May 8, 2015

Finest Hour 111, Summer 2001

Page 43

Correspondence over “Listserv Winston”

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11 June 2001:

“Churchill declared himself as a Zionist—and probably he was one— but his hands were tied by the British (and US) ruling classes, which were anti-Semitic.”

12 June 2001:

“Yes, there was an anti-semitic streak in British high society, but to claim that behind all British government actions lay the anti-semites is nearly as absurd a claim as Hitler’s that Jewish financiers were the real Western governments, started the war, etc., etc. (which we know to be rubbish). In what way were WSC’s ‘hands tied’?”

Editor’s note:

Consider Douglas Feith, ‘Palestine and Zionism, 1904-1922’ in Churchill as Peacemaker (Cambridge University Press 1997), produced in association with (and growing out of a symposium by) The Churchill and Wilson Centers in Washington. Mr. Feith devotes extensive research to arguing, not only that the British government was flagrantly anti-semitic in its actions toward Palestine; but that Churchill “refused to see or admit that Arab opposition to Zionism was beyond appeasement,” and that he more or less went along with the official government stance through 1939. Palestine, Feith says, was the “twice-promised land” (by Balfour to the Jews, Lawrence to the Arabs); that successive British governments never intended to set up a Jewish National Home there.

Churchill, of course, argued often for a “National Home,” and Feith does note that Churchill attacked the Chamberlain government’s May 1939 Palestine White Paper, which Feith calls an effort “to appease, respectively, the Arabs in Palestine and the Germans in Europe. Both efforts, [Churchill said] were doomed to fail….The White Paper had given the Arabs a veto over future Jewish immigration into Palestine, thereby ensuring permanent minority status for the Jews.” But the White Paper, Feith went on, “anticipated such criticism,” asserting that “Britain had never committed itself to a Jewish majority or a Jewish state in Palestine. As evidence, it offered a lengthy quotation from the Churchill White Paper of 1922, in which [WSC] had played ‘hide the ball’ regarding the aims of Britain’s Zionist policy. Churchill played this game with such care that the new colonial secretary in 1939 could claim, plausibly if disingenuously, that the ball never existed in the first place.”

Feith’s indictment of Churchill was that he did not rank Palestine “among the top priorities of British foreign policy,” which struck me as itself disingenuous. After 1930, Churchill had no power to set priorities on anything—until late 1939, and from that point his main preoccupation was Britain’s survival. To that extent I quarreled with Feith’s thesis (as Professor Muller, the book’s editor, knows!). Mr. Feith holds that there never was any chance of Arab accommodation toward the Jews (those present at Camp David last year would probably agree). But…when Churchill was Colonial Secretary in 1921-22, Britain was a superpower which could have imposed and enforced any settlement she desired, even two separate states. And Douglas Feith argues with some justification that there wasn’t an official in the Foreign Office who would support such an arrangement— that they were, at least all of those with power, essentially anti-Zionist.

It is instructive, however, that Feith made no criticism of Churchill’s later reaction to the Holocaust, and what he tried to do about it. See Sir Martin Gilbert’s famous lecture, “Churchill and the Holocaust” (Churchill Proceedings 1992-1993), or his later book, Churchill: A Life.