Bleeding Edge

The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government during World War I announcing support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman Turk occupied region of the Middle East, with a minority Jewish population.

It reads as follows:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2nd of November 1917, from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917.

The actual thoughts behind the Balfour letter, were initially expressed by Winston Churchill, with the inputs of Leo Amery, Lord Milner, Arthur Balfour, and also Lionel Walter Rothschild. Yet Sir Arthur James Balfour a Conservative Politician who was the Foreign Secretary, sent the letter, and thus the declaration is remembered, after his name…

A private Cabinet memorandum was produced in January 1923, providing a summary of the then-known Foreign Office and War Cabinet records leading up to the declaration. An accompanying Foreign Office note, asserted that the primary authors of the Balfour declaration were Balfour, Sykes, Weizmann, and Sokolow, with perhaps Lord Rothschild as a figure in the background, and that “negotiations seem to have been mainly oral, and by means of private notes and memoranda of which only the scantiest records seem to be available.

However the account of the key role played by Churchill in honoring the pledges made by Britain in 1917 to help establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, can be gleaned also from a copy of Chaim Weizmann’s 1918 pamphlet “What Is Zionism?” which illustrates the decades-long relationship between Churchill and Israel’s first president. Indeed, Churchill was an avowed Zionist, and consistent in his support, because Churchill heartily admired the Jewish characteristics that he shared in abundance, such as the energy, the self-reliance, the hard work, and the focus on family life of the Jewish people…

After all, Winston Churchill’s philo-Semitism had deep historical and philosophical roots, as he wrote in 1950: “The thought, the inspiration and the culture of the Jews, has been one of the vital dominants in the world history. There are none of the arts or sciences which have not been enriched by Jewish achievements.”

“No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem. Their messages in religion, philosophy, and art have been the main guiding lights of modern faith and culture,” Churchill argued in his memoirs.

However at the time of the “letter” Winston Churchill was part of the “Quiet Services” as he was fairly well hated in “Public” because of the Dardanelles expedition’s failure that was pinned on him. So although his thoughts, his exegesis, and his direction, are all clearly imprinted, all over the Balfour Declaration, this historical document that he himself instigated into existence, nowhere carries his name. Indeed the Churchill name is nowhere to be found within the official or the public Foreign Office records, due to his own personal wish to work primarily on the background at that time shielded from the irritable Public Eye, and also due to the demands of his office at the Secret Service, to keep a low profile when needed. Apparently if it were known that Churchill was the “Big Brain” behind Balfour’s letter — this declaration would not have been received as warmly as it did at the time from the British public and form the International community since he was already painted as a war monger and worse, because of Gallipoli…

This way one of his great achievements came to being while his personal and deep involvement with it — has been successfully shielded from public knowledge. Yet it is proven in official papers that are still secret today, a hundred years later.

Funny how History works that way.

This declaration is consistent with Churchill’s basic belief and principled foundation, instead of a career move, because from the early years of his political life, Churchill said that he had formed a strong bond with the British Jews that were members of his constituency of Manchester North-West, which was estimated to have an electorate that was made up of quite a few Jewish voters, maybe up to a tenth of the total population.

When in parliament — he fought legislation designed to curtail Jewish immigration to Britain and he was appalled by pogroms in Tsarist Russia, and strongly expressed himself in defense of the Jews of Europe. Most people know that he became a believer in the Zionist cause, as shown form his speech at a rally in Manchester when he cried against the massacres of the Jews of Russia. Indeed at that meeting he met Chaim Weizmann, for the first time. Shortly after, he wrote in a letter: “I recognize the supreme attraction to a scattered and persecuted people of a safe and settled home under the flag of tolerance and freedom.”

Yet, despite strong support from the Jewish voters of his constituency, Churchill lost the Manchester by-election in 1908, and he then stood for and elected to another constituency in Scotland. But in his new place, the complete absence of Jewish constituents did not alter his sympathies. Because Churchill, always held in high regard both the Jewish religious ethic, and the Zionist ideal for a homeland to be resurrected in ancient Palestine that was the traditional home of the Jews through the ages.

And as Churchill correctly had forecast, the time was right & propitious, for the return of the prodigal people to their national Home. Mainly because at the time, the “Sick Man of Europe” — the Ottoman Empire was collapsing from within — for a hundred years. And the First Word War hastened the process, and gave the Ottoman empire, the final shove into the scrap heap of history. And this opened up a vacuum of power and space to be populated by stronger better and more educated People that would advance the cause of the whole region in terms of Progress, Growth, and Development.

This historical opportunity was also evident to other astute observers and brilliant strategists, who like Winston Churchill also prompted the thoughtful British War Cabinet, to begin considerations for the future of Palestine with a Jewish homeland — immediately following the declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914.

Other brilliant men of the Secret Service, like British Intelligence Services Officer, T.E. Lawerence (of Arabia) already were crisscrossing the sands, and sowing seeds of discontent in the Bedu tribal camps, as they bribed & schemed with local potentates, to liberate the whole of the Middle East from the Turks in a popular uprising. They, started by exciting the tribal factions into tribal upswell, and nationalistic uprisings, that swept the local populations, and opened the whole of the Middle East, in a state of Open Revolt against their barbaric and tyrannical Turkish overlords.

T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) worked for Winston Churchill from his first days traipsing across the sands pretending to be an Archaeology student, but in 1921, when the future Prime Minister was to become Colonial Secretary, he also employed Lawrence as an advisor on the whole of Arab and Middle Easters affairs. The two men had grown to admire each other and thus became lifelong friends. After World War I ended, Lawrence had lost two brothers in that conflict and yet he didn’t hesitate to re-enlist under other assumed names, as part of his Secret Service personna.
After completing his “Covert diplomatic services” under Churchill, Lawrence returned to the military in 1922 by enlisting in the Royal Air Force. But in an attempt to avoid the glare of celebrity, he did so under a pseudonym, and became John Hume Ross. Sadly some months later, he was inadvertently unmasked by a rival political faction and the press revealed his secret, and he was immediately discharged. Lawrence subsequently enlisted as a private in the Royal Tank Corps, but under the assumed name Thomas Edward Shaw, a nod to his friend, the famed Irish writer George Bernard Shaw. Lawrence subsequently published an English translation of Homer’s Odyssey under the pen name of T.E. Shaw and maintained the assumed name until his death.

During the lead up to the Balfour declaration, the wider World War One was raging. It was then known as the Great War, and the battling forces had reached a stalemate, with millions of lives lost in the blood soaked trenches of the Western Front. The bloody mud of the battle lines of Flanders, was intractable and it came to be known as the biggest blood bath in a stalled conflict in history.

At this crucial time, two of Britain’s strongest Allies and Associated Powers, were not yet engaged in the war effort. Because at this time, the United States had yet to suffer a single war related casualty, and the Russians were not even thinking of getting into that battlefield, because they were utterly distracted by the internal civil wars, the political upheaval, and the newly installed Communists leaders, being fully unwilling to engage in foreign adventures, but instead choosing to consolidate their power in the vast country and it’s satellite states that they had been bequeathed with.

For the British, battling two Imperial armies, on all fronts, with the French playing the role of “undecided ally” — the future of the war itself was chancy, yet not very changeable, at least within the European theater of War. And with both armies muddling through, it was the urgent need for a new front — the Middle East — that needed to “Awaken” as Churchill always said. Awaken the sleepy giant of the oppressed indigenous people, who were suffocating under the banner of the Ottoman Caliphate, that occupied Jerusalem, and this fact the Turks wielded as a dagger stiching the heart of all Christians. Indeed it was at this time that Winston Churchill stated clearly that the British absolutely needed to open a new war front, by sticking a bayonet, in the soft underbelly of the German and Austro-Hungarian Power combine, that was firmly allied with the Ottoman Turks and entrenched in the Oriental Middle East sands.

To that end Winston Churchill masterminded the Gallipoli expedition in the Dardanelles, as the “Big Elephant Push” while cleverly hiding behind this bloody stalemate, the real aim of his thrusting dagger into the soft underbelly of the beast. This dagger thrust was the Arab revolt and the capitulation of the whole of the Ottoman Empire and her loss of all the Oil Fields to the British through Winston Churchill’s brilliantly executed secret plan to get the bitumen and the crude diesel, whose value he was well aware of, since his early days as First Lord of the Admiralty when he converted all the Naval warships to diesel boilers away from the old coal engines. He knew the efficiencies necessary to run a modern war and correctly forecast the necessity to capture the still “unknown” to the world oil fields of “Magna Arabia.”

Back in the Gallipoli campaign of the Dardanelles naval battle, the involvement of the “undecided and not fully committed French navy” had caused the campaign to begin with a giant loss, due to the failed naval attack by British and French ships on the Dardanelles Straits in February-March 1915. This gave time to the Turks to rearm and resupply their forts, and thus this sad state of indecision compounded the losses, since the Allies continued this already failed push with the major land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula on April 25th that resulted in a serious stalemate to mimic the Western Front, only this time involving both British and French troops, as well as major divisions of the Australian, and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) that were all repelled by the German led Turkish defenders. Maybe this was never meant to become a Victory — but it had great potential to liberate the greatest City of Christendom, Constantinople that Winston Churchill always wanted to see freed up and resurrected from the Muslim hordes’ oppression that’s been ongoing for five long centuries.

The stalemate of the Western Front of Europe, came to be replayed in the shores of ancient Troy, in 1915 … and finally the Allies chose to withdraw, and call it a day. It wasn’t even a draw. It was a disaster by any other name. That’s what that was.

Yet having foreseen this eventuality and being wholly out of “Official Favor” Winston Churchill, the black swan, had worked quietly for both practical and geopolitical reasons. Yet his brilliant strategy, had already provided for the parallel scheme to flank the Germans, by striking against them in the soft underbelly of their Empire. Therefore, he chose to oust the German led Turks from the Middle East, and from Syria-Palestine, on a long term basis, because from the beginning, he saw the creation of the state of Israel as a much needed pivot. And as the right thing to do for this tribe of unalloyed and resilient people that needed to return to their ancestral homeland. And because there were ancillary benefits to that friendship as well…

In Churchill’s mind, Israel was the strong pivot that would forever counter the inevitable Arab belligerence, and the rise of militant Mohammedanism, that in it’s essence is and always will be, firmly aligned with the tyrannical, oppressive, and barbaric Nazi Axis powers, or any other forces of darkness and evil to come. This is simply so, because of the serious similarities in these faulty ideologies, that always pits them together.

This is Winston Churchill’s brilliance as seen in his secret negotiating actions, that led to the Balfour declaration that spiked the Middle East with a tribe that over the many centuries of friction and volition within Europe’s educational and political systems was more European than anyone else. The European Jews would be the best antidote to tribalism, totalitarianism, and religious animosity, in that corner of the World, and hopefully they would be able to export the fruits of Science, Justice, and Democracy to the rest of the region. Winston, formulated this plan early on — and certainly well before the failed Gallipoli campaign, but he held his powder dry, as seen from the fact that he only held the first official high level negotiation between the British cabinet, and the Zionist leaders, in a conference on the 7th of February 1917. That conference had included the “map drawer” of the Middle East, Sir Mark Sykes, and the Zionist leadership as represented by his personal friend Sir Lionel Walter Rothschild. This private  conference and the subsequent discussions, are what led to the official request by the Foreign office, on the 19th of June 1917, for Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann, to submit a draft of a public declaration. Further drafts were discussed by the British Cabinet during September and October, with input from Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, who both had assistance from the Secret Service in drafting the preferred letter. The release of the final declaration was authorised by the 31st of October, seeing as the preceding Cabinet discussed and referenced amongst other things, the perceived positive propaganda, that would benefit and bolster the worldwide Jewish diaspora, and their various national communities that would inevitably support the Allied war effort on the side of the British and American allies.

It was a prescient thought, and a well conceived plan with enough Churchillian diplomacy and feigns and thrusts to mimic a good fencer. Much is gained by just reading the opening words of the Balfour declaration, that one understands the great Spirit hidden behind it. Not because the Balfour declaration represented the first expression of public support for Zionism by the major political power, that of the British Empire and it’s Compassionate and Humane policies that needed to be contrasted to the barbaric enemy — but also because it was simply the RIGHT THING TO DO.

And as Churchill argued in his writing in 1920 of Zionism as an “inspiring movement” describing Weizmann as “just like an Old Testament prophet.” He went on to state that “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 compromise three or four millions of Jews, an event will have occurred in the history of the world which would from every point of view be beneficial.”

Mind you, at this time, the term “national home” had no precedent in international law, and was intentionally vague, as to whether a Jewish state was contemplated. Mind you also that at the time the intended boundaries of Palestine were not specified, because all these lands were under the German allies, the Ottoman Turks, and the Kaiser with his Arabs, had already built his personal villa and his “eternal” throne in Jerusalem.

Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941), who ascended the throne of Prussia (head of the German empire) in 1888, was possibly the most arrogant person the West produced in the late 19^th century. At the Hague Conference of 1899, and later in 1907, the chairman of the conference said, “With the weapons now in our hands the effectiveness of fire presents the possibility of total mutual annihilation.”

“Therefore, war is unthinkable.”

These words were uttered by a person that ought to have known better — just seven years before the greatest bloodbath in history. The greatest bloodbath in the “Great War” the “War to End All Wars” at least until the Second World War. In reality, war at the time of Hague Conference was not unthinkable, because it took only one madman to make war.

The madman existed: the Kaiser of Germany, who in his speeches to his soldiers he said that “the German army should be modeled on that of Attila the Hun” and insisted that there would be “no quarter given and no prisoners taken.”

The Kaiser unleashed German industry and made it possible for the Krupp Iron Works in Germany to build artillery that could fire shells 25 to 30 miles. He created a canon called “Big Bertha,” irreverently named after his wife, which was so large that it could only be transported on a railroad car. It was the ballistic missile of its day and hailed as the guarantor of peace. Under that guise of Peace building, Germany armed and rearmed, and drew up plans for war – all in the name of peace.

Does that remind anyone of the “Religion of Peace” that bloodies the world everyday these days through the islamic terrorists that are the vermin scourge of the modern era?

But the Kaiser was paranoid to the extreme. He was extraordinarily sensitive to insult – whether real or perceived; whether to him, his wife or Germany. Anything that happened could be understood by him as an insult to Germany, something that he swore to avenge. He was pompous beyond pompous. At one time he owned more than 150 dress uniforms – and he loved to parade in them. He designed the uniforms for the German army, including the impractical great spiked helmets and long, gray coats that did not allow soldiers proper mobility, with tunics and pants which itched terribly in the summer heat and yet did not keep the wearer warm in the winter snows. But he liked the style.

Arguably, the height of his pomposity took place the time he visited Jerusalem in 1898. All the gates of the city have actual gates except for Jaffa Gate. It is open; there is no gate-door. It had a gate-door before the Kaiser came to Jerusalem. However, he was a tall man who rode a tall horse, to go along with the enormous spiked helmet on his head. This made it impossible for him to ride under the gate of Jaffa into the city without bending his prodigious head. Since that would be insulting to him, he prevailed upon his Turkish hosts to take the gate down – the gate that was built by Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16^th century, one of the great pieces of architecture. They complied and tore down the ancient Jaffa gate just to please the German Kaiser. This stupid action of historical destruction impressed even this pompous ass…

The Kaiser was extremely bigoted, and he regarded darker people as slaves, but the Turks, and the Arabs, somehow disregarded that flaw in their plan to be his perfect hosts and permanent allies. To prove the point, the Kaiser once said for the Japanese, that “are little, short-tailed monkeys that have no future.” The Kaiser despised the Jews, even more than the dark races, and he called them many derogatory names, using heavy anti-Semitic slurs, and saying things like: “The problem with the English is that they have too many Jews in their midst.”

Yet the Kaiser dreamed of German world domination, a full generation before Hitler, who somehow seemed to embody the same principles as the erstwhile Kaiser.

It was right then, that the Palestinian Arabs, willingly and unprompted, built a villa for the pompous Kaiser, with a huge stone throne, overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem — hoping that this gesture would cement their relationship, and thus ensure his forever alliance, allegiance, and protection against the ravages of the looming future. But obviously their misinformed about World Affairs leaders, their Arab Muftis, and their local Imams, chose the wrong Champion. And unleashing their fervor against the hated Brits and their Western European Christian allies, whom they hated even more than the Jewish settlers of Palestine — the Arabs fell victim to their own wishful thinking of virulent Muslim Jihadism aligned with German proto-Nazism. We all know how well that went later on… Both bankrupt ideologies came up pear shaped.

German bigoted and racist uber Aryan nationalism, in blood alliance with the dark Arabs who are semitic people and considered by the Germans as racially impure. What could go wrong?

Was it a great idea or a folly for the ages? You decide.

And let’s not forget that there are obvious consequences to those who align themselves with the wrong side of Reason, and certainly with the losing side of a World War. The losers have to lose enough, so that they do not repeat the experience. They need to learn the lesson. And yet the Palestinian Arabs tried the same thing by aligning with the Nazis a few short years later after their unlearned lesson of the First World War, and they fell in the ideological trap once again with Adolf fvckin Hitler. Twice already they were proven wrong and short sighted. And yet, to this day, they align themselves with the wrong side of history.

What is wrong with these people?

When are these people going to learn anything from History’s swift, certain, and deadly educational curve?

Back in the day, it was the powerful & pompous man, the German Kaiser and the First World War that had already destroyed the Jewish community centers of Eastern & Central Europe, and thus had changed the face of the Jewish world forever. And although today we look at the Second World War as the watershed for the destruction of world Jewry — in reality — the First World War, was the beginning of the total annihilation of European Jews. It was Kaiser’s wishful ideology of racial purity, that caused the destruction of European Jewry, and inspired the Nazi systematic and industrial scale extermination during the Holocaust. The NAZI killing machine, was the direct result of the First World War expulsions and progroms of the Jewish people throughout Europe instituted by Kaiser and his generals. Indeed all of the great centers of Jewish population and learning – whatever stability the Jewish world had – were unhinged in the First World War, and this is what Winston Churchill and the Balfour Declaration sought to address and correct in an Act of Compassion and Kindness.

And to think that the First World War hinged on the ego of a man who asked the Arabs to take down the most beautiful ancient gate of Jaffa, in the walled City of Jerusalem, so that he could fit his prodigious head through it … and for the Arabs to comply — gives us a sense of the magnitude of the problem with the Arab mind.

And it was in this climate of pomposity, religiosity, and hate, against the Jews, that Churchill, and the British government thoughtfully exchanged ideas, consulted and finally assembled the Balfour declaration from many wise heads, after long years of consultations — in an effort to right a wrong, and repair an affront to a whole People that were disenfranchised from home and hearth, under an unjust decree that was perpetuated for millennia.

Indeed in my mind this was a magnificent act of historical redress. It was a simple humanitarian gesture. An act of compassion that somehow providentially foresaw the horrors of the Holocaust to come, because Winston Churchill and the British Cabinet in their long term “Political Weather” correctly foresaw the dismal fate to befall the Jews during the Holocaust under the National Socialists of Germany, led by Adolf Hitler.

They thoughtfully read the tea leaves and from their historical knowledge could discern the writing on the wall, and sought to cushion the blow against these innocent People, proactively. They knew the secret deep state German plans for the biggest progrom in history to take place against the Jews, and acted to stop it, the only way they could see fit. Place the Jewish people out of harm’s way, by returning them to their homeland of Palestine. This is something we should consider doing today with the Kurdish people and the Catalan people as well, but that’s another story…

At the time and especially later and to this day, the Balfour Declaration sowing the seeds for the national homeland of the Jewish State and for the creation of the State of Israel, it was a magnificent moment in both English history and in the history of Palestine, and certainly the most significantly positive thing to happen to the Jewish people, in the couple of Millennia, after Jesus.

It was indeed the celebrated moment of the ancient homeland of Jesus Christ, a Jewish Rabbi, returning to his people. Short of a second coming this was Great News. The Jewish people returning in their ancestral homelands. What’s wrong with that?

Yet some people later chose to be politically correct and backtracked by saying that the words “in Palestine” meant that the Jewish national home was not intended to cover all of Palestine, whereas Winston Churchill had clearly meant that this was the Jewish “National Home” and it would be an undivided land where the co-inhabitants would live in Peace and Toleration with each other regardless of faith, race and belief. This would have come to pass as a United Palestine, but current difficulties and the unwillingness of the Palestinian Arabs to cooperate, has caused us today to place the emphasis on the second half of the declaration, which was specifically added to satisfy opponents of the policy, who had claimed that it would otherwise prejudice the position of the local population of Palestine and encourage antisemitism against Jews worldwide. Whilst the declaration called for political rights in Palestine for Jews, rights for the Palestinian Arabs, who comprised the vast majority of the local population, were limited to the civil and religious spheres. The British government acknowledged in 1939 that the local population’s views should be taken into account, and recognized in 2017 that the declaration should have called for protection of the Palestinian Arabs’ political rights, but that at the time the Palestinian Arabs didn’t not have any real leadership except the one beholden to the Ottoman Turks, and the German Kaiser, and were thus not at all interested to look for a future of freedom, under the British guarantors.

Even today, the Arab leaders ought to remember that aligning yourself with the totalitarian Axis powers of evil, or with any evil ideology — has long term consequences for your people…

Yet back in the day of the Balfour declaration, the notion of a revived Jewish Palestinian homeland, for these ancient homeless people dispersed in the four corners of the world — had many long-lasting consequences. For one thing, it greatly increased popular support for Zionism, and this led to the creation of the British Mandate over Palestine, that caused the creation of “Mandatory Palestine” which later became the State of Israel and the Palestinian territories.

As a result of the intifada and the continued intransigence of the Arab Palestinians to embrace the UN solutions to the conflict, today, the Balfour Declaration is wrongly considered to have caused the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict, often described as the world’s most intractable conflict.

Because controversy remains over a number of areas, such as whether the declaration contradicted earlier promises the British made to the Sharif of Mecca in the McMahon–Hussein correspondence, or the White paper of Winston Churchill, and many other efforts at reconciliation between these related Peoples that have lived in Palestine from almost the beginning of Time…

Churchill’s approach thus stemmed from the dilemma British governments would wrestle with throughout the time of the Mandate: how to square the circle of the promises Balfour had made both to establish in Palestine “a national home for the Jewish people” while also maintaining the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” But, both in and out of government, Churchill did more than many British politicians to fulfill those twin goals. The internal challenge Churchill faced is illustrated by a copy of the map he ordered of the territory which, in the wake of World War I, Britain now administered. On a memo accompanying it, a civil servant has scrawled a warning to the new Colonial Secretary: the marked boundaries were “very approximate … disputed … a guess.” Map in hand, Churchill departed for the Middle East in March 1921. At a conference in Cairo he laid the foundations for the Jewish national home by separating Transjordan from Palestine.

At the time, his decision disappointed Chaim Weizmann, but was later seen as the crucial step towards the birth of the State of Israel. To corroborate this view, you can see the letter James de Rothschild wrote to Churchill in 1955 clearly stating: “Without this much-opposed prophetic foresight of yours, there could not have been an Israel today.”

And when he was conferring in 1921 in Jerusalem — Winston Churchill, bluntly refused Arab demands that Britain halt Jewish immigration and abandon its commitment to a Jewish national home. “It is not in my power to do so,” he replied, “nor, if it were in my power, would it be my wish.” He went on to tell the delegation that the pledge was “manifestly right.”

Meeting with a Jewish delegation in Jerusalem he urged: “You must provide me with the means … of answering all adverse criticism. I wish to be able to say that a great event is taking place here … without injury or injustice to anyone.” At a tree-planting ceremony on the site of the future Hebrew University at Mount Scopus, Churchill declared: “Personally, my heart is full of sympathy for Zionism.” The establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine would be “a blessing to the whole world, a blessing to the Jewish race scattered all over the world, and a blessing to Great Britain.”

But, he reminded his audience, Britain’s promise had been “a double one. On the one hand we promised to give our help to Zionism, and on the other, we assured the non-Jewish inhabitants that they should not suffer in consequence. Every step you take should be for the moral and material benefit of all Palestinians.”

Churchill was convinced that it could be so…

The Balfour declaration had two indirect consequences, the emergence of a Jewish state and a chronic state of conflict between Arabs and Jews throughout the Middle East. It has been described as the “original sin” with respect to both Britain’s failure in Palestine and for wider events in Palestine. The statement also had a significant impact on the traditional anti-Zionism of religious Jews, some of whom saw it as divine providence; this contributed to the growth of religious Zionism amid the larger Zionist movement.

Starting in 1920, the Intercommunal conflict in Mandatory Palestine broke out, which widened into the regional Arab–Israeli conflict, often referred to as the world’s “most intractable conflict”.  The “dual obligation” to the two communities quickly proved to be untenable; the British subsequently concluded that it was impossible for them to pacify the two communities in Palestine by using different messages for different audiences. The Palestine Royal Commission – in making what was the first official proposal for partition of the region – referred to the requirements as “contradictory obligations”, and that the “disease is so deep-rooted that, in our firm conviction, the only hope of a cure lies in a surgical operation”. Following the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, and as worldwide tensions rose in the build up to World War II, the British Parliament approved the White Paper of 1939 – their last formal statement of governing policy in Mandatory Palestine – declaring that Palestine should not become a Jewish State and placing restrictions on Jewish immigration. Whilst the British considered this consistent with the Balfour Declaration’s commitment to protect the rights of non-Jews, many Zionists saw it as a repudiation of the declaration. Although this policy lasted until the British surrendered the Mandate in 1948, it served only to highlight the fundamental difficulty for Britain in carrying out the Mandate obligations.

Britain’s involvement in this became one of the most controversial parts of the British Empire’s history, and its reputation in the Middle East for generations. According to historian Elizabeth Monroe: “measured by British interests alone, the declaration was one of the greatest mistakes in imperial history.”

The 2010 study by Jonathan Schneer, specialist in modern British history at Georgia Tech, concluded that because the build-up to the declaration was characterized by “contradictions, deceptions, misinterpretations, and wishful thinking”, the declaration sowed dragon’s teeth and “produced a murderous harvest, and we go on harvesting even today”.

Yet it was one of the most compassionate and humanitarian measures that the British Empire ever produced, because judging by the harsh light of History, and the subsequent horrors of Hitler’s Germany exterminating the jews by the millions, this was the only safe heaven for the Jewish people. The State of Israel, that came into being because of the Balfour declaration and the subsequent actions of the British Empire and the English people to safeguard the Home of the Jews in their ancestral lands of Palestine.

The foundational stone for modern Israel had been laid a hundred years ago, but the prediction that this would lay the groundwork for harmonious Arab-Jewish cooperation proved to be more difficult. Of course Churchill was not blind to the potential consequences of Britain’s actions, telling the Canadian Prime Minister in 1921 that, if “after many years,” the Jews “become a majority in the country, they naturally would take over.”

Churchill again made the case that “the intention of the Balfour Declaration was that Palestine might in the course of time become ‘an overwhelmingly Jewish State” in his in his secret testimony to the 1937 Peel Commission that investigated the Palestine Mandate’s crucial lingering questions.

Many years later, when Churchill was cast into the political wilderness during the 1930s, Winston likened his “Exile” to that of the “Jewish Prophets in the desert” yet he nonetheless maintained his Zionist sympathies, as illustrated by a copy of a letter he received from Frederick Peel in July 1936 as the Arab revolt gathered steam. Peel, a British army officer who commanded the Arab Legion (Transjordan’s army), had attended the Cairo conference in 1921 and had remained in touch with Churchill. Now Peel wrote to warn him that of the dangers of Britain continuing to allow Jewish immigration. But Churchill was unconvinced. When, in 1939, Britain moved to halt Jewish immigration to Palestine, Churchill opposed the government in parliament. Referring to the Balfour Declaration — as a consequence of which, he reminded the Commons, Britain had not only received “important help in the war” but also the Mandate itself — he called the MacDonald White Paper a “plain breach of a solemn obligation.” Twisting the knife further, he accused prime minister Neville Chamberlain of caving before “an agitation which is fed by foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and fascist propaganda.” He closed by recalling prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s own support for Balfour and his call two decades before for the Zionists to “build up a new prosperity and a new civilization in old Palestine, so long neglected and misruled.”

“They have answered his call,” Churchill charged, “They have fulfilled his hopes. How can he find it in his heart to strike them this mortal blow?” But, despite the opposition of Churchill, the Labour party and scores of its own backbenchers, Chamberlain’s government got its way.

However, just a year later, Churchill was in Downing Street. There is great poignancy in the copy of the telegram he sent to Weizmann on the 25th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration: “My thoughts are with you on this anniversary. Better days will surely come for your suffering people and for the great cause for which you have fought so bravely,” he wrote. [Beneath Churchill’s message, the Foreign Office’s instruction to its embassy in Washington: “You should ensure that it is understood that the message is not [repeat not] for publication.”]

Churchill evidently fought an uphill battle for the Jewish State of Western Palestine, because throughout the war, the prime minister faced a cabinet which did not share his enthusiasm for Zionism. His attempt to overturn the MacDonald White Paper swiftly faltered. As Harold Wilson, an ardent supporter of Israel who would later become prime minister, wrote in his history of the relationship between Britain, America, and the Jewish state: “Army and official circles in Whitehall and Palestine were determined to have none of it, Churchill or no Churchill. Downing Street disposes, but before long the rats get at it — in this case the Colonial Office, the military, and the Palestine administration.”

Churchill, however, held to his beliefs, meeting regularly with Weizmann to assure that their thoughts were “99 percent identical.” In 1941, he wrote to the War Cabinet of his hopes for the postwar establishment of “the Jewish State of Western Palestine,” which would have the opportunity “for expansion in the desert regions to the southwards which they would gradually reclaim.” He lobbied Franklin Roosevelt, reminding him: “I am strongly wedded to the Zionist policy, of which I was one of the authors.”

And he told his senior ministers that, if the Allies were victorious: “the creation of a great Jewish state in Palestine would inevitably be one of the matters to be discussed at the Peace Conference.”

Many years later, at the age of 76, Churchill became the Prime Minister of Great Britain for a second time.

Chaim Weizmann, was now the president of Israel, and he sent his personal congratulations to Winston.

From Number 10 Downing Street, Churchill wrote his response:

“The wonderful exertions which Israel is making in these times of difficulty are cheering to an old Zionist like me.”

Obviously, it took a lot of work, but if anything, this past Century, proves that Churchill succeeded in his prescient views of support for the creation of the State of Israel, as did the Jews whose philosophy, humanism, and children, he had adopted as his own.

God Bless and God Speed.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

A century later the promise of the Balfour declaration has been realized fully, with the help of America that safeguards the Jewish homeland, amid it’s inimical and intransigent neighbors.