CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Between the start of the Arab uprising in April 1936 and the spring of 1939, Arab attacks on British troops and military installations had been continuous. According to the British War Office statistics, more than five thousand Palestinian Arabs were killed by British troops during that three-year period. At the same time, at least five hundred Arabs had been killed by their fellow-Arabs because they had advocated good relations with the Jews, and were unwilling to oppose continued Jewish immigration. Churchill had gone to great lengths to warn of the scale and intensity of this conflict, and of the need to resolve it without reneging on Britain’s promise to the Jews.
In searching for a means to end Arab violence inside Palestine, Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues bowed to the growing pressure of the independent Arab States beyond Palestine, in particular Saudi Arabia and the recently independent Egypt and Iraq, for an end to any further Jewish immigration. At the Cabinet’s Palestine Committee on 20 April 1939, Neville Chamberlain stressed that it was of ‘immense importance’ with regard to British strategy ‘to have the Moslem world with us.’ Chamberlain added, ‘If we must offend one side. Let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.’1 The result was a British Government decision, reached in May 1939, to devise a policy that would ensure a permanent Arab majority, and a permanent Jewish minority, in Palestine. The policy was to be implemented by the Colonial Office under Malcolm MacDonald. The MacDonald White Paper – known to the Jews as the Black Paper – laid down a final limit to Jewish immigration of a total of 75,000 Jews during the coming five years.
The crux of this limit was that after the five-year period had passed, self-governing institutions would be set up, with the Jews still in a minority. At that point in time Arab approval would be needed for any further Jewish immigration. The Arabs would have power to prevent a Jewish majority for all time. That power would come into effect in May 1944. The government figure of a maximum of 75,000 Jewish immigrants included up to 25,000 emergency Palestine certificates. The five-year average of 15,000 a year was half that of the annual 30,000 to 35,000 that Churchill had earlier proposed, and which he had regarded as the lower rate of Jewish immigration needed to calm Arab fears. As well as giving the Arabs the power to prevent for all time a Jewish majority in Palestine, the 1939 White Paper cut off the persecuted Jews of central and eastern Europe from one of the main places of refuge left open to them, and from the possibility of an eventual Jewish State that would serve as a place of unimpeded sanctuary.
The White Paper was made public on 19 May 1939. Before it was debated in the House of Commons, Churchill invited Weizmann to lunch with him at his London apartment. In his memoirs, Weizmann recalled how Churchill ‘produced a packet of small cards and read his speech out to us; then he asked me if I had any changes to suggest. I answered that the architecture was so perfect that there were only one or two small points I might want to alter – but they were so unimportant I would not bother him with them.’2
During the second day of the debate, on 23 May, Churchill spoke with force and bitterness against what he believed was both a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration, and a shameful act of appeasement. ‘I find this a melancholy occasion,’ he said; others ‘may feel that the burden of keeping faith weighs upon them rather oppressively. Some may be pro-Arab and some may be anti-Semite. None of these motives offers me any means of escape because I was from the beginning a sincere advocate of the Balfour Declaration and I have made repeated public statements to that effect.’
As a person ‘intimately and responsibly concerned’ in the earlier stages of Britain’s Palestine policy, Churchill said, ‘I could not stand by and see solemn engagements into which Britain has entered before the world set aside for reasons of administrative convenience or – and it will be a vain hope – for the sake of a quiet life.’ He would, he said, ‘feel personally embarrassed in the most acute manner if I lent myself, by silence or inaction, to what I must regard as an act of repudiation.’
Of the proposed Arab veto on all Jewish immigration after 1944, Churchill declared: ‘Now, there is the breach; there is the violation of the pledge; there is the abandonment of the Balfour Declaration; there is the end of the vision, of the hope, of the dream.’
Churchill was particularly concerned about the effect of the White Paper on world opinion in the context of Britain’s attempt to rally the democratic and threatened forces of Europe against Nazism and Fascism. ‘What will our friends say?’ he asked. ‘What will be the opinion of the United States of America? Shall we not lose more – and this is a question to be considered maturely – in the growing support and sympathy of the United States than we shall gain in local administrative convenience, if gain at all indeed we do? What will our potential enemies think? What will those who have been stirring up these Arab agitators think?’
Would the Arab agitators themselves not be encouraged, Churchill asked, ‘by our confession of recoil? Will they not be tempted to say: “They’re on the run again. This is another Munich” and be the more stimulated in their aggression by these very unpleasant reflections which they make?’
Churchill turned to the situation in Europe. In March 1939 Hitler had entered Prague as a conqueror, his first act of military aggression against an independent, non-German State. Czechoslovakia, already emasculated at Munich, was no more. In response, Neville Chamberlain had given Poland, Romania and Turkey guarantees against outside aggression and, much encouraged by Churchill, was negotiating with the Soviet Union to bring it into the alliance system.
Linking this search for allies with the new Palestine White Paper, Churchill warned: ‘Shall we not undo by this very act of abjection some of the good which we have gained by our guarantees to Poland and to Rumania, by our admirable Turkish Alliance and by what we hope and expect will be our Russian Alliance?’ These recent foreign developments had to be considered. Might not the new White Paper ‘be a contributory factor – and every factor is a contributory factor now – by which our potential enemies may be emboldened to take some irrevocable action and then find out, only after it is all too late, that it is not this Government, with their tired Ministers and flagging purpose, that they have to face, but the might of Britain and all that Britain means?’
It was hoped by the government, Churchill pointed out, ‘to obtain five years of easement in Palestine by this proposal,’ but he was convinced that the consequences would be ‘entirely the opposite.’ As he saw it, a ‘sense of moral weakness’ in the mandatory Power ‘will rouse all the violent elements in Palestine to the utmost degree.’
Angered by, and afraid of, the impact on the European situation of the White Paper’s appeasement of the Arabs, Churchill warned the Conservative Party: ‘The policy which you think is a relief and an easement you will find afterwards you will have to retrieve, in suffering and greater exertions than those we are making.’
He would end his speech, Churchill said, ‘upon the land of Palestine’, and as he did so he directed his criticisms first against MacDonald and then against Chamberlain. First, he quoted from MacDonald’s speech: ‘Yesterday the Minister responsible descanted eloquently in glowing passages upon the magnificent work which the Jewish colonists have done. They have made the desert bloom. They have started a score of thriving industries, he said. They have founded a great city on the barren shore. They have harnessed the Jordan and spread its electricity throughout the land.’ Angrily, Churchill told the House: ‘So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population. Now we are asked to decree that all this is to stop and all this is to come to an end. We are now asked to submit – and this is what rankles most with me – to an agitation which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and by Fascist propaganda.’
Churchill knew the extent to which German and Italian radio broadcasts had been inflaming Arab anti-Jewish and anti-British sentiment in Palestine. He finally turned his criticism against Chamberlain. Twenty years earlier, he pointed out, Chamberlain himself ‘used these stirring words’ – which Churchill then quoted: ‘A great responsibility will rest upon the Zionists, who, before long, will be proceeding, with joy in their hearts, to the ancient seat of their people. Theirs will be the task to build up a new prosperity and a new civilisation in old Palestine, so long neglected and misruled.’ Such were Chamberlain’s words to the Jews at the time of the Balfour Declaration. ‘Well, they have answered his call,’ Churchill declared. ‘They have fulfilled his hopes. How can he find it in his heart to strike them this mortal blow?’3
Churchill’s speech, widely publicised in newspapers throughout Britain, and in the English-language Palestine Post, gave hope to the Zionists. ‘Your magnificent speech may yet destroy this policy,’ Dr Weizmann telegraphed to him that day.4 ‘Words fail me to express thanks.’ Nathan Laski wrote from Manchester: ‘May I congratulate you upon the great and statesmanlike speech you made on the Palestine question last night. I think it is not exaggerating to say that you will get the blessings of millions of Jews all over the world.’5 So impressed were the Zionist leaders by the speech that it was later published as a pamphlet by the British Association for the National Home in Palestine.6 And, three years later, during the Second World War, when Churchill was in conflict with his War Cabinet colleagues over the future of Palestine, he circulated the speech to them as a Cabinet paper.
The Palestine White Paper of 1939 was neither destroyed nor modified as a result of Churchill’s speech. The government commanded one of the highest majorities in British political history, and the final vote was 268 to 179 in favour of its policy. No amount of argument could change ingrained attitudes. On 30 July Chamberlain commented on the persecution of the Jews of Germany in a letter to one of his sisters: ‘I believe the persecution arose out of two motives; A desire to rob the Jews of their money and a jealousy of their superior cleverness.’ His letter continued: ‘No doubt Jews aren’t a lovable people; I don’t care about them myself; but that is not sufficient to explain the Pogrom.’7 Not a ‘lovable people’: with such an attitude at the highest level of government it was a misfortune for the Jews that Churchill, their most articulate and passionate defender, was out of political office.
On 8 August, in a broadcast to the United States, Churchill spoke to his American listeners of ‘a hush’ all over Europe. ‘It is the hush of suspense, and in many lands, it is the hush of fear,’ he said. One could also hear the tramp of armies; the armies of Germany and Italy. ‘After all, the dictators must train their soldiers. They could scarcely do less in common prudence, when the Danes, the Dutch, the Swiss, the Albanians – and of course the Jews – may leap out upon them at any moment and rob them of their living space.’8
Hitler had long demanded ‘living space’ for the German people: it was one of his most strident demands, self-serving and threatening at the same time. In search of living space, and of the further spread of Nazi rule and terror, on 25 August 1939 Germany signed a pact with the Soviet Union, whereby the two countries would partition Poland between them. On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. The Second World War had begun.