By Prof. Paul Eidelberg
Since anti-Semitism is sweeping cross England and Europe, I want to quote some passages from England’s greatest statesman, Winston Churchill.
I propose to quote passages from Churchill’s official biographer Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill & the Jews (2007). And here it should be born in mind that Churchill was first and foremost a British statesman, and that his political duties must be taken into account in any assessment of his attitude toward Jews and Palestine.
Despite the anti-Zionist attitude of many of his Conservative Party colleagues, Churchill was steadfast in his support of the Jews, as Gilbert thoroughly documents. Churchill was a life-long friend of Chaim Weismann, who, with David Ben-Gurion, regarded him as a champion of the Jewish cause. Of course, Churchill could not ignore Arab claims and pressure if only because millions of Muslims lived under British rule. Nevertheless, he opposed the 1939 White Paper, which curtailed Jewish immigration to Palestine when Jews were trying to escape Nazi Germany.
In March 1920, Churchill wrote,
“We owe to the Jews … 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.”
Here is what he told the House of Commons about his visit to in Palestine, in 1921: “Anyone who has seen the work of the Jewish colonies which have been established during the last twenty or thirty years in Palestine will be struck by the enormous productive results which they had achieved. He described how he had driven from
the most inhospitable soil, surrounded on every side by barrenness and the most miserable form of cultivation, into a fertile and thriving country estate, where the scanty soil gave place to good crops and good cultivation, and then to vineyards and finally to the most beautiful, luxurious orange groves. All created in twenty or thirty years by the exertions of the Jewish community who live there.
In 1929, armed Arabs attacked and murdered 133 unarmed Jews. In Jerusalem, four thousand Jews were driven from their homes. Churchill, then visiting the United States, was asked by reporters whether this killing of Jews and destruction of Jewish property would affect Britain’s pledge to allow continued Jewish immigration. Churchill replied, the Arabs had no reason to be against the Jews.
The Jews [he explained] have developed the country, grown orchards and grain fields out of the desert, built schools and great buildings, constructed irrigation projects and water power houses and have made Palestine a much better place in which to live than it was before they came a few years ago. The Arabs are much better off now … To Jewish enterprise the Arab owes nearly everything he has. Fanaticism and a sort of envy have driven the Arab to violence …”
On March 12, 1937, the year after the beginning of the Arab uprising in Palestine, Churchill was called to give evidence to the Peel Commission. He was asked more than 100 questions since he was the author of the 1922 White Paper that enabled 300,000 Jews to enter Palestine.
Asked whether this influx of Jews constituted a harsh injustice to the Palestinian Arabs, he replied:
“Why is there harsh injustice done if people come in and make a livelihood for more and make the desert into palm groves and orange groves? Why is it injustice because there is more work and wealth for everybody. There is no injustice. The injustice is when those who live in the country leave it to be a desert for thousands of years.”
He rejected the contention that the Jews in Palestine constituted a foreign race. He pointed out it was the Arabs who had been the outsiders, the conquerors. “The [Jewish] population of Palestine,” he said, “was much greater when it was a Roman province.… When the Mohammedan upset occurred in world history and the great hordes of Islam swept over these places, they … smashed it all up. You have seen the terraces on the hills which used to be cultivated, [but] which under Arab rule have remained a desert.”
Churchill was asked whether the Arabs were right in saying the entry of the Jewish Home in Palestine prevented them from having self-governing institutions. He replied that “the Mandate limited the development of Arab self-governing institutions as long as they do not accept the spirit of the Balfour Declaration. The moment they accept that spirit, with all the pledges of their civil liberties, the question falls to the ground. [But the Arabs] resist and they do not want it.” Churchill added: “If I were an Arab I should not like it, but it is for the good of the world that [Palestine] should be cultivated, and it will never be cultivated by the Arabs.” (Churchill said the Balfour Declaration refers to civil liberties and made no mention of national rights.)
One Peel Commission member complained that the Jewish Agency—set up in 1930—has its representative in London, whereas the Arabs feel they are left in the cold. Churchill replied: “It is a question of which civilization you prefer.”
Peel said Britain “might have some compunction if she felt she was downing the Arabs year after year when they wanted to remain in their own country.” Gilbert comments that Churchill rejected this line of reasoning, and allowed himself to be drawn into a more contentious discussion. He quotes Churchill:
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 that right. I do not admit, for instance, that that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit 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.”
Clearly, Churchill had no high opinion of Islam. Would that Israel had a fraction of a Churchill at the helm
@ yamit82
I was at a good few nights out, but nothing like this T.G.. There was never anything like this until the tourists came, and demanded atmosphere. The tourist rush of Americans with lots of money looking for the old thatched cottage(full of rats) and the little back field their grandfather dug his potatoes from poured money into the country, and joining the Common Market gave them a huge boost. International meetings began to be held there, so they were no longer the beggars of Europe. But the tourist schtik got out of control, and all those crappy Irish songs began to be everywhere. I hardly ever heard one, -say since I was about 15-16 and going out on the town-any time in my life and I didn’t leave there until nearly 28 years old. All this happened years after.
And you’ve heard of th “Celtic Tiger”, Movie studios from Hollywood came looking for cheap locations, food and cheap supporting actors etc. Everybody thought…”How quaint’…whilst the Irish were raking in the dough. Well it didn’t last and now they’re up to their eyes in debt. Need International Money Fund loans etc. Good luck to them, the most Anti-Semitic country in Europe and that’s a hard thing to achieve. It always was, I grew up there and Jews had to keep a very low profile.
Never mind Bobby Briscoe (a close family friend, and member of our shool of which my late grandfather and father were Presidents for about 30 years each, my eldest brother succeeded my father), and his son being Lord Mayor. Briscoe was entitled by rotation about 15-20 years before he became LM. And there were 7-8 Councellors and they all got their turn…except him. the one who deserved it most. They went round the table twice, before chosing him out of sheer neccessiity.
@ Edgar G.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oFQ76ctfS0
@ Edgar G.:
Mmmm. Quite. Moreover, according to Churchill biographer, Mel Brooks, the war would have been over 4 years earlier but for his terrible enunciation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX0FQkeTs4Q
Much, as Obama hampered this war effort by scrubbing all negative references to Islam in combatting terror. Trump was spot on when he said you have to understand who your enemy is and what motivates him in order to effectively fight and win. Though, in Churchill’s case, his sin was not being a Muslim but being a Brit.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
You have it correctly right in this post. In one of his books, written by himself, he admits, that as he was growing up he was an Anti-Semite-almost in those words- and only gradually came around -patronisingly at first-when he reached about middle age.
It was he who offered the Trans-Jordan Provingce pof Palestine to the Arabs-Abdullah[, and made the deal to supply them with sacks of gold sovereigns in camel loads of leather sacks, yearly, arranged the transfer of weapons and British officers for training the Arab Legion,etc.etc . I think this must have lasted right up to 1948…maybe even longer.
How little we really know about what goes on undercover of political handshakes and crocodile smiles.
Odd. The podcast contradicts the Haaretz article and says he ordered the military to bomb Auschwitz but they didn’t do it. Halfway through it. Also says, during the war, he wanted Jews to be allowed in to Palestine but didn’t focus on it.
Interesting podcast interview with biographer MIchael Mayakovsky. He changed over time. He gave lip service to Zionism early but wrote memos against it in 1920. But when he visits Palestine in 1921 he became sympathetic. Also before going there, he wrote an essay called “Bolshevism or Zionism” which had anti-semitic overtones echoing the Protocols.
https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2017/08/winston-churchill-the-jews-and-israel/
I also read somewhere that he occasionally pandered to anti-semitic sentiment early on in his career as a politician, though he also pandered opportunistically to Jewish voters at times, for example, giving lip service to zionism in 1906.
His father was philo-semitic, and he admired and took after his father.
Mostly, he was in favor of whatever he thought was good for the British empire and Western Civilization.
He opposed the British white paper in 1939, but thought Jewish refugees should be forcibly repatriated after the war to the countries where they had been nearly all murdered and not allowed to return home to Israel. Refused to bomb Auschwitz.
MIxed bag.
@ Edgar G.: Churchill seems to have been a very mixed bag.
This Haaretz article by Michael Cohen, one of his biographers, also talks about how he refused to bomb Auschwitz repeatedly even though it was near Alllied targets, taking FDR’s stance that the murder of the Jews should only be opposed by by the Allies winning the war, and opposed allowing Jewish refugees making aliya after the war.
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.767730
Everything I am finding now echoes this line that he was supportive of Zionism from the beginning but I could swear I read something about how in the very beginning of the Mandate, he did something crucial to enable the Empire to become the enemy of the Jewish people that it quickly became. I wish I could find it.
Yet it was Churchill who did the dirty on us when he begged Abdullah not to attack the French in Damascus but to become the emir of Moab/Trans-Jordan…. Abdullah, who had no real intention nor capability, of attacking the French, (who had kicked out his brother Feisal from Damascus,) with his 900 or so bandits, had straggled up from Hejaz over the previous 9 months. He grabbed the offer like a man dying of thirst grabs a canteen of water.
Churchill had heard about Abdullah’s “intention” in London, and went immediately out there, seated uncomfortably in a cockpit of an old WW1 aeroplane. He was afraid the French, with whom Britain had just concluded a rocky mandatory agreement share-out, would strike back at “Perfidious Albion” whom they never really trusted.
The whole sleazy deal is laid out clearly in “Crossroads to Israel”, a defining book by Christopher Sykes, the son of Sir Mark Sykes, who, with Picot of France, concluded secret agreements with the Arabs in 1915. (The Sykes-Picot Agreements).