It is in this global context that we celebrate the 150th birthday of Winston Churchill, the greatest Western leader of the twentieth century, whose supreme aspiration was the security and advancement of what he simply referred to as “civilization,” the virtue and value of which he had no doubt. He also had no doubt about the virtue and value of Zionism and the State of Israel, which he considered an integral part of this civilization, and a crucial partner in its advance.

Churchill was a far more complex figure than he is often depicted in popular culture, and that was certainly evident in the evolution of his thinking about Zionism. This late nineteenth century political movement, which aimed to restore a Jewish sate in the Holy Land, became very dear to him, contributing to his unpopularity among his colleagues and other members of the political establishment. He came to support Zionism for a host of reasons: paternal, personal, historical, humanitarian, racial, romantic, strategic, mystical, religious, and civilizational. Churchill’s worldview was founded on the nineteenth-century ideal of promoting progress and advancing civilization, so it was the Zionist’s civilizational contribution that motivated Churchill the most and was the most enduring reason for his Zionism.

Churchill was natural philo-Semitic due to the influence of his father Lord Randolph, which was unusual among the British aristocracy, so he was naturally sympathetic to Jewish causes. Czarist Russian pogroms in 1903-05 convinced Churchill that Jews needed a refuge, which he first advocated in 1905. He declared then, and repeated many times in his life, a theme of Benjamin Disraeli, the nineteenth-century, Jewish-born, British Conservative prime minister: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations dealt with the Jews.” Churchill first made clear in 1908, prompted by his Jewish constituents in Northwest Manchester, that the Jews’ refuge should be located in the Holy Land, their historical homeland. He believed restoration of such a state “would be a tremendous event in the history of the world.”

Seeing for himself

But what impelled Churchill to become an unshakeable Zionist was the civilizational cause, which he discovered as Colonial Secretary in March 1921, when traveling to the Middle East to establish a post-war regional order and implement the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (which committed the British government to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine). After meetings in Cairo, he went to Jerusalem for more meetings with regional officials, then toured towns in Palestine. He was stunned by how the Zionists were turning a barren land green and were developing the area, while observing that the Palestinian Arabs did neither. (He generally was frustrated with Palestinian Arabs, who supported the Ottomans in the First World War and the Nazis in the Second.)

Churchill visited Tel-Aviv and was impressed by the twelve-year-old city built on sand dunes and the remarks of Mayor Meir Dizengoff. In welcoming Churchill, Dizengoff declared that despite the Turks and the First World War, “we have been able to create such a pretty oasis in the middle of the sandy desert,” and extolled “our civilizing action in the domains of agriculture, industry, and commerce, for the greatest benefit of all the inhabitants of the country…The Jewish people will still have to speak its word in the history of civilization.” Nothing could have resonated more with Churchill.

Yet, what impressed Churchill even more was his visit later that day to Rishon Lezion. Jews had continuously lived in the Holy Land for several thousand years, despite losing sovereignty for almost two millennia. Rishon was the first permanent Zionist agricultural settlement in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, established in 1882 and at times supported by the French Baron Edmond de Rothschild. The town elders told Churchill they converted a land that was “deserted” and served “as a dwelling for jackals,” into a place where there were “all kinds of plantations as oranges, almonds, vines, olives etc. are to be found.” Additionally, “at present nearly all swamps, rocks and sands became beautiful colonies, gardens and orchards.” Churchill marveled at the vineyards and wine cellars, and enthusiastically declared, “Nothing will stand in your way. You have changed desolate places to smiling orchards and initiated progress instead of stagnation.” Henceforth, Rishon became the image of Zionist Palestine.

Upon returning to England, Churchill exuberantly shared, in public and private, what he observed. One journalist privately noted what Churchill conveyed to him, “Splendid open-air men, he exclaimed, beautiful women; and they have made the desert blossom like the rose.” To the Cabinet, Churchill “paid a high tribute to the success of the Zionist colonies of long standing, which had created a standard of living far superior to that of the indigenous Arabs.”

Defending Progress

In June 1921, Churchill had to defend the government’s Palestine policy in the House of Commons, at a time when Zionism and British assumption of the League of Nations Mandates in Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq) were not popular, especially among the ascending Conservatives, whose favor Churchill, then a Liberal but soon to rejoin the Conservative Party, was increasingly keen to have. Given political sensitivities, Churchill at this time mostly spoke very carefully about Zionism—except when it related to its civilizational value. In the Commons, he declared being “struck by the enormous productive results” which the Zionists had achieved. He insisted that amid the “most inhospitable soil,” the Jews of Rishon Lezion had produced the “most beautiful, luxurious orange groves,” and “excellent wine.” He thundered, “I defy anybody, after seeing work of this kind, achieved by so much labour, effort and skill, to say that the British Government, having taken up the position it has, could cast it all aside and leave it to be rudely and brutally overturned by the incursion of a fanatical attack by Arab population from outside. It would be disgraceful if we allowed anything of the kind to take place.” He could not imagine Britain interrupting and obstructing the Zionists’ tremendous achievements to advance civilization. He also noted how Jewish industry was benefiting the Arabs: “All round the Jewish colony, the Arab houses were tiled instead of being built of mud, so that the culture from this centre has spread out into the surrounding district.”

Shortly after, Churchill reiterated the same themes to a skeptical imperial conference: “It should be remembered that wherever they [the Zionists] have been they have not only created wealth for themselves but for the Arabs around them. Wherever the footprints of the Jews in Palestine are found you have prosperity, progress and scientific methods of cultivation, and where there was a wilderness you now find vineyards.”

These were astonishing statements, delivered to the mostly unsympathetic Cabinet, Commons, and imperial conference. They were not circumspect or hedged in tentative words, such as Churchill generally used about Zionism and Palestine at this time. When he discussed the civilizational impact of the Zionist venture, Churchill was bold and defiant, and insisted that Britain continue to support this momentous historical endeavor. The Zionists were collaborators, fellow civilizers in this most important historical mission.

This view of the Zionists was reinforced by its diaspora leader Chaim Weizmann. The same age as Churchill, Weizmann was a Russian Jewish chemist to emigrated to England in 1904 and eventually became head of the World Zionist Organization. The two began to develop a close friendship when Churchill became Colonial Secretary. Churchill perceived Weizmann to be devoted to England and sharing many of the same value, as well as a man of great moral force.

The Birth of IsraelZionism’s value stood out in Churchill’s mind in the interwar period. He viewed the years from the First World War till the Second extremely pessimistically. He considered the period as a corruption of the blessed nineteenth-century order, which he loosely defined as the Victorian era. He thought the latter, during which he grew up, as glorious, liberal, full of progress and hope, and led by great statesmen. In contrast, he disliked how the First World War was fought, settled, and led by small men and he detested the war’s aftermath, including the Bolshevik Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and what he presciently foresaw in the early 1920s as the makings of another major war. He viewed Zionism as a rare bright spot in such a darkening world.

In the early 1930s, Churchill became an isolated figure, in the political wilderness, perceived as a relic whose time had passed and whose views were disregarded. This mirrored the position of the Zionists, who also dwelt in the British political wilderness. His strategic conception of Europe and the Middle East was completely out of sync with that of the political establishment. Successive British governments increasingly distanced themselves from the Balfour Declaration’s commitment to Zionism, considering it a strategic liability. Meanwhile, Churchill viewed the Palestinian Jews as strategic assets, at a time when Britain needed more allies and needed to demonstrate that it was strong enough to keep its commitments. He bonded with fellow pariahs Weizmann and the English Zionists, believing the movement offered a rare hope for a civilization severely under threat.

Churchill championed Zionism during the Second World War, seeking to establish a Jewish state in the postwar period, then restrained his Zionism right after the war amid acute anti-Zionist hostility by the Labour government and the British population. But once the Zionists declared a state in May 1948 and defeated invading Arab armies by early 1949, overcoming British support for Jordan’s military, Churchill blasted the Labour government for pursuing a “policy of folly, fatuity and futility the like of which it is not easy to find in modern experience.” Churchill asserted, as he indicated in 1908,”[The] coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years.” He maintained that attitude when returning as premier in 1951.

In the spirit of Churchill’s 150th, Western countries should again embrace Israel and its current fight, and thereby reaffirm the value and durability of their common civilization.

Michael Makovsky is President and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) and author of Churchill’s Promised Land (Yale University Press, 2008).

Originally Published in Finest Hour #207 by the International Churchill Society.

The post “Nothing Will Stand in Your Way”- Churchill and Zionism appeared first on JINSA.

Malley’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee represented the first time that the administration had been required to account publicly for its yearlong effort to entice Iran back into the 2015 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Predictably, Malley spent a lot of time blaming President Trump’s withdrawal from the deal for the subsequent escalation of Iran’s nuclear program and regional aggression. Fair enough. But he studiously avoided the uncomfortable reality that Iran’s most worrisome nuclear advancements — including its unprecedented decision to enrich a bomb’s worth of uranium to 60 percent — have occurred on Biden’s watch. Ditto the fact that Iran-backed attacks targeting U.S. troops and partners in the Middle East doubled during Biden’s first year in office as compared with Trump’s last year in office. Iran’s behavior might have been bad under Trump’s maximum-pressure policy, but it has gotten significantly worse under Biden’s more accommodationist approach.

While acknowledging that, even after eight rounds of exhaustive diplomacy in Vienna, the prospects of returning to the JCPOA “are, at best, tenuous,” Malley offered no hint that the administration is contemplating any course correction. In defending a continuation of its current approach, his argument boiled down to this: “Are we better off reviving the nuclear deal and, in parallel, using all other tools at our disposal — diplomatic, economic and otherwise — to address Iran’s destabilizing policies? Or are we better off getting rid of the deal and banking on a policy of pressure alone to get Iran to accept more onerous nuclear constraints and curb its aggressive parties.”

There’s much to take issue with in that formulation. The first concerns the core question of how well American interests would actually be served by reviving an agreement that grants Iran’s rulers an enormous financial windfall that would immediately be put to use funding terrorist proxies across the Middle East and increasing its arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones (already the region’s largest), while conferring international legitimacy on a nuclear program that, in accordance with the JCPOA’s terms, will be free to expand without restraint well before the end of this decade.

Setting aside that non-trivial concern, what about Malley’s suggestion that the administration is coupling its nuclear diplomacy with simultaneous efforts to use “all other tools at our disposal” to push back on Iran’s malign behavior? For anyone who has followed the Iran issue closely, his claim is sharply at odds with the reality of Biden’s actual policy.

Take the issue of sanctions enforcement. Iran’s oil sales have been allowed to nearly double from their lows under Trump, averaging around 1 million barrels per day this year, with the vast majority being bought by China. As a result, Iran’s accessible foreign-currency reserves have exploded. At the end of Trump’s term, the regime was almost broke, down to its last $4 billion; after a year of Biden’s lax enforcement, its financial cushion had ballooned to a much more comfortable $31 billion. Is it any wonder why Iran’s rulers have been perfectly content to drag out the negotiations in Vienna and stick to their exorbitant demands for U.S. concessions?

The accuracy of Malley’s depiction of U.S. policy fared no better with respect to security matters. He described a world in which the administration is “working day in, day out with Israel, in particular, but also with our European allies on a strategy to counter, deter, and respond to any Iranian action, whether it has to do with attacks against our partners, its UAV program, its ballistic missile program.” In these efforts, he added, “we are not leaving any stone unturned.”

If only. The list of unanswered Iranian attacks against U.S. personnel, interests, and partners in the last year is too long to list in full. Among the greatest hits would be a complex drone strike on a U.S. base in Syria last October, clearly intended to kill U.S. troops. Another would be Iran’s brazen firing of a dozen ballistic missiles at U.S. allies in Iraqi Kurdistan just two months ago, about a mile from a new American consulate. Or multiple missile and drone attacks earlier this year against the United Arab Emirates, one of Washington’s oldest and most important regional friends, which also targeted thousands of U.S. forces based in the country. There may be many ways to characterize this pattern of failing to retaliate against an aggressor’s repeated efforts to kill and maim. But “using all tools at our disposal” to “counter, deter, and respond to any Iranian action” is not one of them.

Indeed, despite Malley’s best efforts to paint a picture of an administration committed to the practice of coercive diplomacy, the truth did out when Malley was pressed on the administration’s willingness to use force to back up Biden’s commitment that Iran would never get nuclear weapons on his watch. Malley’s response? A “military option cannot resolve this issue.” Further, “The only real solution here is a diplomatic one.” Finally, “We know that a military strike is not an answer to Iran’s nuclear program.”

So much for using all instruments of national power or doing whatever it takes to stop Iran from acquiring the bomb. Moreover, even if this is what Biden and Malley truly believe about the utility of U.S. force, why would the administration communicate that publicly to Iran’s hard-line leaders? What possible purpose could be served by surrendering the extraordinary leverage of a credible U.S. military threat during a difficult negotiation with a recalcitrant enemy?

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Senator Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) made it clear how unconvincing he found Malley’s testimony. “I heard a lot of it focus on the Trump administration’s decision,” he noted, while pointing out that Biden has been in charge of Iran policy since January 2021. Noting that multiple officials had been warning for months that the administration was “weeks” away from breaking off negotiations, Menendez implored Malley to explain “what is your plan B? Because I get no sense of what that plan is.”

Exactly right. There is no Plan B. Malley made clear that the administration is prepared to keep on its current course — Plan A — “to get back into the JCPOA for as long as our assessment is that its nonproliferation benefits are worth the sanctions relief that we would provide.” While adding that “being at the table doesn’t mean we’re waiting” to act against Iran, Malley was at a loss to identify any specific steps — beyond a handful of token sanctions — that the administration has taken to push back in a sustained way against Iran’s escalating nuclear expansion and regional aggression.

In other words, the Biden administration in reality is not acting but waiting. It doesn’t want to declare dead the talks that Iran has used as cover for 13 months to reach the cusp of nuclear-threshold status because doing so would require it to pivot to a Plan B, which it doesn’t have, and doesn’t want to have. Plan B would necessarily involve some willingness to confront Iran — directly or through U.S. allies — with new, sustained economic and military pressure to end its nuclear advancements, drone attacks, and hostage-taking, which the administration is evidently loath to do.

None of this is likely to satisfy our regional allies, especially Israel, which cannot remain, for its own security and even existence, as patient as the Biden administration and is likely to feel compelled to take matters into its own hands to prevent a nuclear Iran, thus triggering a serious conflict that could spread to a regional war.

Our organization, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), just issued a report that calls on the administration to pivot to a Plan B, with detailed recommendations on what such a strategy would entail. Key elements would include the vigorous enforcement of existing sanctions to cripple Iran’s oil revenues, including a willingness to punish Chinese firms for their purchases; working with our European partners to trigger the JCPOA’s powerful “snapback” provision that would resurrect all United Nations sanctions on Iran; and censuring Iran at the International Atomic Energy Organization for its stonewalling of international inspectors investigating its suspect nuclear activities.

The report also urges President Biden to publicly declare a recommitment to U.S. defense of the region’s security, including the use of force to prevent the Iranian regime from developing nuclear weapons. At the same time, the United States should strengthen the military capabilities of its regional partners and take full advantage of the Abraham Accords to build a new U.S.-led security framework that can carry more of the burden in countering Iranian aggression. Particular priority should be given to ensuring that Israel has all the capabilities it needs to act on its own to prevent a nuclear Iran, including the swift transfer of KC-46A aerial refueling tankers, large quantities of precision-guided munitions and bunker-busting bombs, and more missile-defense batteries and interceptors.

Malley’s testimony exposed a sober reality. The administration’s Iran policy has run its course and failed. Refusing to recognize that fact and shift course only guarantees that the Iranian threat will worsen, leading to the nightmare of a nuclear Iran or war. Just as Congress pushed the Biden administration to adopt a more robust policy toward Ukraine, Congress should now pressure President Biden to pivot to a realistic, tough-minded Plan B toward Iran, which leverages all elements of U.S. power and all U.S. partners to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

John Hannah, a former national-security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, is the Randi and Charles Wax Senior Fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA). Michael Makovsky, a former Pentagon official, is JINSA’s President and CEO.

Originally published in National Review.

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