Excerpts from ch 38:

Dr. Weizmann knew that if a British government could once be brought to support “partition” it would at last be committed to a separate Jewish state.

His Asiatic mastery of the art of negotiation compels admiration. By invoking the Old Testament he firmly nailed down the idea of partition without committing himself to any boundaries. He said that he might be able to make some concession about the actual area to be taken for his Zionists, as Jehovah had not indicated precise frontiers in his revelations to the Levites. This accepted the offer of territory while leaving the entire question of boundaries open so that even “partition,” obviously, was to be no solution. The words with which Dr. Weizmann supported partition are of interest in the light of later events: “The Arabs are afraid that we shall absorb the whole of Palestine.

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the Second World War reinvolved it in the insoluble problem.
As it approached Dr. Weizmann continued to beleaguer the Western politicians with the argument that “the Jewish National Home would play a very considerable role in that part of the world as the one reliable ally of the democracies.” By this he meant that the Zionist demand for arms for the forcible seizure of Palestine, which was about to be made, would be presented in that way, through the politicians and the press, to the public masses of the West.

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After the murder of von Rath and the anti-Jewish disorders in Germany he told Mr. Anthony Eden:
“If a government is allowed to destroy a whole community which has committed no crime … it means the beginning of anarchy and the destruction of the basis of civilization.

The powers which stand looking on without taking any measures to prevent the crime will one day be visited by severe punishment.”

Hitler's persecution of men was ignored in these private, fateful, interviews in political antechambers; the plight of one “community” alone was advanced as the argument for war. The Zionists, as events have shown, were intent on destroying “a whole community which had committed no crime” (the Arabs of Palestine, who knew nothing of Hitler) and the arms they demanded were used for that purpose.

Significantly, Dr. Weizmann put his argument in terms of the Christian creed; under that teaching the destruction of a community innocent of crime is itself a crime which will bring “severe punishment.” Under the Levitical Law, however, which Dr. Weizmann invoked as the basis of his demand for Palestine, it is the chief “statute and commandment,” to be rewarded by power and treasure, not punished.

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Mr. Chamberlain's name is linked with the final, fatal act of encouragement to Hitler: the abandonment and enforced surrender of Czechoslovakia at Munich.

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Mr. Chamberlain may have calculated that he was compelled to do what he did by the state of British weakness and unpreparedness which his predecessor, Mr. Baldwin, had allowed to come about. I believe he was wrong if he so calculated; even at that late moment firmness would have saved the day, because the German generals were ready to overthrow Hitler; but he may have been honestly convinced that he could not act otherwise. Where he unforgivably erred was in depicting the deed of Munich as something morally right and in bolstering up this contention with allusions to “a small country a long way away with which we have nothing to do,” or similar words.

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1938, when the word “partition” rang out, was the bloodiest year in Palestine up to that time; 1500 Arabs were killed. The Peel Commission had recommended partition but could not suggest how it might be effected. Yet another body of investigators was sent out, this time in search of a means of bisecting the infant without killing it.

This Woodhead Commission reported in October 1938 that it could not devise a practical plan; in November the von Rath murder and the anti-Jewish disorders which followed it in Germany were used by the Zionists to intensify their incitements against the Arabs in Palestine.

Mr. Chamberlain then did an extraordinary thing, by the standards prevailing. He called a Palestine conference in London at which the Arabs (for the first time since the Peace Conference of 1919) were represented.

From this conference emerged the White Paper of March 1939 in which the British government undertook “the establishment within ten years of an independent Palestine state” and “the termination of the Mandate.”

In this state the native Arabs and immigrant Zionists were to share the government in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community were safeguarded. Jewish immigration was to be limited to 75,000 annually for five years and the irrevocable land-purchases were to be restricted.

This plan, if carried out, meant peace in Palestine at last, but no separate Jewish state. At that moment the figure of Mr. Winston Churchill advanced to the forefront of British affairs. He had for ten years been in political eclipse and the future student may be interested to know what contemporaries have already forgotten: that during this period he was a highly unpopular man, not because of any specific acts or quality, but because he was consistently given that “bad press” which is the strongest weapon in the hands of those who control political advancement. This organized hostility was made particularly plain during the abdication crisis of 1937, when his pleas for time received much more bitter attack than they inherently deserved and he was howled down in the House of Commons. His biographers depict him as suffering from depression during these years and thinking himself “finished” politically. His feeling in that respect may be reflected in his published words (privately written) to Mr. Bernard Baruch early in 1939: “War is coming very soon. We will be in it and you will be in it. You will be running the show over there, but I will be on the sidelines over here.”
Very soon after he wrote this Mr. Churchill's political fortunes took a sudden turn for the better and (as in the case of Mr. Lloyd George in 1916) his attitude towards Zionism appears to have had much to do with this, to judge from what has been published. His record in this matter suggests that Mr. Churchill, the product of Blenheim and Brooklyn, is something of “a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma,” to use the words employed by him about the Communist state in 1939. In 1906, as has been shown, he was among the earliest of the politicians who supported Zionism on the hustings, so that a Zionist speaker said any Jew who voted against him was a traitor. However, in office during the First War he took little part in that affair and Dr. Weizmann only mentions him once at that period, and then not as a “friend.” Then, as Colonial Secretary in 1922, he gave offence to Zion by his White Paper, which Dr. Weizmann calls “a serious whittling down of the Balfour Declaration.” It proposed for Palestine “a Legislative Council with a majority of elected members,” and this would have meant, not only holding those elections which Dr. Weizmann to the end forbade, but allowing the native Arabs of Palestine to govern their own country!
Thus Mr. Churchill's ten years in the political wilderness, 1929-1939, were also ones during which he was in disfavour with the Zionists and Dr. Weizmann's narrative never mentions him until the eve of the Second War, when he is suddenly “discovered” (as the playwrights used to say) in it as a most ardent champion of Zionism. This is the more curious because, as late as October 20, 1938, Mr. Churchill was still talking like the author of the White Paper of 1922: “We should … give to the Arabs a solemn assurance … that the annual quota of Jewish immigration should not exceed a certain figure for a period of at least ten years.” Very soon after that he re-emerges in Dr. Weizmann's account as a man implicitly and privately agreed to support a Zionist immigration of millions.
Quite suddenly Dr. Weizmann says that in 1939 he “met Mr. Winston Churchill” (ignored in his story for seventeen years) “and he told me he would take part in the debate, speaking of course against the Proposed White Paper.” The reader is left to guess why Mr. Churchill should have undertaken “of course” to speak against a document which, in its emphasis on the need to do justice to the Arabs, was in accord with his own White Paper of 1922 and with his speeches for seventeen years after it.

Then, on the day of this debate, Dr. Weizmann was invited to lunch with Mr. Churchill “who read his speech out to us” and asked if Dr. Weizmann had any changes to suggest. The reader will recall that editors of The Times and Manchester Guardian wrote editorial articles about Zionism after consultation with the chieftain of one interested party; now Mr. Churchill approached a debate on a major issue of state policy in the same manner. He was renowned for the quality of his speeches, and became so in America on account of the strange fact (as it was considered there) that he wrote them himself. However, in the circumstances above described by Dr. Weizmann, the point of actual penmanship appears of minor importance.
At that moment Mr. Churchill's “championship” (Dr. Weizmann) was vain; the great debate ended in victory for Mr. Chamberlain and his White Paper by a majority of 268 to 179. It was substantial, but many politicians already smelt the wind and their sail-trimming instinct is reflected in the unusually large number of abstentions: 110. This gave the first warning to Mr. Chamberlain of the method, of dereliction within his own party, by which he was to be overthrown.

The debate showed another interesting thing, namely, that the Opposition party by this time held Zionism to be a supreme tenet of its policy, and, indeed, the ultimate test by which a man could prove whether he was a “Socialist” or not! The rising Socialist party had long forgotten the wrongs of the working man, the plight of the oppressed and the sad lot of “the underdog”; it was caught up in international intrigue and wanted to be on the side of the top-dog.

Thus Mr. Herbert Morrison, a Socialist leader, pointed accusingly at Mr. Malcolm Macdonald (whose department was closely identified with the White Paper) and mourned the heresy of a man who “was once a Socialist.” Socialism, too, by this time meant driving Arabs out of Palestine, and the trade union notables, with their presentation gold watches, did not care how poor or oppressed those distant people were.

The Second War broke out very soon after the issuance of the White Paper and the debate. At once all thought of “establishing an independent Palestine” and “terminating the Mandate” was suspended, for the duration of the war (and at its end a very different picture was to be unveiled). At its start Mr. Roosevelt in America was “publicly and privately committed” to support Zionism (Mr. Harry Hopkins). In England Mr. Chamberlain was an impediment, but he was on his way out. Mr. Churchill was on his way in. The people wanted him, because he was “the man who had been right” about Hitler and the war; they knew nothing of his talks with Dr. Weizmann and the effects these might produce.