In the autumn of 1911, Herbert Asquith, then
PrimeMinister of Britain, was playing golf with a young politician and
ambitious journalist WinstonChurchill. Suddenly the older man turned to his
companion and asked, “Did you ever hear of the word Weltraumpolitik?” Churchill
confessed he did not know german well and had no idea what the word meant.
Asquith then explained that it meant in effect the domination of the world by
Germany and added that he was gravely concerned by the obvious bid she was
making for world supremacy.
“The Navy is Britain’s only hope,” he said, looking
directly at his companion. “Would you be willing to accept the post of the
First Lord of the Admiralty if it were offered to you?”
“Indeed, I would,” replied Churchill eagerly.
Returning to his lodgings, he reflected on the
unexpected offer, on Germany’s militaristic challenge, and in a mood of
dejection he began to leaf idly through the Bible which was lying on the table.
Opening a page at random, his eye caught this verse: “Hear, O Israel! Thou art
to pass over Jordan this day to go in to possess nations greater than thyself,
cities great and fenced up to heaven.”
The episode is related in Churchill’s World Crisis
which deals with World War I and the events leading up to it. A feeling of vast
relief, exaltation and power, he says, swept over him. From that moment he felt
he walked with Destiny. The episode is an important clue to the mind, vision
and career of the man and the statesman whom the world now mourns. For he was above
all a dedicated man. Without this sense of dedication he might have become a
gallant adventurer, a literary dilettante and a mediocre politician. A
seriousness of purpose transformed an impetuous journalist into a prophetic
statesman and a crusader devoted to a lifetime struggle against Militarism and
Totalitarianism.
Churchill has been designated by some as the century’s
foremost statesman. Others believe he belonged to a previous century because in
“weal and woe Winston was for the quo.”
But with regard to two supreme issues – german Militarism and Communism – there
can hardly be any serious dispute as to Churchill’s preeminent role as
architect of international policy.
His fight against Communism began soon after the
Russian October Revolution. His reaction to the “immense and terrible
catastrophe of Russia” was immediate and intense. He strongly felt that the
Bolshevik Revolution would be menacing to civilisation and dangerous to the
peace of Europe and Asia. His speeches and writing in the years immediately
following the revolution were dominated with a theme which was almost an
obsession – “Watch Russia – that’s where the winter’s coming from.”
That he regarded Hitlerism and Bolshevism as the twin
evil movements of the century is easy to understand. For both have constituted
not only a challenge to the survival of England and the British Empire, but
also a threat to western civilisation and the hebraic spiritual heritage. He
strongly held that both movements crush man’s spirit, that both are cold and
desolating, differing in climate and conditions in the way that the North Pole
differs from the South Pole. Of the two, however, he considered Hitlerism the
greater evil and the more immediate menace.
Whereas in the 30’s he had a clear premonition that
unless confronted with a solid Grand Alliance, Hitlerism meant war (“I felt it
in my bones”), he tended to regard the situation in later years not
unhopefully. Churchill had often stated that the negotiations between the
leaders of the two worlds may fail and that mankind may not be able to escape
the supreme ordeal of Armageddon, but he insisted that a serious bid for a
negotiated settlement was imperative. To those who argued with him that a third
world war was inevitable, he had an answer which almost became his slogan: “A
world divided is better than a world destroyed.”
In October 1954, Churchill declared that since the
death of Stalin he had cherished the hope that there “is a new outlook in
Russia, a new hope of peaceful coexistence with the russian nation, and that
therefore it is our duty, patiently and daringly to make sure whether there is
such a chance or not.”
But a noticeable change of emphasis in Churchill’s
outlook upon the future had become discernible. Before Russia manufactured the
atombomb he urged that as quickly as possible, while the immense superiority of
the United States atombomb organisation offset the Soviet military
predominance, the western Powers should bring matters to a head with the soviet
Government and “should arrive at a lasting settlement.” But later on Churchill
spoke of at best “a generation of Peace.” In May 1953, he urged a meeting of
the heads of the Governments of the United States, Russia and Great Britain. And
later he stated that he had not receded from his willingness to meet the head
of the Soviet Union “if the right time and occasion is found.” Thus Churchill’s
emphasis seemed to have shifted from “daringly” to “patiently.”
Churchill had tended to stress that the basic policy
of the West was “Peace through strength,” but he had conceded that coexistence
was merely a transitory phase during which lasting Peace and how they are to be
built he had had very little to say. Weary from the titanic Labour, the strife
and convulsions of the century, he had apparently abandoned his last ambition –
to be the savior of Peace. The “last prize” had become the “lost prize.”
His reflexions on Peace appeared to take the
following direction: the world has undergone a cataclysmic change; a revolution
in the Science of destruction has made a good many solid tenets of a glorious
past and a good many seemingly impregnable imperial strongholds, precarious, if
not untenable; let a future generation grapple with the problem of an enduring
Peace and a new era; sufficient unto the day – the task thereof.
In his voluminous speeches and writings Churchill
often acknowledged a profound debt to the hebraic spirit. In a revealing essay
on the life of Moses, Churchill stressed the grand simplicity and essential
accuracy of the Bible’s recorded truths which have lighted the pilgrimage of
man. He was fascinated by the hebrew nomadic tribes because it was they who
grasped the idea of which all the genius of Greece and the Power of Rome were
incapable; that there was only one God, a universal God, a God of nations, a
Just God.
He rejected with scorn those learned and laborious
myths that Moses was a legendary figure employed by the priests to gain
authority for their social, spiritual and religious beliefs. He saw in Moses
one of the greatest humanbeings and regarded his achievement as one of humanity’s
most decisive steps forward. “We may be sure,” he declared, “that all these
things happened just as they are set out according to Holy Writ. We may believe
that they happened to people not so very different from ourselves and that the
impressions those people received were faithfully recorded and have been
transmitted across the centuries with far more accuracy than many of the
telegraphed accounts we read of the goings-on of today. In the words of a
forgotten work of Mr. Gladstone, we rest with assurance upon the ‘impregnable
rock of Holy Scriptures’.”
While on an imperial mission to the Middle East, in
the year 1921, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill paid a visit to Jerusalem.
During that memorable visit he met Pinchas Rutenberg. A russian-born jew, an
engineer by training, a revolutionary by necessity, a democrat with an
outstanding record of resistance to the advent of the Bolshevik Revolution,
Rutenberg had settled in Palestine to fulfill an old ambition, namely, the
generation of electric power and light by harnessing the river Jordan. It was
with reference to this project that Rutenberg had gone to see Churchill.
Churchill was attracted by the man and the idea. On
returning to London he approuved the steps that led to the granting of the
Rutenberg concession. But when the decision was announced a storm of protest
broke out. Churchill’s critics made the extraordinary charge that british and
arab interests were being sacrificed and that the key to the industrial
development of the country was being given away to a “bolshevik jew.”
In the House of Commons Churchill faced the critics.
In a brilliant speech he lamented the cold and prosaic mood of the nation
toward Zion that had succeeded the perfervid enthusiasms of the war. He
affirmed his purpose nevertheless to translate those enthusiasms into the
sober, concrete facts of day-by-day administration, and justified the Rutenberg
concession on that score. He described Rutenberg as a remarkable man, a social
revolutionary who had fought the despotic Czarist regime as well as the Tyranny
of the Bolshevik rulers, who in the fateful year of 1917 had in fact
recommended to Kerensky that Lenin and Trotsky be executed. With a typical
Churchill thrust he turned to the bigots: “It is hard enough, in all
conscience, to build a new zion, but if, over the portals of the new Jerusalem,
you are going to inscribe the legend, ‘No israelite need apply,’ then I hope
the House will permit me to confine my attention exclusively to irish matters.”
With another thrust he rejected the contention on
behalf of the arabs: “I am told that the arabs would have done it themselves.
Who is going to believe that? Left to themselves, the arabs would not in a
thousand years have taken effective steps toward the irrigation and
electrification of Palestine. They would have been quiet content to dwell – a handful
of philosophic people – in wasted sun-scorched plains, letting the waters of
the Jordan continue to flow unbridled and unharnessed into the Dead Sea.”
In the years that followed, Churchill played a vital
role as a crusader for zion. In 1939, on the eve of the world storm, Churchill
trained his guns on Chamberlain, not only with regard to the latter’s
appeasement of Germany, but also with regard to his appeasement of the arabs.
He predicted that Chamberlain’s Palestine policy would do England serious
injury. In 1940, with England on the brink of disaster, Churchill succeeded
Chamberlain as PrimeMinister. Even during his preoccupation with saving the
British Isles he was not unmindful of the desperate situation in the Middle
East. In a daring move he diverted weapons to that region thereby certainly
rescuing it from the heel of a merciless conqueror. In his Memoirs he referred
to the many attempts he had made to arm the jews of Palestine and to the
numerous obstacles that were placed in this path. In an entry during July 1940,
for example, he wrote: “I wished to arm the jews of Tel Aviv who, with proper
weapons, would have made a good fight against all comers. Here I encountered
every kind of opposition.”
After a long period of exploration, a Jewish Brigade
was formed as part of the British Army. I recall that on the day the
announcement was made in London, I happened to talk with a high official of the
British Foreign Office whom I used to see periodically in the course of my
work. He attributed the decision to Churchill’s personal intervention and made
no effort to disguise his hearty dislike of Churchill’s “zionist adventure.”
The formation of the Jewish Brigade proved to be invaluable to the jewish
struggle in Palestine, affording as it did an excellent training ground for the
military leaders and technicians who in 1948 were to constitute the core of the
victorious Army of Israel.
The delay in arming the jews of Palestine, and above
all, the restrictions on jewish immigraiton and land purchase in Palestine
which continued under Churchill’s war premiership, became a sore point with
many who urged immediate action and complained that Churchill’s deeds were not
as eloquent as his words. His son, Randolph Churchill, testifies that his
father sought to avoid Weizmann during the war. “Whenever I see him, I can’t
sleep at night,” Winston Churchill was reported to have said.
In a House of Commons debate early in 1949, his words
on the subject of Israel were heard with rapt attention by all parties. Turning
to the late Ernest Bevin, Churchill said: “Whether the Right Hon. member likes
it or not, whether we like it or not, the coming into being of the jewish State
is an event in world History to be viewed in perspective, not of a generation
or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand years, or even
three thousand years. That is the standard of time values which seems out of
accord with the perpetual click-clock of the rapidly changing moods of the age
in which we live. This is an event in world History....” In another historic
speech in May 1953, Churchill spoke in glowing terms of the role of the State
of Israel in the Middle East and paid a high tribute to the Army of Israel. His
words served as a poignant contrast with Bevin’s “squalid war” and the sullen
atmosphere surrounding the departure of the british from the shores of
Palestine.
In his address to the joint session of the U.S.
Congress in 1952, Mr. Churchill said: “From the days of the Balfour
Declaration, I have desired that jews should have a national home, and I have
worked to that end. I rejoice to pay my tribute here to the achievements of
those who founded the Israel State, who have defended themselves with tenacity
and who offer asylum to a great number of jewish refugees. I hope that with
their aid they may convert deserts into gardens....”
Churchill once wrote: “The jews are beyond doubt the
most formidable and remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.” We
may fittingly respond that Churchill was the most formidable and remarkable man
which England produced in the present epoch. Only a future historian writing
with a better perspective and more profound insight than a contemporary
historian can possess will be able to do Justice to Churchill’s inspired
leadership in the struggle for world freedom and liberty and to his role as a
british architect of Zionism.
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