Churchill: Zionist

Let us remind ourselves and the world of what Churchill had to say about Jews and the revival of the Jewish state.

At a 1905 Manchester meeting protesting Russian antisemitic pogroms, Churchill strongly condemned this persecution (just as his father had in 1881), and pointedly warned Russia by citing an adage that he attributed to Disraeli: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations dealt with the Jews.” He quoted it a number of other times throughout his life, reflecting a sincere belief in it.

“I recognise,” he wrote on January 2, 1906, “the supreme attraction to a scattered and persecuted people of a safe and settled home under the flag of tolerance and freedom.” On January 30, 1908, he wrote: “Jerusalem must be the only ultimate goal. 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…I am in full sympathy with the historical traditional aspirations of the Jews….The restoration to them of a centre of true racial and political integrity would be a tremendous event in the history of the world.” And in 1920, he wrote: “If, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event will have occurred in the history of the world which would from every point of view be beneficial.”

The Arabs on August 22, 1921 urged Churchill to end Jewish immigration to their ancient homeland. Churchill responded: “The Jews have a far more difficult task than you. You have only to enjoy your own possession; but they have to try to create out of the wilderness, out of the barren places, a livelihood for the people they bring in… they were in Palestine many hundreds of years ago. They have always tried to be there. They have done a great deal for the country. They have started many thriving colonies and many of them wish to go and live there. It is to them a sacred place.” From the International Churchill Society:

Churchill truly became a Zionist in 1921, when, being charged as Colonial Secretary to implement the Balfour Declaration, he visited Palestine and was stunned by how the Zionists were turning a barren land green. He spontaneously declared, “Nothing will stand in your way. You have changed desolate places to smiling orchards and initiated progress instead of stagnation.” A few months later he told a skeptical imperial conference: “Wherever the footprints of the Jew in Palestine are found you have prosperity, progress and scientific methods of cultivation, and where there was a wilderness you now find vineyards.” Churchill’s whole worldview was founded on the nineteenth-century ideal of promoting progress and advancing civilization, and now he had witnessed firsthand the Zionists doing just that. While Churchill thought the Jews deserved a homeland in the Holy Land for historical and biblical reasons, it was the civilizational argument that resonated most with him and alone sufficed to justify Zionist title deeds to Palestine. In this new, corrupted postwar world, exemplified by the rise of Bolshevism, Zionism held out hope for a better civilization….

Churchill also became a more ardent Zionist in the 1930s. He feared that any loosening of British control in Palestine or any reneging on Britain’s commitment to the Jews would signal weakness and unreliability, thereby exacerbating Britain’s slipping world position. He considered Palestinian Jews to be strategic assets and saw the Zionists as allies in the mounting battle of ideas, sharing principles of the Victorian world that Britain helped to shape, amid the attack on those principles by rising fascism and communism. In 1939, Churchill led the charge in the Commons against Neville Chamberlain’s White Paper proposing to restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine, calling it “another Munich,” because it effectively nullified the Balfour Declaration….

Churchill understood early what became known as the Holocaust, which effectively began in the summer of 1941, first by mobile killing units and then in 1942 with an extensive network of extermination camps. Churchill circled the number of murdered Jews in the decrypted reports he received from Bletchley Park, and, in a 24 August 1941 radio broadcast, he referred to mass German killings, adding starkly, “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” He did not specifically mention the Jews, perhaps for fear of tipping off the Germans to the secret intercepts. In November 1941, armed with more evidence, Churchill issued a statement to a Jewish newspaper: “None has suffered more cruelly than the Jew of the unspeakable evils wrought on the bodies and spirits of men by Hitler and his vile regime.” Then, alluding to the postwar Zionist plans, he was quietly pursuing, he stated: “Assuredly in the day of victory the Jew’s sufferings and his part in the struggle will not be forgotten.”

Churchill was especially infuriated with Ernest Bevin, Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s Foreign Secretary — who had loyally served Churchill as minister for labour during the war — for being antisemitic and pursuing a “policy of folly, fatuity and futility the like of which it is not easy to find in modern experience.” Churchill declared, “[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.

Now would be an appropriate time to compare Churchill’s views on the Jewish people and on Israel with what he thought of Muslims and of Islam, with both of which he became acquainted when he fought in the Sudan aganst the Muslim troops of the “mad Mahdi.” He took part in one of the last cavalry charges, at Omdurman in 1898.

Here is what he wrote about Muslims in The River War:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.

Compare those damning paragraphs on Muslims and Islam with his lifelong support for Jews and for the coming into being of a Jewish state, which he insisted would be “a tremendous event in the history of the world.”

Churchill — was he ever wrong?