NETANYAHU'S GODFATHER
How British Imperialists
Created the Fascist Jabotinsky
by Steven P. Meyer
Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), the patron-saint of Israel's Likud party who also created Revisionist Zionism, and Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), the decades-long chairman of the World Zionist Organization who was seen as the prime minister-in-exile of a Jewish Palestine, were both witting champions of the British Empire. They were instruments of Lord Alfred Milner and Leo Stennet Amery, the final authors of the Balfour Declaration, who craftily used them to secure British rule over Palestine as part of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreements.
The British also controlled the leaders of the Arab nationalist movements, which they created and funded. They owned Haj Amin al-Husseini, a young radical, whom they chose as Mufti of Jerusalem. They funded his religious network and social organizations, and to give him status among all of the Islamic faith, they created the post of Grand Mufti for him. (See accompanying articles.)
The armed conflict in Israel today, which threatens to become World War III, is the continuation of almost a century of British-staged armed conflict between Arab and Jew that dates back to the Nebi Musa riots of 1920, just months after the close of World War I, as the British settled in to occupy Palestine. Eyewitness intelligence reports proved that British military operatives encouraged and facilitated the Arab rioting, lead by Haj Amin al-Husseini, against the Jews.
The Jewish armed response was led by Jabotinsky, and a British-trained Zionist military force that had been placed in Palestine at the end of the war. The Jewish Legion, as it was called, had no military significance. Its creation was opposed by the world's Jewish community, including the small Zionist movement that then existed. But it was a major propaganda tool created by Milner and Amery to back up Sykes-Picot. When the war ended and the Legion demobilized in Palestine, it became a deadly weapon to be used for violent bloody confrontations with the Arabs.
The Nebi Musa riots lasted several days. Five Jews and four Arabs were killed, and 216 Jews and 23 Arabs were wounded. Both Jabotinsky and Husseini were made public heroes by their British controllers, and the results gave them the capability to recruit followers that would be used for future confrontations. The die was cast, but the stage for the conflict had already been set decades before.
1. Modern Zionism and the British Empire
Palestine had been a necessary imperial target of acquisition for consolidation of the Empire for more than half a century before the Sykes-Picot agreements, dating back to the 1830s and the efforts of Lord Shaftsbury, a leading Tory politician, and Lord Palmerston, his stepfather-in-law. Palmerston served as Foreign Minister from 1830-51 and was destined to become prime minister and master of cultural and political warfare.
Shaftsbury was a Christian Zionist and British Israelite, who believed that the Jews must return to Zion before there could be a second coming of Christ. Although he opposed Jewish civil emancipation in England, and was indeed anti-Semitic, he believed it was Britain's destiny to establish Zion. Shaftesbury wrote: "though admittedly a stiff-necked, dark-hearted people, and sunk in moral degradation, obduracy, and ignorance of the Gospel, [the Jews] were not only worth of salvation but also vital to Christianity's hope of salvation." Shaftesbury's writings appeared in the The History of London Society for the Propagation of Christianity among the Jews. Shaftesbury was a member of the society and, in 1848, served as its president.
In 1838, an Arab revolt took place in Greater Syria, run by Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt. British Foreign Secretary Palmerston offered the Sultan of Turkey British help in putting down the revolt, and in return, Britain was given the right to establish a vice-consulate in Jerusalem. Once this beachhead for the Empire was secured, the British decided to use a fledgling Zionist movement as their proxy, to increase their presence in the Holy Land.
In 1840, Palmerston sent a letter to the British ambassador in Constantinople, instructing him to contact the Sultan: "There exists at the present time among the Jews dispersed over Europe, a strong notion that the time is approaching when their nation is to return to Palestine.... It would be of manifest importance to the Sultan to encourage the Jews to return and settle in Palestine because the wealth which they would bring with them would increase the resources of the Sultan's dominions; and the Jewish people, if returning under the sanction and protection and at the invitation of the Sultan, would be a check upon any future evil designs of Muhammad Ali or his successor. I have to instruct Your Excellency strongly to recommend the Turkish government to hold out every just encouragement to the Jews of Europe to return to Palestine."
In 1845, Edward Ledwich Mitford, one of Palmerston's collaborators in the Foreign Service and a political supporter, published "An appeal in Behalf of the Israel Nation in Connection with the British Policy in the Levant." The piece called for the "final establishment of the Jewish nation in Palestine as a protected state under the guardianship of Great Britain." Mitford reasoned that such a state would "place the management of our steam communication entirely in our hands and would place us in a commanding position in the Levant from whence to check the process of encroachment, to overawe open enemies and, if necessary, to repel their advance."
With the introduction of the steamship in the 1840s, the most efficient route to India and other parts of Asia was through what the British call the Near East. Britain's dominant shipping route now went from London, through the Mediterranean to Alexandria and Cairo by steamship, overland to Suez, and then continued by steamship to points east. Britain was no longer dependent upon the Atlantic currents and the whims of nature to circumnavigate Africa to reach India.
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 massively increased the efficiency and shortened the time of travel, putting an even higher premium on Britain's securing a base of operations in Palestine, as a northern defense of the canal. One of Britain's motives in starting World War I was to finally secure Palestine, and they did that with Sykes-Picot and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. No longer would the British have to entreat the Turks to accept the Jewish immigrants, which in British eyes were only surrogates for their empire.
Jabotinsky's Imperial Roots
Every Likud prime minister in Israel has been an avowed promoter of the policies of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky. Some were personal protégés, others extremist leaders within his movement. The father of current Likud leader and candidate for prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was Jabotinsky's personal secretary.
The Likud prime ministers are considered an elite grouping. They are often referred to as Jabotinsky's Princes, and to this day, Jabotinsky is omnipresent within the Jewish right wing. His picture adorns the Likud website, and U.S. Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman has had a framed photo of him on his desk.
Jabotinsky was a wholly owned and created asset of the British Empire. He was controlled by a political network led by Leo Stennet Amery, who became Britain's most prominent Imperial spokesman and political organizer. Amery's circle included the greatest names of British imperialism: Cecil John Rhodes, the self-avowed enemy of the American republic; the Coefficients group; and Alfred Milner, Rhodes' mentor, who ran Rhodes' secret society.
Jabotinsky and the creation of a Jewish Legion became Amery's number one project, as the British moved to take over Palestine at the close of World War I.
Amery's vision was that of Rhodes, who, in 1877, wrote his first Last Will and Testament. Only a bit more than a decade had passed since the British plan to dismember the United States in a Civil War had failed, bitterly. Rhodes, a rabid British race imperialist, had amassed his fortune through the exploration and mining of gold in Africa. Rhodes wrote that the purpose of his Will was: "To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands ... and especially the ... entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, ... the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, ... the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire..." (emphasis added).
Rhodes' secret society, and the intricacies of how it operated, are detailed in Carroll Quigley's The Anglo-American Establishment. Quigley describes the British power elite and their purpose at the turn of the century. They combined important press outlets, created political institutions, and used financial power to affect their policy. This elite group consisted of the Venetian Cecil family; the political and financial trustees of Rhodes' Trust, in which Alfred Milner was key; various banking institutions, including Lazard Frères; and the British royal family. Quigley describes a small inner core of collaborators, with two concentric circles of semi-witting and non-witting conspirators from Britain's aristocracy and financial elite.
By and large, they shared the aims of Rhodes' Will. They had one major enemy, the American System of Political Economy. It threatened the existence of the British Empire, which depended upon a mercantilist system of securing cheap raw materials from colonized, backward parts of the world, and shipping them back to England for industrial production and military use.
At the turn of the century, there were two powers in the world that represented the American system: the United States of America, and Germany, which had built its economy on the model of America's great economist Henry C. Carey. Following the stipulations of Rhodes' Will, his collaborators sparked World War I to dismantle a hated and threatening Germany, and to carve up Europe. They sought to secure and expand their colonial holdings by acquiring much of the Ottoman Empire, which would give them its oil holdings, as well as secure Palestine as a military buffer to the Suez Canal. In order to accomplish these goals, they also worked non-stop to trap the United States into collaborating with their warring schemes, and sought to diminish America's industrial economy from within.
Lord Alfred Milner, who ran Rhodes' Trust, was central to the secret cabal. He had been British High Commissioner for Africa, had won the Boer War, and had united South Africa as one political entity under British rule. That act gave Britain looting rights for the most important raw materials on the continent, and he derived much power from these accomplishments.
At the close of the Boer War, Milner recruited a group of the best and the brightest from Oxford University to assist him in establishing British rule in Africa. He recruited them to his philosophy and became each and every one's mentor. Known as Milner's Kindergarten or The Kindergarten, these individuals returned to London and would play a major role in both World War I and World War II.
As World War I approached, Rhodes' secret society, under the direction of Milner and various other collaborators, went to work. Both Liberal and Conservative, they held in common a rabid racial imperialism. Their own writings detail their thoughts and aims. For propaganda purposes, they created the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), but they also purchased the Times of London and ran other crucial press organs to rally the public behind their aims.
Milner's personal protégé was Leo Stennet Amery. Quigley describes their relationship: "Amery can be regarded as Milner's political heir. From the beginning of his own political career in 1906 to the death of Milner in 1925, he was more closely associated with Milner's active political life than any other person ... his associations with Milner became steadily more intimate. In his last years of public office, Milner was generally assisted by Amery (1917-1921), and when he died it was Amery who arranged the public memorial service and controlled the distribution of tickets."
To understand today's Likud and the rest of the right wing in Israel, one must understand Amery and Milner and their role in shaping the British Empire. They used Zionism to secure the oilfields of the Middle East and defense of the Suez Canal. They stated this openly, as did their Christian Zionist supporters. This was geopolitics in the mode of Sykes-Picot.
2. Amery: The Empire Is 'The Kingdom of Heaven'
Leo Amery's son, Julian, aptly described his father in the 1988 introduction to The Empire at Bay, Notes from the Leo Amery Diaries. British Imperialism, he wrote, "was a civilizing mission to which the British peoples could dedicate themselves: one from which they would derive a sense of purpose and a source of pride.
This concept of Empire was much more than a political programme. It was an ideology that constituted a coherent system of thought to which every issue, political, economic, social, cultural, and even moral could be related. More than that, it was a faith. This faith would sustain [Leo Amery] throughout his entire life.
In Leo Amery's own words, this faith and concept of Empire, with its responsibility for "civilizing other cultures," was mandated by God. Amery is famously quoted as saying: "The Empire is not external to any of the British nation. It is something like the Kingdom of Heaven within ourselves."
Amery entered Oxford College at Balliol in 1892. Aside from languages, his study concentrated on political economy. He became a Fellow at All Souls College and left in 1898, taking a post writing for the Times. He was recruited by Milner in South Africa while reporting on the Boer War, and was known as Milner's mouthpiece.
Amery had a long dinner meeting with Cecil Rhodes in Africa, a few years before the latter's death in 1902. Rhodes discussed with him the Rhodes Trust, and the establishment of a scholarship fund that would recruit talented young men to attend a special program at Oxford. The scholarships would be awarded to select students from the British Dominions, Germany, and the United States, with the proportion heavily weighted to U.S. recipients. The overt purpose was to recruit American support for the British Empire.
Amery ran Rhodes' Trust from 1933 until his death in 1955. He joined the board as a director in 1919, and for the next 36 years, he missed only one meeting.
While at Oxford, Amery founded a branch of the Fabian Society, and established a close relationship with the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb. He also came under the hegemony of Joseph Chamberlain, to become the leading spokesman for a tariff policy to secure advancement of the Empire.
In 1902, he and the Webbs founded the Coefficients, a secret dining club of Liberal and Conservative imperialists. The group of a dozen persons was chosen for their expertise. They included Bertrand Russell for science; Halford Mackinder for geopolitics; Sir Clinton Dawkins, a partner of Morgan Guaranty Bank, London, for finance; Prof. W.A.S. Hewins, principal of the London School of Economics, for economics; and Leo Maxse, a close collaborator of Amery's and editor of the National Review, for journalism. H.G. Wells was chosen for his general knowledge. Of Wells, Amery wrote in his autobiography: "Our minds certainly worked very much alike in many ways and for some years we saw a good deal of each other."
The format of the club required each specialist to make a presentation over dinner. Discussion ensued. Their intent was to create a Brains Trust that would make government policy.
Amery's area of expertise was the military. Having covered the Boer War for the Times, he had become ensconced with a grouping of leading military personalities, and, representing the Milner Group, Amery was in the process of anonymously writing a 12-part series on the Army that would appear in the Times. The articles detailed how inadequate were the training and staffing of the army. He argued for a complete overhaul, so that well-trained troops could be efficiently deployed to the European continent and Dominions, in the event of a new war. In other words, Amery presented the reorganization plans for the Army that would allow the British to fight World War I.
Amery was already passionately imbued with Rhodes' and Milner's view of the British Empire in world affairs, and Bertrand Russell later described Amery's presentation to the Coefficients: "... in 1902, I became a member of a small dining club called the Coefficients, got up by Sidney Webb for the purpose of considering political questions from a more or less Imperialist point of view. It was in this club that I first became acquainted with H.G. Wells, of whom I had never heard until then. His point of view was more sympathetic to me than that of any member. Most of the members, in fact, shocked me profoundly. I remember Amery's eyes gleaming with blood-lust at the thought of a war with America, in which as he said with exultation, we should have to arm the whole adult male population..." (emphasis added).[1]
The original Coefficient group lost many of its members, but Amery and the Webbs remained, as did Wells for a while, with Amery being the only original member left when the group disbanded in 1909. Russell dropped out early, but Milner and Sir Henry Birchenough, the chairman of the British South Africa Company, along with John H. Smith, chairman of Hambro's bank, soon joined, as did others from Milner's circle.
In 1910, Amery married Florence Greenwood. Her father, Hamar Greenwood, had emigrated from Wales to Canada, where he married into a family of American colonists who had sided with the British during the American Revolution. Her family was fiercely loyal to the United Empire Loyalist tradition, which combined a deep suspicion of everything American with an almost fanatical reverence for the British Crown and everything British.
On June 11, 1916, less than a month after the secret Sykes-Picot treaty had been signed, Milner was given a full page in the New York Times to make his case that America should partner with the British Empire. The article was entitled "Lord Milner Wants Anglo-American Union: British Statesman, Who Was Among First Mentioned as Kitchener's Probable Successor, Believes It Will Bring World Peace." The significance of the timing of this article cannot be overstated. Milner knew of the secret agreements with the French to move the war to Palestine and the East, and for the carving up the Ottoman Empire between the two. His article was placed to gather America's support for that outcome.
A New York Times reporter had interviewed Milner in London. America had already entered the war on the side of the British, and as the United States would provide the margin of victory, it would have a major say in the settlement of the peace. Milner, the man in pursuit of carrying out Cecil Rhodes' Last Will and Testament, was about to join a War Cabinet with Prime Minister David Lloyd George. The secret agreement to move the war to the eastern front would give Britain control over Palestine, providing a military buffer to the Suez Canal. Palestine would also provide a deep-water port (Haifa) on the Mediterranean for the export of oil. Milner needed the Americans on his side for the plan to succeed.
The New York Times gave Milner a glowing introduction. Looking towards the end of the war, Milner sought two essential agreements. The first, that the United States and Great Britain would have a cooperative purpose in handling the peace; and the second, that there would be agreements signed to establish a unified military to ensure the peace—and, of course, the British Empire. Those exact same demands were echoed less than a quarter of a century later, during World War II, by American Clarence Streit, who authored Union Now with Britain.
Milner's words speak for themselves:
...What I especially stand for is the closest possible union between the various States under the British Crown. Always I have aimed as well as I have been able, at the accomplishment of this. This might seem to strike away from closer relationship between Great Britain and the United States. I do not think it need do that.
I believe philandering between nations to be foolish, but there must never be another serious quarrel between the States and England. I believe the greatest disaster in human history was the split which separated the American colonies from the home country... [emphasis added].
The word 'empire' and the word 'imperial,' imperfectly convey the thought, and perhaps, have been unfortunately chosen. They suggest domination, ascendancy, the rule of a superior over inferior or vassal States. But British 'imperialists' of the modern school (of which I am one and ever shall be one), when speaking of the British Empire think, not of an empire in the old acceptation of the term, but of a group of States, independent one of the other in local affairs, although bound together in the defence of their common interests and the development of a common civilization.
Lord Milner then went on to speak of England's work in governing backward peoples. He declared that she was doing America's work as well as her own. Someone, said Milner, must bear "the white man's burden," and Germany had a bad record in this respect:
I do not believe America would care to see the British dependencies in Africa ruled in the spirit which has been shown by Germany in such few enterprises of the sort as she has undertaken. And I am sure that those in the United States who are familiar with the facts of British Government in India, would never wish to see that Government replaced by a Government of Junkers.
Milner ended:
... I was ultra-British—an out and out British Imperialist.
That is what I am and always shall be. I have given you my reasons for it, my reasons too, for thinking that British Imperialism, as I conceive it, should find favour and sympathy in your country, on which, next to my own, I base my hopes for the future freedom and progress and peace of the world.
Milner was a lying scoundrel. His purpose and belief were quite to the contrary. A March 18, 1917 entry in Beatrice Webb's diary describes Milner's more private thoughts. Webb's entry is made at the conclusion of a briefing she was given by Tom Jones, then acting secretary to the Cabinet Committee on Territorial Terms of Peace, and a close friend. Milner was the chairman of this committee. "There is a vivid movement, guided by Milner and served by Amery, to prepare for another war, to complete the ruin of Germany and the domination of the British Empire. This gang of Power worshippers are running down the Russian revolution and minimising the entry of the U.S.A as one of the belligerents. They are bent on maintaining a ruling caste of a ruling race: they fear and despise democracy. Any aspirations towards self-government among British subjects, who do not already possess it, is sedition to be put down by machine guns and plentiful hangings."
Milner's private papers give credence to this report. After colonizing Southern Africa, he wrote: "I believe in a lot of virtual-self-government in the new Colonies, without letting the supreme control out of Imperial hands."
Amery's view was similar:
South Africa must develop as a white man's country under the guidance of white men, and not as a bastard country like most of South America.... In five hundred years' time I expect the South African white man will contain a strong dark blend, and the end of all things may be a brown South African race.... That doesn't matter, what does matter is that there should not be too quick a mixture now or for the next few centuries.
Amery was a eugenicist, as well, referring to the African population as "niggers."
From the Jewish Legion to Berchtesgaden
Amery's civil career in Britain's Imperial Command was illustrious, varied, and colored throughout by sympathy for fascism. He joined Milner as an undersecretary at the War Cabinet, where he first met both Jabotinsky and Weizmann. When Milner became Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1919, Amery was posted as his Under-Secretary. In 1922, he joined the Privy Council and was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. He became Colonial Secretary in 1924, and in 1925, he was concurrently given the post of Dominions Secretary which put him in charge of the Palestine Mandate, a post he held until 1929.
During the 1930s, as a member of the board of various British and German metal companies, he often travelled to Germany and monitored its rearmament. As Quigley reports, the policy of the Milner group was to re-arm Germany to go east to destroy Russia. Statements to that effect are included in Amery's diaries.
In August 1935, more than a year after Hitler's Night of the Long Knives (his purge of the Nazi party), and only two months after the signing of the British-German naval agreement that allowed Germany to rebuild its Navy, Amery met with Hitler. Amery gave Hitler his advice on how to strengthen the German economy. Amery's diary entry dated Aug. 13, 1935 reads as follows:
At 10.45 the big open car, familiar to cinema visitors, arrived and K., myself and Dr. Schmidt, another expert from von Ribbentrop's office, ... drove through Berchtesgaden up the winding road to Obersalzberg.... We were welcomed by a burly brown shirt ADC, like a jollier Göring, and then taken on to a veranda where Hitler met us and took us in to a room opening out on to it. He didn't waste much time on compliments but got on to high politics at once. What I was chiefly interested in was his outlook on the European problem generally. On this he talked what seemed to me vigorous commonsense....
We talked—though it was about ten to one—for over an hour and a half. I did not find the hypnotic charm I had heard of, and no attempt to exercise it, but liked his directness and eagerness to let his hearer know all his mind. Intellectually he has a grip on economic essentials and on many political ones, too, even if it is crude at times and coloured by deep personal prejudice.... His immediate surroundings, like K. regard him as a universal genius as well as a national saviour. It will be interesting to see how he shapes in the next 20 years, if he lasts, and there is no particular reason why he shouldn't. He over works and under-sleeps, but as he leads an extraordinarily ascetic life he may stand more of that than most. We got on well together I think, owing to the fundamental similarity of many of our ideas. But I admit we didn't discuss some controversial subjects like Austria, constitutional liberty, Jews, or colonies. I did, however, expound to him my view that Germany should enter into preferential schemes with Holland and Belgium in regard to their colonies (emphasis added).
Amery was also an intimate of Reichsbank president and later Hitler's Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht, whom he met numbers of times. It was Schacht who told Lord Lothian that Amery said the British were not interested in allowing Germany to have her colonies back, but there was no reason Germany couldn't go east to build up her economy.
Amery's friend and collaborator, Lord Lothian, a member of the pro-Hitler Cliveden set, naturally also admired Hitler. As late as May 1937, he met with Hitler. Amery's diary reported: "... RIIA Garden Party in St. James Square.... Lothian told me all about recent interviews with Hitler and Göring, describing the former as essentially a prophet and the latter as a genial buccaneer of the F.E. type. He says the Germans are very anxious to be friends with us if they can but that if we allow things to drift, ... they will solve it by force, in which case we are likely to climb down ignominiously."
A proponent of corporatist fascism, Amery admired and advised Benito Mussolini, with whom he was in frequent communication. David Low, the cartoonist famous for his Colonel Blimp character, which made fun of the hypocrisy of the British aristocracy, published a cartoon in the Evening Standard of June 29, 1934, entitled "Signor Moslini's language class." It shows a bust of Mussolini as Giovanni Bull, towering over a group of Englishmen in brown shirts. Amery is at the center of the group. British Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley is standing before the group at a lectern, leading them in a rendition of "Rule Britannia," sung in Italian. On the wall is a map of the Fascist Empire (British Section), with the countries of the British Empire highlighted.
Amery became Secretary of State for India and Burma in the closing phase of his career, According to his son Julian, "India was an empire of its own closely connected with the Middle Eastern and later with the far eastern theatres of war. Amery's main task, working with two great Viceroys, Linlithgow and Wavell, was to mobilise the human and material resources of the subcontinent in support of the war. No less important, with the Japanese enemy at the gate, was the need to contain the efforts of Gandhi and the Congress Party to overthrow the Raj.
India ... absorbed Amery's main energies throughout the war but as a member of the Cabinet he was naturally involved in other spheres as well. He fought a long battle ... over post-war economic policies where he feared that American economic imperialism and 'anti-Colonialism' would threaten the very existence of the Commonwealth and Empire.
Amery had a visceral hatred of President Franklin Roosevelt and his closest advisors. According to Amery's biographer William Roger Louis, who had access to his private papers, Amery reserved special venom for Sumner Welles, President Roosevelt's Under-Secretary of State who, Amery correctly believed, wished to break up the British Empire. He warned Lord Linlithgow in a private letter of Jan. 25, 1941 about Roosevelt's Secretary of State: "Cordell Hull really represents mid-nineteenth-century vision on economics, coupled no doubt with the desire to create an American export hegemony in the world." Amery described Hull's philosophy as dating back "to somewhere around 1860," which implies the economic philosophy and foreign policy of Abraham Lincoln's collaborator, American System economist Henry Carey. According to Louis, Hull accurately identified Amery, Viceroy Linlithgow, and Sir Winston Churchill as the "arch-opponents" of any attempt to break up the empire.
Roosevelt did intend to dismantle the British Empire at the end of the war, and Amery's response is revealed in a letter dated Aug. 26, 1942 to Robert Arthur James Gascoyne-Cecil, Fifth Marques of Salisbury, Viscount Cranborne, Secretary of State for the British Colonies: "After all, smashing Hitler is only a means to the essential end of preserving the British Empire and all it stands for in the World.... It will be no consolation to suggest that Hitler should be replaced by Stalin, Chiang Kai-Shek or even an American President if we cease to exercise our power and influence in the world. What I think is needed to-day more than anything else is a vigorous reaffirmation of our faith in our destiny as an Empire ... , regarding the war merely as a step in that process."
Amery had a formidable will as the philosopher and spokesman of the Imperial movement. He was a prolific writer, rallying the public behind the empire. At the close of World War II, he wrote The Washington Loan Agreements, A Critical Study of American Economic Foreign Policy, where he warned that Roosevelt's New Dealers could use the Bretton Woods agreements and the terms of the British war debt to the United States to dismantle the British Empire. Again he railed: "The object of American policy is perfectly simple. It is to clamp upon the world, and in particular upon the British Empire, the obsolete economic system of the last century."
3. Israel on the Plains of Armageddon
Both Weizmann and Jabotinsky were steered by British intelligence operatives, who were Christian Zionists. Weizmann's confidante, and the only non-Jewish member of the Palestine Executive, was Blanche "Baffy" Dugdale. Dugdale was the go-between for Weizmann and the British royal family and Anglo-Dutch elites.
Trained as a naval intelligence expert during World War I, she founded the League of Nations Union after the war, with her cousin, Lord Robert Cecil, and headed its intelligence unit until 1928. According to her diaries, she befriended Weizmann by no later than 1923, and she and Amery, identified in her diaries as her "invaluable friend," were to closely collaborate on their Zionist project for the next several decades.
Amery's relationship to Weizmann dates back to the Balfour Declaration of 1918, at least. But what probably cemented their relationship was the threat that the United States might get the mandate for Palestine at the close of the World War I.
Weizmann was made chairman of the British-run Zionist Commission after the Balfour Declaration, and in 1918, it made its first official tour of Palestine. On the day of departure, Mark Sykes (of Sykes-Picot) arranged for Weizmann to be received by the King at Buckingham Palace. The reception made Weizmann the most heralded man in Zionism: It was a knighting of sorts. Weizmann was accompanied on the trip by Maj. William Ormsby-Gore (Lord Harlech, the political liaison officer of the Zionist Commission. Ormsby-Gore had been Milner's private secretary and was an old hand at the Arab Bureau.
Upon his return in October 1918, Weizmann was summoned to see Amery. According to Weizmann's biographer Barnet Litvinoff: "An authoritative Jewish voice was more necessary than ever now to a government facing the new situation of an America demanding its say in world affairs. Shortly after his return to England Weizmann was advised by Leopold Amery of the Cabinet Secretariat, of renewed moves to bring Palestine into the trusteeship of the United States.... Amery looked to Weizmann for help in locking Palestine into the Empire, for the sake of territorial contiguity between Egypt and India. Weizmann required no persuasion on this score."
Their relationship lasted decades, and there are numerous entries in Amery's diaries of meetings and dinners with Weizmann and Dugdale. In 1945, the English Zionist community honored Weizmann on his 70th birthday with a Festschrift; both Amery and Dugdale were asked to write for it.
Amery avowed that his support for Weizmann and Zionism was geopolitical from its inception:
My own acquaintance with Dr. Weizmann and with the cause with which his name will always be identified goes back to the beginning of 1917, when, together with the late Sir Mark Sykes [of Sykes-Picot], I was appointed one of the political assistant-secretaries to Mr. Lloyd George's newly formed War Cabinet. Sykes was an enthusiastic advocate of the establishment of the Jewish national home in Palestine. I myself had not previously thought of Zionism as much more than a sentimental fantasy. But Sykes soon persuaded me that, from the purely British point of view, a prosperous Jewish population in Palestine, owning its inception and its opportunity of development to British policy, might be an invaluable asset as a defence of the Suez Canal against attack from the north and as a station on the future air routes to the east....
Amery had entered a similar thought into his diary on July 26, 1928: "Our ultimate end is clearly to make Palestine the centre of a western influence, using the Jews as we have used the Scots, to carry the English ideal through the Middle East and not merely to make an artificial oriental Hebrew enclave in an oriental country."
Dugdale's maternal grandfather was George Campbell, the Eighth Duke of Argyll, who was the Secretary of State for India and Lord Privy Seal under Gladstone. Her maternal grandmother was the sister of Robert Cecil, third Marques of Salisbury, leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister of three administrations. Her mother, Lady Frances Campbell, who most influenced her life, was a suffragette activist, and Dugdale would throw herself into support for Zionism as her mother had for the right for women to vote. Her father was Eustace Balfour, the brother of Arthur James Balfour, of whom Dugdale was the official biographer. As a young woman, Dugdale had an official "coming out ceremony" and met Queen Victoria on at least three occasions in this period; the Queen's daughter Princess Louise was married to Dugdale's uncle.
Norman Rose, the editor of Baffy, The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale 1936-1947, describes her as the only non-Jewish supporter who was allowed into "the inner circle of Zionist policy-making bodies." Her day-to-day work at the Jewish Agency and Zionist Federation headquarters in London consisted mainly of helping to draft policy documents. More than that, she was a member of Weizmann's entourage and one of his key advisors. Her access to government officials and the elite gave the Zionists a wide range of capabilities and intelligence. According to Rose,
Baffy constituted in fact an essential ingredient in all diplomacy. Well informed, trusted by both sides, she acted as an unofficial channel of communication, freely passing information back and forth....
Questions of dual loyalty held no fear for her. Upholding the Zionist cause, defending it from attack, rescuing it from defeat was for her a British interest.
The diaries detail that Dugdale travelled to Geneva, Paris, and Palestine, with or on behalf of Weizmann, in their pursuits, both social and political. Dugdale held sway amongst the Zionist elite beyond Weizmann, as well. Notably, the diaries mention that Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, often differed in policy and approach with Dugdale and Weizmann.
The Campbells and Balfours were both members of the Church of Scotland, and according to Rose, Dugdale's religious upbringing was crucial to her sense of self, plus "it afforded her a profound understanding of the roots of Zionism."
"Nurtured on the scriptures and fortified by a deeply-felt bond with the Old Testament," Rose wrote, "it was the prophecies of the Book she knew so well that were being redeemed by the twentieth-century descendants of the Children of Israel." A glimpse into the religious fervor that motivated her Zionism is afforded by the entry for April 27, 1937: "... Frontiers fairly satisfactory to Chaim—all the north—the most important after Emek [the Vale of Esdraelon]. Complete independence. Chaim told him he would go as far as he could—... Great events lie ahead. The Jews in the plains—so it must be before Armageddon" (emphasis added)).
Jabotinsky: Warrior for the Empire
In 1915, one of the most crucial steps in the buildup of the Jabotinskyites occurred, when Col. John Henry Patterson was selected to command Britain's Zionist Mule Corps. Like Dugdale, he was a rabid Christian Zionist, and he chose Jabotinsky as his military collaborator. For the next 31 years Patterson remained an ardent supporter of the Jabotinskyites, including the terrorist Irgun, and maintained an intimate relationship with Ben Zion Netanyahu, father of Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Mule Corps was composed of all-Russian Jewish exiles living in Alexandria, Egypt. Organized by Jabotinsky, who did not serve, this military support group saw themselves as having the opportunity to help the British take over Palestine and themselves gain a foothold in establishing a Jewish state. It was Britain's first hint at using the Jews to secure Palestine as part of the broader Sykes-Picot arrangement.
Patterson wrote of his appointment:
It was certainly curious that the General's choice should have fallen upon me, for, of course, he knew nothing of my knowledge of Jewish history, or of my sympathy for the Jewish race. When, as a boy I eagerly devoured the records of the glorious deeds of Jewish military captains such as Joshua, Joab, Gideon and Judas Maccabaeus, I little dreamt that one day I, myself, would in a small way, be captain of a host of the Children of Israel.
Swearing in the roughly 750 Jewish soldiers on March 3, 1915, Patterson said: "Pray with me that I should not only, as Moses, behold Canaan from afar, but be divinely permitted to lead you into the Promised Land." To their dismay, the Mule Corps was sent to Gallipoli, in what is today Turkey, where it saw action for several months, but was demobilized on Dec. 28, 1915, after the British military failure, never setting foot in Palestine.
On the evening in 1918 that the Balfour Declaration was passed by the British War Cabinet, Patterson was invited to dinner with other luminaries at the home of Weizmann. He and Amery then created the Jewish Legion, for which Jabotinsky was the organizer and spokesman. The Legion, a propaganda effort to support Sykes-Picot, was deployed to Palestine at the end of the war.
After Patterson retired from military duty in 1920, he became a spokesman for Zionism, and helped transform Jabotinsky from a somewhat clandestine intelligence operative jointly run by British intelligence and the Russian Okhrana, into a major political figure. In the second phase of their relationship, Patterson travelled the world over with Jabotinsky.
In 1921, he accompanied Jabotinsky to the 12th World Zionist conference at Carlsbad, Germany, and later, in the Fall of the same year, he accompanied him on a fundraising trip to the United States.
Patterson maintained his support for Jabotinsky in 1925, when the latter broke from the World Zionist Organization and created Revisionist Zionism, a right-wing movement that supported Hitler and Mussolini. In 1928 and 1929 he accompanied Jabotinsky to Palestine to review Betar training camps. The Betar was a militarist Revisionist youth group, modelled on Mussolini's brownshirts, who were often involved in armed confrontation with the Palestinian Arabs.
In 1929, Jabotinsky was the director of the Judea Insurance Company, thought to be a financial conduit from the United States for clandestine activity. Patterson was the manager of its Cairo branch.
In 1933, when Weizmann's friend and Zionist leader Chaim Arlosoroff was assassinated, Patterson was the conduit of the Revisionist report denying involvement, and accusing the Labor Party of using the incident against them. Arlosoroff had been targetted for assassination by the right wing of the Revisionist movement. He had been corresponding with the American Elwood Meade, the water specialist who had made California's barren land into a blooming garden, and was secretly meeting with leading Arabs with whom he was discussing joint economic development, based upon harnessing the Jordan River. Arlosoroff was a threat to the British, who were the only ones to benefit from the assassination.
In 1936, Jabotinsky joined Patterson on a speaking tour to oppose the 1936-37 Peel Commission (Palestine Royal Commission) report, and to organize for a Jewish Palestine, which would join the British Crown as a Seventh Dominion.
In January 1939, Patterson toured the United States to raise funds for the Irgun. In September of the same year, after Britain announced its entry into the war, he returned with Jabotinsky to the United States, where they attempted to raise a Jewish Army and intelligence unit of half a million Jews. They met with Lord Lothian, then British Ambassador to the United States, who sanctioned their activity, and Patterson and Jabotinsky addressed a mass rally in New York calling for the new Legion.
Patterson was always a conduit for money to the Revisionists. Early in 1940, he embarked upon a fundraising tour of Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, and Peru. He was with Jabotinsky on Aug. 3, 1940, reviewing a Betar youth camp in New York State, when Jabotinsky was struck dead by a heart attack. Patterson never returned to England, but corresponded regularly with Amery up until his death in 1947.
After Jabotinsky's death, Patterson assisted Ben Zion Netanyahu, father of the current Likud leader, who took the reins of leadership of the Revisionist movement. Patterson served as the honorary president of the New Zionist League of America, the Revisionist Zionist organization headed by Netanyahu. He continued to organize for Irgun operations as well. Patterson worked closely with Peter Bergson, a collaborator of Netanyahu, whose real name was Hillel Kook. A founder of the terrorist Irgun in Palestine, Bergson changed his name to operate in the United States.
Bergson was the nephew of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first chief rabbi of Palestine under the British Mandate, who supported the activities of Jabotinsky and the right-wing Zionists. Patterson served as the military advisor and honorary chairman of the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, a Revisionist front group and propaganda organization located in New York City and run by Bergson. He was a member and officer of various other Revisionist and Irgun front groups run by Netanyahu and Bergson, and often spoke at their rallies and meetings.
In 1946, a year before his death, Patterson was honored by the Netanyahu family for his services to Jabotinsky and Revisionist Zionism. When Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu's younger brother was born, Patterson was anointed his godfather, and the son was given the name Jonathan, to honor both Patterson and Bibi's grandfather Nathan.
Amery and Jabotinsky
While Patterson's Zionist Mule Corps was deployed to Gallipoli, Jabotinsky continued his organizing efforts to get a full Jewish Legion established and trained that would deploy to Palestine. Although he travelled through Britain and the European continent, there was little support within the Zionist community. In the Summer of 1915, the Zionist Actions Committee, which was composed of delegates from Russia to England, passed a resolution that Zionists everywhere should oppose the formation of such a group. Jabotinsky returned home to London by mid-August, where he found no support. The wartime policy of Field Marshall Horatio Herbert, Lord Kitchener, was to direct all efforts to the Western Front. There was no discussion of an offensive in Palestine. He drew support only from Weizmann. The two became close, and Jabotinsky moved into Weizmann's apartment for several months.
Through the first half of 1916, the Jewish Legion project was dead in the water. Then Patterson asked Jabotinsky to meet with him in London. The two went immediately to Amery, who had already spoken with Patterson about the project. Amery was then Secretary to Lord Derby at the War Office. Jabotinsky was well aware of the importance of the liaison. He described Amery as "one of the most important members of Lloyd George's famous secretariat (known as the 'kindergarten' to the elder political generation, who deplored the youthfulness of the members of this omnipotent group)." As Joseph Schechtman states in his official biography of Jabotinsky, Amery became Jabotinsky's most energetic and devoted advisor and contact man in government circles. Details of their first meeting are scant, but the timing coincides with the signing of the Sykes-Picot agreements in May.
Jabotinsky then set out to gather thousands of signatures on a petition with the intent to present them to the British government, but he secured a mere 300. At public recruiting meetings, the Jewish opposition, both Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, were able to overwhelm Jabotinsky, calling him and his associates provocateurs, militarists, and murderers, and pelting them with rotten potatoes.
Patterson and Amery kept the project alive nonetheless. By the end of 1916, Amery managed to move 124 former Zionist Mule Corps volunteers to London from Alexandria, Egypt, into a separate company of the 20th Battalion, which met with Jabotinsky. Amery wrote to Jabotinsky on Jan. 22, 1917: "Since I saw you I have had an opportunity of speaking to people in the War Office, who have promised to look into the whole question again." The next day, Jabotinsky sought Amery's counsel. The latter directed him to write a detailed proposal that he would review and edit, and move it along to the War Cabinet and Prime Minister.
You might recapitulate that you originally opened negotiations with the War Office and Foreign Office armed with credentials from the Russian authorities, who were favorable to your enterprise; and that you understood at the time that the Foreign Office was not unsympathetic to the idea in view of the political effect in America, but that you also understood that the War Office did not at that time consider the matter of sufficient importance to warrant the raising of a special Corps for service in Egypt and Palestine... ; then you ought also briefly to mention that, without official encouragement, you undertook a purely personal campaign of meetings in East London, which in the absence of any canvassing or official support did not attract more than a very limited number. What I mean is that you ought to briefly put the Prime Minister in possession of the main facts as to your previous efforts to form a special Jewish Corps in this country.
A few days later, Amery received the final text signed by Jabotinsky and his fellow organizer Joseph Trumpeldor, and committed himself to handing it over personally to Prime Minister Lloyd George. Amery kept in constant contact with Jabotinsky over the next weeks and kept the project moving. On April 13, Amery was able to give Jabotinsky some good news: "Your affair is really making progress at last.... Anyhow, you can be sure that I have done my best to help the thing forward and will continue to do so."
By the end of April, the War Cabinet approved the proposal, and Secretary for War Lord Derby met with Jabotinsky to discuss the details. Amery set a slew of meetings for Jabotinsky with other key individuals, including Gen. Jan Smuts, the South African Prime Minister, who was attending War Cabinet meetings.
Jabotinsky praised Smuts in his diaries as
a deeply cultured man, educated at the Universities of Holland, Heidelberg and Cambridge, and a fine thinker and writer. He was a Zionist of the caliber of Balfour or Robert Cecil....
On Aug 23, 1917 the creation of the Jewish Regiment was officially announced in the London Gazette. Patterson was assigned to recruit and train the soldiers. There was still opposition from the highest levels of the British aristocracy, and Amery and Weizmann went straight to Lord Milner, who extracted a compromise from the aristocracy.
But the East End of London, which was the Jewish enclave, was largely opposed, even after the Legion was endorsed officially by the government. On Aug. 17, the Jewish Chronicle reported: "As to the proposed formation of a Jewish regiment, it can be said frankly that the mass of Jews will not hear of it. Organized Jewish labor is opposed to it as violently as the Zionists.... They regard it as a deep grievance that one or two individuals have influenced the authorities in that direction.... What is most galling to the Jewish public opinion is the arbitrary manner in which the scheme has been foisted on them."
Socialists and Zionists were most outspoken in their hostility. At a conference of Jewish trade unions, it was unanimously resolved that a Jewish Regiment was undesirable. Several Zionist societies passed resolutions disapproving of a Jewish Regiment, contending that if they had to fight, they would do so "as Englishmen or Russians, but not as Jews."
But the creation of the Jewish Legion for deployment to Palestine during World War I was sealed by Amery and Milner, who would write the final drafts of the Balfour declaration just two weeks later. This was Sykes-Picot: Palestine was to come under a British Mandate, and, as Amery said, the Milner group was using the Jews as its proxy.
The Legion was ultimately sent to Palestine near the end of that campaign, under Gen. Edmund Allenby's command; it saw limited combat. At the close of the war, Jabotinsky was officially demobilized as an officer in the British Army and protested to the Foreign Office and Colonial Office, hoping to maintain a defense force in Palestine for the new Jewish home. Amery, now posted to the Colonial Office, replied on Oct. 16, 1919:
I was very sorry indeed to hear from you that the military authorities in Palestine demobilized you in so summary and ungracious a fashion. I don't suppose that anything could be done now to remobilize you.... I think the least the War Office could do would be to show their recognition in some way or other of your services in the creation of the Jewish units and have written to urge this upon them....
At Amery's urging, the War Office bestowed the Medal of the Most Distinguished Order of the British Empire (MBE) upon Jabotinsky. The order was created by King George V, in 1915, for those who had served the empire during the war. Its motto is "For God and the Empire." Jabotinsky was not of the mind to accept. However, Amery sent Patterson to Palestine with a letter, dated Feb. 17, 1920, which urged him to accept the decoration, because it was "officially recommended by the War Office and approved of by His Majesty the King." Jabotinsky then accepted the award.
The letter continued: "I know, in your keenness for the cause, you will be concentrating all your efforts in the future." What Amery and Milner had done was to place a trained military contingent of Zionists, under the leadership of fascist Ze'ev Jabotinsky, on Palestinian soil, where none had existed before; then Amery signalled his post-war support for Jabotinsky's Legion on the ground in Palestine.
Less than six months later, on April 4, 1920, the Nebi Musa riots occurred in Jerusalem. British intelligence officer Richard Meinertzhagen, who was on the scene, wrote a secret report detailing how the British military had encouraged and facilitated the Arabs in rioting against the Jews. Meinertzhagen alleged that Col. Bertie Harry Waters-Taylor, General Allenby's chief of staff, had secretly given Haj Amin al-Husseini instructions to run the riots so as to show the world the Arabs would not stand for Jewish rule in Palestine. An arrest warrant was issued for al-Husseini, who fled into exile. He was subsequently made the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British, and became a collaborator of Hitler.
Numbers of former Jewish Legion members were arrested. Some had been found with illegal weapons, and others had taken part in a shootout. A cache of weapons and ammunition was found in Jabotinsky's apartment. Nineteen men were imprisoned, but not Jabotinsky, since he was not at the apartment at the time the weapons were seized. According to Israeli historian Tom Segev, author of One Palestine, Jabotinsky was indignant that he had not been arrested, so he went to the Kishla Prison at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem with his attorney, Mordechai Eliash, demanding to be arrested! At the beginning of the riots, Jabotinsky had willfully offered and handed over his illegal pistol to British Military Governor Storrs (one of Jabotinsky's supporters). The British authorities ultimately arrested him for that.
The events showed Jabotinsky to be a protected asset of the highest of authorities. Military Governor Brig. Gen. Ronald Storrs went to the jail to make sure that Jabotinsky was properly treated. He led Jabotinsky to a more comfortable cell, and ordered that a bed with a mattress and wash basin be provided. Jabotinsky was brought food from the adjacent Amdursky Hotel and was served wine with his meals!
He was then made into a cause célèbre by his protectors. Tried along with the others, he was convicted of possession of an illegal firearm and sentenced to 15 years in prison, the equivalent of the sentence handed out to Arab rioters who were convicted of raping Jewish women.
Both his trial and sentence created an uproar. The Milnerites and their British Israelite collaborators went into motion to protest the sentence and create a firestorm behind Jabotinsky. The Prime Minster's private secretary, Philip Kerr, protested at the San Remo Conference. In the House of Commons, Robert Cecil and a host of others who had been Jabotinsky's supporters filed parliamentary questions.
The same British newspapers that had promoted Jabotinsky in creating the Jewish Legion came to his defense. The entire London press, as well as provincial papers, prominently and sympathetically featured a report by the Jewish Correspondence Bureau, released by Reuters Agency, in which it was stressed that "Jabotinsky is to the Jews what Garibaldi was to the Italians."
On July 8, 1920, civil rule in Palestine was transferred by the military to Herbert Samuel, the new High Commissioner. One of his first acts was to provide amnesty to all those imprisoned for the Jerusalem riots, both Arab and Jew. Upon his release, Jabotinsky travelled back to Jerusalem, where he was received by his supporters, headed by Rabbi Kook. According to Jabotinsky biographer Joseph Schechtman, "He was returning to liberty as a universally recognized and acclaimed national hero: his popularity was at its peak."
'Service to the Empire'
Jabotinsky's Revisionist cadre and the militant Betar groups were at the center of riots and armed confrontations with Palestinians over decades. They were openly pro-fascist during the latter part of the 1920s and early 1930s, as were Amery and Lord Lothian, promoting corporatist economic schemes for Palestine, and praising Hitler and Mussolini. Jabotinsky established a naval military school under the official auspices of the Fascist Italian government, to train Revisionist cadre.
Amery and other members of Milner's Kindergarten continued their promotion of Jabotinsky through this entire period, until his death in New York in 1940, when he was meeting and corresponding with Lord Lothian, then British Ambassador to the U.S.A., who officially supported his activities. And Jabotinsky was loyal to these British controllers. A survey is useful.
In April 1928, Jabotinsky spent ten days in London, having been invited by Amery, who was then Secretary of State for the Colonies. A dinner was held for him at the House of Commons, which was arranged by Col. Josiah Wedgewood, a long-time supporter. Wedgewood was in the process of completing a book entitled The Seventh Dominion, which called for Palestine to officially become the Seventh Dominion of the British Crown, replacing the temporary British Mandate. Jabotinsky was recruited to the idea, and in a confidential letter to Wedgewood, he noted that the book was "more than brilliant and clever—it is a service to both causes, the British and the Zionists ... [and] had we today even a 99 per cent majority in Palestine, I, the extremist, would still fight every idea of independence and would insist on keeping within the British Empire" (emphasis added). He told Wedgewood squarely that he "should not be averse to submitting it to the Revisionist League for acceptance." Wedgewood concurred.
Jabotinsky presented the Seventh Dominion concept at the Third Revisionist World Conference in Vienna in December 1928, and the conference resolved that there was "no contradiction' between the idea of a Jewish Palestine and an eventual Dominion status within a British Commonwealth of Nations; further, that every Revisionist was free individually to join the Palestine Dominion League, which was headed by Wedgewood. In May 1929, when a Seventh Dominion League was constituted in Jerusalem, Jabotinsky accepted its chairmanship.
Abba Achimeir, the mentor of Benjamin Netanyahu, was the leader of the extremist wing of Revisionist Zionism. An avowed fascist, he was an early supporter of Hitler and Mussolini, and authored a column on fascism which appeared regularly in Dor Hayoam, a major Revisionist newspaper in Palestine. Achimier wrote of the British: "In every East-West conflict, we will always be on the side of the West, for the West has represented a more superior culture than the East over the last thousand years, after the destruction of the Baghdad Caliphate by the Mongols ... and we today are the most prominent and loyal bearers of the culture ... our interest lies in expanding the British Empire even further than intended by the British themselves" (emphasis added).
Jabotinsky openly voiced his deep respect for and kinship with the British Empire, and it cohered with his early writings on race superiority. In a speech in Warsaw, Poland on Dec. 28, 1931, he stated: "England is no longer inspired by her old lust for building and leading. And what we ask of the English is, indeed, this lust and resolution, the capacity for more courageous, more creative action.... England is becoming continental! Not long ago the prestige of the English ruler of the 'colored' colonies stood very high. Hindus, Arabs, Malays were conscious of his superiority and obeyed, not unprotestingly, yet completely. The whole scheme of training of the future rulers was built on the principle, 'carry yourself so that the inferior will feel your unobtainable superiority in every motion.' But a decline of imperialist instinct is felt in Englishmen.... This lessening of the taste for imperialist scope is revealed in various ways—in the indifference with which the emancipation of Egypt was received, in the lack of concern at the prospect of the loss of India and Ireland. This does not mean that all is lost. In five or ten years all this may change. England may still reeducate her proconsuls. The imperial appetite may flame up anew, because this is a very powerful and gifted people" (emphasis added).
In the ensuing years, as official British support for Zionism wavered, Jabotinsky's allegiance to his British controllers did not diminish, although his criticism of actions of the British government increased. Speaking at the Sixth Revisionist World Conference in Cracow in January 1935, he said: "British statesmen, and perhaps some of our own hot-heads too, should get one thing absolutely clear. We are mercilessly critical with regard to the Mandatory's present policy in Palestine, and we demand a switch to a better policy, more appropriate to the interests of Zionism. But since it is to England that we put such demands, it means that we want her to stay on in Palestine, and to go on ruling Palestine. For you cannot say to a person, 'go away—and help me into the saddle.' If you want England to help you into the saddle, you don't want England to go away; on the contrary, the implication is that you believe she can be persuaded to help you. What is more: Israel is no beggar asking for services that she does not intend to repay. Since you demand a historical service from England, you imply that, if that service is rendered, Jewish Palestine will be ready to repay it, loyally and durably, by service to the Empire..." (emphasis added).
Jabotinsky testified before the Peel Commission in the House of Lords, on July 11, 1937, and three days later, he was feted at the Hotel Commodore in a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Jewish Legion. The event was organized by Amery. Among the other sponsors were Field Marshal Sir Philip Chestwood, Colonel Patterson, and Colonel Wedgewood. Although the celebration was boycotted by the World Zionist Organization, intelligence operative Baffy Dugdale sat at the main table. Over 200 persons came and heard speeches from Amery, Wedgewood, Chestwood, and Patterson honoring Jabotinsky, who spoke last. Jabotinsky drew his speech to a close by rising and proclaiming the final toast of the evening:
I believe in Freedom and the ultimate triumph of freedom. I believe in England, and the brotherhood between England and Israel.
Select Bibliography
Books:
Charles Leopold, Maurice Stennet Amery, My Political Life, Vols. 1-3, England Before the Storm: 1896-1914 (London: Hutchinson, 1953); War and Peace: 1914-1929 (London: Hutchinson, 1953); Vol. 3, The Unforgiving Years: 1929-1940 (London: Hutchinson, 1955).
——, Maurice Stennet Amery, The Washington Loan Agreements, A Critical Study of American Economic Foreign Policy (London: Macdonald and Co., 1945).
John Barnes and David Nicholson, eds., The Leo Amery Diaries, Vol. 1: 1896-1929 (London: Hutchinson, 1980); The Empire At Bay, The Leo Amery Diaries: 1929-1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1988).
Paul Goodman, ed. Chaim Weizmann, A Tribute on his Seventieth Birthday (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1945).
Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Story of the Jewish Legion (Bernard Ackerman, Inc., 1945).
Barnet Litvinoff, Weizmann, Last of the Patriarchs (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976).
William Roger Louis, In the Name of God, GO! Leo Amery and the British Empire in the Age of Churchill (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1992).
Shmuel Katz, Lone Wolf, A Biography of Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky (New York: Barricade Books Inc., 1966).
Lieut. Col. John Henry Patterson, With the Zionists in Gallipoli (George H. Doran Co., 1916).
Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment: A History of the World In Our Time (GSG and Associates, 1966).
Norman Rose, ed., Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale, 1936-47 (Vallentine Mitchell and Co., 1973).
Joseph B. Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet, The Vladimir Jabotinsky Story, The Last Years (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1961).
Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2001).
Articles:
William Roger Louis, "American Anti-Colonialism and the Dissolution of the British Empire" International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs: Vol. 61, No. 3, Summer 1985).
Norman Rose, "The Seventh Dominion," The Historical Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2, June 1971.
Regina Sharif, "Christians for Zion, 1600-1919," Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 5, Nos. 3-4, Spring-Summer 1976.
"Lord Milner Wants Anglo-American Union," New York Times, June 11, 1916.
[1] The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1872-1914 (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1967).
