The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (122 page)

Meanwhile, Weizmann had told the Political Committee of the Zionist Organization that he was worried about Churchill’s mission. The new colonial secretary was “of a highly impressionable temperament,” he said, and he expected the Arabs to “organize an agitation to greet him on his arrival in the East.” On March 1, Winston’s last day in London before the six-day voyage, Weizmann sent him a long letter, demanding that the Jewish state’s eastern boundary be extended east of the Jordan River to include all of Transjordan (now Jordan). Transjordan, he wrote, “has from the earliest time been an integral and vital part of Palestine.” Here the tribes of Manasseh, Gad, and Reuben “first pitched their tents and pastured their flocks.” The climate was “invigorating,” the soil “rich,” irrigation would be “easy,” and the hills were “covered with forests.” There “Jewish settlement could proceed on a large scale without friction with the local population.” How friction with the Arab inhabitants could be avoided he did not say. Nor was that all. Weizmann also wanted Palestine’s southern frontier pushed southward. Churchill was noncommittal. He favored including the triangular wedge of the Negev Desert in the Palestine Mandate, but not the east bank of the Jordan. Two days later, when the ship paused at Marseilles, a newspaperman came aboard and asked him the purpose of his trip. He replied disingenuously: “I am endeavouring to realise French and British unity in the East. My journey to Egypt and Asia Minor is proof of this. We must at any price coordinate our actions to the extent of uniting them. It is by those means only that we shall be able to arrive at lasting quiet, and diminish the enormous expenditure we are both making.” Privately he was more entertaining. He told his party: “What the horn is to the rhinoceros, what the sting is to the wasp, the Mohammedan faith is to the Arabs—a faculty of offense or defense.”
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As Weizmann had predicted, Churchill’s arrival in Cairo was a tumultuous event. A few weeks earlier he had publicly described Egypt as part of the British Empire, and newspapers here had carried the story. El Azhar University students were staging a one-day protest strike. Thousands of spectators, many carrying rocks, awaited his appearance in Station Square. The bridge leading into Shubra Road was packed to capacity. “Various notables,” the
Palestine Weekly
reported, “waited patiently in the station, which had been cleared of all unauthorised persons, and Bristol Fighters and huge Handley Pages circled overhead. The train steamed in to the station half an hour late and amid intense excitement disgorged five boxes and other baggage.” But where was Churchill, the great Satan? Prudently, he and his party had detrained at the suburban terminal of Shubra, whence they had motored unseen and undisturbed to their destination. The newspaper noted that “a disorderly rabble gathered outside Shepheard’s crying ‘Down with Churchill!’ but they were dispersed speedily and without casualty.” Being students, they had picked the wrong hotel. He was staying at the Semiramis.
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The Semiramis, another newspaper reported, was “a scene of feverish bustle,” as high commissioners, generals, governors, and civil servants checked in from the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Palestine, and British Somaliland. His Marseilles interview to the contrary, Winston’s real purpose in Cairo was, not the knitting together of Allied unity, frayed though it had become, but the choosing of two kings, protégés of the British, to rule over Iraq and Transjordan. As Lawrence later wrote frankly, he and Winston had already reviewed the aspirants “over dinner at the Ship Restaurant in Whitehall.” The two likeliest candidates were Husein’s sons, emir Faisal and emir Abdullah. On March 12, 1921, the Cairo conference opened at the Mena House. “Practically all the experts and authorities on the Middle East were summoned,” Churchill wrote afterward, a singular description of a meeting at which, of the thirty-eight participants, thirty-six were British. Lawrence suggested that Faisal be crowned head of Iraq, “not only,” the minutes read, “because of his personal knowledge and friendship for the individual, but also on the ground that in order to counteract the claims of rival candidates and to pull together the scattered elements of a backward and half-civilized country, it was essential that the first ruler should be an active and inspiring personality.” His motion, with Churchill’s approval, carried without dissent. Abdullah, in Lawrence’s opinion, was “lazy and by no means dominating,” but though unfit to rule Iraq he would be permitted to reign over Transjordan under the watchful eye of a British high commissioner. Churchill announced his intention to appoint Abdullah in Palestine, and in later years he would say: “The Emir Abdullah is in Transjordania, where I put him one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem.” Zionism’s hopes were honored; Sir Herbert Samuel, the Empire’s high commissioner in Palestine, was instructed to foster a Jewish homeland. It was all very insular—Faisal and Abdullah would send their sons to public schools in England—and it was also rather medieval. Churchill enjoyed this feudal role immensely. And Lawrence was delighted. He continued to hold other politicians in contempt, but in the
Seven Pillars
he would write enthusiastically of Winston’s accomplishments, concluding that, as a result of them, “I must put on record my conviction that England is out of the Arab affair with clean hands.” When at long last the book was published he sent an inscribed copy to “Winston Churchill, who made a happy ending to this show…. And eleven years after we set our hands to making an honest settlement, all our work still stands; the countries have gone forward, our interests having been saved, and nobody having been killed, either on one side or the other. To have planned for eleven years is statesmanship. I ought to have given you two copies of this work!” James Morris wrote: “The routes to India were safe as never before, the oil wells of Iran and the Persian Gulf, the Abadan refinery, all were securely in British possession.”
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Other matters lay before the conference, notably the occupation of Iraq by British troops. Churchill decided to withdraw them, and, in a grand if absurd gesture, declared that the entire country—116,600 square miles—would be defended by the emaciated RAF, thereby saving the Exchequer £25,000,000 a year. Then he left the details to subordinates in Mena House and departed to enjoy leisure outside. The Egyptian climate is at its most pleasant in March, and he sprawled happily beneath its sun. He knew he was unpopular with the Egyptians—many vehicles carried stickers reading
“à bas Churchill”
—“but,” as Jessie Crosland, the wife of a civil servant, recalled a half-century later, “he didn’t care. He took his easel out and sat in the road painting—he also talked so loudly in the street that the generals got quite nervous.” Cordons of police held back furious mobs who had come to stone him. Carried to and fro in an armored car, he painted the Sphinx and the Pyramids while Clementine admired them, and he even held a one-man show of his canvases. On an expedition in the desert he was careening forward on a loping camel when his saddle slipped, dashing him off. Several colorfully dressed bedouins galloped up and offered one of their horses, but he rose, dusted himself off, and growled: “I started on a camel and I shall finish on a camel.” An Englishwoman who attended the conference remembers: “When things were boring in the hotel everyone would cheer up when Winston came in, followed by an Arab carrying a pail and a bottle of wine.” On their last day in Egypt, Winston and Clementine were driven to a Nile dam, which he painted. Returning, they crashed into another car. Churchill, a journalist observed, was “far more concerned about the safety of his painting than about himself.” According to the
Egyptian Gazette,
no one was hurt. Indeed, at a farewell ball given by Lord Allenby, the country’s high commissioner, Clemmie was reported to have danced until “close on midnight.”
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Churchill and a friend in Egypt with T. E. Lawrence (right)

H
er husband had left the dance floor earlier in the evening, when Sir Herbert Samuel arrived from Jerusalem. The
Palestine Weekly
noted that “Mr Churchill at once went upstairs with him and was seen no more.” The discussion of the river Jordan, its banks, and its people, had begun. At midnight on March 23, Winston, Clementine, Sir Herbert, and Lawrence boarded a train in Cairo Station for their first Palestinian stop, Gaza. There, early the following morning, they confronted a mob of 150,000 Arabs, whose “chief cry,” according to a British officer, “over which they waxed quite frenzied, was: ‘Down with the Jews! Cut their throats!’ ” This, incredibly, was unexpected. Winston’s Arabists had assured him that there was no incongruity in England’s separate pledges to the Jews and to the Arabs. Even Lawrence had believed that Palestinian hostility to Zionism had been overrated and could easily be contained; he had endorsed Abdullah, despite his reservations about him, because he thought Abdullah could persuade his people to accept a Jewish homeland. But when he heard the shouting crowds at Gaza and successive stops, he realized his error. Churchill, misunderstanding their fervor, thought they were acclaiming him and waved back cheerfully. Lawrence then translated their chants, and Winston muttered that he was at least grateful they weren’t stoning him. Actually, they were plotting violence, but against the Jews, not him. Abdullah’s appeals for calm were ignored. So was a government ban on all demonstrations during Churchill’s tour. In Haifa ten Jews and five policemen were wounded by missiles and knives, and two innocent bystanders, a young boy and a Moslem woman, were killed. The Executive Committee of the Haifa Congress of Palestinian Arabs, calling on Winston, handed him a twelve-thousand-word statement denouncing the Balfour declaration and the concept of Palestine as a Jewish homeland. Jews, they said, had been scattered over the earth for thousands of years, “and have become nationals of the various nations amongst whom they settled. They have no separate political or lingual existence…. Hebrew is a dead language.” If there was such a thing as Jewish power and a Jewish nation, what was the status “of those high Jewish officials who are serving England to-day? Are they Jewish nationals or English nationals?… It is obvious they cannot be both at the same time.”
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This was debatable, but reasonable—very different from the throngs that screamed “Palestine for the Arabs! Down with the Zionists!”—and Churchill was attentive. But then they made a mistake. They threatened him. “If England does not take up the cause of the Arabs,” they declared, “other Powers will…. If she does not listen, then perhaps Russia will take up their call some day, or perhaps even Germany.” Now his temper rose. As Lawrence wrote a friend, “The man’s as brave as six, as good-humored, shrewd, self-confident & considerate as a statesman can be: & several times I’ve seen him chuck the statesmanlike course & do the honest thing instead.” The political response to such an overture would be equivocation. Winston bluntly told them that it had been Englishmen, not Palestinian Arabs, who had overthrown their Turkish oppressors: “The position of Great Britain in Palestine is one of trust, but it is also one of right.” Nearby, he reminded them, more than two thousand British soldiers were buried, “and there are many other graveyards, some even larger, scattered about in this land.” To fulfill that trust, “and for the high purposes we have in view, supreme sacrifices were made by all these soldiers of the British Empire, who gave up their lives and blood.”
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Whatever his previous doubts about the justice of creating a Zionist state, they were gone now. He knew that it would be expensive. He said: “In Africa the population is docile and the country fruitful; in Mesopotamia the country is arid and the population ferocious. A little money goes a long way in Africa and a lot of money goes a very little way in Arabia.” But he believed the price must be paid. At the same time, however, he urged the Jews to be realistic. After trying to speak at the Mosque of Omar, where he was shouted down by Arabs, he visited the Hebrew University, still under construction, to plant a symbolic tree. “Personally,” he told his audience, “my heart is full of sympathy for Zionism.” He believed “that the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine will be a blessing to… Great Britain.” Then he reminded them that when the British promised to support Zionism, they also “assured the non-Jewish inhabitants that they should not suffer in consequence. Every step you take should therefore be also for the moral and material benefit of all Palestinians.” He said: “I am now going to plant a tree, and I hope that in its shadow peace and prosperity may return once more to Palestine.”
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It will surprise no one who has lived in the Middle East that the tree broke as it was handed to him, that there was no backup, and that they had to settle for a scrawny palm which wouldn’t even grow in that soil. Harry Sacher, an English Zionist who was practicing law in Palestine, wrote a friend that “Churchill spoke very plainly in reaffirming the Balfour Declaration, both to the Jews and the Arabs. But he also told the Jews that they must do their bit, and he enlarged upon the pressures on the [British] taxpayer, and the anti-Zionist critics in Parliament. The Arabs are angry, and there was a bit of trouble in Haifa, where a crowd was dispersed by force, perhaps too much force. I am not happy about the Arab position.” He wondered “whether the British Government may not finish by dropping the whole thing and clearing out—for financial reasons. I really don’t know whether England today can afford such a luxury as a foreign policy, with or without mandates.”
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Back in England the House discovered that Winston’s commitment to the Palestine problem was absolute. At times it seemed a thankless task. Some English Zionists regarded the creation of Transjordan as a betrayal of Balfour’s pledge; one of them, Richard Meinertzhagen, wrote a friend that he had confronted Winston and “told him it was grossly unfair to the Jews, that it was another promise broken and that it was a most dishonest act, that the Balfour Declaration was being torn up by degrees and that the official policy of H.M.G. to establish a Home for the Jews in Biblical Palestine was being sabotaged; that I found the Middle East Department whose business it was to implement the Mandate almost one hundred per cent hebraphobe and could not the duration of Abdullah’s Emirate in Transjordan be of a temporary nature, say for seven years…. Churchill listened and said he saw the force of my argument and would consider the question. He thought it was too late to alter but a time limit to Abdullah’s Emirate in Transjordan might work.”
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It wouldn’t have worked, and he must have known that, but on this very delicate issue he had to listen to all sides and, however great the strain, exercise an uncharacteristic restraint.

On May 31, 1921, he reported to the cabinet that the “pronounced suspicion of Zionism” among Palestinian Arabs was unjustified. There was no validity in “current accounts of the inferior quality of recent Jewish immigrants.” Indeed, they had “created a standard of living far superior to that of the indigenous Arabs.” But they would need protection. The rioting in Haifa had spread to Jaffa; Jews were dying. “Zionist battalions,” he believed, were not the solution. He recommended “a strong local gendarmerie.” Nor did he favor elections; the Arab majority “would undoubtedly prohibit further immigration of Jews.” But how many Jews? At present Palestine was inhabited by over 500,000 Moslems and fewer than 80,000 Jews. Two weeks later he assured the House that Arab fears that “in the next few years they are going to be swamped by scores of thousands of immigrants from Central Europe, who will push them off the land,” were “illusory.” Jewish immigration would be “a very slow process, and the rights of the existing non-Jewish population would be strictly preserved.” Here he was dissembling. His private papers show that he anticipated a Zionist state of between three and four million—Israel’s population today.
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Arab violence in Palestine was growing. On the fourth anniversary of the Balfour declaration Samuel cabled Churchill that a gang of “roughs” had invaded Jerusalem’s Jewish quarter; gunfire had been exchanged and policemen had found four corpses, three of them Jews. Meanwhile, Winston had delivered a major speech in the House on Middle Eastern developments. Arabs had fought with the Allies during the war, he reminded them, and Allied “pledges were given that the Turkish rule should not be reintroduced in these regions.” At the same time, a promise “of a very important character” had been given to the Jews—that Britain would do its best “to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine.” England was “at this moment in possession of these countries,” providing “the only form of Government existing there.” To redeem these assurances he had created Iraq and Transjordan, which had given “satisfaction to Arab nationality.” Now he promised to move toward a political solution in Palestine. If the Arabs were provided with a democratic form of government, they would “veto any further Jewish immigration,” and this would violate England’s pledge, which would mean “that the word of Britain no longer counts throughout the East and the Middle East.” He believed the riddle could be solved. He could not guarantee “complete success, but I do believe that the measures which we are taking are well calculated to that end.” He had “great confidence in the experts and high authorities” working on the problem, and he asked Parliament to give them “support in the difficult and delicate process of reduction and conciliation which lies before us, and on which we are already embarking.”
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Applause was prolonged. “Winston has had a great success,” Austen Chamberlain wrote Lloyd George, “both as to his speech & his policy, & has changed the whole atmosphere of the House on the Middle East question.” But many were unconvinced. Churchill was not the only English politician to believe that there was a predominance of Jews in Red Moscow, and hebraphobia, as Meinertzhagen called it, was still quite respectable then. Lord Winterton warned Winston that “once you begin to buy land for the purpose of settling Jewish cultivators you will find yourself up against the hereditary antipathy, which exists all over the world, to the Jewish race.” The Zionists were alarmed, but Churchill, undiscouraged, proceeded to draft a Palestinian constitution which would prevent the Arab majority from barring Jewish investment and immigration. He assured the nervous Zionist leaders that “His Majesty’s Government have no intention of repudiating the obligations into which they have entered toward the Jewish people.” A House referendum on the declaration and the constitution was scheduled for June, and anti-Zionists in both the Commons and the Lords began to hold strategy meetings. In the upper house they were a heavy majority; despite an appeal from Balfour, a newly created earl, the peers voted down his declaration, 60 to 29. Churchill told the House that it couldn’t be renounced, that it was “an integral part of the whole mandatory system, as inaugurated by agreement between the victorious Powers and by the Treaty of Versailles.” To those who argued that the Arabs could develop Palestine’s economic wealth by themselves, he said: “Who is going to believe that? Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps towards the irrigation and electrification of Palestine. They would have been quite content to dwell—a handful of philosophic people—in the wasted sun-drenched plains, letting the waters of the Jordan continue to flow unbridled and unharnessed into the Dead Sea.” An Arab delegation called at the Colonial Office. He told them bluntly: “The British Government mean to carry out the Balfour Declaration. I have told you so again and again. I told you so at Jerusalem. I told you so at the House of Commons the other day.” The House backed him, 292 to 35, rendering the Lords’ vote meaningless. On July 22 the League of Nations approved. All legal hurdles for the birth of Israel had been cleared.
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Yet it remained in gestation for another quarter century. British Arabists remained militant. On August 19, 1922, Lord Sydenham wrote
The Times
that in Palestine the British had adopted “a policy of forcing by British bayonets a horde of aliens, some of them eminently undesirable, upon the original owners of the country.” Later that year, when Churchill was all but immersed in the bogs of Ireland, the government issued a White Paper affirming the declaration but adding that this did not mean “the imposition of a Jewish nationality upon the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole.” This bland concession to the Arabs infuriated Weizmann without placating the Arabs. The only alternative seemed to be a continuance of British rule. In 1928 the Zionists, with British encouragement, established the Jewish Agency for Palestine to manage their interests there. The immediate response of the Arabs was a pogrom. A succession of British commissions studied the Palestine dilemma in 1929, 1936, 1938, and 1939. Some suggested restrictions on Jewish immigration; one proposed partition. The Arabs struck back with violence, terrorism, and boycotts of British goods. With the outbreak of World War II, England once more needed the Arabs as allies, and nothing was done until the postwar years, when Jewish terrorists took matters into their own hands. Robert Rhodes James, who is perhaps Churchill’s most astute critic, believes that his failure “to produce a workable solution in the area cannot be held against him. It was a task beyond his capacities, but it is probably true to say that it was beyond the capacities of any individual to accomplish. At the time it seemed as though he had skillfully reconciled the conflicting wartime assurances made by the British to the Arabs and the Jews.” His successors in the Colonial Office were either lacking his determination, intimidated by the Arabs, or infected by racial prejudice. Poring over the old documents, one has the feeling that they themselves did not know.
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