From Churchill and the Jews (Martin Gilbert, 2007) pp 10-12
The Russian Jews whose entry into Britain was being so strongly supported by Churchill in the House of Commons had good reason to want to leave the Tsarist Empire. For more than thirty years they had been subjected to spasmodic but often lethal outbreaks of violence: pogroms that continued into the twentieth century. In the Russian city of Kishinev, a three-day pogrom in April 1903 had led to forty-seven Jewish deaths – men, women and children — and more than seven hundred houses had been looted. A second pogrom took place in the same city in October 1905, when nineteen Jews were killed.
Jews worldwide were outraged at the continuing attacks. On 10 December 1905 a public protest meeting was called in Manchester. It was the day after Churchill had accepted his first government post, as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies in the new Liberal administration, formed following the resignation of the Conservative Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour.
Churchill was the main speaker at Manchester. During the course of his speech, he told an audience of several thousand that they had met to protest ‘against the appalling massacres and detestable atrocities recently committed in the Empire of Russia.’
Churchill went on to declare: ‘The numbers of victims had been enormous. Many thousands of weak and defenceless people had suffered terribly, old people alike with little children and feeble women who were incapable of offering resistance, and could not rely at all on the forces of law and the regulations of order. That those outrages were not spontaneous but rather in the nature of a deliberate plan combined to create a picture so terrible that one could hardly distinguish it in its grim reality, even amid the darkness of Russia. They had met there to express, in no uncertain terms, how deeply moved the whole British nation were at such atrocious deeds.’°
Among those present on the platform when Churchill spoke was a Jewish chemist and active Zionist, Russian born Dr Chaim Weizmann, who had come from Geneva, where he was a lecturer in chemistry, to Manchester a year earlier. The two men, who were born three days apart, were to become closely associated in the evolution of Zionist needs and policies.
For the Jews of Britain in 1905 who were attracted to Zionism, the question was whether to press for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then firmly under Turkish rule, or to seek some area of Jewish settlement, within the wide confines of the British Empire, where the persecuted Jews of Russia could find an immediate haven. The Zionist movement itself was divided. Some wanted all Jewish efforts to be focused on opening Turkish-ruled Palestine to Jewish immigration.
Others, members of the Jewish Territorial Organisation — led by the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, and known as Territorialists – pressed the British Government to make some British colonial territory available. A favoured area was in the highlands of Kenya, part of British East Africa Protectorate — an area that today is part of Uganda. Another option, supported publicly by Lord Rothschild and already being financed by Baron de Hirsch, was for Jewish agricultural colonies in Canada and Argentina.
For Churchill, this question of Jewish national aspirations arose within a few days of his entry into government — and three weeks before the General Election called as a result of Balfour’s resignation — when he was approached, on Boxing Day 1905, by a leading Jewish constituent, Dr Joseph Dulberg, who was Secretary of the Manchester Territorialists. On New Year’s Day 1906 Churchill wrote to Dulberg, noting the ‘numerous and serious difficulties which present themselves to a scheme of establishing a self-governing Jewish colony in British East Africa, of the differences of opinion among the Jews themselves, of the doubtful suitability of the territories in question, of the rapidly extending settlements by British colonists in and about the area, and of the large issues of general state policy which the scheme affects.’
Churchill was supportive, telling the Territorialists: ‘I recognise the supreme attraction to a scattered and persecuted people of a safe and settled home under the flag of tolerance and freedom. Such a plan contains a soul, and enlists in its support energies, enthusiasms, and a driving power which no scheme of individual colonisation can ever command.’ But what was needed was ‘a definite detailed plan sustained by ample funds and personalities.’° Despite this positive suggestion, the Zionists who wanted Palestine or nothing won the day within the Zionist movement, and the focus of Jewish national aspirations turned back to the Turkish-ruled region between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan, where, by 1905, fifty Jewish villages had been established, mostly by Jews from Russia. *
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