CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PALESTINE: A VIGILANT EYE

In the summer of 1943, after discussion with Weizmann, Churchill put forward a plan whereby Britain would offer King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia the leadership of an Arab Federation throughout the Middle East, and pay him £20 million a year, in exchange for his support for a Jewish State in Palestine.1 But Anthony Eden was outraged when he heard from the British Embassy in Washington that Weizmann, in conversation with Roosevelt’s foreign policy adviser Sumner Welles, had referred to the project as ‘the PM’s plan’, as if it were a fact.

Indignantly, Eden wrote to Churchill that such a move would be the opposite of British official policy. ‘I do not know how far Dr Weizmann has authority to speak in your name,’ Eden wrote, ‘but I am a little worried about the danger of confusion arising in Washington. Our present Palestine policy has been accepted by Parliament. I know well your personal feeling on this but there has been no discussion suggesting that the US government should be approached as regards the possibility of modifying it.’ Eden went on to remind Churchill – who knew this all too well – that the 1939 Palestine White Paper, voted for by a large parliamentary majority, was unequivocally against letting Palestine become a Jewish State.2 Churchill replied, without withdrawing from his position: ‘Dr Weizmann has no authority to speak in my name. At the same time, I expressed these views to him when we met some time ago and you have often heard them from me yourself.’3

In his continuing opposition to the 1939 Palestine White Paper, Churchill was under pressure to accept that one of the few Cabinet supporters of Jewish statehood, Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, should not be a member of the Cabinet committee set up to discuss the issue. On 11 July Churchill wrote to Eden: ‘I have decided not to remove the Secretary of State for India’s name from the Cabinet Committee on Palestine and the Jews. It is quite true he has my way of thinking on this point, which no doubt is to be deplored, but he has great knowledge and mental energy.’4

Churchill knew that Amery, as an Under Secretary in Lloyd George’s government, had been a strong supporter of the Balfour Declaration when it was under discussion in 1917. What he did not know was that Amery was of Hungarian Jewish descent on his mother’s side: that did not become known until many years after Churchill’s death.

A further element entered into the Palestine debate when Roosevelt, under pressure from his State Department, suggested arming the Arabs of Palestine in order to gain their support for the Allied war effort, and hopefully their participation in the wider struggle. On 6 October Churchill wrote to Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office: ‘I could, of course, point out to the President the dangers of arming the Arabs while leaving the Jews practically disarmed, and the serious consequences this may have on the fulfilment of our policies towards the Jews at the end of the war. This, I think, would be decisive. The whole matter should be watched with the greatest vigilance.’5

On 25 October Weizmann was one of Churchill’s luncheon guests at Chequers. Churchill’s brother Jack and his son Randolph were also there, as was Clement Attlee, Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party. Weizmann’s notes give a vivid account of the discussion, during which Churchill told those present that ‘after they had crushed Hitler they would have to establish the Jews in the position where they belonged. He had had an inheritance left to him by Lord Balfour, and he was not going to change.’ Weizmann commented that he did not think Churchill would change, but that ‘there were dark forces working against them which might force the Cabinet’s hand.’ Churchill told Weizmann, ‘You have some very good friends: for instance, Mr Attlee and the Labour Party are committed on this matter.’

Attlee interjected that he certainly was committed, adding that he thought ‘something should be done’ about allowing the Jews to settle in Transjordan. Churchill commented he had been thinking about Partition, but that Transjordan as an extra outlet for the Jews ‘was a good idea’, thus echoing Weizmann’s argument two decades earlier that Transjordan should be part of the Jewish National Home. Churchill added: ‘He knew the terrible situation of the Jews. They would get compensation, and they would also be able to judge the criminals.’

Attlee then told Weizmann that ‘some of his people were overplaying their hand,’ a reference to Jewish demands for statehood immediately after the war, and that the British ‘were sometimes threatened.’ Churchill said ‘they should not do that. He personally would prefer one good row. He would advise them not to have a series of rows. What they had to do was to watch the timing. He could not say publicly what he was telling Dr Weizmann now: there would be questions, and he would have to lose time explaining. They could quote his public utterances, and say that he would not budge from them.’

Churchill told Weizmann that he understood that there were some Jews in America who opposed Zionism. To combat this attitude, he suggested that Weizmann should ‘try and win over’ Bernard Baruch. Churchill then informed Weizmann that he had told Baruch he was wrong to be against Zionism ‘but had not succeeded in persuading him.’ Churchill then assured Weizmann that he was ‘not going to change his views; he would bite deeply into the problem, and it was going to be “the biggest plum of the war.”’

When Churchill mentioned Partition, both Randolph Churchill and Weizmann demurred. Churchill replied ‘that he had been against it originally, but now they had to produce something new instead of the White Paper. He had not meant Partition in the literal sense – he then mentioned something about the Negev and Transjordan’ – both of which might be part of the future Jewish State.

Speaking of the Arabs, Churchill remarked that ‘they had done very little, and in some instances had made things difficult for us. He would remember this when the day of reckoning came.’ When the Palestine issue came up he would speak out, he said, and he then gave his listeners the headings of his speech. He ended by saying that Weizmann ‘need not worry,’ the Jews had ‘a wonderful case.’6

Two years earlier, in Baghdad, Rashid Ali al-Gailani, the leader of the Iraqi nationalist movement with links to Nazi Germany, had led a military revolt against the British. As he seized power in Baghdad, Rashid Ali assured Germany that his country’s natural resources would be made available to the Axis in return for German recognition of the right of the Arab States to independence and political unity, as well as the right to ‘deal with’ the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were then living in Arab lands.

Rashid Ali had been defeated, but his rebellion, at a time of British military weakness throughout the Middle East and in Greece, had rankled: ‘The Arabs have done nothing for us during this war, except for the rebellion in Iraq,’ Churchill wrote to the Chiefs of Staff Committee in late September. ‘Obviously we shall not proceed with any plan of partition which the Jews do not support.’ Churchill knew well the hostility of British officials in the Middle East to every aspect of Zionism. ‘Of every fifty officers who came back from the Middle East’ he told the Chiefs of Staff Committee, ‘only one spoke favourably of the Jews – but that has merely gone to convince him that he was right.’7

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In January 1944 Churchill was in Washington to discuss war policy during the coming year, when the Allies were to land on the Normandy beaches, take the war to northern Europe, and in time to Germany itself. But the future of the half million Jews in Palestine was never far from his mind. In a telegram from Washington on 12 January 1944 he had harsh words for those Cabinet Ministers who were pressing him to implement the 1939 Palestine White Paper, whereby it had been proposed, as of May 1944, to create an Arab majority government in Palestine, thus making even a partitioned Jewish State impossible. ‘Surely we are not going to make trouble for ourselves in America,’ he telegraphed to Attlee and Eden, and, looking ahead to the Presidential election in November 1944, ‘hamper the President’s chances of re-election for the sake of this low-grade gasp of a defeatist hour.’8

On 15 February 1944 Churchill invited Weizmann to dinner. After the meeting Weizmann was asked by his Zionist colleagues whether Churchill’s response to the idea of a Jewish ‘commonwealth’ in Palestine after the war had been positive. ‘Yes, his attitude is usually encouraging,’ Weizmann reported. ‘We don’t have reason to worry, because we have a good response indeed.’9

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Six months had passed since Churchill had written to Roosevelt about how ‘Our immediate facilities for helping the victims of Hitler’s anti-Jewish drive are so limited.’ An opportunity to do more came in the first months of 1944, as an increasing number of Jews from Romania and Bessarabia began to make their way by ship across the Black Sea to Istanbul. Their aim was to get to Palestine. On 30 March 1944 Moshe Shertok, the head of the international department of the Jewish Agency, asked Oliver Stanley, the Colonial Secretary, to allow any Jew reaching Istanbul from Nazi-occupied Europe to be admitted to Palestine. The precedent was a Colonial Office arrangement to this end, agreed in 1942, but overlaid with tight bureaucratic strings and tape. ‘Eventually,’ Shertok telegraphed to Jerusalem, ‘Stanley agreed liberal interpretation’ – one that would be based on individual applications that the Jewish Agency should itself recommend.

It was a breakthrough in the search for a safe haven. On 3 April Shertok reported to Jerusalem that Stanley had also agreed to ‘keep matters elastic, reviewing policy in light of actual escape from Nazi lands,’ and to make an official British approach to the Turkish Government ‘for liberal transit.’10 The result was quickly seen. On 8 April the Jewish Agency telegraphed from Istanbul to Jerusalem that the steamship Maritza, carrying 244 Jewish refugees from Romania, had arrived that day in Istanbul, and that the passengers would be leaving the city in two days’ time by train for Palestine.

Henceforth, any Jew who reached Istanbul could continue on to Palestine irrespective of Palestine Certificates and quotas – in effect of the 1939 White Paper. Each time a boat with refugees reached Istanbul, the refugees – mostly survivors of the concentration camps in Romania – were sent to Palestine by rail within forty-eight hours. To expedite matters, if there were a hundred Jews on the ship, they were given a single British passport, in its familiar dark blue cover, with each of the names typed on a single sheet of paper and pasted onto the inside cover. With that single passport, every one of the refugees reached Palestine. More than six thousand Jews made that journey of liberation.

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On 15 April 1944, at Chequers, Churchill pondered the question of who should succeed Sir Harold MacMichael, whose term as British High Commissioner in Palestine was coming to an end. The half million Jews of Palestine feared a High Commissioner unsympathetic towards their hopes of statehood. Churchill therefore suggested that Weizmann himself should succeed MacMichael, or, failing Weizmann, that another British Jew, Lord Melchett, the son of the former Sir Alfred Mond, a distinguished industrialist and former Minister of Health, should be chosen.

Churchill saw many benefits of having Weizmann as High Commissioner, the first Jew to hold that office since Sir Herbert Samuel twenty years earlier. When the Colonial Secretary, Oliver Stanley, expressed scepticism, Churchill resorted to a double tactic: stalling, and putting more arguments to make his case. ‘We have plenty of time in which to settle this appointment,’ he wrote, and continued, ‘I do not think it should be of a departmental character. It should certainly be one to give satisfaction to the Jews and, at the same time, do justice to the Arabs. I wonder if Dr Weizmann would take it? He had rendered great service by his science to the Allied cause. He would certainly take a world-wide view. It might ruin him with the Jews, but it would, in the first instance, quell a good deal of the trouble in the United States.’

Churchill added: ‘You can depend on Weizmann. He would not take on a job if he did not mean to stick to the conditions which would have to be imposed. The present Lord Samuel, when Governor of Palestine, held the scales there evenly, and got much abused by fellow Jews. Another possibility would be Lord Melchett, if his health were good enough to stand it, but Weizmann would be better. I believe both of them would be ready to work towards your partition scheme.’ In addition, Churchill wrote, ‘I do not believe at all in Colonial Office officials or military men in this particular task so full of world politics.’11

On 19 April Churchill presided at a meeting of the Defence Committee. General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, warned of the repercussions in Palestine that might follow the political crisis in Egypt, where King Farouk wished to dismiss his Prime Minister and appoint someone more amenable to the royal wishes. The Jews, warned Brooke, ‘who we knew were forming a secret army in Palestine, might well seize on such a moment to create trouble.’ Churchill was sceptical. He did not believe there would be ‘any general trouble with the Jews,’ he said, telling the Defence Committee that there were ‘a small number of extremists who were likely to cause trouble and there might be some murders,’ but a general uprising was most unlikely. It might be advisable, he added, ‘to tell Dr Weizmann that if such murders continued and the campaign of abuse of the British in the American papers did not stop, we might well lose interest in Jewish welfare.’12

Churchill never did ‘lose interest’ either in Jewish welfare or in the Jewish future in Palestine. Having consistently supported the Jewish majority interpretation of the 1922 White Paper, he refused to allow the 1939 White Paper, despite its passage into law by an overwhelming majority of Members of Parliament, to come into effect. This was certainly unconstitutional. But it ensured that the Jews would not be subjected to the rule of those whose one aim was to deny them statehood in any form.

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Early in 1944, Randolph Churchill, who had parachuted behind German lines in Yugoslavia to serve as a liaison officer with the Yugoslav communist partisans led by Marshal Tito, also acted as a conduit for a Jewish Agency request that Palestinian Jews should be parachuted into Nazi-dominated Europe. The Agency hope was that they could contact the surviving Jewish communities, mainly in Hungary and Slovakia, and help organise rescue efforts both for Jews and for escaped Allied prisoners-of-war and aircrew who had been shot down. These Jewish parachutists, trained by the Royal Air Force and parachuted behind German lines, were an integral part of Britain’s war against Hitler. Of the thirty-two volunteers, seven were caught and killed, two of them women, the Hungarian-born Hanna Senesh and the Slovak-born Havivah Reik.13

Following the German occupation of Hungary in mid-March 1944, Weizmann also asked Churchill to approach Marshal Tito. Weizmann wanted Tito to help any Jews who managed to escape from German-occupied Hungary into the Communist-controlled areas of Yugoslavia to be sent on to Allied-controlled southern Italy. Randolph Churchill suggested to his father one way that this might be done: the small aircraft that flew men and supplies into the partisan-held air strips near Topusko in Yugoslavia, would return to their Allied bases at Foggia in southern Italy, with Jewish refugees. Churchill sent Tito a message along these lines, asking him to receive the Jews who managed to flee southward from Hungary. On 21 June Churchill was informed by the Foreign Office: ‘Marshal Tito has consented to facilitate the escape of Jewish refugees through his lines from Hungary, with the idea that they should reach southern Italy, via Dalmatia.’14

A year later, in London, Randolph Churchill informed Weizmann that he ‘had tried to save 115 Jews in Yugoslavia; he has saved 112 but 3 had perished.’15