The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (38 page)

Another way of putting it might have been that the British government viewed with favour the eating of a piece of cake by the Jewish people, provided nothing should be done to prejudice the rights of non-Jewish communities to eat the same piece of cake at the same time.

What prompted this bizarre declaration? Partly it was idealism. Ever since the vile pogroms in nineteenth-century Russia there had been a growing movement to find a homeland for the Jews. At one stage the British had even toyed with finding some space in Uganda; but Palestine, the land of the Hebrew Old Testament, was the obvious place. Palestine was still relatively underpopulated; and to some extent Balfour was merely adding the official British voice to the chorus that wanted to give ‘
a land without a people to a people without a land’.

Balfour may also have been moved by a more practical consideration: there was much anxiety in the First World War that Jewish sympathy might be inclined towards the Germans, because that was the best way of paying back the Russians for their anti-Semitism before the war. As Churchill himself later admitted, the Balfour
declaration was partly intended to shore up Jewish support, especially in America—and its manifest muddle arose from the countervailing desire not to alienate the many millions of Muslims (not least in India) upon whose troops the British imperial forces relied.

Look at these three promises together, and there is no doubt about it: Britain had sold the same camel three times.

This was the mess that Churchill had to clear up, and in March 1921 he summoned all the key players to the splendour of the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo—then also, of course, an informal part of the British Empire. Soon the lobby echoed to the calls of Arabists in states of excitement.

‘
Gertie!’ cried T. E. Lawrence, as he spotted the elegant but mannish figure of Gertrude Bell.

‘Dear boy!’ said Gertrude Bell.

Churchill marched in, to cries of protest from a few Arabs outside, some of them carrying placards saying ‘
a bas Churchill’. He was holding an easel and followed by a member of staff carrying a bottle of wine in a bucket.

He established himself in the garden and began a spurt of creative activity that was to produce enough paintings for him to hold an exhibition; but the biggest and most dramatic canvas of all was the political landscape of the Middle East.

At some point in the proceedings he organised a trip to see the Pyramids, and the entire party posed on camels in front of the Sphinx. Although he was an accomplished rider, Churchill managed to slip off the camel’s hump. Thinking that their principal tourist was at risk, the dragoman offered him a horse instead.

‘
I’ve started on a camel, and I will finish on a camel,’ he said, and there we see him today, firmly in the saddle—as he was throughout proceedings.

By the end of the Cairo conference he had gone some way to
making sense of the McMahon–Hussein letters. Of the four sons of King Hussein, Faisal was given the throne of Iraq (the French having chucked him out of Syria) and Abdullah was given the throne of Transjordan, now Jordan—where his family remains ensconced. T. E. Lawrence thought the summit was an outstanding success, and eleven years later he wrote to Churchill to point out that it had already delivered more than a decade of peace: not bad going.

Churchill’s work was not done. Now he had to see whether he could massage away the inconsistencies of the Balfour declaration. The next stop was Jerusalem, where he conducted sessions of Solomon-like wisdom and impartiality.

He held two consecutive audiences, first with the Arabs and then with the Jews. The first group in to see him was the ‘Executive Committee of the Arab Palestine Congress’. They did not make a good impression on Churchill; and it should be remembered that he already harboured the feeling that the Palestinians had failed to join the other Arabs in the revolt against the Turks.

The gist of the Palestinians’ case was that the Jews should hop it. The Balfour declaration should be annulled. ‘
The Jews have been among the most active advocates of destruction in many lands . . . The Jew is clannish and unneighbourly, and cannot mix with those who live about him . . . the Jew is a Jew all the world over’, and so on. They gave no sign of being willing to compromise, or to come to any sort of accommodation with the settlers. A condominium, shared rule, joint sovereignty, a federal solution—none of it was acceptable. Jews out, they said. As Abba Eban was later to say,
the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, and they started as they meant to go on.

Churchill listened carefully, and then responded with practical advice. He stressed the two sides of the Balfour declaration—the protection that it afforded to the civil and political rights of the existing
peoples. He noted that the declaration referred to ‘a’ national home for the Jews, rather than ‘the’ national home, with the indefinite article giving the suggestion that this was to be a shared abode and not exclusively Jewish property.

‘
If one promise stands, so does the other, and we shall be judged as we faithfully fulfil both,’ he told them. But there could be no getting round the substance of what Balfour had promised the Jewish people, he said.

It was a declaration made while the war was still in progress, while victory and defeat hung in the balance. It must therefore be regarded as one of the facts definitely established by the triumphant conclusion of the Great War . . . Moreover it is manifestly right that the Jews, who are scattered all over the world, should have a national centre and a National Home where some of them may be reunited. And where else could that be but in this land of Palestine, with which for more than three thousand years they have been profoundly and intimately associated?

He then heard from the Jewish deputation. Their speech, as you might perhaps expect, was couched in words much more calculated to appeal to Winston Churchill.

‘ . . .
Our Jewish and Zionist programme lays special stress on the establishing of sincere friendship between ourselves and the Arabs. The Jewish people returning after 2000 years of exile and persecution, to its homeland, cannot suffer the suspicion that it wishes to deny another nation its rights . . .’

Churchill replied gravely, with the tones of a Roman proconsul arbitrating in a dispute. One tribe might be more advanced, more civilised—but they had a duty to those unrulier tribes that faced the
prospect of dispossession. The Jewish settlers must show ‘
prudence’ and ‘patience’, he warned. They must allay the alarm of others, no matter how unjustified that alarm might be.

Later, in a speech at the Hebrew University, he repeated his message. The Jews had a great responsibility, he said. They had indeed the chance to create a land flowing with milk and honey. But he warned them that ‘
every step you take must therefore be for the moral and material benefit of all Palestinians’.

He was then given a symbolic tree to plant. Symbolically, it broke. There was nothing else to plant except a palm, and the sapling did not flourish.

There are those who say that Churchill was naive in his handling of the Arab–Jewish question, some that he was positively disingenuous. In March 1921 he took the crucial decision that the west bank of the Jordan was emphatically outside the terms of the McMahon–Hussein promises. It was not to be part of the Kingdom of Abdullah, the son of Hussein.

This was the beginning of the creation of that Jewish homeland promised by Balfour—and in taking that step there have been plenty of people who have accused Churchill of being a tool of the great global Jewish conspiracy.

There are loonies out there who will tell you that Churchill’s mother Jennie Jerome was of Jewish stock (she wasn’t; her father was descended from Huguenots. She may have been partly Native American, but she wasn’t Jewish). A little more plausibly, they will tell you that his views were warped by the very substantial donations he received from Jewish bankers and financiers: Ernest Cassel, Sir Henry Strakosch, Bernard Baruch. It is perfectly true that Churchill’s personal finances would not today pass the
Private Eye
test. They would not look good if splashed on the front page of the
Guardian
. He did indeed take money from these men, sometimes in considerable sums.
But those were very different times, when parliamentarians and ministers were paid much less—and expected to have a private income—and it was by no means unusual for politicians to receive financial support from their admirers.

As it happens, I don’t think these donations made a bean of difference to Churchill’s views about Jewry, nor to his decisions about Palestine. He was basically philo-Semitic, like his father Randolph, and had been all his life. He admired the Jewish characteristics that he shared in such abundance—energy, self-reliance, hard work, family life.

As he wrote in a newspaper article in 1920, ‘
Some people like the 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 has from time to time been accused of adopting some off-colour sentiments—such as in an unpublished article in which he seems to suggest that Jewish people may be partly responsible for some of the resentment they inspire, and the feeling that they are ‘
Hebrew bloodsuckers’. But the authorship of the article is contested (a ghostly hand alleged) and it is surely important that it was never published.

As Sir Martin Gilbert has demonstrated beyond the slightest doubt, Churchill admired Jews, employed Jews, enjoyed the company of Jews, and believed in a Jewish homeland. He was not a Zionist, he once said, but he was ‘wedded to Zionism’.

All that is true. On the other hand, it does not mean that Churchill was in any sense anti-Arab, let alone anti-Muslim. Indeed, there were times both in 1904 and in the 1920s when his general ‘
tendency to orientalism’ encouraged him to join Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in actually wearing Arab-style robes. He hero-worshipped the headdress-sporting Lawrence of Arabia, and as Warren Dockter points out
in his new survey,
Winston Churchill and the Islamic World
, he was
always mindful that the British Empire was the greatest Muslim power on earth: the home in 1920 of 87 million Muslims.

He inveighed against the loss of India not just because of the blow to British prestige, but also because he worried about future Hindu oppression of the Muslims; and since Muslim troops were invaluable for the empire, Muslim goodwill was vital. He tended to side with the Turks over the Greeks, even though the Turks had been his opponents in the First World War.

Remember what he did in the depths of 1940, when Britain was most desperate for friends: he found £100,000 to build the Regent’s Park mosque in London—a gesture that was intended to be noted in the Muslim world.

So when Churchill paved the way for Jewish entry to Palestine—and his 1922 White Paper encouraged more immigration—it was because he genuinely believed that it would be the best thing for that otherwise arid and neglected part of the world, and that it would be the best thing for both communities. He saw Jew and Arab living side by side.

He imagined the technically expert Schlomo giving eager young Mohammed a hand with his tractor, and teaching him the art of irrigation. He saw orchards blossoming over the desert, and prosperity for all. Indeed, he had some support for this vision from the old King Hussein himself, who wrote in his publication
al-Qibla
that Palestine was a ‘
sacred and beloved homeland of its original sons—the Jews’. The Hashemite King went on to make precisely the same starry-eyed prediction as Churchill.

‘Experience has proved their capacity to succeed in their energies and their labours . . . The return of these exiles to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually an experimental school for their Arab brethren in the field, factories and trade.’ Alas, things did not work out that way. As the years rolled on, tensions got worse;
Jewish immigration increased, especially as the Nazi persecutions began.

As it turned out, Churchill was too optimistic about the caring, sharing spirit of the early Zionists. They did not tend to employ Arabs on their farms. There were Arab riots and protests, and the poor soldiers of the British mandate were caught in the middle, driven to shoot Arabs—when many in Britain were starting to feel that a serious injustice was being done.

In 1937 the position had got so bad that it was decided to set up the Peel Commission, to understand what had gone wrong in Palestine. Churchill gave some secret testimony to that Commission—and here we can see exactly what he imagined he was doing when he opened the door to substantial Jewish immigration, and created that homeland on the west bank of the Jordan.

‘ . . .
We committed ourselves to the idea that some day, somehow, far off in the future, subject to justice and economic convenience, there might well be a great Jewish state there, numbered by millions, far exceeding the present inhabitants of the country . . .’ (Today we can see how his vision has come true. There are more than eight million Israelis, and 75 per cent of them are Jews.)

Of course it would be right to protect the Arabs, he told the Peel Commission, and it was wrong of the Jews not to hire them; but he saw the Zionist project as something that was fundamentally progressive, enlightened and civilising. It made no sense to allow the Arabs to get in the way of that progress—when ultimately it would be to the advantage of all.

‘
I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger,’ he said. It was like saying that America should be reserved for the Native Americans or Australia for the Aborigines. It was absurd, in his view—an offence against his Whiggish concepts of social improvement.

In any event, he denied that he had imported a ‘foreign race’ to Palestine. ‘Not at all,’ he said: it was the Arabs who were the conquerors. Churchill pointed out that in the time of Christ the population of Palestine was much greater—and the people had been mainly Jews. That all changed in the seventh century
AD
. ‘When the Mohammedan upset occurred in world history, and the hordes of Islam swept over these places they broke it all up, smashed it all up. You have seen the terraces on the hills which used to be cultivated, which under Arab rule have remained a desert.’