5 – Churchill was prone to outbursts of anti-Semitism

“It may be that, unwittingly, they are inviting persecution – that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer. There is the feeling that the Jew is an incorrigible alien, that his first loyalty will always be towards his own race.”

The question of just how anti-semitic Winston Churchill was is one that is hotly debated. Supporters of Churchill will point to his detest for the Nazis and his avid support of the foundation of the State of Israel, while detractors can point to a lifetime of anti-semitic comments that still exist in print. Even his official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, was torn on the issue. He calls Winston “a fervent believer in the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own and that state should be in what we then called Palestine,” while also remarking that he “shared the low-level casual anti-Semitism of his class and kind.”

Of course, many defenders of Churchill point to his aristocratic background and British (and white) supremacist ideas, which vacillated between the outlandish, such as his views on Indians, and the mainstream. It is possible that he held both opinions at the same time. Certainly, he was an outspoken supporter of Zionism, though as we will read later, he also hated Muslims, so perhaps that merely places Jews above Arabs in his racially-ranked worldview.

He drew a large distinction between those Jews whom he saw as loyal to their nation and those whom he saw as internationalists, Jews loyal to other Jews. In particular, he saw Bolshevism and communism as a predominantly Jewish phenomenon. “This movement among the Jews is not new,” he wrote in an article in 1920. “From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.”

Churchill’s views on the formation of the Jewish state were formed by ideas that there was a battle over the Jewish community in which those of a “national” character – whom he perceived to be loyal to their countries and more religiously observant – contrasted with the Bolshevik Jews, whom he described as “adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world.”

He saw Zionism as a bulwark against Communism and thus admissible. It conveniently ignores, for example, the individual agency of Jews to think whatever they liked, while also denigrating those Jews who aligned themselves with other countries that he didn’t like, such as the millions of Jews in Germany, thousands of whom had fought against Britain in the First World War. When there was a real anti-semitic presence on the streets of England in the 1930s in the form of the British Union of Fascists, Churchill did little to assist anti-fascists.

While he did ameliorate his stance in later years, his words were always those of one who thought the Jews were a strategic pawn to be moved where appropriate and dropped whenever necessary. When the state of Israel was finally formed in 1948, Churchill was out of office – but he would have been pleased with the way that it ill-affected another of his most hated groups: the Muslims.