“Nothing Will Stand in Your Way”- Churchill and Zionism

For years Western civilization has been in crisis. In the United States, which long ago replaced Britain as the leader and ultimate defender of Western civilization, there has been a growing chorus of those doubting the virtue of the country’s origins and its present. Hamas’ barbaric invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023, and ensuing events, intensified this crisis, exposing deep fissures in America about what the country stands for, and should stand for. Most Americans support Israel, which claims to be acting as the West’s vanguard in a defensive civilizational battle against the Iran axis. Yet a sizeable minority of Americans view the democratic Jewish state, a close partner of the US, as the villain.

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.