Rich: That James Kurth American Interest piece is not terribly far from my current reading matter, Michael Makovsky’s Churchill’s Promised Land. I vaguely knew that Winnie was a Zionist, but didn’t realize the depth and conviction of his Zionism. (Though always, of course, with a sharp eye for Britain’s interests. The fascination of Churchill is the contrast between the literary, imaginative romantic and the cold-eyed, often empirical, statesman. There were two human bings in there, and they didn’t always get along.) Along with Churchill’s warmth towards Palestinian Jews went a deep dislike and distrust of Palestinian Arabs.

Churchill considered Palestinian Jews to be Britain’s allies and Palestinian Arabs to be its enemies. He insisted to a skeptical commission member [this is the British govt.’s Peel Commission of 1936-7] that the Palestinian Arabs had sided with the Ottomans in the First World War and ‘filled the armies against us and fired their rifles and shot our men.’ … Churchill correctly predicted that the Palestinian Arabs would again side with Britain’s enemy in a future war. … Echoing what he had said as colonial secretary, Churchill relentlessly stressed that the Arabs in Palestine did nothing with the land and thus forfeited any right to control its destiny… (pp.154-155)

Churchill’s Zionism was too much for the Truman White House:

When Churchill dined at the White House at the end of Truman’s presidency in January 1953, his aide Jock Colville unsympathetically described the scene in his diary: ‘After dinner Truman played the piano. Nobody would listen because they were all busy with post-mortems on a diatribe in favour of Zionism and against Egypt which W. [Winston] at dinner (to the disagreement of practically all the Americans present, though they admitted that the large Jewish vote would prevent them disagreeing in public.)’ (p. 255)

I recommend Churchill’s Promised Land to anyone building up a bookshelf of Churchilliana. Which everybody should.