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08/03/2006
Churchill / The Middle East
I was staring at my extensive library the other day, looking for
some new material, when I spotted a book of speeches by
Winston Churchill. Following are some thoughts of his with
relevance to today’s conflict in the Middle East.
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‘The Jews Should Have a National Home’
March 31, 1921
[Reply to a Muslim delegation, Government House, Jerusalem]
Churchill was Colonial Secretary at this time and had just
convened and chaired the Cairo Conference at which the states of
Jordan and Iraq were established from the ruins of the Ottoman
Empire. Hashemite Emirs Abdullah (Jordan) and Feisal (Iraq)
were named. Also the boundaries of Biblical Palestine were
spelled out for the first time.
Churchill was a staunch supporter of the Balfour Declaration,
which was a letter written by British foreign minister Arthur
Balfour, 1917, to the British Zionist Federation pledging
cooperation for the settlement of Jews in Palestine. Jews were
admitted to the area when it became a British mandate under the
League of Nations after World War I.
Churchill made clear his view that Palestine should be a National
Home for the Jews, but not to the exclusion of the Palestinians.
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I consider your address partly partisan and incorrect. You ask
me to repudiate the Balfour Declaration and stop immigration.
This is not in my power and is not my wish .Moreover it is
manifestly right that the scattered Jews should have a national
center and a national home in which they might be reunited, and
where else but in Palestine, with which the Jews for 3,000 years
have been intimately and profoundly associated? We think it is
good for the world, good for the Jews, and good for the British
Empire, and it is also good the Arabs dwelling in Palestine, and
we intend it to be so. They shall not be supplanted nor suffer but
they shall share in the benefits and the progress of Zionism.
I draw your attention to the second part of the Balfour
Declaration emphasizing the sacredness of your civil and
religious rights. I am sorry you regard it as valueless. It is vital
to you, and you should hold and claim it firmly. If one promise
stands, so does the other. We shall faithfully fulfill both .
Examine Mr. Balfour’s careful words, Palestine to be ‘a national
home’ not ‘the national home,’ a great difference in meaning.
The establishment of a national home does not mean a Jewish
Government to dominate the Arabs. Great Britain is the greatest
Muslim State in the world, and is well disposed to the Arabs and
cherishes their friendship .You need not be alarmed for the
future. Great Britain has promised a fair chance for the Zionist
movement, but the latter will succeed only on its merits .We
cannot tolerate the expropriation of one set of people by another.
The present form of Government will continue for many years.
Step by step we shall develop representative institutions, leading
to full self-government, but our children’s children will have
passed away before that is completed.
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‘The Jews: Their Blood and Race Declared Defiling and
Accursed’
March 24, 1936
[House of Commons]
The right hon. Gentleman has assured us that the Mandate and
the Balfour Declaration are safe, but I personally feel great
doubts about that. If you have an Arab majority, undoubtedly
you will have continued friction between the principle of the
Balfour Declaration and the steps that must be taken day by day
and month by month to give effect to that Declaration and the
wishes of the Arab majority. I should have thought it would be a
very great obstruction to the development of Jewish immigration
into Palestine and to the development of the national home of the
Jews there.
I have no hostility for the Arabs. I think I made most of the
settlements over 14 years ago governing the Palestine situation.
The Emir Abdullah is in Transjordania, where I put him one
Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem. I acted upon the advice of that
very great man Colonel Lawrence [ed. Lawrence of Arabia], who
was at my side in making the arrangements, which I believe have
stood the test of time and many changes of government
throughout the Middle East. But I cannot conceive that you will
be able to reconcile, at this juncture and at this time, the
development of the policy of the Balfour Declaration with an
Arab majority on the Legislative Council. I do not feel a bit
convinced of it, even though Sir Andrew Walker may be of that
opinion. I do not feel convinced when I see so many other
people who have studied the matter, and who are friends of
Palestine, friends of the Arabs, friends of the Jews, who view this
departure at the present moment with the very greatest
misgiving.
We are doing very fine work in Palestine at the present moment.
When I traveled through the country a little more than a year ago
I was enormously impressed with the order and smoothness with
which the administration was being conducted. If you go into
neighboring countries, like Syria, you see that there is also order
and progress, but enormous military forces are used. Scores of
thousands of troops are maintained in the country. I always
consider that our administration must be judged, in comparison
with these countries, not by the fact that they can govern with
overwhelming military forces – anyone can do that – but that we
can conduct progressive administration with the comparatively
small forces that we employ in those areas.
Do not be in a hurry to overturn the existing system. It is
working very well. It is not as though it had got into such a state
that you said that you could not go on any more with the present
administration, and that, although your local government
institutions have completely failed up to date, or have made no
success of their experiment, nevertheless you must plunge into
the larger field. That is not the position. You are in the full tide
of a successful experiment in British administration and your
local government is moving forward in a very slow manner.
Surely, therefore, you can afford to wait for some other time.
Does the right hon. Gentleman mean to say that if, under the
advice of Parliament or under the persuasion which reaches him
from any quarter, he decided that this matter could not go
forward this year or next year, but that he would feel himself
guilty of a breach of faith, of a breaking of the pledge given to
the League of Nations? It is absurd. I have not the slightest
doubt that, if our representatives at Geneva explained the
position as it has been explained in this House from every bench,
they would get cordial support for not taking this step at the
present moment, from the authority whom they have a right to
consult.
I have been speaking of this matter in connection with Palestine,
but, of course, there is in our minds an added emphasis upon this
question of Jewish migration which comes from other quarters,
at a time when the Jewish race in a great country is being
subjected to most horrible, cold, scientific persecution, brutal
persecution, a cold ‘pogrom’ as it has been called – people
reduced from affluence to ruin, and then, even in that position,
denied the opportunity of earning their daily bread, and cut out
even from relief by grants to tide the destitute through the winter;
their little children pilloried in the schools to which they have to
go; their blood and race declared defiling and accursed; every
form of concentrated human wickedness cast upon these people
by overwhelming power, by vile tyranny. I say that, when that is
the case, surely the House of Commons will not allow the one
door which is open, the one door which allows some relief, some
escape from these conditions, to be summarily closed, nor even
allow it to be suggested that it may be obstructed by the course
which we take now.
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‘Repudiation of the Balfour Declaration’
May 23, 1939
[House of Commons]
Now I come to the gravamen of the case. I regret very much that
the pledge of the Balfour Declaration, endorsed as it has been by
successive Governments, and the conditions under which we
obtained the Mandate, have both been violated by the
Government’s proposals. There is much in this White Paper
which is alien to the spirit of the Balfour Declaration, but I will
not trouble about that. I select the one point upon which there is
plainly a breach and repudiation of the Balfour Declaration – the
provision that Jewish immigration can be stopped in five years’
time by the decision of an Arab majority. That is a plain breach
of a solemn obligation. I am astonished that my right hon.
Friend the Prime Minister [ed. Neville Chamberlain], of all
others, and at this moment above all others, should have lent
himself to this new and sudden default.
To whom was the pledge of the Balfour Declaration made? 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 and in particular to the Zionist associations. It was in
consequence of and on the basis of this pledge that we received
important help in the war, and that after the war we received
from the Allied and Associated Powers the Mandate for
Palestine. This pledge of a home of refuge, or an asylum, was
not made to the Jews in Palestine but to the Jews outside
Palestine, to that vast, unhappy mass of scattered, persecuted,
wandering Jews whose intense, unchanging, unconquerable
desire has been for a National Home – to quote the words to
which my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister subscribed in the
Memorial which he and others sent to us:
the Jewish people who have through centuries of dispersion
and persecution patiently awaited the hour of its restoration to its
ancestral home.
Those are the words. They were the people outside, not the
people in. It is not with the Jews in Palestine that we have now
or at any future time to deal, but with world Jewry, with Jews all
over the world. That is the pledge which was given, and that is
the pledge which we are now asked to break, for how can this
pledge be kept, I want to know, if in five years’ time the National
Home is to be barred and no more Jews are to be allowed in
without the permission of the Arabs?
I entirely accept the distinction between making a Jewish
National Home in Palestine and making Palestine a Jewish
National Home. I think I was one of the first to draw that
distinction. The Government quote me, and they seem to
associate me with them on this subject in their White Paper, but
what sort of National Home is offered to the Jews of the world
when we are asked to declare that in five years’ time the door of
that home is to be shut and barred in their faces? The idea of
home to wanderers is, surely, a place to which they can resort.
When grievous and painful words like ‘breach of pledge,’
‘repudiation’ and ‘default’ are used in respect of the public
action of men and Ministers who in private life observe a
stainless honor – the country must discuss these matters as they
present themselves in their public aspect – it is necessary to be
precise, and to do them justice. His Majesty’s Government have
been brutally precise. On page 11 of the White Paper there is
this provision:
After the period of five years no further Jewish immigration will
be permitted unless the Arabs of Palestine are prepared to
acquiesce in it.
Now, there is the breach; there is the violation of the pledge;
there is the abandonment of the Balfour Declaration; there is the
end of the vision, of the hope, of the dream. If you leave out
those words this White Paper is no more than one of the several
experiments and essays in Palestine constitution-making which
we have had of recent years, but put in those three lines and there
is the crux, the peccant point, the breach, and we must have an
answer to it .
I cannot feel that we have accorded to the Arab race unfair
treatment after the support which they gave us in the late war.
The Palestinian Arabs, of course, were for the most part fighting
against us, but elsewhere over vast regions inhabited by the
Arabs independent Arab Kingdoms and principalities have come
into being such as had never been known in Arab history before.
Some have been established by Great Britain and others by
France. When I wrote this dispatch in 1922 I was advised by,
among others, Colonel Lawrence, the truest champion of Arab
rights whom modern times have known. He has recorded his
opinion that the settlement was fair and just – his definite, settled
opinion. Together we placed the Emir Abdullah in
Transjordania, where he remains faithful and prosperous to this
day. Together, under the responsibility of the Prime Minister of
those days, King Feisal was placed upon the throne of Iraq,
where his descendants now rule. But we also showed ourselves
continually resolved to close no door upon the ultimate
development of a Jewish National Home, fed by continual
Jewish immigration into Palestine. Colonel Lawrence thought
this was fair then. Why should it be pretended that it is unfair
now?...
I end upon the land of Palestine. It is strange indeed that we
should turn away from our task in Palestine at the moment when,
as the Secretary of State told us yesterday, the local disorders
have been largely mastered. It is stranger still that we should
turn away when the great experiment and bright dream, the
historic dream, has proved its power to succeed. Yesterday the
Minister responsible descanted eloquently in glowing passages
upon the magnificent work which the Jewish colonists have
done. They have made the desert bloom. They have started a
score of thriving industries, he said. They have founded a great
city on the barren shore. They have harnessed the Jordan and
spread its electricity throughout the land. 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 by fascist propaganda.
It is 20 years ago since my right hon. Friend used these stirring
words:
A great responsibility will rest upon the Zionists, who, before
long, will be proceeding, with joy in their hearts, to the ancient
seat of their people. Theirs will be the task to build up a new
prosperity and a new civilization in old Palestine, so long
neglected and misruled.
Well, they have answered his call. They have fulfilled his hopes.
How can he find it in this heart to strike them this mortal blow?
[Source: “Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill’s
Speeches,” Selected by His Grandson Winston S. Churchill]
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Hott Spotts will return next week...Blair and Hagel.
Brian Trumbore
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