Free Churchill by Paul Johnson

Iraq and Transjordan, for the two leading Hashemite princes, Emir Faisal, sharif of Mecca, and Emir Abdullah. The role of the RAF was confirmed and a vast new base in Habbaniya in northern Iraq, still in use by the West, was created. This settlement lasted half a century and would have endured longer but for an unfortunate intervention by the world’s largest oil company, Standard Oil. While Britain was using Anglo-Persian and Anglo-Dutch Shell to develop the fields in Persia, Iraq, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Gulf, Standard formed an alliance with the Saudis to develop fields on their territory, which proved the richest of all. American policy almost inevitably backed Standard, and so the Saudis. Thus the Wahhabi fundamentalists became a great power in the Middle East, immune from attack because of U.S. support and provided with colossal sums of oil royalties with which to undermine the moderates everywhere and the Hashemites in particular.
    Churchill was painfully aware of the shadows this cast over the future, but there was little he could do about it at the time. What he could, and did, do was to ensure the continuation of the Jewish experiment in making a National Home in Palestine. To reinforce worldwide Jewish support for the Allies, Britain had issued in 1917 a promise known as the “Balfour Declaration” (he was foreign secretary at the time), under which the government promised “its best endeavours” to help the Jews found their new home there “without prejudice to the existing inhabitants.” The declaration, of course, did not exactly envisage the creation of Israel, and it was internally a contradiction. But it had the enthusiastic support of Churchill. His time as a Manchester MP had put him in close touch with a thriving Jewish community. He was always pro-Jewish and became (and remained) pro-Zionist as soon as it became a practical scheme. At Cairo and later he was able to defeat attempts to renege on the declaration and wind up the Jewish National Home in response to Arab pressure. On the contrary, he gave it every support in his power, and when in 1922 the House of Commons showed signs of turning against the whole idea, he made one of his greatest speeches, which swung MPs round into giving the Jews their chance. Without Churchill it is very likely Israel would never have come into existence. It is not given to many men to found, or help preserve, one new state: his score was three.
    Churchill was meanwhile playing a key role in the latest phase of the Irish problem. He had been at the front, happily, when the Easter Rebellion broke out in Dublin in 1916 and was not involved in the subsequent hangings. By the end of the war, the Irish Republican Army, under the leadership of Michael Collins, the handsome killer-charmer known as “the Big Fellah,” had reduced much of Ireland to anarchy. Lloyd George’s first instinct was to pacify it by force, bringing in a special army of ex-soldiers whose uniforms made them known as the Black and Tans, and whose tendency to match the atrocities perpetrated by the rebels with similar reprisals made them hated. The net result was that there was no longer any possibility of coercing Ulster into accepting Home Rule, i.e., inclusion in a Dublin Parliament. The problem was: could the rest of Ireland be persuaded to accept a settlement which left the six counties (of Ulster) under British rule? By 1921 Lloyd George was determined to negotiate a settlement along these lines, and he called in to help him Churchill and his lord chancellor, Birkenhead (as F. E. Smith had become). These three men, plus Collins, eventually reached one. Churchill again proved himself, in negotiation, a moderate by nature, infinitely fertile in imaginative compromises, much helped by Birkenhead’s legal genius, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty must be counted another of his positive achievements, albeit shared with the other three in the quadrumvirate. This treaty led to the establishment of the