From Yahweh to Zion by Laurent Guyénot

Author:Laurent Guyénot [Guyénot, Laurent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780996143042
Published: 2018-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

“An old Zionist like [Churchill]”

Another thing that Hitler could not know is how deeply Churchill was committed to helping Weizmann make the war the springboard for the foundation of Israel. It was only after his retirement that Churchill confessed. He declared publicly, on the fourth anniversary of the independence of Israel, that he had been “a Zionist from the days of the Balfour Declaration,” and he wrote to US President Eisenhower in 1956: “I am, of course, a Zionist, and have been ever since the Balfour Declaration.”348

Churchill’s Zionism helps explain how the Balfour Declaration became such a cornerstone of British policy. Churchill had always claimed that the intention of the Balfour Declaration was that Palestine might in the course of time become “an overwhelmingly Jewish State.” In his 1920 article “Zionism versus Bolshevism” he had already affirmed the British Government’s responsibility “of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and a centre of national life. […] 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 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.”

In 1922, as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Churchill issued a White Paper crafted to reassure the Arabs, whose apprehensions, it said, “are partly based upon exaggerated interpretations of the meaning of the [Balfour] Declaration.” By “a Jewish National Home in Palestine,” the Declaration “does not mean a Jewish government to dominate Arabs. […] We cannot tolerate the expropriation of one set of people by another.” Yet that White Paper imposed no limitation to Jewish immigration in Palestine, nor to the purchase of lands by Jews, which were the great concerns of the Arabs. It simply said, in terms alarmingly vague: “For the fulfillment of this policy it is necessary that the Jewish community in Palestine should be able to increase its numbers by immigration. This immigration cannot be so great in volume as to exceed whatever may be the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals. […] Hitherto the immigration has fulfilled these conditions.” Moreover, if Churchill’s White Paper said that Jews will not rule over Arabs, it could be understood to mean that they will rule in a land free of Arabs. It was, therefore, carte blanche for the Zionist plan.

In 1939, a new Labour majority undermined Churchill’s influence in Parliament. A new White Paper was voted for by a large majority, which limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 for the next five years, with the stated purpose of preserving an Arab majority in Palestine. This was a serious reversal of policy regarding Zionism: The 1939 White Paper was unequivocally against letting Palestine become a Jewish State. This provoked not only a

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