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meeting of the British Zionist Federation, Churchill declared, “I am in full sympathy with the historical traditional aspirations of the Jews. The restoration to them of a centre of true racial and political integrity would be a tremendous event in the history of the world.”
A passion for Jewish values
It is with this in mind that we begin to understand Churchill’s view of Zionist efforts to seek a haven for the Jews in their historic and ancestral homeland, the Covenanted Land of Israel. Churchill played a significant part in creating the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 in which British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, gave the UK’s commitment to the establishing of a Jewish homeland in the newly created British Mandate of Palestine.
In a 1920 article, Zionism versus Bolshevism, Churchill began,
“Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.”
He continued, “We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilisation.”
As well as appreciating these Judeo- Christian values, Churchill observed something very special about God’s chosen people. Whilst mocking Germany during the war, he once quipped, “Since the Germans drove the Jews out and lowered their technical standards, our science is definitely ahead of theirs.”
‘A temple of Jewish glory’
In the same 1920 article, under the heading 'A Home for the Jews', Churchill stated strongly, “But if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of
the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection
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of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.”
And he concluded that important article by reiterating the importance of “building up with the utmost possible rapidity a Jewish national centre in Palestine which may become not only a refuge to the oppressed from the unhappy lands of Central Europe, but which will also be a symbol of Jewish unity and the temple of Jewish glory.”
In his first visit to the Holy Land in March 1921, Churchill, now Secretary of State for
the Colonies, planted a tree in a ceremony
on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, the future location of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Churchill declared to the Jewish people, “The hope of your race for so many centuries will be gradually realized here, not only for your own good but for the good of all the world.”
"Personally, my heart is full of sympathy for Zionism," he told listeners, "I believe that the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine will be a blessing to the whole world, a blessing to the Jewish race scattered all over the world, and a blessing to Great Britain. I firmly believe that it will be a blessing also to all the inhabitants of this country without distinction of race and religion."
In the 1921 Report on the Middle East Conference held in Cairo and Jerusalem, Churchill is quoted as saying that if the Jews in Israel would work diligently toward their goal of establishing a Jewish state, then the Holy Land would turn into the promised land, as prophesied in the Bible, “a land flowing with milk and honey, in which sufferers of all races and religions will find a rest from their sufferings.”
Churchill’s visit to the Holy Land had
a significant influence on him. Seeing the landscape for himself and witnessing how a Jewish minority had turned the deserted and desolate marshland into a blooming oasis energised Churchill even more and proved to him that the Bible was being brought to life by the people of the Bible in the land of the Bible.
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