Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer

(1874–1965)

   British statesman. Early in his political career, Churchill took a sympathetic interest in Jewish matters. In 1904, four years after his election to the House of Commons, he attacked the Aliens Immigration bill. He also supported legislation that gave Jewish shopkeepers the right to keep open on Sunday and closed on Saturday. As colonial secretary in 1921, Churchill went to Cairo to sort out the tense and tangled post-war situation in the Middle East. The Emir FEISAL, who had been expelled from Damascus by the French, was given a throne in Iraq. His elder brother ABDULLAH was marching up through the desert with a Bedouin force to assist Feisal. Churchill met him in Jerusalem, and made him emir of Transjordan. That territory was excluded from the Jewish National Home provisions of the Palestine mandate. In the following year, Churchill issued a White Paper on Palestine that reaffirmed the Balfour Declaration, and declared that the Jews were in the country as of right and not on sufferance. At the same time, the Arabs were reassured that the Jewish National Home did not mean Jewish control of the whole country, that Jewish immigration would be regulated by absorptive capacity, and that Arab rights would not be prejudiced. The Zionists regarded the White Paper and the cutting off of Transjordan as a whittling down of the Balfour Declaration. Be that as it may, Churchill was to remain committed to the 1922 balance. He therefore regarded both the Passfield White Paper of 1931, and the Macdonald White Paper of 1939, as betrayals of Britain’s pledge to the Jews. From the opposition benches he launched powerful and eloquent broadsides against these appeasement policies.

   It was a painful irony, therefore, that Churchill’s record as the outstanding leader in World War II should have come under serious Jewish criticism. Nothing was done by the Allies to help the Jews being slaughtered in Europe - for instance, by a suggestion that the death camps and the railway lines leading to them should be bombed. Moreover, the 1939 White Paper was left intact, and the gates of Palestine remained almost closed to Jews who managed to escape. In his memoirs, Churchill defended himself on the ground that no disruptive issues could be allowed to impair the single overriding objective of defeating Hitler. Churchill was, however, responsible for one important wartime concession to the Jews. From the beginning of the war, the Zionist leaders had pressed for a Jewish brigade, under its own flag, to fight in Europe as a separate formation in the British army. The British military authorities obstructed the proposal until 1944, when Churchill overruled them.