by Gerald A. Honigman
Photo by Unknown, dedicated to the Bettmann Archive – Getty Images, Public Domain, Wikipedia
Some points especially stood out since I’ve also studied this topic extensively myself.
The authors note that Churchill was considered/considered himself to be a lifelong Zionist.
Some things needed to be added to this, however…Not that the authors didn’t also mention that Churchill was also concerned about Arab aspirations, but that this subject was not covered as much as it should have been to place things into a more accurate perspective.
While the important Cairo Conference of 1921 was covered, I felt that the impact of it for the future of the entire region was not explained as much as it could have been.
As a result of that gathering, in the following year, almost 80% of the entire original April 25, 1920 Mandate of Palestine—which included both banks of the Jordan River, clear up to the border with Great Britain’s much larger Mandate of Mesopotamia, Judaea and Samaria, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and today’s Israel—was lopped off by Churchill, “the Zionist,” and awarded to one of London’s former Arabian Peninsula Hashemite emirs, Abdullah, whose family was in the process of getting booted out of the Peninsula by the family of Ibn Saud.
So, right from the getgo, the scope of the original 1917 Balfour Declaration providing for the resurrection of the Jews’s 4,000 year old ancestral homeland was greatly reduced to a mere fraction of what was promised.
While this might have been acceptable given the relative powerlessness of the Jews to push their position further, the fact that all the land east of the Jordan River (Transjordan) turned over to Arabism’s cause was immediately made Judenrein—off limits to Jews—was also very hostile.
Arabs were not forbidden to live in areas of Jewish Palestine.
Right around this same time period, the main arm of British imperialism, the Royal Navy, was switching from coal to oil—and guess who had and didn’t have most of it in the region?
And at a time when Jewish sovereignty in at least parts of the historic ancestral homeland of Judaea and Samaria is considered to be “extremist Zionism” at its worst, please consider the hypocrisy regarding the Brits and others on this very issue…
https://share.google/h7jDB6jIpOhG0tJGv
Whatever influence Dr. Chaim Weismann and his scientific chemical contributions were to the Allied war effort, they were dwarfed by the influence of Gulf Arab oil potentates.
Around the same time that a reborn Jewish nationalism was being shortchanged, the Brits were doing even worse to another 41 million non-Arab people (today’s population), the Kurds of Mesopotamia—the descendants of the ancient Medes, Hurrians, and Gutians (Guti, Gurti, Kurdi, Kurd) who predated their Arab and Turk conquerors in the region by millennia.
After receiving a favorable resolution on the Mosul question in predominantly Kurdish northern Iraq, in 1925 the League of Nations awarded this oil rich area to the British Mandate of Mesopotamia instead of to Mustafa Kemal’s (Ataturk) Turkey.
Earlier promises made to the Kurdish people were tossed out of the window as London next subsequently only acknowledged Arabism’s cause in the entire Mandate—abandoning Kurds, Assyrian Christians, Chaldeans, Armenians, Jews, Turkmen, and others to the whims of their Arab rulers.
The Hashemite’s other Emir, Feisal, had recently been unceremoniously dislodged from Syria by France, so London gave him and Arabism the entire huge Mandate of Mesopotamia (later “Iraq”) as a conciliation.
To add insult to injury, as British military officers would form the Arabs’s best fighting force, Transjordan’s Arab Legion led by Sir John Bagot Glubb and other British antisemites/anti-Zionists, the Brits would assist Iraqi Arabs in quelling Kurdish revolts for freedom as well.
British led Arab forces, loaded with left over military equipment from the Rommel Campaign, attacked a minuscule, beleaguered, nascent Israel in 1948, together with about five other well equipped Arab armies and local Arab forces loyal to Hitler’s Balkan Waffen SS chief and close personal friend, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini.
The point is that besides Arab aspirations not only being more than fairly addressed regarding both the Palestine and Mesopotamia questions, London had indeed become an ally of those aiming to nip Israel in the bud and slaughter its Jews).
Great Britain under the leadership of Churchill or whoever else was at the helm, did nothing to assist the region of MENA’s numerous other peoples in their own quests for a slice of the justice pie after former empires fell apart as a result of WWI.
Putting it another way, one of the Jewish People’s greatest human saviors of all time, Revisionist Zionism’s Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who is probably the man most responsible for creating the IDF as it exists today, gave one of his most important speeches before the 1937 Peel Commission and explained the desire of Arabism’s quest for numerous nation states in comparison to perpetually persecuted Jews utterly stateless condition—and that of scores of millions of other non-Arab native peoples as well. He called this the difference between appetite versus starvation:
https://share.google/HOBt5uGZwa7MakLSO
Arabs, already in possession of so many independent countries, demanded to add yet more to their list at the expense of countless millions of other truly stateless peoples whom they earlier conquered and forcibly Arabized and Islamized. In most Arabs’s mindsets, justice is merely for Arabs and other Arabized peoples only in “their” region of the world…“purely Arab patrimony,” an inseparable part of the ever expanding Dar ul-Islam.
Churchill had a big falling out with Zionism because his close blatantly antisemitic friend, Lord Moyne, was assassinated by Jews in 1944 seeking revenge for the killing of their comrades by British soldiers, but even more because he was a very powerful opponent of Jewish nationalism and of Israel’s rebirth, regardless of the size of a proposed future resurrected Jewish State.
In short, Lord Moyne was as bad an enemy the Jews could have imagined.
He was a key figure limiting Jewish immigration into the Mandate just when the desperate survivors of the Nazi death camps needed a safe haven to turn to.
At this same time sources such as the Minutes of the Permanent Minutes Commission of the League of Nations were recording scores of thousands of Arabs pouring into the Mandate from elsewhere—and not stopped by the Brits…future “native Palestinians.”
Even President Roosevelt’s America was not permitting survivors to land in our country, turning away the SS St. Louis in 1939, loaded with Jews fleeing Europe for their lives. FDR sent the US Coast Guard out to chase them away from our shores, and most all were returned to Europe to be slaughtered.
Similarly, Mizrahi and Sefardi Jews native to the Middle East and North Africa were also in grave danger now because of the conflict over “Palestine,” the name the Roman Emperor Hadrian gave to Iudaea(Judaea) after the Jews 2nd major revolt for freedom in 132-136 C.E. They needed refuge as well from those who knew them mostly as “kilab yahud” Jew dogs.
The first two major revolts had been so costly for Rome that Hadrian decided to put an end to his Judaean problem once and for all.
He renamed the Jews’s 4,000 year old ancestral homeland after their ancient historic enemies, the non-Semitic Greek invaders from the islands around Crete—the Philistines…”Syria Palaestina.”
Despite Arabism’s claims to the contrary, it was the Jews who revolted at least four major times, clear up to just decades before the massive invasion of Arab hordes pouring across borders in all directions in search of other non-Arab peoples’s greener pastures from their own fast desiccating Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E. See here next…
https://share.google/Wz6hW3kDQnM2MMsFG
As they did in Egypt, Persia, North Africa, subsaharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Kurdistan, Judaea, and elsewhere, Arabs came as jihadi settlers, colonizers, and conquerors spreading their new faith violently—slaughtering untold millions—offering most native peoples the choice of either conversion to Islam or beheading…enslavement if women or children were involved.
Diimmmi “protected” Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians had it somewhat better if they accepted their subjugated status and paid their special taxes on time—and if the wind blew in the right direction. Very “iffy” existence, to say the least.
To his credit, Churchill acknowledged the multi-millennial connection of the Jewish People to their ancestral homeland, despite periods of earlier forced exile due to imperial conquests. And he greatly appreciated the Jewish People’s enormous contributions to civilization throughout their 4,000 years of history.
That was evidently also why he was so upset at acts of Jewish violence, directed against British occupying forces who were disarming Jews in Israel while Arabs were becoming more powerful, and retaliating against Arabs after atrocities were committed.
It seems that Churchill, like too many other folks today, expected Jews to simply be more “Christian” in their reactions to the butchers of their people… perhaps “turning the other cheek” instead of pursuing their murderers.
Churchill’s Christianity had great influence on him, so the above may not be as much of a stretch as it may appear to be.
The problem of course is that no other people nor nation is expected to put up with the repeated acts of terrorism that Israel and its people have been repeatedly been subjected to.
Additionally, to his credit, he acknowledged Christianity’s close relationship to its Jewish roots.
Finally, the Arabs in question were mostly relative newcomers into the land, and indeed even during the years leading up to the Mandate era, most allegedly “native Palestinians” came from families who crossed into the Mandate from surrounding nations…
https://share.google/jhtUkXvlwL4UB0Cii
This last offering, together with its essential internal links, goes far in explaining the overall Arab-Israeli conflict, including its “Palestinian” component…
https://share.google/SeINVD4vqyuEM3MBB
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_White_Paper
“ In a speech in June 1921 on the occasion of the Royal birthday, Samuel stressing Britain’s commitment to the second part of the Balfour Declaration, declared that Jewish immigration would be allowed only to the extent that it did not burden the economy. Those who heard the speech had the impression that he was trying to appease the Arabs at the Jews’ expense, and some Jewish leaders boycotted him for a time.[4]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_riots
Churchill is famous for having protested the 1939 White Paper limiting Jewish immigration when he was out of power but was worse than useless to the Jewish people whenever he was in a position to help. Likewise, Great Britain never bombed the death camps during his tenure, though his memorial website says he gave a feeble suggestion to the military that they do something if they thought they could spare any planes but left it up to them, even after German defences had been obliterated and planes bombing nearby military targets flew right overhead and so close that survivors recounted windows rattling. Planes were however sent to aid the Warsaw uprising.
Samuel, to his credit, at least, had been influential in getting Weizman heard in the halls of British power and getting the Balfour Declaration passed but the first Jew to rule Eretz Israel in 2,000 years fell down on the job. It was also he who appointed the Grand Mufti in predictably futile attempts to appease the Arabs.