CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE FIRST NINE MONTHS OF WAR

On 3 September 1939, two days after the German invasion of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany. That day, Neville Chamberlain brought Churchill back into the Cabinet after ten years exclusion, appointing him First Lord of the Admiralty, the post he had held on the outbreak of war in 1914. On 19 September, Weizmann dined with him at his official residence, Admiralty House. Brendan Bracken, one of the Conservative rebels who had voted against the Palestine White Paper four months earlier, was present. The Jewish Agency notes of the meeting recorded Churchill’s suggestion that Weizmann prepare ‘a list of our requirements’ with regard to the participation of the Palestinian Jews in the British war effort, and should consult Brendan Bracken with regard to it. Churchill then said ‘that he would then see that it was put through.’

During their talk, Weizmann gave Churchill an indication of ‘the spirit of the Jews of Palestine’, pointing out that 75,000 young Jewish men and women there had registered for national service, to fight as part of the British armed forces wherever they might be needed. Churchill asked if they were armed, ‘and on receiving a negative reply said that he would arm them.’ If the Jews were armed, Churchill said, it would be possible to take British troops away from Palestine.

When Churchill said that ‘presumably we would not need first-class arms for these people,’ Weizmann replied that what was important ‘was to create cadres and establish a military organisation.’ Churchill asked that Bracken and Weizmann ‘prepare something definite.’ He added that he believed that once the Jews were armed ‘the Arabs would come to terms with them.’1 Encouraging words, sincerely meant, but Churchill was unable to persuade the Cabinet.

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To the annoyance of his Cabinet colleagues, Churchill continued to challenge the White Paper, and to speak in Cabinet against draconian restrictions on future Jewish land purchase. These restrictions, unlike the immigration restrictions, had yet to be finalised. On 15 December Churchill wrote to Malcolm MacDonald: ‘I should be obliged to you if you would let me know whether, and if so when, the question of applying the new Land Ordinance to Palestine will come before the Cabinet, and also to ask that it would be brought before the Cabinet before being put into execution.’ He noted: ‘It will be the cause of very great friction with the Jews and with Dr Weizmann, and will raise political issues in the House of Commons. I feel in view of my past association with the Palestine question, that I ought not to let the matter pass without discussion.’

Churchill saw Weizmann again on 17 December. ‘Mr Churchill was very cordial,’ record the Jewish Agency notes, and deeply interested in Weizmann’s forthcoming visit to America. Weizmann thanked Churchill ‘for his unceasing interest in Zionist affairs,’ telling him, ‘You stood at the cradle of this enterprise; I hope that you will see it through.’ When Churchill asked Weizmann what he meant by ‘seeing it through’, Weizmann replied ‘that after the war the Zionists would wish to have a State of some three or four million Jews in Palestine.’ To this Churchill replied, ‘Yes, indeed, I quite agree with that.’2

The proposed Land Transfer Regulations forbade further Jewish land purchase throughout the area now known as the West Bank, as well as in most of present-day Galilee: more than four million acres of Mandatory Palestine. Although Jews would be allowed to continue to buy land in areas of existing Jewish settlement along much of the coast and in the hinterland of Haifa, Jewish land purchases would be strictly curtailed in the immediate environs of Jerusalem – a city with a Jewish majority – and in the Jezreel Valley, where there were already more than twenty Jewish farming villages. Jews were also forbidden to extend their land purchases in three other areas of existing Jewish settlement: the Jerusalem corridor, the area around Beersheba, and the area north of Acre.

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In a memorandum that he wrote for the War Cabinet on Christmas Day 1939, Churchill was sharply critical of a proposed Foreign Office telegram to the British Ambassador in the United States, Lord Lothian. The telegram was a re-iteration of the 1939 Palestine White Paper and its restrictions on Jewish immigration. Churchill, who less than eight months earlier had been the leading parliamentary critic of the restrictions, was not pleased. The ‘trend of American opinion’ since the outbreak of the war, he warned, ‘has been disappointing, and the movement to interpret neutrality in the strictest manner has gathered unexpected strength.’ As American attention was becoming increasingly concentrated upon the following year’s Presidential election, ‘do we really wish at this juncture to throw what Lord Lothian calls “the powerful factor” of the influence of American Jewry into the scales against us? Can we afford to do so?’

Churchill then reminded his Cabinet colleagues that ‘it was not for light or sentimental reasons that Lord Balfour and the Government of 1917 made the promises to the Zionists which have been the cause of so much subsequent discussion. The influence of American Jewry was rated then as a factor of the highest importance, and we did not feel ourselves in such a strong position as to be able to treat it with indifference.’ With a Presidential election only a year away, ‘and when the future is full of measureless uncertainties, I should have thought it was more necessary, even than in November 1917, to conciliate American Jewry and enlist their aid in combating isolationist and indeed anti-British tendencies in the United States.’

He was ‘most reluctant’, Churchill wrote, ‘to stir pre-war disputes; but I cannot help being struck with the uncompromising tone of the draft telegram just sent to Lord Lothian. It must be remembered that the White Paper gave rise to the sharpest differences of opinion in the House of Commons. The Labour and Liberal Opposition denounced it as a breach of faith. Mr Lloyd George and I, who both were concerned in the giving or interpretation of the original promise, were forced to testify in this sense. Both the Liberal and Labour Parties voted against the White Paper, and a number of Conservatives, of whom I was one, voted with them. The Labour Party spokesman announced that should they obtain power, they could not be bound by the White Paper as an instrument.’ Since then the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations ‘has pronounced against the validity of the White Paper, having regard to the conditions of the Mandate. In fact it is hardly possible to find a topic more calculated to divide British opinion and to enable those elements who support the war, but do not like the Government, to come together, and to make a powerful case that our war effort is being hampered by undue insistence upon the views of the pre-war Cabinet.’

It would seem, Churchill pointed out, ‘that if the war darkens and deepens, we may have increasingly to rely upon the support of the Liberal and Labour Parties to marshal the whole force of the nation. They would certainly regard the White Paper as a grievous obstacle. Moreover it seems to me most unlikely that any future British Government which may take office in the next five years will espouse the theme of the White Paper that all Jewish immigration into Palestine will be closed down at the end of that period, unless the Arab majority is found willing to re-open it.’ It was wrong for the draft telegram to Lord Lothian to speak about the White Paper ‘as a just, fixed, unalterable settlement.’

Churchill told his War Cabinet colleagues – all of whom had supported the restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine—that Weizmann had gone to see him before he left for New York. ‘I am sure,’ Churchill wrote, ‘that it is his whole desire to bring United States opinion as far as he possibly can on to our side, but the line indicated in the draft telegram may well make his task impossible, and he will find himself confronted with the active resentment of American Jewry. Their anger may become public and be readily exploited by all unfavourable elements in the United States. This may do us great harm there; and when the repercussions of this outcry reach this country the Government will have to face a debate in the House of Commons which will be not only embarrassing, but dangerous and damaging to our common interest.’

What Lord Lothian should be told to say, in Churchill’s view, was that the White Paper represented the sincere effort of the pre-war Cabinet to hold the scales evenly between Jew and Arab, and to fulfil all the pledges which had been given, ‘but that there were admittedly great differences of opinion about this in the House of Commons; and that it was our desire during the war to reduce all domestic controversies to the smallest limits. He could continue that His Majesty’s Government were not now prepared to take a new view of the policy announced by the former Cabinet, but that having regard to the attitude adopted by the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, they felt that the future of Palestine was one of the questions which must find its place in the general peace settlement at the end of the war; and that meanwhile nothing would be done to prejudice the final form which that settlement would take.’

This was to be Churchill’s theme throughout the war: that no permanent restriction on Jewish immigration should be imposed, but that the future of Palestine should be determined at a peace conference after the war. ‘The one thing he ought not to say,’ Churchill told his colleagues, ‘is that with the world in flux and the life of every European nation and the British Empire hanging in the balance, the sole fixed, immutable inexorable fact was that Jewish immigration into Palestine would come to an end after five years in accordance with the White Paper.’

Astonished by the continuing intensity of feeling against Jewish immigration among his War Cabinet colleagues, and in the Foreign Office, Churchill ended his Christmas Day memorandum: ‘Many people are called upon in these days to make sacrifices, and sacrifices not only of opinion, in order to save the country, and I venture to urge for the sake of our sailors and soldiers, and of all our hopes of victory that we also should allow no minor obstacles to complicate our task.’3 The Cabinet Ministers were unmoved; most of them had been in the Cabinet seven months earlier when the policy had been decided.

Determined to prevent Churchill having information about the trickle of Jews who were making their way to Palestine by sea illegally, the civil servants concerned decided that he should not be informed that Royal Navy ships, for which he was responsible, were being used to intercept refugee traffic. When he discovered this at the beginning of 1940 he was incensed. On 4 January 1940 he wrote to MacDonald: ‘I was somewhat surprised to see that the telegram about intercepting was sent off without being shown to me. These orders cannot be carried out.’4

On 12 February 1940 the question of Palestine was on the War Cabinet agenda, when, at the start of the final discussion on the Land Transfer Regulations, Churchill told his colleagues he ‘regretted greatly that this policy should be adopted in the interests of one of the two parties to whose welfare the Mandate had enjoined us to pay an equal regard.’ He went on to point out that the proposed land transfer restrictions, as first set out in the White Paper, had been condemned by the majority of the Mandates’ Commission at Geneva. In his view, ‘it was a shortsighted policy’ that would ‘put a stop to agricultural progress in Palestine.’

After stressing, as he had done several times before in the House of Commons, that the Jewish settlers had made ‘tremendous strides in recent years, while there was no prospect that the Arabs would ever abandon their primitive methods of cultivation,’ Churchill told his War Cabinet colleagues that it was a ‘striking fact’ that the Arab population had shown the largest increase in those areas where land had been purchased by Jews. The policy of restricting land sales would almost certainly be followed by a slump in land values, ‘from which Arabs and Jews alike would suffer.’ In addition, he asked, ‘what was the urgency in taking these steps? Our action would cause a great outcry in American Jewry.’

The Secretary of State for War, Oliver Stanley, had a different perspective. ‘Looking at the matter from the economic point of view,’ he said, ‘it might be a good thing for Palestine, Jew and Arab alike, if steps were taken to slow down the movement for the intensive cultivation of the land. There was great danger of over-production of citrus fruits.’ MacDonald, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, said he and his advisers ‘were inclined to hold this view,’ but that, ‘on the other hand, one could not withhold one’s tribute of admiration for the work the Jews had carried out in reviving a dead countryside.’ It had long been government policy, MacDonald added, to teach the Palestinian Arabs to modernise their agricultural methods, and this might be continued by an offer of financial assistance.

Churchill responded by saying that he ‘personally, ascribed to Government encouragement very little of the credit for the great agricultural improvements which had taken place in Palestine. Broadly speaking, they were all the result of private Jewish efforts. So far as the Government of Palestine had played any part in agricultural development, it was with Jewish money wrung from the settlers by taxation.’ Nor was Churchill impressed by ‘the political grounds on which it was attempted to justify our action in bringing this great agricultural experiment to an end. The political argument, in a word, was that we should not be able to win the war without the help of the Arabs.’ Churchill said he did ‘not in the least admit the validity of that argument.’

Churchill then told his colleagues that provided ‘there was no ambiguity about his position, and that his views were on record in the War Cabinet Minutes, he would not press further this opposition to the Secretary of State’s land proposals.’

Turning to the question of arming the Jews, Churchill said that ‘it might have been thought a matter for satisfaction that the Jews in Palestine should possess arms, and be capable of providing for their own defence. They were the only trustworthy friends we had in that country and they were much more under our control than the scattered Arab population.’ Churchill thought ‘that the sound policy for Great Britain at the beginning of the war would have been to build up, as soon as possible, a strong Jewish armed force in Palestine. In this way we should have been able to use elsewhere the large and costly British Cavalry force, which was now to replace the eleven infantry battalions hitherto locked up in Palestine.’

It was ‘an extraordinary position’ Churchill concluded, ‘that at a time when the war was probably entering its most dangerous phase, we should station in Palestine a garrison one-quarter the size of our garrison in India’ – and this for the purpose of forcing through a policy which, in his judgment, was unpopular in Palestine and in Great Britain alike.5

Churchill also reiterated at the War Cabinet the need to make use of both Jewish and Arab military manpower ‘so as to free for use elsewhere the greater part of the Regular battalions now held there for internal security purposes.’ By ‘balancing the Arabs against the Jews’ in the units that might be formed, ‘not only would an outlet be provided for the more adventurous spirits in those peoples, but each community would be enabled to keep watch upon the other.’ Despite these arguments, the War Cabinet would not agree to arming the Jews of Palestine, or to a joint Jewish-Arab force. Churchill’s opposition to the Jewish land purchase restrictions was likewise unsuccessful. Nor did his circulation to the War Cabinet on 24 February of a telegram that Weizmann had sent him, describing the ‘deplorable’ results of the restrictions, and not only in Jewish circles, have any influence.6

The Land Transfer Regulations were put in place on 28 February.7 ‘The effect of these regulations,’ David Ben-Gurion, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency, declared, ‘is that no Jew may acquire in Palestine a plot of land, a building, or a tree, or any right in water, except in towns and a very small part of the country.’ The regulations ‘not only violate the terms of the Mandate but completely nullify its primary purpose.’8

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In the first week of May 1940 there was mounting criticism in Parliament of Chamberlain’s conduct of the war. The question of who would succeed him dominated political talk. On 8 May Sir Samuel Hoare, the Secretary of State for Air, and one of those closest to the pulse of the Conservative Party, drew up a private list of what he called ‘Winston’s mistakes’ – mistakes that made him an unsuitable candidate to succeed Chamberlain. One of these mistakes read tersely: ‘Pro-Zionist row over land settlement in Palestine.’9

Fortunately for Britain, and for the Jews in Palestine, Zionist considerations did not determine who would become Prime Minister. When, on 10 May 1940, German forces struck simultaneously at Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, Chamberlain agreed to resign. That evening a young Palestinian Jew, Ben Gale, who was in Tel Aviv, recalled how, in the middle of a lecture, ‘the chairman interrupted the speaker to read a note handed to him by a messenger.’ The note read: ‘Chamberlain has stepped down and Winston Churchill is now Prime Minister.’ ‘Everyone in the large hall stood up and cheered wildly. With Churchill at the helm there was now hope for the Jews of Palestine!’10

At the Jewish Agency’s office in London, the historian Lewis Namier, whom Churchill had consulted on his Marlborough biography eight years earlier, ‘picked up echoes of afflicted Jewry’s deliverance that had rustled through their ranks at Churchill’s elevation.’11