CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PRIME MINISTER: THE PALESTINE DIMENSION

From the first days of Churchill’s premiership, as fears of a German invasion of Britain intensified, there was a call for all eleven battalions of British troops in Palestine, and their support troops – twenty thousand soldiers in all – to be brought back to Britain. This would leave the Jews at the mercy of Arab attack. Churchill, with his joint authority as Prime Minister, and also Minister of Defence, suggested that the Jews should be armed for their own protection, but on 23 May he was informed by his Principal Private Secretary, Eric Seal, that the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Lloyd, had ‘strong objections’, as he feared the ‘worst possible repercussions on the Arab world.’1

Lord Lloyd was far from alone among British policymakers in fearing that the ‘Arab world’ – however defined – would turn against Britain if it saw any favours being given to the Jews of Palestine, even arming them in self defence. Eric Seal agreed with Lloyd, writing to Churchill: ‘I must confess that I have a strong feeling that he is right about arming the Jews.’2

Churchill was not convinced. ‘How can you remove all the troops and yet leave the Jews unarmed – and disarmed by us?’ he wrote to Seal.3 He then explained to Lloyd what he had in mind. ‘I do not want Jewish forces raised to serve outside Palestine,’ he wrote. ‘The main and almost the sole aim in Palestine at the present time is to liberate the eleven battalions of excellent Regular troops who are now tethered there. For this purpose the Jews should be armed in their own defence, and properly organised as speedily as possible. We can always prevent them from attacking the Arabs by our sea power which cuts them off from the outer world, and by other friendly influences. On the other hand, we cannot leave them unarmed when our troops leave, as leave they must at a very early date.’4

Churchill saw Lloyd, and finding him emphatically opposed to arming the Jews, pressed him to talk with Weizmann ‘about the protection of Jewish settlements; and try to bring him along with you.’ Churchill added: ‘You know what I think about the White Paper.’5 American Jews also expressed their view. At the height of his dispute with Lloyd, Churchill received a telegram from Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador in Washington, stating that the Jews in the United States ‘want Jews in Palestine to be organised under British command to defend Palestine from outside attack and to help the Allies. If Palestine were overrun and Jews had not been put in a position to defend their country, there would certainly be a most deplorable effect on American Jews’ opinion.’6

Lothian’s telegram gave Churchill extra ammunition in his debate with Lord Lloyd. ‘This is a matter in which I take a great interest,’ he wrote to Lloyd on 25 June. ‘The cruel penalties imposed by your predecessor upon the Jews in Palestine for arming have made it necessary to tie up needless forces for their protection. Pray let me know exactly what weapons and organisation the Jews have for self-defence.’7

Those ‘cruel penalties’ were the ten-year prison sentences imposed by Malcolm MacDonald on forty-two Jews who had been caught drilling with weapons; a forty-third was sentenced to life imprisonment. But when, on 27 June, Churchill reiterated in Cabinet that he wished the Jews in Palestine to be armed, Lloyd spoke against. Churchill had no authority to overrule a Secretary of State. All he could do was write and expostulate, pointing out in a letter to Lloyd on the following day that twenty thousand ‘sorely needed’ British and Australian troops were tied up in Palestine. ‘This is the price we have to pay for the anti-Jewish policy which has been persisted in for some years. Should things go badly in Egypt all these troops will have to be withdrawn. The position of the Jewish Colonists will be one of the gravest danger. It is little less than a scandal at a time when we are fighting for our lives that these very large forces should be immobilised in support of a policy which only commends itself to a section of the Conservative Party.’8

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One of those in London in the autumn of 1940 was the Chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, David Ben-Gurion, who had reached Britain from Palestine ten days before Churchill became Prime Minister. The impression that Churchill’s leadership made on Ben-Gurion was profound. On 7 June, after the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, he wrote to his wife about Churchill’s radio broadcast after the evacuation: ‘I know that you cannot stand against Hitler with speeches. Without planes and tank and bombs and cannons we will not destroy the “Mechanized Attila” … But Churchill’s speech was undoubtedly the steadfast and stubborn persistence of the English nation to stand and fight to the end.’

The phrase ‘Mechanized Attila’ had been coined by the Jewish former French Prime Minister, Léon Blum, with whom Churchill had been much impressed in their meetings before the war.

Ben-Gurion understood the nature and the impact of Churchill’s oratory, telling his wife in this same letter: ‘Churchill did not find reassurance in false consolations. He did not hide the severity of the blow that befell the Allies in Flanders: “… our thankfulness for the escape of our Army – must not blind us to the fact that what happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster.” Only a great man who believes in his strength can allow himself to say such bitter words – and before the entire nation. And it was this brave statement that gave meaning and importance to the things he said immediately afterwards – that England would fight until it wins, would fight for years, would fight alone – if it needs to! And the words with which he finished his speech will ring in the ears of the world for years to come.’

Ben-Gurion then quoted those words, which were indeed to be among the most memorable of Churchill’s war utterances, that the British Empire and the French Republic, ‘linked together in their cause and in their needs, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.’9

These words, Ben-Gurion told his wife, ‘were not merely a jest. This is the spirit of the rebellious England, and in it a guarantee for better days – even if not the soonest.’10

On 8 August Ben-Gurion wrote to his wife again: ‘And how great is this nation that found a suitable leader in this terrible hour – and at the right moment, and one could say that if England – and with it all of humanity, were to survive the Nazi disaster – it would be due only to the rule of democracy and freedom that has taken root so deeply. It’s hard to describe how much England has changed. Since Churchill inherited Chamberlain’s place, the silent and confident bravery beating in every Englishman’s heart is the fruit of this exchange.’11

The memory of Churchill’s leadership in 1940 was to inspire Ben-Gurion himself eight years later, when he led a nation likewise believed by many inside it – and out – to be on the verge of destruction.12 In a letter to Churchill sixteen years after the end of the war, Ben-Gurion wrote of how, in London, from the beginning of May until September 1940, ‘I heard the historic speeches in which you gave utterance to the iron determination of your people and yourself to fight to the end against the Nazi foe. I saw you then not only as the symbol of your people and its greatness, but as the voice of the invincible and uncompromising conscience of the human race at a time of danger to the dignity of man, created in the image of God. It was not only the liberties and the honour of your own people that you saved.’13

On 20 August, in the course of one of his most stirring wartime speeches, Churchill declared that from the moment the Germans ‘drove the Jews out’ – and thereby lowered their ‘technical standards’ – ‘our science is definitely ahead of theirs.’14 Churchill knew the contribution the German Jewish refugees had made. Some of the first of them had been brought to Britain from Germany following his own meeting with Einstein in the spring of 1933. Churchill also appreciated the Jewish military contribution to the British war effort at this time of grave danger to Britain. In September, fifteen battalions of Palestinian Jews, almost 20,000 men – all volunteers – were incorporated into the British Army and sent to join the defence of Egypt against Italian and German attack.

From the outbreak of the war in September 1939, tens of thousands of ‘enemy aliens’ had been arrested and interned in Britain. Some were German Nazis then resident in Britain, some were German anti-Nazi refugees, and others were German citizens who happened to be in Britain when war broke out, including many German and Austrian Jews, among them Churchill’s pre-war supporter Eugen Spier. Fears of a German parachute landing, and of a fifth column that would support the invaders behind the lines, meant that an immediate, all-encompassing, unselective action was needed. At the beginning of August, when the threat of parachute landings had receded, Churchill told the War Cabinet that, with Britain’s position ‘considerably more secure than in May’, it should be possible ‘to take a somewhat less rigid attitude in regard to the internment of aliens.’15 A day later, he authorised the liberation ‘of considerable numbers’ of the internees, ‘now that we are feeling a good deal firmer on our feet,’ as he explained on 2 August to the chairman of the Council of Aliens.16

Churchill encouraged those internees who were released to join the British Army. Many did so, fighting on the war fronts as they opened up, and volunteering for missions behind German lines, where their fluency in German would be both a protection and a source of intelligence information.

On 15 September, a wave of Italian warplanes bombed Tel Aviv. There were five military deaths: four British and one Australian soldier. Ninety-five Jews, all civilians, were also killed, fifty-eight of them children. As soon as Churchill was told of the raid, he telegraphed to the Mayor of Tel Aviv, the city he had visited two decades earlier: ‘Please accept my deep sympathy in losses sustained by Tel Aviv in recent air attack. This act of senseless brutality will only strengthen our united resolve.’17

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On 20 November 1940 Churchill received details from the Jewish Agency of the situation of those Jews, the ‘illegal’ immigrants, who had been deported by the British authorities in Palestine to the British colonial island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, where they were kept in strict confinement. He took immediate steps to make sure that their detention was less onerous, writing that day to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Lloyd: ‘I had never contemplated the Jewish refugees being interned in Mauritius in a camp surrounded by barbed wire and guards. It is very unlikely that these refugees would include enemy agents, and I should expect that the Jewish authorities themselves, as Weizmann can assure you, would be most efficient and vigilant purgers in this respect.’

Churchill added that deportation to Mauritius, on which Lloyd had insisted, ‘should be confined to future illegal immigrants’, and that those in Palestine, ‘after careful vetting, be allowed to stay.’18 On 22 November Churchill wrote again to Lloyd: ‘As the action has been announced, it must proceed, but the conditions in Mauritius must not involve these people being caged-up for the duration of the war. The Cabinet will require to be satisfied about this.’19

That autumn, in Germany, a Committee for Sending Jews Overseas, organised by an SS lieutenant, Adolf Eichmann, had chartered three ships in Romania, on which a total of 3,600 Jews, most of them from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, left the Romanian Black Sea port of Tulcia in September 1940 and arrived in Palestine separately, starting on 1 November. The SS aim was to embarrass the British Government by sending Jews to Palestine who did not have the necessary immigration certificates. Following the pre-war policy laid down by Neville Chamberlain’s Cabinet, each ship was intercepted by the Royal Navy. Its passengers were then transferred to a fourth ship, the Patria, for transport to the British Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, where they would be interned with the other ‘illegals’ already aboard.

The Patria was a pre-First World War French ship that had been seized by the British in Haifa harbour in June 1940, after the French-German armistice. It was about to leave Haifa, with 1,972 of the recently arrived illegals on board, when it was blown up in Haifa harbour. The explosive charge had been set by the Haganah, the Jewish Agency’s military arm, with the aim of preventing the ship from sailing. The charge had proved more devastating than intended. The British Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East, General Wavell, telegraphed to the Secretary of State for War that the survivors of the explosion, which had killed 267 of the refugees, must still be shipped to Mauritius.

In this telegram, Wavell warned that if the survivors of the explosion were allowed to stay in Palestine ‘it will be spread all over Arab world that Jews have again successfully challenged decision of British Government and that policy of White Paper is being reversed. This will gravely increase prospect of widespread disorders in Palestine.’20

Wavell’s telegram was seen by Churchill, who replied to it himself: ‘Personally, I hold it would be an act of inhumanity unworthy of British name to force them to re-embark.’ In instructing Wavell to let the refugees stay in Palestine, Churchill commented: ‘I hope at least that you will believe that the views I have expressed are not dictated by fear of violence.’21

As a result of Churchill’s intervention, the Patria survivors were allowed to remain in Palestine. But the Cabinet was equally insistent that in future all illegals who were intercepted should be sent to Mauritius. Churchill agreed, ‘provided’, as he had insisted two weeks earlier, ‘these refugees are not sent back to the torments from which they have escaped and are decently treated.’22 When the European war ended, the deportees in Mauritius were allowed to leave: eighty per cent chose to go to Palestine and were admitted without delay.

The issue of illegal immigration was again on the Cabinet agenda on Christmas Eve, when ministers argued in favour of the strictest measures against those illegal immigrants who were caught as they tried to land on the soil of the Jewish National Home. But Churchill informed the Commonwealth Governments that the British Government ‘have also to consider their promises to the Zionists, and to be guided by general considerations of humanity towards those fleeing from the cruellest forms of persecution.’23

Having received this clear indication of Churchill’s attitude, Sir John Shuckburgh, the former head of Churchill’s Middle East Department, who had become Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office, took steps to avoid the Prime Minister’s scrutiny of his department’s actions. He did this by not informing Churchill of the suspension of the quota. On 24 December, Shuckburgh told his departmental colleagues: ‘Our object is to keep the business as far as possible on the normal administrative plane and outside the realms of Cabinet policy and so forth.’24 As a result of this civil service decision, Churchill was not informed when, soon afterwards, the quota for April to September 1941 was also suspended, and no immigration certificates were issued for that period either.

Churchill’s Cabinet colleagues looked askance at his contrasting attitude to Jews and Arabs. On 9 January 1941 news reached the Colonial Office from the Governor of Aden that there was jubilation in the colony as a result of a British victory over the Italians at Bardia in North Africa, and that photographs of Churchill as ‘the Victorious Vizier’ were in great demand.25 Lord Lloyd asked his officials to write to Churchill’s Principal Private Secretary, John Martin: ‘Lord Lloyd thinks that the Prime Minister might like to see that some Arabs have virtue in them.’26 The word ‘some’ was underlined. Martin showed the note to Churchill, who noted on it: ‘I have been one of the best friends the Arabs ever had, and have set up Arab rulers in Transjordania and Iraq which still exist.’27

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In German-occupied Poland, the Jews were being confined to ghettos and reduced to penury and starvation. From Romania, one of Germany’s allies, news of the imminent killing of Jews by members of the fascist Iron Guard reached London at the end of January 1941. Churchill felt that a protest should be made at once to the Romanian dictator, Ion Antonescu, and advised Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary: ‘Would it not be well to tell General Antonescu that we will hold him and his immediate circle personally responsible in life and limb if such a vile act is perpetrated?’ Churchill added, ‘Perhaps you may think of something more diplomatic than this.’28 In fact, the killings had taken place before Churchill had been told that they were imminent: in sadistic fury, the Iron Guard had hunted down and killed several hundred Jews, injuring thousands more, and looting hundreds of shops and homes.

Despite the Palestinian Jewish battalions that had been formed, Dr Weizmann still wanted a specifically Jewish force, with its own insignia and flag, to serve as an integral part of the British Army. Weizmann hoped for a complete division of 12,000 men. Churchill was supportive, but General Wavell was opposed, arguing, as he had when the refugees on the Patria were about to be allowed to stay in Palestine, that this would create anger and protest in the Arab world. Churchill was indignant, writing to the new Colonial Secretary, Lord Moyne, on 1 March: ‘General Wavell, like most British military officers, is strongly pro-Arab. At the time of the licences to the shipwrecked illegal immigrants being permitted, he sent a telegram not less strong than this, predicting widespread disaster in the Arab world, together with the loss of the Basra-Baghdad-Haifa route. The telegram should be looked up, and also my answer, in which I overruled the General and explained to him the reason for the Cabinet decision. All went well and not a dog barked. It follows from the above that I am not in the least convinced by all this stuff’: Wavell’s fears that any favour shown to the Jews in Palestine would lead to the whole Arab world turning against Britain.’ Churchill added that the Arabs, under the impression of recent British victories, ‘will not make trouble now.’

With Wavell about to oversee a desperately risky British military commitment to Greece, Churchill did not feel able to overrule him. The Jewish army project was put off for six months, but, Churchill wrote, it ‘may be reconsidered again in four months.’29 For the War Office and the Colonial Office, however, this postponement provided an excuse for a far longer delay.

When Churchill saw Weizmann on 12 March, he told the Zionist leader that there was no need for a long conversation as their thoughts were ‘99 per cent identical.’ Churchill added that whenever he saw him it gave him ‘a twist in his heart’. He would have to postpone the Jewish military force, he said, but stressed that he would not let Weizmann down.

One of those ‘other matters’ was the post-war future of the Jewish community in Palestine. Churchill believed he could persuade the existing independent Arab States to accept a Jewish State in their midst, once Germany and Italy – the persistent stimulators of Arab unrest – had been defeated. ‘At the end of our conversation,’ Weizmann noted, ‘the PM said that he was thinking of a settlement between us and the Arabs after the war. The man with whom we should come to an agreement is Ibn Saud. He said the PM would see to it and would use his good offices.’ Ibn Saud ‘would be made the Lord of the Arab countries’, the ‘Boss of the Bosses’ was how Churchill expressed it. But Churchill added, as Weizmann noted, that Ibn Saud ‘would have to agree with Weizmann (he put it that way) with regard to Palestine.’30

The issue of arming the Jews inside Palestine arose again as German and Italian forces advanced deep into Egypt, threatening to reach the Suez Canal. At the same time, Churchill knew from his most secret sources that Germany was putting pressure on Turkey to allow the passage of German troops through Turkey, thus threatening Palestine from the north. On 10 May, a year to the day after he had become Prime Minister, Churchill wrote to Moyne’s successor as Colonial Secretary, Viscount Cranborne – ‘I have always been most strongly in favour of making sure that the Jews have proper means of self-defence for their Colonies in Palestine. The more you can get done in this line, the safer we shall be.’31

With the danger of German forces moving south through neutral Turkey and north from Egypt in a pincer attack on Palestine, the Jewish community was encouraged by the British to prepare a plan of self-defence, and to build fortifications on the crest of Mount Carmel, high above Haifa, to face the attackers whether they came from the north or the south.

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Three years before the 1939 White Paper’s intended permanent Arab majority in Palestine was due to take effect, Churchill began his plans to prevent it coming to pass. On 19 May 1941 he dictated a note for the War Cabinet that at the time of giving ‘very great advancements to the Arab world’ – postwar independence for both Syria and Lebanon – ‘we should, of course, negotiate with Ibn Saud a satisfactory settlement of the Jewish problem; and, if such a basis were reached, it is possible that the Jewish State of Western Palestine might form an independent Federal Unit in the Arab Caliphate.’ Churchill added: ‘This Jewish State would have to have the fullest rights of self-government, including immigration and development, and provision for expansion in the desert regions to the southward, which they would gradually reclaim.’32

The southward desert region was the largely uninhabited Negev, home to small numbers of Bedouin nomads, an area Churchill had long believed ought to be developed by the Jews, and about which Weizmann had first written to him more than twenty years earlier.

The future of the Jewish community in Palestine was again in Churchill’s mind during his first wartime meeting with President Roosevelt in August 1941. On 20 August, the President presented Churchill with the Atlantic Charter, his vision of the postwar world. Under this, Britain and the United States would pledge themselves ‘to respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.’33 Churchill supported such a promise, but not with regard to the Arabs of Palestine, explaining to Roosevelt that ‘the Arabs might claim by majority that they could expel the Jews from Palestine, or at any rate forbid all future immigration.’ Churchill added, by way of explanation of his concern: ‘I am strongly wedded to the Zionist policy, of which I was one of the authors.’34

Roosevelt was not swayed, but Churchill persevered. At a meeting of the War Cabinet on 2 October he insisted that if Britain and the United States ‘emerged victorious from the war, the creation of a great Jewish State in Palestine would inevitably be one of the matters to be discussed at the Peace Conference.’ Not all Churchill’s Cabinet colleagues shared his vision. During this meeting the Colonial Secretary Lord Moyne reported that Weizmann and other members of the Zionist Organisation, ‘were making increasingly large claims as to the possibilities of Jewish immigration after the war.’ Weizmann had recently suggested ‘that at least three million Jews should be absorbed comparatively quickly into Palestine.’ This, Moyne told the War Cabinet, was ‘impracticable, and he thought that the time had come when we should say something to prevent our silence being taken as evidence of assent to these increasing claims.’

In response to Moyne’s remarks, Churchill told the War Cabinet that he was ‘disposed to doubt the need for a public reply to these claims, but thought that perhaps a private warning might be given.’ In a remark that was to be at variance with his own hostile policy towards Jewish immigration after the war, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour and National Service, said that ‘if an autonomous Jewish State could be set up, the question of regulating the flow of immigration thereto would be a matter to be settled by the authorities of that State. This would greatly ease our difficulties in the matter.’35 For a brief moment, Churchill, and one of his future opponents on the question of future Jewish statehood, were in agreement.