CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE PARTITION DEBATE: ‘A COUNSEL OF DESPAIR’

It was widely assumed that the Peel Commission would recommend the partition of Palestine into two separate sovereign States, one Jewish and one Arab. Partition was favoured by Dr Weizmann, who preferred a small State at once rather than the prospect – always open to potential setback – of a larger State in the relatively distant future. On 8 June 1937, Weizmann presented his reasoning at a private dinner given by Sir Archibald Sinclair at which Churchill was present, as well as James de Rothschild and several parliamentary supporters of Zionism: Leo Amery, Clement Attlee, Colonel Josiah Wedgwood and Captain Victor Cazalet. ‘You know, you are our masters,’ Churchill told Weizmann, and he added, pointing to those present, ‘If you ask us to fight, we shall fight like tigers.’

Weizmann, in pressing for Partition as the best he felt the Jews could hope for – ‘frontiers so drawn as to be adequate as well as defensible’ – also asked for an annual Jewish immigration of between 50,000 and 60,000, slightly lower than the highest rate – 66,472 in 1935 – since the start of the Mandate.

At the dinner, Churchill spoke emphatically against Partition. The British Government were ‘untrustworthy; they would chip off a piece here, and chip off a piece there; and Dr Weizmann’s dream of an annual immigration of 60,000 or so would be smashed from the outset.’ The ‘only thing’ that the Jews could do was ‘persevere, persevere, persevere!’ Partition would be appeasement to Arab pressure, he warned. But even with Partition a Jewish State would not come into being, as the Arabs would immediately start trouble and the British Government would back down.

Churchill told Weizmann that he ‘quite realised’ that the British Government ‘had let the Jews down in the past, and felt it was shameful that they should wake up only now, when the Jews came to them in dire distress. The Jews should wait until the whole of Western Palestine was theirs, as envisaged by the 1922 White Paper. ‘The time would come’ when Britain was strong again, ‘and the Jews must hang on.’ Meanwhile, the government should be warned ‘that there would be no walk-over for their proposals’ of Partition.1

On the following morning, 9 June, Weizmann gave an account of this meeting to a number of leading Zionists then in London, including Ben-Gurion, who sent an account of it to the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem. While not contradicting Weizmann’s first version, it added some light and colour – and apparently also some Churchillian profanities against the British Government leaders, made, Weizmann reported, under the influence of drink. While the meal was in progress Churchill had exclaimed ‘Let’s eat less, I want to hear what Chaim has to say.’ When Weizmann said that he would accept Partition if the British Government would agree to allowing 50,000 to 60,000 immigrants a year Churchill had ‘jumped up and interrupted him’ with the words: ‘You’re wrong, Weizmann. Your State is a mirage’ – the partitioned state, that is. ‘They won’t let you bring in 60,000. The Arabs will toss bombs, they’ll receive help from Iraq, and the Government will back out.’

Churchill added that in 1922 Rutenberg had told him about the geographic needs of the Jewish National Home. ‘Rutenberg spoke to me about all this, demanded that I promise this mountain and that mountain – I have no idea where these mountains are located. I haven’t seen the map, and I won’t. But all these the Mandate will fulfil.’ After Sinclair and Wedgwood had opposed Partition, and Cazalet and James de Rothschild supported it, and thus supported Weizmann, Churchill again ‘jumped up’ and denounced Partition as ‘a fraud’. The members of the Baldwin government were ‘idiots, talentless … If England depends on them it will be destroyed … However, this situation will not continue much longer – England will wake up and defeat Mussolini and Hitler, and then your time will come too.’2

On 14 June Weizmann wrote to Churchill that he had spoken to the Colonial Secretary, William Ormsby-Gore, and ‘gathered that you have pressed very strongly the idea that the Southern part of Palestine should not be incorporated into the Arab State – if and when such a State comes to be set up. This is a point which worries us a great deal, for obvious reasons, and I would like to express to you my heartiest thanks, both for the advice you gave me last Tuesday, and for all you have done with Mr Ormsby-Gore to endeavour to make that project (if such a project comes off) as acceptable as possible in the circumstances.’3

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The Peel Commission published its report on 7 July 1937. As anticipated, it proposed the division of Palestine into a Jewish State and an Arab State in separate geographic areas within Western Palestine. Jerusalem and Bethlehem – including the Holy Places – were to be a separate entity governed by Britain, together with a British-controlled corridor from Jerusalem to the sea, through Ramleh and Jaffa, both of which towns would also be retained by Britain. The corridor would give Britain access to the sea.4

Partition was to be debated in the House of Commons on 21 July 1937. For several weeks beforehand, debate raged among the Zionists as to whether or not to accept a truncated, incomplete Palestine, without even the substantial Jewish areas of Jerusalem. Ten days before the debate, Weizmann, who continued to favour Partition, again saw Churchill in London. Churchill reiterated that he did not favour Partition: that the Mandate intended that the Jewish State, when eventually it came into being, should constitute the whole of Palestine from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan.5

Recognising that Partition might nevertheless be the actual outcome, Churchill saw William Ormsby-Gore, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, who in 1918 had been an Assistant Political Officer in Palestine. Churchill asked him to include in the proposed Jewish State the northern Negev desert, which the Peel Commission had allocated in its entirety to the Arab State, but which Weizmann and the Zionists were keen to cultivate.6

Two weekends before the Partition debate, Churchill was a guest of James and Dorothy de Rothschild at Waddesdon Manor, where he was unexpectedly approached by the Zionist Revisionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky. It was Lady Violet Bonham Carter (the daughter of the former Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith) who had encouraged Jabotinsky to seek Churchill out – even if it meant gate-crashing a weekend house party. She also wrote to Churchill that in her view Partition ‘should not be rushed through in a fortnight. People are so ignorant of the geographical proportions and strategic position of the tiny corner now allotted to the Jews.’7 Lady Violet underlined the word ‘tiny’.8

Jabotinsky and Churchill had not met before. Churchill was inevitably intrigued by his interlocutor, despite – or even because of – the unorthodox method of their meeting. While Weizmann was the long-established, diplomatic, determined leader of mainstream Zionism, Jabotinsky was the charismatic head of the impatient, visionary, militaristically inclined wing, the Revisionists, with its Betar youth wing.

In London at the outbreak of the First World War, Jabotinsky had urged the formation of a Jewish Legion to fight the Turks. While in Cairo, he had been instrumental in forming the Zion Mule Corps that fought at Gallipoli. In 1918, in battle against the Turks, he led a unit of Jewish soldiers across the River Jordan. In 1920, when Churchill was Secretary of State for War, he had been sentenced to fifteen years in prison by a British military court in Palestine for confronting an Arab mob in Jerusalem during the Passover riots that year. Amnestied within a few months, he formed a breakaway Zionist movement, the World Union of Zionist Revisionists. In 1930 the British banned Jabotinsky from Palestine. He went to Eastern Europe, electrifying the Jewish multitudes by his demand for the establishment of a Jewish State on both sides of the Jordan, and calling on them to emigrate en masse: he hoped for a million and a half immigrants.

Writing to Churchill on 16 July, Jabotinsky apologised for his ‘informal approach, and for disturbing whatever there may be of repose in your week-end seclusion.’ Lady Violet Bonham Carter had told him that Churchill was not sure whether he would speak in the Partition debate. Jabotinsky then explained: ‘This letter is an attempt to urge you to intervene. To me as a Jew – and even opponents never deny that I do represent the feelings of the Jewish masses – you are one of the very limited inner circle of British statesmen responsible for the birth of the Jewish Commonwealth idea between 1917 and 1922; and we expect you to defend it now that it is so dangerously threatened, and would be grievously disappointed if your voice were not heard.’

What the Jews wanted, above all, Jabotinsky wrote, was ‘room for colonisation.’ As the Jews gradually realised that Partition ‘kills all their hopes, their opposition crystallises.’ The he ‘worst feature of the whole business,’ Jabotinsky added, ‘is that we shall have no time even to state our case. I hope it will be stated by friends, in the first place by you.’ In his memorandum Jabotinsky stressed that a partitioned Palestine would create a Jewish State too small in area to be defendable from sustained Arab attack from outside it. The Partition scheme ‘is to be rejected’, he wrote, even if the arearea of the proposed Jewish State could be increased, since even if it were to include the northern Negev it offered ‘no room for any considerable Jewish immigration.’

Once ‘prematurely formed’, Jabotinsky believed, the Jewish State ‘could never expand either by peaceful penetration or by conquest. On the contrary, such a Jewish State would be destined to be eventually captured by the neighbouring Arab States, the conquest being probably accompanied by destruction and massacre.’ So tightly hemmed in was the area designated for the Jewish State that the density of its population was already equal to that of Germany and almost double that of France. In addition, more than half of the 645,000 inhabitants occupying the area allocated to the Jewish State were not Jews but Arabs. The hope expressed in the Peel Report that the Arabs could be induced to ‘trek’ away eastward was ‘a fallacy’. The Jewish State ‘would be a rich and busy place, and people do not, as a rule, voluntarily emigrate from rich into poor districts. Nor would there be any room for them to go to in the Arab State deprived of Jewish energy and capital.’ The addition of Jerusalem to the Jewish State – ‘whether the modern city only or the whole of it’ – would be of no account as a significant geographic area. As to the northern Negev, this was ‘an area where no water has so far been found, an area destined at best for dry or semi-dry farming,’ able to sustain no more than 125,000 Jewish settlers.

Jabotinsky then wrote about the Jewish populations of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and Czechoslovakia. ‘The homeless Jewish masses in Eastern and Central Europe,’ he told Churchill, ‘constitute a reservoir of distress numbering eight to nine millions.’ In some of these Eastern countries, ‘the only argument against anti-Semitism is the hope that Palestine will some day be able to absorb large masses of Jewish emigrants. The moment this prospect becomes obviously impossible, an unprecedented outburst of anti-Jewish feeling is to be expected, and governments will be powerfully urged to follow the Nazi example in placing anti-Semitism on the Statute book.’

Jabotinsky then made a plea for the wider Revisionist aim of a Jewish State on both sides of the Jordan: ‘It would mean a refuge for several million Jews, without any need to displace the million Arabs who live there now, or their progeny.’ But the moment the Balfour Declaration was abolished outside the narrow limits of the proposed Jewish State, ‘immigration of Jews into the Arab State will only be possible within limits which the Arab government will tolerate. Even if such immigration will be allowed at all (it may even be encouraged, in small numbers bringing in big capital), it will never be suffered to reach such a size as to change the predominantly Arab character of any district. The Jews may be allowed to form new ghettos in Arab territory, but not to form new Jewish majorities with the consent of an Arab government.’

Any hope of using the area proposed for the Jewish State for organising a Jewish army that would eventually conquer the rest of Palestine by force was ‘utterly absurd,’ Jabotinsky wrote. ‘The Jewish army will be unable even to defend the “Jewish State” if, or rather when, it will be attacked by the Arab countries: the “Jewish State” consists essentially of plains dominated by hills which will belong to the Arabs, Tel Aviv being within fifteen miles from the nearest Arab mountain gun and Haifa within eighteen miles.’

This being so, the capture of the small Jewish State by its Arab neighbours, Jabotinsky warned, would be inevitable. ‘A dwarfish area, whose defenders can never grow to more than a handful, but full of riches and culture, will be surrounded not by the Arab Palestine only, but by an Arab Federation from Aleppo to Basra and Sanaa (for the Report openly invites the proposed “Arab State” to join such a Federation). It will inevitably be coveted, and inevitably attacked at the first opportunity; and the meaning of “opportunity” is – any moment when the British Empire will be in trouble elsewhere.’9

Churchill was impressed by these arguments, and saw Jabotinsky again a few days later, for an hour in the House of Commons.10 Jabotinsky’s points made their mark. When the Commons debated the Peel Report on 21 July, Churchill opposed any final commitment to partition. He first spoke about the Balfour Declaration, insisting, as he had done on so many occasions in the past sixteen years, that it was ‘a delusion to suppose that this was a mere act of crusading enthusiasm or quixotic philanthropy.’ On the contrary, he stressed, it was a measure taken ‘in the dire need of the War with the object of promoting the general victory of the Allies, for which we expected and received valuable and important assistance. We cannot brush that aside and start afresh as though it had never been given, and deal with this matter as if we had no obligations or responsibility.’

Churchill explained that he could not vote for the government motion to approve the principle of Partition. ‘Take the military aspect alone,’ he said. ‘The gravest anxieties arise about that. There are two sovereign States, one a rich and small State more crowded than Germany, with double the population to the kilometre of France, and then in the mountains in the surrounding regions, stretching up to Baghdad with the Assyrians and the desert tribes to the south, the whole of this great Arab area confronting this new Jewish State, and in between the two the British holding a number of extremely important positions with responsibilities at present altogether undefined.’

How could the House of Commons decide at that moment, Churchill asked, ‘that we will stand between these two sovereign States and keep the peace between them without knowing at all to what we are committing ourselves?’ It was a problem ‘where all the world is looking to see whether Great Britain behaves in an honourable manner, in a courageous manner and in a sagacious manner.’11

When the debate ended, as a result of Liberal and Labour Party opposition the government agreed not to proceed with Partition, but to keep it as a possibility for the future. Churchill was quick to ensure that his point of view remained vocal and visible. Writing in the Evening Standard two days after the debate, he described the ‘plan of cutting Palestine into three parts’ as ‘a counsel of despair’ and he went on to ask: ‘One wonders whether, in reality, the difficulties of carrying out the Zionist scheme are so great as they are portrayed, and whether in fact there has not been a very considerable measure of success.’ In the sixteen years that had passed since the Mandate, many troubles had been overcome, and ‘great developments’ had taken place in Palestine. When he made his previous visit three years earlier, he was ‘delighted at the aspect of the countryside. The fine roads, the new buildings and plantations, the evidences of prosperity, both among Jews and Arabs, presented on every side, all gave a sense of real encouragement.’

The change that had taken place since his visit in 1934 was due, Churchill explained, ‘to outside events’ that were not Britain’s fault: ‘The persecutions of the Jews in Germany, the exploitation of anti-Semitism as a means by which violent and reactionary forces seize, or attempt to seize, despotic power, afflicted the civilised world with a refugee problem similar to that of the Huguenots in the seventeenth century. The brunt of this has fallen upon this very small country and administration of Palestine. Jewish immigration, suddenly raised to 30,000 or 40,000 a year, may not have exceeded the “economic absorptive capacity” of the settled districts, but it naturally confronted the Arabs with the prospect, not of an evolutionary growth of the Jewish population, but of actual flooding and swamping which seemed to bring near to them the prospect of domination.’

Churchill then expressed the immigration conflict in vivid terms. ‘Too much current was put on the cables,’ he said. ‘And the cables have fused. That may be a reason for mending the cables and reducing the current. It is surely no reason for declaring that electricity is a fluid too dangerous for civilisation to handle.’ He had the ‘strong impression’, Churchill concluded, ‘that the case for perseverance holds the field.’12

On 28 July, at Chartwell, Churchill had a two-hour talk after dinner with Henry Mond, the second Baron Melchett. A former Member of Parliament, and a director of Imperial Chemical Industries, Melchett was a close friend of Weizmann, and of Churchill. Randolph Churchill was the only other person present. In reporting on the conversation to Weizmann, Melchett expressed his concern at Churchill’s insistence that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, the principal fomentor of the Arab revolt, should be arrested, using if necessary ‘violent methods’. The main talk was about Partition, which, Churchill insisted, would mean war, as ‘long before the Jewish State is able to organise itself, and either get in the necessary men to defend the position, or the necessary arms, they will be attacked by the Arabs and wiped out.’ This was Jabotinsky’s view.

Churchill warned Melchett that the British officials in Palestine and in the Colonial Office ‘are against you, and they will see to it that you do not, in effect, get a sovereign State.’ Churchill’s suggestion was that the Jews ‘insist upon the execution of the Mandate,’ even if it meant accepting a reduction in immigration and probable restriction on the sale of land. That situation might last for five, ten or even twenty years. ‘But never mind, the principle remained unchanged. Your claim, which is based on moral not physical grounds remains unaltered. The world is going to go through stormy and perilous times. There will probably be wars; no one knows what the outcome of these will be. Through all this period causes will survive: little territories will not. The great cause of Zionism is capable of surviving two or three wars.’

Churchill spoke optimistically of the Zionist future. For as long as Britain was the mandatory power it would preserve Palestine intact and ‘to a greater or lesser degree’ protect the Zionists’ interests. After the period when immigration was restricted and land purchase curtailed, ‘things will then get better again: more immigration will be allowed and more land sales will be allowed. The thing will swing backwards and forwards in accordance with the circumstances and the amount of pressure which Zionists are able to bring to bear on British public opinion.’ Churchill added: ‘Zionism is a great cause and has survived many centuries and will continue to do so. Temporary restrictions of any sort are not incompatible with the great Zionist principles.’

Churchill was emphatic that Partition would be a mistake. The small Jewish State envisaged in the Partition plan, he argued, ‘can be ravished by its enemies, defeated in war, annexed to other powers or suffer any of the other incidents that are common to small States in the fortunes and chances of war. Once you have accepted your State, and it has gone, or been destroyed, your great moral claims will have disappeared too.’ Churchill then used an expression he had not used before, which struck Melchett forcibly: ‘The only reason why the cable has broken down is because you put too much current on it and it has fused. It should be repaired, and is still a good cable. The reason you put too much current on it was due to persecution in Germany, by no means your fault. You are in no way to blame. But the facts must be realised and a more moderate tempo must be used in the future.’

Churchill knew that his advice would be deeply disappointing to the Zionists, whose persistent hope was for a more rapid pace of immigration. But with Arab hostility so intense that Britain was having to send an increasing number of troops to Palestine, Churchill wanted to see that pace reduced. Even so, he did not believe that it would affect the ultimate goal of Zionism: statehood. If the Mandate was ‘worked a bit slower, on the lines that had been intended,’ he said, eventually he ‘considered it to be inevitable that we should have sovereignty over the whole of Palestine, although that might take a century or two centuries.’ Jewish civilisation, Churchill told Melchett, was ‘the stronger and would ultimately dominate,’ but the Jews ‘must go slowly and not try to hurry on this thing yet.’ He was a friend to Zionism and ‘would do everything to help; but he was ‘not going to be more Zionist than the Zionists.’ Churchill added, in Melchett’s words to Weizmann, that: ‘Of course, if we are going to arrive at an arrangement satisfactory to ourselves he would be the last person in the world to oppose it.’

As to how the Zionists should conduct themselves during the Partition discussions, Churchill told Melchett that he was ‘all for hard bargaining and for taking a great stand on the Balfour Declaration,’ telling Melchett that the Zionists must take up ‘a fighting position.’13

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On 3 September 1937, as the Jewish leaders debated for and against Partition, Churchill wrote an article in the Jewish Chronicle that came down firmly against. He began, however, with a sympathetic account of Weizmann’s desire to accept, reluctantly, the truncated Jewish State. He could ‘readily understand’, he wrote, Dr Weizmann, and others with him who have borne the burden and heat of the day, and without whose personal effort Zionism would perhaps no longer be a reality, being attracted by the idea of a sovereign Jewish State in Palestine, however small, which would set up for the first time, after ages of dispersion and oppression, a coherent Jewish community and rallying point for Jews in every part of the world.’ Instead of constant bickering with British Mandate officials, and annual disputes about the quota of immigrants, there would be ‘a responsible Government and independent autonomous State, a member of the League of Nations, to play its part not only in the Holy Land but in world affairs.’

Opposition to Partition came, Churchill noted, from Jews who ‘complain that the small part, already thickly populated, to be confided to them is wholly inadequate, and offers no real scope for future immigration and expansion.’ But the Arabs, ‘who might perhaps be induced to acquiesce in the present proposals, will certainly resist strenuously any modification of them in favour of the Jews.’ Under Partition, conflict would be inevitable. He doubted that the Jews would ‘rest content with the area assigned to them. Certainly the Arabs will, from the outset, be on the alert against the slightest encroachment.’

The Arabs, ‘children of the desert’ as Churchill described them, were ‘always armed and rapidly improvise a fighting power. The Jews, on the other hand, living in settled districts, will require a regularly trained defence drilling on barrack squares. Naturally, they will arm their soldiers with the best weapons they can buy, and very terrible weapons can now be bought.’ It was almost certain ‘that an electric atmosphere will prevail on both sides.’ Every measure the Jewish State took for its defence would look like ‘a design for aggression.’ A strong Jewish Army, once developed, ‘could always be used to extend the Jewish frontiers if opinion changed – as change it might.’ The trend of events ‘would be set towards an armed collision.’

Churchill saw no solution in the much-discussed proposal that Britain should be the policeman of a partitioned Palestine. If the British forces were to stand ‘between the rival races and interpose a cordon,’ he wrote, they would have to be greatly strengthened, but there were ‘already great demands upon our very small army.’ It might not be easy to provide the necessary garrisons. Fighting would be inevitable. Partition would ‘certainly be attended with friction, and possibly with reprisals by the Arabs upon Jews who wish to dwell in the Arab zone.’

This was a bleak picture. The hopeful assumption which underlay the Peel Report, Churchill pointed out, that once sovereign States, ‘however small and primitive, have become members of the League of Nations, their troubles are ended, they never do any wrong themselves, and will never be molested, is, to say the least of it, premature.’ The British Government had hitherto found it difficult to keep order between Jews and Arabs even when only sporadic local riotings and murders occurred. ‘Why should it be thought more capable of restraining the organised armies which will certainly be brought into being by both these independent Sovereign States?’

The policy of Partition, Churchill warned, ‘will not lead away from violence, but into its very heart; will not end in peace, but in war.’ It would be far better to persevere along the old lines. The Jews were steadily being settled in the land of their fathers. The Arabs might well be conciliated from day to day and month to month by the sense of increased well-being in which both races shared. The best course would be if Jews and Arabs would themselves agree ‘for a term of years the mode of living and the settlement which, without perhaps solving the problems of the future, would afford to the present generation a measure of peace, prosperity, and happiness.’ It is in that direction ‘that wise men should look and bold men march.’14

It was the Jews and Arabs who were about to be called upon to agree upon a settlement. On 23 December the British Government established a new commission of enquiry, headed by Sir John Woodhead, former Finance Member of the Government of Bengal, who was instructed to assemble the materials on which, when the ‘best possible’ scheme of Partition had been formulated, they could then ‘judge its equity and practicability.’15