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To the Editor:
Hillel Halkin brings characteristic good judgment to his discussion of Winston Churchill’s relationship with the Jewish people, and draws a compelling portrait of a natural philo-Semite who did as much for the Jews as his political standing allowed—but not more [“Books in Review, February].
Those who take Churchill to task for having been insufficiently supportive of Zionism at certain crucial times must acknowledge that he was far more sympathetic than most of the leading members of his party and of the foreign service at Whitehall. Churchill could not very well have bucked his “Arabist” colleagues at every turn.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting that there were contemporary observers in England, including non-Jews, who found Churchill to be gratuitously unfair to Zionism at a time when the lives of Jews were endangered. Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, a military officer who spent most of his career in the Middle East and was a great friend of Zionism, wrote the following in his diary in 1944, shortly after the assassination in Cairo of a British diplomat at the hands of Jewish militants:
Churchill spoke yesterday in the House of Commons on the murder of Lord Moyne and its effect on Zionism. I regard his statement as grossly unjust and as using the action of a small, desperate gang of exasperated Jews to whip the whole of Jewry. Churchill knows full well that the assassination is not any part of the Zionist policy nor has it ever been. . . . Churchill now threatens Zionism with the withdrawal of the support of His Majesty’s Government unless they will eradicate this murderous element from their ranks. . . . Is this the time, when the Jewish nation has and still is suffering more than any other people, when anti-Semitism is almost aflame throughout the world, to blame a whole people for the acts of a small murderous gang? I cannot help feeling that Churchill’s unwise pronouncement and unjust condemnation is a sop to anti-Semitism and an excuse to justify further curtailments of the Zionist policy.
Alexander Drazin
New York City
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To the Editor:
Hillel Halkin writes: “[Churchill] could not get his generals to agree to bomb the Nazi death camps or the rail lines leading to them.” This is a cautious formulation that misses important nuances in the story.
In the course of producing my documentary film on the Allies’ failure to bomb the Nazi concentration camps, They Looked Away (2002), I interviewed American bomber pilots who flew over Auschwitz in 1944 on their way to industrial targets that were just a few miles from the gas chambers. I also learned that the Royal Air Force dropped supplies to the Polish Home Army in Warsaw, 150 miles farther from their bases in southern Italy than Auschwitz. Thus, British pilots, too, had the ability to bomb Auschwitz or the railways leading to it, but never received an order to do so.
In July 1944, Churchill jotted a note to his foreign minister, Anthony Eden, endorsing a request by Jewish leaders to bomb Auschwitz. But the plan stalled amid objections by army officers. If Churchill had taken care to overrule them (something he was not above doing in other respects), the Nazi death machine might have been struck a significant blow.
Stuart Erdheim
Las Vegas, Nevada
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To the Editor:
Hillel Halkin’s discussion of Winston Churchill’s relationship with the Jews and Zionism is compelling and balanced, but he is unwittingly unfair to Churchill in failing to provide context for the latter’s opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1946.
Churchill, Mr. Halkin notes, thought it “silly” to suppose that there was “room in Palestine for the great masses of Jews who wish[ed] to leave Europe.” But in this Churchill was simply reflecting the universally perceived view at the time. As then-Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin famously said, “Palestine is too small to swing a cat in.”
After World War II, my late father M.H. Blinken created the American Palestine Institute, which engaged one of America’s most eminent economists, Robert Nathan, to study Palestine’s capacity to absorb large numbers of immigrants. Together with Oscar Gass and Daniel Creamer, Nathan produced a large report in 1946 which concluded that capacity for “615,000 would be a low estimate for the next ten years, while 1,125,000 would be high but not unattainable under very favorable circumstances.”
The report was submitted to the newly formed Anglo-American Commission on the Future of Palestine, created by Truman and Atlee. The commission unanimously endorsed the report’s findings. Atlee balked, but under pressure surrendered the British Mandate in Palestine to the United Nations. The rest is history.
I believe that if Churchill had been in power in 1946 and had had access to the Nathan report, he would have acted to open Palestine to Jewish immigration, giving meaningful substance to his continued support of the Zionist cause.
Ambassador
Donald Blinken
New York City
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To the Editor:
Hillel Halkin writes that “Jews were among Churchill’s earliest political and financial backers, and it was because of them that he chose to run for Parliament in 1904, at the age of twenty-seven, from a heavily Jewish district in Manchester.” But Churchill was born in November 1874, and would have turned thirty, not twenty-seven, in 1904. In any case, he first ran for Parliament in 1899 in the so-called “Khaki” election. Although unsuccessful then, he was “returned” (as the English say) from Oldham on his second run in the 1900 general election.
Mr. Halkin may also be mistaken in writing that Churchill ran from Manchester North-West in 1904 because it was a “heavily Jewish district.” As Roy Jenkins notes in his thorough biography of Churchill, “of a total electoral roll of 11,411 [voters] in the constituency, it was estimated that 740 were Jewish.”
Felix M. Phillips
Minneapolis, Minnesota
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To the Editor:
Hillel Halkin errs in describing David Lloyd George as an Englishman and a Tory. Although born in Manchester, Lloyd George was a proud Welshman, and he was a lifelong member of the Liberal party.
Dennis Krikler
London, England
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Hillel Halkin writes:
Alexander Drazin is quite right—as Richard Meinertzhagen maintained at the time—that Churchill overreacted to the 1944 assassination in Cairo of Lord Moyne (the British aristocrat Walter Edward Guinness) by the extremist Freedom Fighters of Israel, commonly known in English in those days as the “Stern Gang.” But it needs to be taken into account, firstly, that Guinness was a good personal friend of Churchill’s, and secondly, that he was not just any diplomat. He was the former British colonial secretary and was, at the time of his death, serving as British resident minister of state in Cairo—that is, as director of British diplomatic activity throughout the Middle East. However exaggerated Churchill’s public reaction may have been, his shock over the assassination was genuine.
Stuart Erdheim is right, too: had Churchill given an order to bomb Auschwitz, rather than simply recommend that it be bombed, it would have been bombed. He did not do so, presumably, because he was loath to quarrel with his general staff and did not wish to stand accused of risking British pilots and air crews in order to save Jewish lives that had no military value. Although this was not courageous of him, it does not mean that his sympathy for the Jews of Europe was insincere.
Whether Churchill would have changed his mind about Jewish immigration to Palestine after World War II if he had read the Nathan report is a matter of speculation. In the end, of course, the “absorptive capacity” of Palestine, which today has 5 million more Jews (with a far higher standard of living) than it did in 1946, greatly exceeded Robert Nathan’s most optimistic estimate. Yet it is not clear to me that Churchill’s skepticism about massive Jewish immigration to post-World War II Palestine was mainly economic in nature. It is likely that political considerations played more of a role in it.
I stand corrected by Felix M. Phillips and Dennis Krikler. Churchill’s biographers, however, do seem to believe that the Jewish vote in Manchester’s northwest district was a reason for his running there. As observers of American electoral politics know, the importance of Jewish political support is not restricted to numbers of eligible Jewish voters and has to do with other factors as well (e.g., high turnout at the polls, financial support, etc.). This may well have been true of Manchester in 1904.
Churchill
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