Britain and the Jews

Melanie Phillips’ disturbing Britian’s Anti-Semitic turn notes that:

And now, in Britain and elsewhere, anti-Semitism has mutated again, its target shifting from culture to creed to race to nation. What anti-Semitism once did to Jews as people, it now does to Jews as a people. First it wanted the Jewish religion, and then the Jews themselves, to disappear; now it wants the Jewish state to disappear. For the presentation of Israel in British public discourse does not consist of mere criticism. It has become a torrent of libels, distortions, and obsessional vilification, representing Israel not as a country under exterminatory attack by the Arabs for the 60 years of its existence but as a regional bully persecuting innocent Palestinians who want only a homeland.

She shows how antisemitism has infected different sectors of British society: academia, the Church and the media. And while it doesn’t seem to be as bad in the government, the government isn’t without its bad apples.

Livingstone is not the only leftist politician “crossing the line.” In 2003, Labour backbencher Tam Dalyell claimed that Tony Blair was “being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers.” Liberal Democrat Jenny Tonge, whose party honored her with a peerage after she sympathized with suicide bombers and compared Arabs in Gaza with Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, told her party conference in 2006: “The pro-Israel lobby has got its grips on the Western world. I think they’ve probably got a certain grip on our party.”

While the English weren’t always supportive of Jewish settlement in Palestine, at least one British leader was supportive of a Jewish Homeland, Winston Churchill. Arthur Herman writes

A student of history, Churchill came to feel that Judaism was the bedrock of traditional Western moral and political principles–and Churchill was of a generation that preferred to talk about principles instead of “values.” For Europeans to turn against the Jew, he argued, was for them to strike at their own roots and reject an essential part of their civilization–“that corporate strength, that personal and special driving power” that Jews had brought for hundreds of years to Europe’s arts, sciences and institutions. To deny Jews a national homeland was therefore an act of ingratitude. Churchill became a keen backer of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which broached the idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As a friend to Zionist leader Chaim Weizman, and as colonial secretary after World War I, Churchill made establishing such a homeland a matter of urgency. “The hope of your race for so many centuries will be gradually realized here,” Churchill told a Jewish audience in Jerusalem during his visit in March 1921, “not only for your own good, but for the good of all the world.”

Interestingly, the one action that Churchill took that haunts the Middle East to this day, was apparently done to help the Jews.

Yet Churchill was convinced that Arab civilization would benefit from contact with an entrepreneurial and morally centered people. “Speaking entirely as a non-Jew,” he wrote, “I look on the Jews as the natural importers of western leaven so necessary for countries in the Near East.” At the same time, Churchill tried to ensure that Palestinian Arabs got their own national homeland. It was Churchill who, as colonial secretary, decided to separate Transjordan (modern-day Jordan) from the rest of Palestine, assuming that Transjordan would become the site of the Arabs’ future state and that other parts of Palestine (including the West Bank of the Jordan River) would be open to Jewish settlement.

(Keep that history in mind the next time you hear a Palesitnian spokesman saying that they’ve compromised by giving up claims to 72% of Palestine and shouldn’t be required to compromise anymore. The Palestine Mandate included what is now Jordan.)

Given Churchill’s friendship with the Jews it’s more than a little ironic that James Baker whose hostility towards Israel was well known, (along with Lee Hamilton) was recently honored with a Churchill Award.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.