In Jewish history, Lloyd George is remembered as the leader of the government that promulgated the Balfour Declaration which set Israel on the path to nationhood. In British history, he is remembered as the head of the government that saw Britain to victory in the First World War. One may also recall his speech, given early in the Second World War, that helped depose Chamberlain and bring in Churchill, the victor in yet another war, with momentous consequences for Israel as for the world.
Churchill: Philo-Zionist and Philosemite
It is interesting that the commanding figures in both world wars should have been philosemites of sorts, although of different backgrounds and political affiliations. Winston Churchill’s father, Randolph, was, one might say, a “social” philosemite. He enjoyed the company and friendship of Jews (the Rothschilds, for example); he liked and admired Disraeli (as many in his party did not); and he respected the “race” that produced such admirable characters. His son Winston shared those traits. He came to know and respect not only the Jewish grandees but the less exalted Jews of Manchester, who made up almost a third of his constituency in 1906. Unlike Balfour, he opposed the Aliens Bill which would have restricted Jewish immigration; as one of his biographers wryly notes, his vote was surely “not unconnected with the fact that this was exactly when he alighted on Manchester North-West.”44 But it was more than political expediency that predisposed him to Zionism. Two years later, as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, he addressed the English Zionist Federation meeting in Manchester. “Jerusalem must be the ultimate goal,” he told them. “When it will be achieved it is vain to prophesy; but that it will some day be achieved is one of the few certainties of the future.”45 Shortly afterwards, he lost his Manchester constituency and acquired a new one in Dundee, but he retained his pro-Jewish and pro-Zionist sentiments.
Churchill was not in the Cabinet that passed the Balfour Declaration, but he remained loyal to that Declaration after the war when Britain assumed the role of Mandate in Palestine. And he did so when he might easily have been provoked to turn against Zionism. Having the direst view of the Russian Revolution and of the Bolshevik-inspired movements throughout the world, he was distressed to find that Jews played a prominent part in both. His article in 1920, “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” was a heartfelt attempt to come to terms with this dilemma. He opened with an encomium to the Jewish people, intended perhaps to mitigate the severe criticism that was to follow. “Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.” He quoted Disraeli—“the Jew Prime Minister of England, ... true to his race and proud of his origin”—as having said on a well-known occasion: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.” Churchill endorsed that sentiment. The Lord had inflicted on the Russian nation the evil of Bolshevism in return for the persecutions Russia had earlier inflicted on the Jews. Unfortunately, some Jews were now complicitous in that evil.
We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilization. And it may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent.
There were now three paths available to Jews: that of “national Jews” who are loyal citizens of the country in which they live (the English Jew, for example, who says, “I am an English man practising the Jewish faith”); that of “international Jews” (like many Russian Jews) who feel no loyalty either to their country or to their faith (they are atheists as well as revolutionaries); and that of Zionists who seek a national home for themselves and for other Jews in Palestine. The first and third paths are “helpful and hopeful,” the second “absolutely destructive.” National Jews could vindicate the honor of the Jewish name by combatting the Bolshevik conspiracy and being faithful to their adopted countries. And Zionists, with the help of the British government, could make that third alternative a reality by creating a Jewish national center in Palestine which would be not only a refuge for the oppressed but also “a symbol of Jewish unity and the temple of Jewish glory.” If, as might well happen in his lifetime, Churchill predicted, a Jewish state under the protection of the British Crown were created, “an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.”46
Churchill’s visit to Palestine the following year, during his brief tenure as Colonial Secretary, introduced him to the bitter reality of the situation—hostile Arabs confronting vigorous Jewish settlers. Before a crowd of ten thousand Jews at the site of the uncompleted Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, he delivered a speech declaring his “full sympathy for Zionism” and his belief that a Jewish national home in Palestine would be “a blessing to the whole world, a blessing to the Jewish race scattered all over the world, and a blessing to Great Britain.” Britain’s promise was two-fold: to help the Zionists and to assure the non-Jewish inhabitants that they would not suffer as a result. It was for the Zionists to see to it that everything they did was for the “moral and material benefit” of all Palestinians.47 Responding to that plea, the Jews declared this was indeed their intention and expressed their gratitude to him for his support. They would have been pleased to know that when he met shortly afterwards with an Arab delegation, he rejected their principal demands: to deny the Jews a national home, to cease all immigration, and to establish a governing council elected only by those living in Palestine before the war. These proposals, he told them, would mean a repudiation of the Balfour Declaration, to which the British, and he himself, were unalterably committed.
Confronted with divided opinions within the government on the crucial subject of immigration, Churchill issued a White Paper in 1922 which did not set a quota for new Jewish immigrants to Palestine, as had been proposed, but did provide that their number be within the “economic absorptive capacity” of the country.48 Zionists were displeased by this limitation but somewhat mollified by Churchill’s reaffirmation of the Balfour Declaration and his assertion that Jews were in Palestine “as of right and not in sufferance.”49 After the fall of the government later that year and the end of his term as Colonial Secretary, his official involvement with Zionism came to an end for the rest of the decade.
In 1929, Churchill’s period “in the wilderness” started (he was in Parliament but not in the Shadow Cabinet), as did his reengagement with Zionism. He made speech after speech defending the “national homeland,” opposing proposals that would have given Arabs an absolute majority in a council and thus the ability to halt Jewish immigration, even anticipating an eventual “Jewish state.” The Jews, he insisted, had brought to the Arabs “nothing but good gifts, more wealth, more trade, more civilisation, new sources of revenue, more employment, a higher rate of wages, larger cultivated areas and better water supply—in a word, the fruits of reason and modern science.”50 His Zionist zeal was reinforced by news about the persecution of Jews in Germany, which roused his fervor against Nazism and made a Jewish home in Palestine seem all the more imperative. Clement Attlee later recalled “the tears pouring down his cheeks one day before the war in the House of Commons, when he was telling me what was being done to the Jews in Germany—not to individual Jewish friends of his, but to the Jews as a group.”51
A White Paper issued by Chamberlain in May 1939—dubbed by Zionists the “Black Paper”—set an absolute limit on Jewish immigration of 75,000 for five years, after which there would be no immigration unless the Arabs agreed t
o it. It also prohibited the sale of Arab land to Jews and envisioned an independent Arab state in ten years, without making mention of a Jewish state. In Parliament, Churchill vigorously attacked it as a violation of the Balfour Declaration, reminding Chamberlain that he himself had defended the Declaration in 1918, and that the British government was obliged to uphold it under the terms of the Mandate.
This pledge of a home of refuge, of an asylum, was not made to the Jews in Palestine but to the Jews outside Palestine, to that vast, unhappy mass of scattered, persecuted, wandering Jews whose intense, unchanging, unconquerable desire has been for a National Home. . . . That is the pledge which was given, and that is the pledge which we are now asked to break, for how can this pledge be kept, I want to know, if in five years’ time the National Home is to be barred and no more Jews are to be allowed in without the permission of the Arabs?
Repeating his by now familiar theme, he assured Parliament that the Arabs themselves benefited from the presence of the Jews. It was the Jews who “made the desert bloom, . . . started a score of of thriving industries, . . . founded a great city on the barren shore, . . . harnessed the Jordan and spread its electricity throughout the land.” As a result, the Arab population in Palestine thrived and multiplied. All this would come to an end if the new White Paper were adopted, which was even more odious because the agitation for it was “fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and by Fascist propaganda.”
Those last words point to an issue that was never far from Churchill’s consciousness in 1939. The pledge of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, he reminded Parliament, was a pledge made not only to Jews but to the world. And for the world, the new White Paper represented not only a repudiation of Britain’s solemn obligation but also a confession of weakness. What would Britain’s friends think of it? What the United States? And what, more fatally, its potential enemies?
Will they not be tempted to say: “They’re on the run again. This is another Munich,” and be the more stimulated in their aggression by these very unpleasant reflections which they may make?” May they be emboldened to take some irrevocable action and then find out, only after it is all too late, that it is not this Government, with their tired Ministers and flagging purpose, that they have to face, but the might of Britain and all that Britain means?52
“Your magnificent speech,” Weizmann telegraphed him, “may yet destroy this policy.”53 That policy was not, however, destroyed. The White Paper remained in effect throughout the war, with the strong support of Parliament, the Cabinet, and, not least, the Colonial Office. Churchill’s speech was delivered on May 23, 1939. A little more than four months later, Britain was at war, with Churchill in the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty. The following May, he became Prime Minister. In 1943, when the issue arose again, he circulated that speech as a Cabinet paper, but the Cabinet was unmoved. Earlier, frustrated in his attempt to create a Jewish military force to fight with the Allied armies, he complained to Lord Cranborne, the Colonial Secretary, of the Colonial Office’s “bias in favor of the Arabs and against the Jews.” The Jews were in danger, he told him, and should be given the opportunity to defend themselves. “It may be necessary to make an example of these anti-Semitic officers, and others in high places. If three or four of them were recalled and dismissed, and the reasons given, it would have a salutary effect.”54 Cranborne, who shared that bias, was hardly disposed to act on that advice. In 1944, in a heated War Cabinet meeting about Hungarian Jews seeking refuge in Israel, Churchill declared that they had “as good a claim to Palestine” as Cranborne had to Hatfield (the long-time residence of the Cranbornes—that is, the Cecils.)55
With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Churchill, no longer in office, started another campaign, this time to recognize the state. On January 26, 1949, in a debate on foreign policy in the House, he pointed out that it was nine months since the establishment of the state, which had been recognized, on that very day, by both the United States and the Soviet Union, and since then by a dozen or more nations. The delay on the part of Britain, he suspected, was due to “the very strong and direct streak of bias and prejudice on the part of the Foreign Secretary” (Ernest Bevin). In defense of the new state, he invoked his usual argument about the Jews “making the desert bloom,” which already had the effect of doubling the population of both Jews and Arabs and which had a limitless potentiality for growth. The heart of the speech, however, was the appeal to the verdict of history.
The coming into being of a Jewish state in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the persepective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years. That is a standard of temporal values or time-values which seems very much out of accord with the perpetual click-clack of our rapidly changing moods and of the age in which we live. This is an event in world history.56
Nine days after this debate in Parliament, Britain formally recognized the state of Israel—not, probably, as a result of Churchill’s intervention, although Israel was grateful to him. To the letter of thanks by Weizmann, Israel’s first president, Churchill replied that he looked back with pleasure to their long association, adding, somewhat elliptically, “The light grows.”57
After yet another term as Prime Minister in 1951, Churchill retired in 1955. The following year, on the eve of the Suez crisis, he urged President Eisenhower not to stand by while Israel was defeated by Russian arms. He himself had no doubt about the merits of the case: “I am, of course, a Zionist, and have been ever since the Balfour Declaration. I think it is a wonderful thing that this tiny colony of Jews should have become a refuge to their compatriots in all the lands where they were persecuted so cruelly, and at the same time established themselves as the most effective fighting force in the area.”58
Churchill’s philo-Zionism—and philosemitism—had everything to do with that “event in world history” and very little with religion, except in so far as he recognized Judaism as a moral and civilizing force in history. In 1953, in the unlikely context of his book on the Second World War, he reflected upon the two “races,” the Jews and the Greeks, who, above all others, had set their mark upon the world. “No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem. Their messages in religion, philosophy, and art have been the main guiding lights of modern faith and culture.” He himself was “on the side of both, and believed in their invincible power to survive internal strife and the world tides threatening their extinction.” 59aw
These passing references to “religion” and “faith” have none of the passion other philosemites brought to those terms. Shaftesbury would have been appalled, and Balfour and Lloyd George perhaps amused but also discomfited, by the irreverence of Churchill’s famous quip, toward the end of his life: “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is ready to meet me is another question.” Asked to elaborate on his religious belief, he quoted a character in one of Disraeli’s novels, “Sensible men are all of the same religion.” Pressed further, he cited Disraeli again, “Sensible men never tell.”60ax
One of the rare occasions when Churchill dwelt at any length on a religious theme was in 1931 in an article in a Sunday newspaper. “Moses: The Leader of a People” opens with an epigraph from Deuteronomy:And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, in all the signs and the wonders, which the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land, and in all that mighty hand, and in all the great terror which Moses showed in the sight of all Israel.
The epigraph, Churchill explained, was “an apt expression of the esteem in which the great leader and liberator of the Hebrew people was held by the generations that succeeded him.” “Esteem,” not “veneration.” In that prosaic style, Churchill went on to relate the story of Moses, with only a very occasional hint of his usual wit or irony.ay
He [Moses] was the greatest of the prophets, who
spoke in person to the God of Israel; he was the national hero who led the Chosen People out of the land of bondage, through the perils of the wilderness, and brought them to the very thresh-hold of the Promised Land; he was the supreme law-giver, who received from God that remarkable code upon which the religious, moral, and social life of the nation was so securely fashioned. Tradition lastly ascribed to him the authorship of the whole Pentateuch, and the mystery that surrounded his death added to his prestige.
Again, “prestige,” like “esteem”—terms more suitable to a politician than to “the greatest of prophets.” Only toward the end of the article did religion make a more serious appearance when Churchill took issue with the scientists and rationalists who denied the Biblical miracles and made of Moses a legendary figure embodying the moral and religious precepts of the people. In fact, he insisted, the essential truths of the Biblical story had been affirmed: “This wandering tribe . . . grasped and proclaimed an idea of which all the genius of Greece and all the power of Rome were incapable. There was to be only one God, a universal God, a God of nations, a just God, a God who would punish in another world a wicked man.” Almost as an afterthought, he invoked the Christian God who brought “a new revelation” inspired by the “Hebrew people”—“a God not only of justice, but of mercy; a God not only of self-preservation and survival, but of pity, self-sacrifice, and ineffable love.”62
It was in November 1931 that Churchill wrote this curious bit of Biblical exegesis. His party was out of power and he himself, disagreeing with Baldwin on the subject of India, had resigned from the Shadow Cabinet a few months earlier. He was now truly “in the wilderness,” out of favor even in his own party. It is hard to resist the thought that he saw the Moses parable as specially relevant to him. “Every prophet,” he wrote midway in the essay, “has to come from civilization, but every prophet has to go into the wilderness. He must have a strong impression of a complex society and all that it has to give, and then he must serve periods of isolation and meditation. This is the process by which psychic dynamite is made.”63 Even Churchill was not vainglorious enough to suppose that he was the prophet chosen to lead the English people out of the wilderness. But he might well have thought that, by that process of “psychic dynamite,” he himself might be led out of the wilderness, bringing his people with him.
The People of the Book Page 13