CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE STATE OF ISRAEL ESTABLISHED: ‘AN EVENT IN WORLD HISTORY’

Britain’s Palestine Mandate came to an end on 14 May 1948. That day, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the independence and name of the State of Israel. The Soviet Union and the United States both recognised Israel at once. Britain declined to do so. Within a few hours of Israel’s declaration of independence, five Arab armies invaded, from Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan and Egypt, with Iraqi troops in support, seeking to bring a rapid end to the Jewish State. Among those forces was the Arab Legion. Raised and trained in Transjordan, and led by British officers, the Arab Legion opened artillery fire on the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. Several hundred Jews were killed in the fighting before the Jewish Quarter was overrun.

Perturbed that British officers were involved in the attack, Churchill drafted a press statement that he intended to telephone to the BBC and the Press Association. ‘As Parliament is not sitting,’ he wrote, ‘I think it necessary to place on record the deep anxiety that is felt about the policy of the British Government in Palestine.’ Giving up the Mandate was ‘a most grave decision. I never conceived it possible that the Government, in carrying it out, would not show the strictest impartiality between Jew and Arab. Instead of this it appears that the Arab Legion, led by forty British officers, armed with British equipment and financed by British subsidy, has fired on the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem.’

Churchill pointed out that opening fire was ‘a violation of the impartiality which at the least we were bound to observe.’ Article One of the Treaty of Alliance between Britain and Transjordan, ‘signed as recently as March this year,’ prescribed that ‘each of the high contracting parties undertakes not to adopt in regard to foreign countries an attitude which is inconsistent with the Alliance or might create difficulties for the other party thereto.’ By failing to invoke this Article, Churchill wrote, ‘we become in marked degree responsible for the military action of the Arab Legion.’1

To the United States Ambassador in London, Lewis Douglas, Churchill wrote on 26 May: ‘I am deeply disturbed about the situation which has arisen in Palestine, and at the policy of His Majesty’s Government and am proposing to raise the matter in the House of Commons.’2 Churchill’s concern was assuaged, however, two days later when he learned that all British officers in the Arab Legion had been withdrawn from active participation in the attack on Jerusalem. ‘It would be amazing in any Government but this,’ he told a meeting at Perth in Scotland on 28 May, ‘that the danger of allowing British officers to be compromised in this way was not seen beforehand.’3

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On 2 June there was a lunch at the Savoy in Churchill’s honour, given by the Conservative Party. Henry Channon, a Conservative Member of Parliament, noted that Churchill’s reception, although not unfriendly, was ‘tepid’ and he went on to explain: ‘I think that the Party resents both his unimpaired criticism of Munich, recently published, and his alleged pro-Zionist leanings.’4 Churchill’s own frustrations at being unable to influence events in the Middle East from a position of authority were considerable. ‘I do not think events would have taken this particular course,’ he wrote to Lord Melchett on 7 June, ‘if they had not been wrested from my hands in the moment of our general victory. Then there was a chance of a good solution, now I can do no more.’5 Asked by his friend and wartime colleague Brendan Bracken to intervene again in debate, Churchill replied: ‘I cannot do any more on Palestine. Events must take their course.’6

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In September 1948 Churchill was in the South of France, partly on holiday, partly writing his war memoirs. Among those who visited him there was a Conservative Member of Parliament, Robert Boothby, a strong supporter of Zionism, who had written to The Times protesting against the Arab Legion shelling of Jerusalem. Boothby later recalled that when the conversation turned to the future of the Jews then fighting for their survival on the battlefield, ‘I said that they were going to win hands down in Palestine, and get more than they ever expected.’ To Boothby’s remark, Churchill replied: ‘Of course. The Arabs are no match for them. The Irgun people are the vilest gangsters. But, in backing the Zionists, these Labour people backed the winners; and then ran out on them.’ Churchill also told Boothby he was ‘quite right’ to send his letter to The Times.

At that point in the conversation, Churchill’s son-in-law Christopher Soames commented – as Boothby recalled – that public opinion in Britain was ‘pro-Arab and anti-Jew.’ ‘Nonsense,’ replied Churchill. ‘I could put the case for the Jews in ten minutes. We have treated them shamefully. I will never forgive the Irgun terrorists. But we should never have stopped immigration before the war.’ Churchill went on to say that he had always been reluctant to meet Weizmann during the war because he found him so fascinating that he would spend too much of his time talking to him. ‘Weizmann gives a very different reason,’ Boothby said. ‘What is that?’ Churchill asked. ‘Last time I saw him,’ Boothby replied, ‘he said that the reason you would not see him was because, for you, he was “Conscience.”’ Churchill was silent.7

As Churchill worked in the South of France and at Chartwell on his war memoirs, the negotiations to sell them in the United States were handled in large part by Emery Reves. As well as securing Churchill a substantial American advance, Reves also sold the memoirs to thirteen European publishers for translation, and to an Israeli publisher in Tel Aviv who brought out a Hebrew-language edition. The six volumes, entitled The Second World War, focused on British policy, the struggle of the armed forces, and the story of Churchill’s war leadership. The volumes were concerned with Britain at war: the Home Front when it faced the threat of invasion, the struggle to avoid defeat, and the hard, prolonged efforts to destroy the all-powerful Nazi war machine, as well as the war against Japan.

Important though the fate of the Jews was during Churchill’s wartime premiership, and frequent though his wartime interventions were, the Jewish aspect of the war was not a significant part of his volumes. These focused on the Great Powers, and on the battlefields. There were, however, references to Nazi persecution of the Jews in his first volume; to the arming of the Jews in Palestine in volume two; to the Jewish Army in volume three; to Zionist policy in volume four; to the Jews and the future of Palestine in volume five; and to both the Jewish Brigade Group and the persecution of the Jews of Hungary in volume six. This last volume included Churchill’s intervention in July 1944 on behalf of Jews trying to escape from Greece, and his forceful wartime description of the Holocaust as ‘probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.’8

As Churchill was writing the memoirs, this view was confirmed when Emery Reves told him of the fate of his own family, shot to death with more than 1,240 Jews on the frozen banks of the Danube by Hungarian troops and police at Novi Sad, in Hungarian-occupied Yugoslavia. Churchill’s principal research assistant, Bill Deakin, later recalled how shocked Churchill had been to learn of their fate, forced out onto the ice of a tributary of the Danube, which was then shelled, so that they all drowned.9 Reves, who was one of those who read the typescript with a critical eye, never suggested that there should be more mention of the Nazi war against the Jews. Nor did the young Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who was among those Churchill asked to scrutinise the text of volume one, and who made many proposals as to content; Churchill described him as ‘my friend’ Isaiah Berlin.10

In sending Churchill his points on volume one, Berlin wrote: ‘You did, I recollect, order me to be quite candid.’11 In his notes to Churchill, Berlin praised his handling of the ‘tremendous story of the Rise of Hitler.’12 Nor did Bill Deakin, who had witnessed the plight of Jewish refugees in German-occupied Yugoslavia, present Churchill for inclusion in the wartime volumes with more than a fragment of the documents bearing on Jewish issues that were a part of Churchill’s wartime archive – not even the files relating to Churchill’s initiative to help bring Jews out of Yugoslavia to safety.

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After six months of Jewish statehood, Britain’s Labour Government still refused to recognise the State of Israel. On 9 October 1948, during a speech at a Conservative Party rally in North Wales, Churchill declared: ‘The Socialists, more than any other Party in the State, have broken their word in Palestine and by indescribable mismanagement have brought us into widespread hatred and disrepute there and in many parts of the world.’13

In November 1948 Dorothy de Rothschild sent Churchill a memorandum written by twenty-five-year-old Marcus Sieff, a member of the Marks and Spencer family. Sieff, who had spent several months in Israel working for Ben-Gurion, stressed the danger of Arab extremism against Israel if Britain continued in its refusal to recognise the new State. In a covering letter of 2 November 1948 – the thirty-first anniversary of the Balfour Declaration – Sieff wrote to Churchill that many Israeli leaders were anxious to see ties with Britain renewed, but that British policy in the United Nations Assembly with regard to Israel and the Arab States ‘prevents any such rapprochement.’14

Speaking in the House of Commons on 10 December, Churchill raised the question of the British Government’s continual refusal to recognise the State of Israel: ‘The Jews have driven the Arabs out of a larger area than was contemplated in our partition schemes,’ he pointed out, but went on to say: ‘They have established a Government which functions effectively. They have a victorious army at their disposal and they have the support both of Soviet Russia and of the United States. These may be unpleasant facts, but can they be in any way disputed? Not as I have stated them. It seems to me that the Government of Israel which has been set up at Tel Aviv cannot be ignored and treated as if it did not exist.’

Churchill pointed out that nineteen countries had already recognised Israel, ‘and we, who still have many interests, duties and memories in Palestine and the Middle East and who have played the directing part over so many years, would surely be foolish in the last degree to be left maintaining a sort of sulky boycott.’ Britain, he urged, should send an envoy ‘without delay’ to Tel Aviv.15 His suggestion was ignored. Attlee and Bevin could not shake off the bitterness of what they saw as their humiliation by a group of Jews who had been determined to force Britain out of Palestine, and had succeeded. Nor did the British Cabinet wish to offend the Arab countries around Israel whose goodwill, and in the case of Saudi Arabia whose oil, was never far from their minds.

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At the beginning of 1949, armistice negotiations were begun between Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. But there was still spasmodic fighting, which threatened a wider conflict on 7 January 1949, when Israeli aircraft shot down three Royal Air Force Spitfires on a reconnaissance mission over Israeli positions just inside the Sinai border of Egypt. One British pilot was killed. To defuse the crisis, Ernest Bevin ordered the immediate release of the remaining ‘illegal immigrant’ detainees being held by the British in Cyprus. During an emergency debate on 22 January, Churchill spoke with passion of Bevin’s ‘astounding mishandling of the Palestine problem,’ a mishandling, he said, that had been ‘gross and glaring.’

Churchill’s first criticism was that Britain had still not recognised Israel, nine months after that State had been proclaimed in Tel Aviv and had been recognised by the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as by more than a dozen other States. ‘De facto recognition has never depended upon an exact definition of territorial frontiers,’ he told Bevin. ‘There are half a dozen countries in Europe which are recognised today whose territorial frontiers are not finally settled. Surely, Poland is one. It is only with the general Peace Treaty that a final settlement can be made. Whoever said, “How can we recognise a country whose limits and boundaries are not carefully defined?” I am astonished to find the Right Hon. Gentleman giving any countenance to it.’

Bevin had made reference to the mistakes some countries had made in hastily recognising Indonesia. Churchill agreed that recognition, or hasty recognition, ‘would be a bad precedent, but how absurd it is to compare the so-called Republic of Indonesia with the setting-up in Tel Aviv of a Government of the State of Israel, with an effective organisation and a victorious army.’

Churchill then drew Bevin’s attention to a longer timetable than the events of the previous months and years: ‘Whether the Right Honorable Gentleman likes it or not, and whether we like it or not, the coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years. That is a standard of temporal values or time values which seems very much out of accord with the perpetual click-clack of our rapidly-changing moods and of the age in which we live. This is an event in world history. How vain it is to compare it with the recognition, or the claims to recognition, by certain countries, of the Communist banditti, which we are resisting in Malaya, or of the anarchic forces which the Dutch are trying to restrain in Indonesia.’

Many in the Conservative Party including himself, Churchill said, had ‘always had in mind’ that the Jewish National Home in Palestine ‘might some day develop into a Jewish State.’ With the Jewish National Home having come into existence, Churchill mocked, ‘it is England that refuses to recognise it, and, by our actions, we find ourselves regarded as its most bitter enemies. All this is due, not only to mental inertia or lack of grip on the part of the Ministers concerned, but also, I am afraid, to the very strong and direct streak of bias and prejudice on the part of the Foreign Secretary.’

This was a strong accusation against Bevin. As protests erupted, Churchill declared: ‘I do not feel any great confidence that he has not got a prejudice against the Jews in Palestine.’

Churchill pointed out that Bevin had thought in May 1948 that the Arab League, founded in Cairo three years earlier, was stronger ‘and that it would win if fighting broke out.’ He, Churchill, had taken another view: ‘I certainly felt that the spectacle of the Jewish settlements being invaded from all sides – from Syria, Transjordan and Egypt – and with a lot of our tanks and modern tackle was, on the face of it, most formidable, but I believed that that combination would fall to pieces at the first check, and I adhered to the estimate I had formed in the war of the measure of the fighting qualities and the tough fibre of the Zionist community, and the support which it would receive from Zionists all over the world. But the Foreign Secretary was wrong; wrong in his facts, wrong in the mood, wrong in the method and wrong in the result, and we are very sorry about it for his sake and still more sorry about it for our own.’

Churchill noted that in May 1948 Britain had ‘arrayed’ against itself the United States, the Soviet Union, the Israelis, and supporters of Zionism all over the world, without – and he wanted the Conservative Members of Parliament ‘to realise this’ – doing the ‘slightest service’ to the Arab countries to whom Britain had ‘very serious obligations.’ He continued: ‘This is a poor and undeserved result of all that we have created and built up in Palestine by the goodwill and solid work of twenty-five years. We have lost the friendship of the Palestinian Jews for the time being.’ He was glad to have read a recent statement by Weizmann ‘pleading for friendship between the new Israeli State and the Western world. I believe that will be its destiny. He was an old friend of mine for many years. His son was killed in the war fighting with us. I trust his influence may grow and that we shall do what we can, subject to our other obligations – because we cannot forget those other obligations – to add to this influence. I hope that later on a truer comprehension of the Zionist debt to this country will revive.’

Churchill then spoke of how, after the war, he was sure Britain could have obtained both Arab and Jewish support for a Partition scheme, whereby two separate States, one Jewish and the other Arab, would have been set up in Palestine. As Churchill said this, Attlee rose to ask Churchill ‘if he thought that could have been done, why did he not do it after the war? He was in power.’ To this Churchill replied caustically: ‘No. The world and the nation had the inestimable blessing of the Right Honorable Gentleman’s guidance.’ Churchill’s view was that Britain could have agreed immediately after the war on a Partition scheme that would have been more favourable to the Arabs ‘than that which will now follow their unsuccessful recourse to arms.’ In their attempt to defeat the newly declared State of Israel in May 1948, after considerable initial success – with Egyptian troops reaching the southernmost suburb of Jerusalem – the Arab forces had been driven back across the borders they had rejected at the time of the United Nations Partition resolution in November 1947.

As Churchill spoke of how, in his view, a Partition scheme acceptable to both the Jews and Arabs could have been agreed before the end of the Mandate, he was interrupted by Thomas Reid, a Labour Member for Parliament and a former member of the Woodhead Commission, who asked: ‘Agreed with whom? Would it not have led to a major war in the Near East if Partition had been pursued?’ To which Churchill answered: ‘I am sure we could have made better arrangements for the Arabs at that time – I am not talking of the Jews – than will be possible after there has been this unfortunate recourse to arms. Indeed, the scheme of Partition proposed by UNO was better than what they will get now, after their defeat.’

Churchill spoke next of the Royal Air Force reconnaissance mission that had come to such a violent end. ‘Curiosity to know what was going on,’ he said, ‘would certainly not justify doing a thing so improvident as this sortie of aircraft at such a moment. I say it was the quintessence of maladresse’ of which Bevin and Attlee, ‘who take the responsibility, were guilty. And now poor old Britain – Tories, Socialists, Liberals, Zionists, anti-Zionists, non-Zionists alike – we find ourselves shot down in an air skirmish, snubbed by the Israeli Government, who said, “We understand you do not recognise us,” and with a marked lack of support from the international bodies upon which we depend so greatly and whose opinions we value so highly.’

Churchill turned to the question of Jewish immigration between the wars. The ‘whole point’ of his own White Paper of 1922, he said, had been that Jewish immigration was to be free, ‘but not beyond the limits of economic absorptive power.’ Britain could not allow it to be said, Churchill explained, ‘that newcomers were coming in, pushing out those who had lived there for centuries. But the newcomers who were coming in brought work and employment with them, and the means of sustaining a much larger population than had lived in Palestine and Transjordan. They brought the hope with them of a far larger population than existed in Palestine at the time of Our Lord.’ In the twenty-seven years since 1922 and his White Paper, the Jewish population of Palestine ‘doubled or more than doubled, but so did the Arab population of the same areas of Palestine. As the Jews continued to reclaim the country, plant the orange groves, develop the water system, electricity and so forth, employment and means of livelihood were found for ever-larger numbers of Arabs – 400,000 or 500,000 more Arabs found their living there – and the relations of the two races in the Jewish areas were tolerable in spite of external distractions and all kinds of disturbances. General prosperity grew.’

The idea ‘that only a limited number of people can live in a country,’ Churchill pointed out, ‘is a profound illusion; it all depends on their co-operative and inventive power. There are more people today living twenty storeys above the ground in New York than were living on the ground in New York a hundred years ago. There is no limit to the ingenuity of man if it is properly and vigorously applied under conditions of peace and justice.’16

After listening to Churchill’s speech, a leading Jewish businessman and philanthropist, Sir Simon Marks, whom Churchill had met on a number of occasions, wrote to him: ‘I know that our mutual friend Dr Weizmann will be thrilled at the news, and particularly at your remark that “this is a great event in world history.”’17

That ‘news’ was the Labour Government’s announcement at the end of the debate that Britain was about to recognize the State of Israel.

Among those who had listened to Churchill’s speech was Sir Simon Marks’s nephew, Marcus Sieff, whose earlier notes had given Churchill a picture of Israeli perspective and hopes. ‘I know from my experience,’ Sieff wrote to him, ‘not only here but in the Middle East in the early years of the War, how great was the part you played in the last quarter of the century in constructing the bridges between this country and the Jews of Palestine, and how the name of Britain stood in that community.’ The Labour Government’s Palestine policy in recent years had ‘largely destroyed’ those bridges, Sieff wrote, ‘but you have again given a lead which, if sincerely followed by the Government, will go a long way to restoring those ties to the advantage of the moderate people, be they Gentile, Arab or Jew, and for which all moderate people must be grateful.’18

Nine days after Churchill’s speech, Britain formally recognised Israel. In answer to a telegram of thanks from Weizmann, who had been elected Israel’s first President, Churchill replied: ‘I look back with much pleasure on our long association,’ and he added, in his own hand: ‘The light grows.’19