CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

‘An Old Zionist Like Me’

On 24 February 1949, Israel and Egypt signed an armistice. A month later an armistice was signed between Israel and Lebanon. Armistice negotiations between Israel and Jordan were in their concluding stages. Israel’s War of Independence was at an end. That March, Churchill was in the United States. Britain was about to recognise Israel. At a meeting in New York on 29 March with American Zionist leaders to discuss Israel’s future, Churchill assured them that he was supportive. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘that I was for a free and independent Israel all through the dark years when many of my most distinguished countrymen took a different view. So do not imagine for a moment that I have the slightest idea of deserting you now in your hour of glory.’¹

Almost thirty years had passed since Churchill had planted a tree on the site of the future Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the last months of the war he had been the co-patron, with the South African leader Jan Smuts, of the appeal to establish a memorial at the university to Orde Wingate, the wartime commando leader killed in action in Burma, who before the war had helped the Jews devise active methods of self-defence.² Asked to send a message for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the opening of the university, Churchill wrote, on 3 June 1950: ‘The thought, the inspiration and the culture of the Jews has been one of the vital dominants in the world history. There are none of the arts or sciences which have not been enriched by Jewish achievements.’³

Within Israel and among Jews generally the extent to which Churchill was a friend was much debated. There were those who felt, as did several of the Zionist leaders in 1945, that he could not be trusted. But in Jerusalem, a South-African born member of the Israeli Foreign Office, Michael Comay, wrote in September 1950 to the Israel ambassador in London, that Churchill ‘is still a powerful friend to have, both in his official and personal capacities.’⁴

In April 1951 Churchill was invited by Weizmann to attend the opening of the Weizmann Forest in the Jerusalem hills. In sending his apologies, Churchill wrote to Israel’s Minister Plenipotentiary in London: ‘As a Zionist since the days of the Balfour Declaration I am much complimented to receive this invitation from so great a world statesman as Doctor Weizmann, whose son fell in the cause of freedom, which we now all labour to defend. It is with much regret therefore that I do not find it possible to come to the ceremony which signifies another stage in reclaiming the desert of so many centuries into a fertile home for the Jewish people. Please convey my warm thanks to the President and express my great regrets.’⁵

As Leader of the Opposition, Churchill watched Israel’s progress with a supportive eye. He also kept an eye on Israel’s adversaries. The three-year-old State was viewed with hatred by its Arab neighbours, of whom Egypt was the most powerful and the most determined to take action that would harm Israel’s young and fragile economy. On 30 July 1951 Churchill spoke in the House of Commons about the Labour Government’s ‘weakness’ in allowing Israel to suffer through Egypt’s closing of the Suez Canal to Israeli ships.⁶ He continued to castigate the Labour Government’s Middle East policy, telling the electors of Huddersfield during the General Election campaign in 1951, ‘It was a wonderful thing, which really ought to be preserved as a model of what not to do, how they managed to excite equally the animosity of the Israelites and the Arabs.’⁷

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On 26 October 1951 Churchill became Prime Minister for the second time. He was a month short of his 77th birthday. One of the first letters he wrote was to Weizmann, who had congratulated him on his return to power. ‘Thank you so much for your letter and good wishes,’ Churchill wrote. ‘The wonderful exertions which Israel is making in these times of difficulty are cheering to an old Zionist like me. I trust you may work in with Jordan and the rest of the Moslem world. With true comradeship there will be enough for all. Every good wish my old friend.’⁸

On 17 January 1952, while on an official visit to Washington, Churchill addressed a joint session of Congress. ‘From the days of the Balfour Declaration,’ he said, ‘I have desired that the Jews should have a National Home, and I have worked for that end. I rejoice to pay my tribute here to the achievements of those who have founded the Israelite State, who have defended themselves with tenacity, and who offer asylum to great numbers of Jewish refugees. I hope that with their aid they may convert deserts into gardens; but if they are to enjoy peace and prosperity they must strive to renew and preserve their friendly relations with the Arab world, without which widespread misery might follow for all.’⁹

At Carnegie Hall in New York on 29 April 1952, Churchill’s daughter Sarah read out a message from her father on the fourth anniversary of the independence of Israel. The gathering was the first meeting of the American Zionist Council, an amalgamation of eight leading Zionist organisations in the United States. ‘As a Zionist from the days of the Balfour Declaration,’ Churchill’s message read, ‘I have watched with admiration the courageous effort of Israel to establish her independence and prosperity. May this and future anniversaries be celebrated with growing confidence and good will by Israel’s friends throughout the world.’¹⁰

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Chaim Weizmann, who was just three days older than Churchill, died on 9 November 1952. On the following day, during a parliamentary debate on Egypt, Churchill declared: ‘There is another country I must mention at this moment. Those of us who have been Zionists since the days of the Balfour Declaration know what a heavy loss Israel has sustained in the death of its President, Dr Chaim Weizmann. Here was a man whose fame and fidelity were respected throughout the free world, whose son was killed fighting for us in the late war, and who, it may be rightly claimed, led his people back into their promised land, where we have seen them invincibly established as a free and sovereign State.’¹¹

Churchill also made a television tribute to Weizmann, one of his few television appearances. Among those watching was James de Rothschild, who wrote from his home in London: ‘My dear Winston, Or perhaps on this occasion I should prefer to say my dear Prime Minister, I have just listened to you and watched you on our TV set and I feel that I really must write and tell you how enchanted I was with your appearance and with what you said.’

James de Rothschild added: ‘I have not seen you in action now for nearly seven years (save perhaps at the Jockey Club meeting) and seven years is a cycle in man’s life. But my dear Winston, you have not changed, the same voice, the same appearance, the same fire and the same cool logic. I was particularly touched and want to thank you personally for what you said about Weizmann; it will mean a lot to the many thousands & tens of thousands of Jews, it will mean a lot to those who are their friends, also perhaps to those who like them less. Yours affectionately, Jimmy.’¹²

Within a few days of Churchill’s warm remarks about Weizmann, he learned that the Iraqi government was suggesting that Egypt extend its border with Israel from the Sinai desert into the Negev – also known as the Negeb – an area that had been part of Israel since the 1948 War of Independence. Churchill, who was shown the telegram reporting this, and who knew that more than half a million Jews forced to flee Arab lands had found refuge in Israel since independence, wrote to the Foreign Office: ‘Surely there can be no question of Israel being asked to give up the Negeb, as its development might afford the only means of sustaining their great population of refugee immigrants?’¹³

The Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, Sir William Strang, hastened to assure Churchill that the Foreign Office ‘consider the Arab claim to be unrealistic and we recognise Israel’s need of an area in which the population can expand and which, once developed, may be a source of wealth to the country.’¹⁴ Churchill replied, ‘I am very glad we are in full agreement.’¹⁵ The largely barren Negev remained a part of Israel.

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In the autumn of 1952, more than sixty years after he had first met the first Lord Rothschild at his father’s house, Churchill made the acquaintance of another member of the Rothschild family – Major Edmund de Rothschild. Churchill did so after Joseph Smallwood, the Premier of Newfoundland, approached him with an ambitious plan to harness the power of the 245-foot high Grand Falls, on the Hamilton River in Labrador, to create a major source of electricity to serve not only eastern Canada but also the East Coast of the United States. Churchill, who thirty years earlier had put his political authority behind the Zionist electrical project in Palestine, turned to the Rothschild bank in the City of London, N. M. Rothschild & Sons, a bank he had first visited more than half a century earlier. There, one of the partners, Edmund de Rothschild, who had served in France, North Africa and Italy during the war, undertook to organise the financing of the scheme, establishing Brinco as the holding company.¹⁶

After retiring as Prime Minister three years later, Churchill purchased shares in Brinco. It was Edmund de Rothschild – Mr Eddie as he was known at the bank – who kept him informed of progress. After Churchill’s death, Smallwood and Mr Eddie, having gone together to pay their respects at the Lying-in-State in Westminster Hall, decided to rename the Grand Falls the Churchill Falls – ‘they bear the name today,’ Mr Eddie later wrote, ‘all 5,255 million kilowatts!’¹⁷

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At the beginning of 1953, Churchill was in Washington for talks with President Truman, who had just given his final State of the Union address and was about to hand over the presidency to General Dwight D. Eisenhower. On 8 January, Truman and Churchill dined together at the British Embassy. During dinner Churchill impressed on Truman his strong support for Israel, and his equally strong criticism of Egypt for closing the Suez Canal to ships bound for Israeli ports. The guests then adjourned to the drawing room, where Truman began to play the piano. But, as Churchill’s Principal Private Secretary, Jock Colville, wrote in his diary: ‘Nobody would listen because they were all busy with post-mortems on a diatribe in favour of Zionism and against Egypt’ that Churchill ‘had delivered at dinner (to the disagreement of practically all the Americans present, though they admitted that the large Jewish vote would prevent them from disagreeing publicly).’¹⁸

Churchill had no qualms in urging support for Zionism, or in stating his support for it. Returning from the United States on the Queen Mary, he saw from the passenger list that Barnett Janner, with whom he had worked on the pro-Zionist Committee in the House of Commons twenty years earlier, was on board. Inviting Janner to join him for coffee in his room, his first words when Janner entered were: ‘I am a Zionist’ – as if to say, Janner noted, ‘Now that’s that, let’s get on with something else.’

Churchill was never an uncritical supporter of Israeli actions. On 14 October 1953, after an Israeli mother and her two children – the youngest only eighteen months old – had been killed by Palestinian Arab infiltrators from Jordan, an Israeli military force, Unit 101, commanded by Ariel Sharon, supported by a paratroop company, carried out a reprisal raid on the Jordanian Arab village of Kibya. Sixty-nine Arabs, mostly women and children, were killed. The British Embassy in Tel Aviv was instructed by the British Government to convey ‘an expression of the horror’ at the attack.¹⁹

Churchill was shown this telegram, but he made no comment. Nor, as some have believed, did he send a personal message to Ben-Gurion deploring the Kibya attack. Indeed, at a meeting of the Defence Committee on 14 October, during the discussion about stationing a British armoured brigade in Jordan, Churchill urged that it should be ‘made clear’ to Israel ‘that the presence of our armoured force in Jordan would not represent any threat to their interests but would, in fact, provide a stabilising influence in that area.’²⁰

At a Cabinet meeting on 17 November 1953, during the discussion on the recent tension between Jordan and Israel, caused by the infiltration of Palestinian Arab terrorists from across the Jordanian border and Israeli cross-border retaliation, Churchill distanced himself from calls, particularly from his fellow Conservative parliamentarians, for Britain to support a Jordanian request for British troops. He was ‘inclined to think,’ he told his Cabinet colleagues, ‘that this particular source of trouble concerned the United Nations more than it concerned the United Kingdom.’ To send a small British force to Jordan, as Jordan wished, ‘might merely provoke Israel.’ If Britain ‘had to intervene at all,’ he said, ‘it would be better to use overwhelming force which could provide an effective deterrent.’²¹

‘Now the Foreign Office wants a war with Israel,’ Churchill told his doctor the following morning, and added ‘Ernie Bevin apparently made a treaty with Jordan. I don’t want war.’²² ‘We should be careful,’ Churchill reiterated in Cabinet on 19 November, ‘to avoid a situation in which British troops became engaged in hostilities between Israel and Jordan.’²³

Not Jordan, but Egypt, proved to be Israel’s main adversary in 1954. When, in the third week of January, the Egyptian Government announced that it would intensify its blockade of Israel, and would continue to prevent Israeli ships, or even ships of other countries bound for Israel, from using the Suez Canal. On 21 January, Churchill told his Cabinet that such a blockade would lead to increased ‘interference’ with the passage of ships through the Suez Canal and the blacklisting by Egypt of many ships of all flags trading with the Levant. The Israeli Government was proposing to raise the matter in the United Nations Security Council ‘and had asked whether they could count on our support and that of the United States Government.’ He hoped ‘we should give prompt and effective support to the Israel Government in this matter.’ In Parliament, members of all political parties would welcome ‘an initiative designed to assert the rights of free transit through the Canal; and it would be convenient if we could transfer the emphasis, in our current differences with Egypt, from the Base to the Canal.’

Commenting on this, the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, told the Cabinet that it should realise ‘that the Egyptian Government had legal grounds for their action, in that their war with Israel had not legally been terminated. It was therefore desirable that we should not take any public position in this matter until we had assured ourselves that we should have the support of some of the other maritime Powers.’ The Cabinet then ‘invited’ Eden to try to enlist the support of those maritime Powers for the protest that Israel proposed to make in the Security Council.²⁴

When nothing had been achieved in this regard after five days, Churchill raised the matter again, stressing at the Cabinet of 26 January ‘the importance of upholding the right of international passage through the Suez Canal and the Parliamentary advantages of putting this issue in the forefront of our differences with Egypt.’ He hoped, therefore, ‘that no effort would be spared in enlisting the support of leading maritime Powers for the protest which Israel wished to make in the Security Council against the Egyptian decision to intensify the blockade.’²⁵

Britain was firmly behind Israel in its dispute with Egypt, which mirrored a wider effort by President Nasser to take control of the Suez Canal. But when Israeli-Jordanian relations worsened, with cross-border Palestinian terrorist attacks from Jordan and Israeli counter-attacks, the British Cabinet was far closer to Jordan, with whom it was allied, and whose army had been trained by British officers.

At the end of March 1954 the Jordanian-Israeli border again became the focus of Churchill’s attention. On 17 March an Israeli bus, travelling up the precipitous hairpin bends of the Scorpion Ascent in the Negev, was attacked by a group of Palestinian Arabs who had infiltrated into Israel from Jordan. The driver and ten passengers were killed. The Israeli Government announced that they considered this a warlike act, responsibility for which ‘falls squarely upon the government from whose territory this unit of murderers was sent forth across the border into Israeli territory to carry out this dastardly deed.’²⁶ There was a state of high tension between Israel and Jordan.

On 31 March the British Cabinet discussed a plan, drawn up by the Chiefs of Staff, for military assistance to Jordan in the event of Jordanian hostilities with Israel. This plan was explained by the Minister of Defence, Field Marshal Viscount Alexander of Tunis, the former Commander-in-Chief of Britain’s wartime forces in the Mediterranean and Italy. It involved, he explained, ‘the invasion of Israel’ by British forces from the south. Should the plan be communicated to the Jordanians, Alexander asked, to which the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding, commented that the Chiefs of Staff did not wish to do so. He was ‘much relieved’ to hear this, Churchill remarked, adding that ‘leakage of such a plan would have very grave consequences.’

Later in the discussion, Eden proposed that Churchill should send a message to David Ben-Gurion the Prime Minister of Israel, ‘reminding him of our obligations under our Treaty with Jordan and urging him to avoid any provocative action.’²⁷ Eden prepared a draft of what he thought Churchill should send to the Israeli Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett. Churchill accepted the draft and it was sent on 2 April, noting that ‘We shall do what we can to influence the Arab States, but we look to you to make counsels of statesmanship and patience prevail on the Israel side.’²⁸

In his reply, Sharett asked Britain to use its influence in Amman to bring about a cessation of terrorist raids across the Jordanian border. ‘Through the clouds of the present local storms,’ Sharett added, ‘we see far-reaching vistas of beneficent co-operation between Britain and Israel in culture and trade, in the advancement and defence of democracy, and in all creative achievement.’²⁹

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Amid his work as Prime Minister, and despite the burden of a severe stroke in 1953, Churchill was always ready to respond to a Jewish request. In March 1954 the Manchester Zionist Council organised an exhibition, ‘Manchester and Israel – a city’s contribution to the birth of a State’, to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Weizmann’s arrival in Manchester fifty years earlier. ‘The City of Manchester may be proud,’ Churchill wrote, ‘of its connection with Dr Weizmann, a man of vision and genius, whose lasting memorial will be the vigour and the prosperity of the State of Israel, which he did more than any other single man to inspire and create. I am indeed glad that Manchester should commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of this great man’s arrival in our country, and I send my best wishes for the success of the exhibition which is being held.’³⁰

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During his second premiership, Churchill befriended a Yugoslav-born Jewish sculptor, Oscar Nemon, who had been commissioned by Queen Elizabeth II to make a bust of Churchill for Windsor Castle. As a guest at Chequers, Nemon recalled Churchill’s words to Field Marshal Sir William Slim, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff: ‘Field Marshal, I’m sending you to Egypt and I want to make one point clear. I am a Zionist and I want you to act accordingly.’ Churchill then spoke of how the world owed ‘an incalculable amount to the Jews,’ telling his guests that the great inventions of the twentieth century had been made by Christians and Jews, ‘as though God had revealed His secrets to them.’ Churchill also spoke of the Jewish contribution in two world wars, mentioning Weizmann’s work on explosives in the First World War, and Einstein’s work on the development of atomic science with which ‘we were able to put the seal’ on the Second World War.

During this discussion at Chequers, Churchill spoke of the Jewish Nobel Prizewinners, whose contribution to humanity in many fields had been ‘unique and absolute’. There were nations consisting of hundreds of millions of people who had been unable to produce a single Nobel Prizewinner, ‘and are the beneficiaries every day from the genius and discoveries of the Jews.’

Speaking of the situation in Israel, Churchill expressed concern at the country’s vulnerability, at a time of repeated terrorist infiltration from across the Jordanian border.’³¹

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On 30 November 1954 Churchill celebrated his eightieth birthday. Among the hundreds of messages he received from overseas was a telegram from the Foreign Minister of Israel, Moshe Sharett (formerly Shertok) – whose request ten years earlier, to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz, Churchill had endorsed. ‘In one of the bleakest crises in the history of civilisation,’ Sharett wrote, ‘it was given to you, by supreme feat of personal determination and inspired national leadership, to save the cause of freedom, to give sublime expression to the faith and fervour of man in his resistance to tyranny, and to lead your own brave people and its allies from defeat to victory.’

Turning to an Israeli perspective, Sharett continued: ‘Your staunch advocacy of the Zionist idea, your belief in its justice and ultimate triumph, and your joy in its consummation with the rise of an independent Israel, have earned for you the everlasting gratitude of the Jewish people. They will never forget your steadfast support of the policy of the Balfour Declaration, your forceful interventions on its behalf, your long and unbroken friendship with Chaim Weizmann, and your resolute step in giving their sons the long yearned-for chance of fighting the mortal enemy as a national unit under their own flag. Your continuing personal interest in the efforts and aspirations of Israel reverberates deeply in our people’s hearts. May you long be spared to persevere in your noble endeavours.’³²

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In the first and second weeks of February 1955, Churchill was host to the Commonwealth Prime Ministers at their conference in London. In answer to a suggestion in a letter from James de Rothschild that Israel, which was then approaching its seventh year of independence, should be admitted to the Commonwealth, Churchill wrote supportively to Eden: ‘This is a big question. Israel is a force in the world and a link with the USA.’³³

In his letter, James de Rothschild recalled ‘our stay in Jerusalem in 1921,’ during which, he reminded Churchill, ‘You then laid the foundations of the Jewish State by separating Abdullah’s Kingdom from the rest of Palestine. Without this much-opposed prophetic foresight, there would not have been an Israel today.’³⁴

On 18 February Churchill was at Buckingham Palace for a lunch to welcome the Shah of Iran to London. Sir John Shuckburgh, who in 1921 had been in charge of the Arab Department of the Colonial Office under Churchill, was among the guests. He recorded in his diary: ‘I was drawn into some talk with him, and he said the Foreign Office was “riddled with Bevinism” on Middle East questions, i.e. anti-Jewish. He had heard (from James de Rothschild) that the Israelis would like to join the British Commonwealth. “Do not put that out of your mind. It would be a wonderful thing. So many people want to leave us; it might be the turning of the tide,” Churchill said.’

Shuckburgh noted that Churchill also said to him: ‘You ought to let the Jews have Jerusalem; it is they who made it famous.’ He also said that large numbers of the refugees ought to be settled in the Negev. I’m not sure whether he was aware that this is something the Israelis are resisting.’³⁵

The exhortation ‘You ought to let the Jews have Jerusalem; it is they who made it famous’ was one of Churchill’s last pronouncements before he retired as Prime Minister. He had been a supporter of Jewish national aspirations for more than fifty years.