CHURCHILL AND THE JEWS
By Martin Gilbert
McClelland & Stewart,
359 pages. $39.99
More Arts Stories
Unfailingly admiring the Jewish people, Winston Churchill, throughout his long career, had close Jewish friends and associates, ardently supported the Jewish cause in Palestine and believed, in his characteristically exuberant idiom, that the Jews were "the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world."
Sir Martin Gilbert, the prolific historian and Churchill's official biographer, has been collecting material on this subject for nearly 40 years. No one knows this topic better, and readers of this volume will be persuaded, as I am, that the great man's affinity was both sincerely felt and tenaciously pursued. As to the explanation for this attachment, however, as to the influences that moved Churchill differently than so many others of his culture and upbringing, and as to how this fit with the rest of his world view, the story is incomplete. Was this simply a case of spontaneous attraction, or were there deep congruencies of culture, politics and temperament that help explain this lifelong commitment?
Among Churchill's earliest ties with Jews were those when, as a Liberal member of Parliament from 1904 to 1908, he chose to represent North-West Manchester, where a substantial portion of the voters were Jewish. Based there, this descendant of the Duke of Marlborough not only hobnobbed with Lionel Rothschild and Jewish dignitaries such as the scientist and Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, he also attended services in a Manchester synagogue, raised funds for the city's Jewish Hospital, subscribed to a neighbourhood Jewish soup kitchen, and put in a good word for the local Talmud Torah.
Churchill moved from local to international involvement with Jews when, holding cabinet portfolios during the First World War and after, he became a determined champion of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, which he saw as competing with what he understood as another Jewish aspiration: Bolshevism in Russia.
Churchill made no bones about where he stood. A lifelong anti-Bolshevik, he thought that all right-thinking Englishmen should help Jews choose the Zionist alternative. "Personally, my heart is full of sympathy for Zionism," he told listeners at a tree-planting on Mount Scopus at the site of the eventual Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "I believe that the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine will be a blessing to the whole world, a blessing to the Jewish race scattered all over the world, and a blessing to Great Britain. I firmly believe that it will be a blessing also to all the inhabitants of this country without distinction of race and religion."
During the 1930s, as Jews struggled desperately to get the British - as the League of Nations Mandatory authority over Palestine - to permit the expansion of Jewish immigration and settlement, Churchill spoke for the Conservatives who championed the 1917 Balfour Declaration's promise of British support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Visiting the country in 1921, Churchill was deeply impressed with the pioneering commitment and achievements of the Jewish settlers. The Jewish community in Palestine "should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance," he wrote in what became known as the Churchill White Paper of 1922. His support for that position never wavered, even when, in the subsequent decade, as Arab hostility to Jewish settlement intensified and many fellow Conservatives wanted to trim their earlier commitments.
Churchill claimed to be mindful of the Arabs' concerns. To the Peel Commission of Inquiry in 1937, he acknowledged that if Jewish immigration were to proceed "too fast," then the result would be "these furious outbreaks." In such cases, he told the commissioners, "you must go a bit slower."
"But you must not give in to the furious outbreaks," he continued, "you must quell them. You may go a bit slower, but do not be diverted from your purpose, which is that you will preserve a nucleus in Palestine round which as many Jews as can get a living will be gathered, without regard to the racial balance of population in the country. That is my view."
In the end, both peoples would benefit from Jewish settlement, he insisted. There was no injustice. "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."
Unconvinced, some of the commissioners shrank from what they felt might be a historic wrong. But Churchill, the imperialist who had fought Sudanese rebels at Omdurman in 1898 and the Boers in South Africa, was unmoved. "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. 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 world-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
Together with his romantic enthusiasm for Jewish achievements and his antipathy to the Arab case (a predisposition that contrasted with many of his compatriots), Churchill drew attention to the desperate conditions Jews faced under Nazi persecution, and urged that the gates of Palestine be opened. "Surely," he told his fellow parliamentarians, "the House of Commons will not allow the one door which is open, the one door which allows some relief, some escape from these conditions, to be summarily closed."
As persecution of the Jews in Germany worsened, he called attention to their plight as a means of warning the British about Hitler. And when Neville Chamberlain's government issued the White Paper of May, 1939, promoting a permanent Arab majority in Palestine, Churchill referred to it, in Gilbert's words, as "both a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration, and a shameful act of appeasement."
"How can he find it in his heart to strike [the Jews] this mortal blow?" he wrote of the British prime minister.
During the war, Churchill was one of few statesmen to have grasped the significance of the Holocaust. "There is no doubt," he wrote to his lieutenant, Anthony Eden, "that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilized men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races in Europe."
"Get anything out of the Air Force you can," he ordered Eden, in response to a request for the aerial bombardment of Auschwitz in 1944, "and invoke me if necessary."
Still, Churchill reiterated, as did so many others, his conviction that nothing should detract from "the speedy victory of the Allied Nations" and that the question of Palestine had to be resolved after the war. Churchill was furious when, in November, 1944, Jewish assassins murdered his friend Lord Moyne, minister resident in Cairo, and unhesitatingly lambasted "a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany."
He was similarly furious in July, 1946, though he was then out of power, when right-wing Irgun terrorists, led by Menachem Begin, blew up a British administration wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Such acts, he later wrote in his history of the Second World War, "were an odious act of ingratitude that left a profound impression."
A somewhat old-fashioned way of seeing things, we must now admit. Martin Gilbert's book takes us back to another era, to the inspired, if flawed and sometimes contradictory imagination of a man for whom the Jewish cause, as he saw it, meshed with his own powerful commitment to liberty and civilization.
Michael Marrus is Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto and the author of The Holocaust in History.
