CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

‘A SENSELESS, SQUALID WAR WITH THE JEWS’

Learning in late August 1946 of British plans to disarm the Jews of Palestine, in an attempt to end the continuing Jewish terrorist attacks on both British and Arab targets, Churchill sent a message to Attlee, through Attlee’s Principal Private Secretary, Leslie Rowan, noting that the disarmament of the Jews ‘carries with it the obligation to protect them from the Arabs.’1

Acts of Jewish terror continued. On 9 September, during an attack on the Area Security Office in Jaffa, a British officer was killed. On 17 October a British police inspector was shot dead in the main street in Jerusalem. On 30 October a British constable was killed during a sabotage action at Jerusalem railway station. On 9 November four British policemen were killed when a booby-trap bomb exploded while they were searching a house for hidden explosives. On 13 November two British policemen were killed while patrolling the Jerusalem-Jaffa railway line. Four days later four policemen were killed when their truck was blown up outside Tel Aviv. On 29 December a British officer and three army sergeants were kidnapped and flogged.

The New Year brought no abatement of Jewish terrorist activity. On 3 January 1947, five British soldiers were injured when their jeeps were blown up by mines. That same day an Arab constable, badly hurt in an earlier attack, died of his injuries. On 12 January four people were killed when a bomb was exploded at the District Police Headquarters in Haifa.2 On 27 January a British judge, Ralph Windham, was kidnapped by six armed Jewish terrorists from his court in Tel Aviv; he was released two days later.

Shortly before Churchill spoke in the Palestine debate of 31 January, the government announced that during the previous year Jewish terrorists had killed forty-five British soldiers, twenty-nine members of the British-manned Palestine Police Force, sixty-three Jewish civilians, sixty Arab civilians, and fourteen British civilians, including two British Jews serving in the Mandate administration.

During the debate of 31 January, Churchill spoke unequivocally of ‘this series of detestable outrages’, but he also cautioned his fellow Members of Parliament – with all his authority as Leader of the Opposition – not to support reprisals against the Jews, and even to be wary of making war on the terrorists. In Churchill’s words: ‘The idea that general reprisals upon the civil population and vicarious examples would be consonant with our whole outlook upon the world of affairs and with our name, reputation and principles, is, of course, one which should never be accepted in any way. We have, therefore, very great difficulties in conducting squalid warfare with terrorists. That is why I would venture to submit to the House that every effort should be made to avoid getting into warfare with terrorists; and if a warfare with terrorists has broken out, every effort should be made – I exclude no reasonable proposal – to bring it to an end.’

Churchill also urged the House, as he had done in his previous speech on Palestine, not to turn its back on a Jewish National Home in Palestine. His friends on the Conservative benches, he pointed out, ‘do not agree with the views which I held for so many years about the Zionist cause. But promises were made far beyond those to which responsible Governments should have committed themselves. What has been the performance? The performance has been a vacuum, a gaping void, a senseless, dumb abyss – nothing.’ The ‘outrageous’ acts of Jewish terror in Palestine, Churchill pointed out, were being committed by a ‘small, fanatical desperate minority.’

Churchill then spoke about one of that ‘fanatical minority’, Dov Gruner, who was under sentence of death. While awaiting execution, Gruner had been asked – following British pressure on the Jewish Agency – to appeal against execution, so that the British Mandate authorities could accept his appeal, and thereby secure the release of Judge Windham, who had been seized as a hostage by Gruner’s terrorist group. In return for not hanging Gruner, the judge would be freed. But Gruner refused to appeal, insisting that the sentence be carried out. While insisting that a sentence once pronounced must be carried out, Churchill spoke with admiration of Gruner’s stand, telling his fellow parliamentarians: ‘The fortitude of this man, criminal though he be, must not escape the notice of the House.’

Churchill turned to the financial aspect of British rule in Palestine. ‘We are told that there are a handful of terrorists on one side and 100,000 British troops on the other.’ The cost to Britain was between £30 million and £40 million a year, ‘which is being poured out and which would do much to help to find employment in these islands, or could be allowed to return to fructify in the pockets of the people.’3 One hundred thousand men was ‘a very definite proportion of our Army for one and a half years. How much longer are they to stay here? And stay for what? In order that on a threat to kill hostages we show ourselves unable to execute a sentence duly pronounced by a competent tribunal. It is not good enough. I never saw anything less recompensive for the efforts now employed than what is going on in Palestine.’

Churchill was convinced that Britain no longer had the means, the will, or the moral right to continue to hold the Mandate. He saw ‘absolutely no reason’ why ‘poor, overburdened and heavily injured’ Britain should continue to suffer ‘all this pain, toil, injury and suffering.’ Unless the United States was prepared to ‘come in with us shoulder to shoulder on a fifty per cent basis on an agreed policy, to take a half and half share of the bloodshed, odium, trouble, expense and worry,’ Britain should lay its Mandate at the feet of the United Nations: ‘Whereas, six months ago, I suggested that we should do that in twelve months I suggest now that the period should be shortened to six months. One is more and more worried and one’s anxiety deepens and grows as hopes are falsified and the difficulties of the aftermath of war, which I do not underrate, lie still heavily upon us in a divided nation, cutting deeply across our lives and feelings.’

Churchill’s conclusion was forthright: ‘I earnestly trust that the Government will, if they have to fight this squalid war, make perfectly certain that the will power of the British State is not conquered by brigands and bandits, and unless we are to have the aid of the United States, they will, at the earliest possible moment, give due notice to divest us of a responsibility which we are failing to discharge and which in the process is covering us with blood and shame.’4

Following the debate of 31 January 1947, the British Labour Government decided to return the Palestine Mandate to the United Nations. This Cabinet decision was made public two weeks later. Britain would leave Palestine as soon as the process of transferring the Mandate to the United Nations could be completed. Meanwhile, despite this decision, Jewish terrorists continued to attack British military targets. On 1 March a bomb was exploded inside the Officers’ Club in Jerusalem. Fourteen officers were killed, the highest single death toll by terrorist action thus far. On 12 March Churchill spoke again in the House of Commons of the cost of the continuing struggle, telling his fellow members: ‘£82 million since the Socialist Government came into power squandered in Palestine, and 100,000 Englishmen now kept away from their homes and work, for the sake of a senseless, squalid war with the Jews, in order to give Palestine to the Arab, or God knows who.’

‘Scuttle everywhere,’ Churchill taunted, ‘is the order of the day – Egypt, India, Burma. One thing at all costs we must preserve: the right to get ourselves world-mocked and world-hated over Palestine, at a cost of £82 million.’5

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British hostility to Zionist enterprise, so often a mask for anti-Semitism, was anathema to Churchill, who challenged it wherever he found it, including among his friends. The fact that Harold Laski, who had recently been appointed head of the Labour Party Secretariat, was Jewish, was a cause of derisive comment by some senior Conservatives. To one of Laski’s detractors, Brigadier General Lord Croft, who had been Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for War in Churchill’s wartime coalition, Churchill wrote words of warning: ‘My Dear Henry, I see you used an expression in your speech the other day about Laski that he was “a fine representative of the old British working-class”, or words to that effect. Pray be careful, whatever the temptation, not to be drawn into any campaign that might be represented as anti-Semitism.’6

Churchill did not know that anti-Jewish sentiments were also being expressed by President Truman, in the privacy of his diary. On 21 July 1947, Truman received a telephone call from Henry Morgenthau Jr, the Secretary of the Treasury, who was much concerned about the ship Empire Rival, on which, on the orders of the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, the Royal Navy was deporting illegal Jewish refugees back to Europe, where they had been living in Displaced Persons camps since the end of the war two years earlier. ‘He’d no business whatever to call me,’ Truman wrote in his diary. ‘The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs.’

Truman then noted that, shortly after the war, Morgenthau had brought a thousand Jews from Europe to New York ‘on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed.’ Truman added: ‘The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as DPs as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political, neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog.’

Truman’s cruel comments were not limited to Jews. ‘Put an underdog on top,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I’ve found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.’7

Churchill had a different perspective; in the sixth and final volume of his war memoirs, first published in 1953, he reflected on two peoples, the Jews and the Greeks. ‘The Greeks rival the Jews in being the most politically-minded race in the world,’ Churchill wrote. ‘No matter how forlorn their circumstances or how great the peril of their country, they are always divided into many parties, with many leaders who fight among themselves with desperate vigour. It has been well said that wherever there are three Jews it will be found that there are two Prime Ministers and one leader of the Opposition. The same is true of this other famous ancient race, whose stormy and endless struggle for life stretches back to the fountain springs of human thought.’

Churchill’s reflections on the Greeks and the Jews continued: ‘No two races have set such a mark upon the world. Both have shown a capacity for survival, in spite of unending perils and sufferings from external oppressors, matched only by their own ceaseless feuds, quarrels, and convulsions. The passage of several thousand years sees no change in their characteristics and no diminution of their trials or their vitality. They have survived in spite of all that the world could do against them, and all they could do against themselves, and each of them from angles so different have left us the inheritance of their genius and wisdom. No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem. Their messages in religion, philosophy, and art have been the main guiding lights of modern faith and culture. Centuries of foreign rule and indescribable, endless oppression leave them still living, active communities and forces in the modern world, quarrelling amongst themselves with insatiable vivacity. Personally I have always been on the side of both, and believed in their invincible power to survive internal strife and the world tides threatening their extinction.’8