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than the Arabs.”
It was this kind of weak appeasement from
Chamberlain that meant Britain was headed down a very dangerous path under his leadership. Tragically, this appeasement proved a failure and its impact on European Jews was devastating.
The House of Commons approved the White Paper on 23 May 1939 by a vote of
268 to 179. It imposed a strict limitation of 75,000 Jewish immigrants to enter Palestine over a period of five years—the years of the extermination of European Jewry—after which Jewish immigration would require Arab consent, a concept that was completely unjustified. Churchill’s voice could have probably been heard throughout the corridors of Westminster, as he spoke with “force and bitterness against what he believed was both a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration and a shameful act of appeasement,” says historian Sir Martin Gilbert.
“To whom was the pledge of the Balfour Declaration made?” Churchill asked, “It was not made to the Jews of Palestine, it was not made
to those who were actually living in Palestine. It was made to world Jewry...to that vast, unhappy mass of scattered, persecuted, wandering Jews whose intense, unchanging, unconquerable desire has been for a National Home....So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population. Now we are asked to decree that all this is to stop and all this is to come to an end. We are now asked to submit—and this is what rankles most with me—to an agitation, which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and Fascist propaganda.”
Churchill knew that without funding from Germany, the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Amin al-Husseini, could never have engineered the Arab Revolt of 1936–39 during which Arabic language leaflets decorated with the swastika were distributed. This relationship between National Socialism and the Jihadist revolt was rooted in their mutual hatred of the Jews. And on 28 November 1941, Amin al-Husseini had his first meeting with Adolf Hitler to discuss the extermination of the Jews.
Aware of the intentions of the Nazis, Churchill insisted that throughout the war “no permanent restriction on Jewish immigration should be imposed” and that “the future of
PART TWO
Palestine should be determined at a peace conference after the war,” says Gilbert.
“Beloved Churchill”
On 10 May 1940, the day Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg and France, Winston Churchill was appointed Prime Minister, succeeding Neville Chamberlain.
Ben Gale, “a Jew living in pre-state Israel”, records that in the middle of a lecture that day in Tel Aviv, when the speaker was interrupted by the announcement that Churchill had become prime minister, “Everyone in the large hall stood up and cheered wildly. With Churchill at the helm there was now hope for the Jews of Palestine!”
The treatment of Jews in Europe helped Churchill spot what the Nazis were really like, unlike many other British politicians, some of whom were anti-Semitic.
Perhaps one of the most fitting and moving tributes to Winston Churchill was from his fierce political rival, Labour’s Clement Attlee, who was Prime Minister between Churchill’s two terms. He recalled of a day in 1933 where Churchill was shedding tears in the House
of Commons, a side of Churchill that is not commonly portrayed today.
“His greatest virtue, his compassion,
has never properly been appreciated,” said Atlee, “It was his compassion, coupled to his energy, that made him so ‘dynamic’. Cruelty and injustice revolted him. His will to fight them took him in many directions, not all of them wise, and not all of them to my liking; but I never questioned that profound fund of humanity, benevolence, love, call it what you like, in his character which made his hatred of cruelty the steering-gear of his great life.
“I remember the tears pouring down his cheeks one day before the war in the House of Commons, when he was telling me what was being done to the Jews in Germany—not to individual Jewish friends of his, but to the Jews as a group. Criticism of him for thinking too much in terms of nations and masses and not enough in terms of individual human beings is frequently misplaced.”
Another tribute, much shorter yet equally touching, were the simple words of a Jewish girl in 1944. Ann Frank wrote in a diary entry, “our beloved Churchill.”
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