelled, then they too were refugees.

Concluded in Part 2….

Further reading

“‘Jarring Gong’: Benjamin Netanyahu on Winston Churchill,” 2023.

“When Did Churchill Become a Zionist?,” 2022.

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

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

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

Nine years ago Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid Sir Winston Churchill a compliment and this writer a minor one, in his thanks for a gift of my book, Churchill by Himself.

The first four editions collected 4000 annotated quotations, along popular aphorisms WSC never said (“Churchillian Drift”). A fifth expanded edition is scheduled for 2024. With over 5000 quotations and half a million words, it will extend our knowledge of Churchill’s timeless wisdom and devotion to liberty.

Mr. Netanyahu…

…was not new to Churchill back then. He is one of the few statesmen who pay more than routine lip-service to Sir Winston’s role in history. Unlike many who invoke his name, Mr. Netanyahu has actually read Churchill extensively, and applied his thought frequently.

With thanks for those kind remarks I quote Prime Minister Netanyahu at the United Nations on 24 September 2009. There he demonstrated an ability to draw guidance from Churchill’s words, while not using them to declare what WSC would do today….

A democracy legitimately defending itself against terror is morally hanged, drawn and quartered, and given an unfair trial to boot. By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals….

Over seventy [now over eighty] years ago, Winston Churchill lamented what he called the “confirmed unteachability of mankind”: the unfortunate habit of civilized societies to sleep until danger nearly overtakes them. Churchill bemoaned what he called the “want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action will be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong….”

I speak here today in the hope that Churchill’s assessment of the “unteachability of mankind” is for once proven wrong. I speak here today in the hope that we can learn from history—that we can prevent danger in time. In the spirit of the timeless words spoken to Joshua over 3000 years ago, let us be strong and of good courage. Let us confront this peril, secure our future and, God willing, forge an enduring peace for generations to come.

“Wise words, Sir, stand the test of time”*

*Churchill, House of Commons, 12 May 1901

From WSC, “Fifty Years Hence,” Strand Magazine, December 1931, reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures (1932):

Certain it is that while men are gathering knowledge and power with ever-increasing and measureless speed, their virtues and their wisdom have not shown any notable improvement as the centuries have rolled. The brain of a modern man does not differ in essentials from that of the human beings who fought and loved here millions of years ago. The nature of man has remained hitherto practically unchanged. Under sufficient stress—starvation, terror, warlike passion, or even cold intellectual frenzy—the modern man we know so well will do the most terrible deeds, and his modern woman will back him up….

We have the spectacle of the powers and weapons of man far outstripping the march of his intelligence; we have the march of his intelligence proceeding far more rapidly than the development of his nobility. We may well find ourselves in the presence of “the strength of civilization without its mercy.”

Britain’s Mandate of Palestine

In 1947, Attlee’s Labour Government scuttled from Palestine in a disgraceful exit, not dissimilar from another disgrace in 2021. In November the United Nations offered a Partition Plan for the 1/7th of Palestine that wasn’t already 100% Arab. (6/7ths was Jordan.) The plan was greeted with rejoicing in Jewish communities and outrage among Arabs. Civil disturbances began and the British refused to intervene. Soon there was a full-scale civil war. The Arabs lost, like the French lost Alsace-Lorraine in 1870, and the Germans Silesia in 1944. Vast shifts of population occurred in all three instances.

The world of 1948 ignored the diasporas. No one much cared. Any more than anyone today cares about Armenian genocide going on at this writing. “History doesn’t repeat, but it sometimes rhymes.” Evidently there’s nothing in Armenia for power-hungry politicians.

In Parliament on 30 July 1951, Churchill sadly reviewed Britain’s contribution to the Palestine morass:

The decline of our influence and power throughout the Middle East is due to several causes. First, the loss of our Oriental Empire and of the well-placed and formidable resources of the Imperial armies in India. Second, it is due to the impression which has become widespread throughout the Middle East that Great Britain has only to be pressed sufficiently by one method or another to abandon her rights or interests in that, or indeed any other, part of the world. A third cause is the mistakes and miscalculations in policy which 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 on Terrorism

On 8 July 1920, before there even was a Palestine Mandate, Churchill denounced the massacre of Indians at Amritsar. Joseph Montague Kenworthy, 10th Baron Strabolgi (1886-1953) was a Liberal MP (1919–26) and Labour MP (1926–31). Echoes of Churchill’s words may be heard again today: more “rhyming” of history.

What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country.… Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia.…

I have heard the Hon. Member for Hull [Lieutenant-Commander Kenworthy] speak on this subject. His doctrine and his policy is to support and palliate every form of terrorism as long as it is the terrorism of revolutionaries against the forces of law, loyalty and order. Governments who have seized upon power by violence and by usurpation have often resorted to terrorism in their desperate efforts to keep what they have stolen….

Unteachable mankind

Neither his opponents nor supporters would dispute Netanyahu’s Churchill reference today. With absolutely no more credentials than the reader, it’s possible to guess that the latest war will not be just another protracted street fight. It is very likely to be much worse than that, and the end of somebody, or some thing. At God knows what cost. Netanyahu was canny to invoke those words. Fifteen years later they are worth quoting in full:

When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong—these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history. —WSC, House of Commons, 2 May 1935

Further reading

“When Did Churchill Become a Zionist?,” 2022

“Churchill at the Stroke of Pen: Jordan and the Indian Army,” 2021

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

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

“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)

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.