Churchill was ‘too fond of the Jews’

17 March 2007

When, in the House of Commons in 1921, Churchill spoke in favour of Jewish land purchase in Palestine, a fellow Member of Parliament warned him that, as a result of his advocacy, he would find himself up ‘against the hereditary antipathy which exists all over the world to the Jewish race’. This was indeed so: in 1940 a senior Conservative gave as one reason for Churchill’s unsuitability to be prime minister his ‘pro-Zionist’ stance in Cabinet, protesting against the Chamberlain government’s restrictions on Jewish land purchase.

During the second world war, Churchill suggested the removal of ‘anti-Semitic officers’ from high positions in the Middle East. This led one of those officers, his friend General Sir Edward Spears, a Liberal MP, to warn me, as Churchill biographer, that ‘Churchill was too fond of Jews’.

Following the Jewish terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, at a time of strong anti-Jewish feeling in Britain, Churchill told the House of Commons: ‘I am against preventing Jews from doing anything which other people are allowed to do. I am against that, and I have the strongest abhorrence of the idea of anti-Semitic lines of prejudice.’

These were Churchill’s consistent and persistent beliefs. As he remarked when his criticisms of Jewish terrorism in Palestine were being discussed: ‘The Jewish people know well enough that I am their friend.’ This was indeed so.

Sir Martin Gilbert’s book Churchill and the Jews is being published in Britain in June by Simon & Schuster, and in the United States in October by Holt.