9. JEWISH OPPOSITION TO POLITICAL ZIONISM
The case that the Zionism's desire to return to Palestine was a very small minority of Jewish people. Was it a British experiment in proxy colonization, in which the Jewish people were the guineapigs?
[This is a segment from Victor Kattan, “From Coexistence to Conquest”, toward the end of chapter two, 5,000 words. Please follow the footnotes attached at the end, they give additional information.]
In post #8 we saw that the Jewish who were attracted to emigrate to Palestine were very small in numbers. (We said people vote with their feet. How many Jews had actually moved to Palestine?) We also investigated the premises of the British Christian Zionists, and found they had ulterior motives. Also, the British political class had conflicting intentions.
Now we will consider what the prominent British Jews thought about Zionism. The most outspoken was Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India (1917–22). He was the only Jewish member of the cabinet at the time.
Herbert Samuel was the first British high commissioner for Palestine, 1920 – 1925, and an ardent Zionist. However, not all was rosy for Samuel who faced fervent opposition to his advocacy of uprooting millions of Jews from Europe and settling them in Palestine, principally from his cousin Edwin Montagu. Montagu was opposed to the Balfour Declaration because he thought that the effect of a Zionist policy would be anti-Semitic all over Europe, and that Zionism was itself ‘a mischievous political creed’.227 In contrast to Herbert Samuel, Montagu did not agree that anti-Semitism was inevitable wherever Jews settled in large numbers. Nor did he believe that Zionism was the answer to the Jewish Question. On the contrary, he thought that Zionism was extremely dangerous because it would encourage the anti-Semites to view the Jews as “foreign elements” in their societies. He also had the foresight to warn his colleagues of the conflict that would arise between the Jews who settled in Palestine and its indigenous inhabitants. So zealous was Montagu’s opposition to Zionism that he drafted three memoranda on the subject which he presented to the Parliament in as many months. In his first memorandum entitled ‘The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government’, Montagu wrote in his opening paragraph:
I have chosen the above title for this memorandum, not in any hostile sense, not by any means as quarrelling with an anti-Semitic view which may be held by my colleagues, not with a desire to deny that anti-Semitism can be held by rational men, not even with a view to suggesting that the Government is deliberately anti-Semitic; but I wish to place on the record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic in result, and will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world.228
Montagu said that he had been prompted to write the memorandum after he received correspondence between Lord Rothschild and A.J. Balfour on Palestine being a Jewish national home. He felt that as he was ‘the one Jewish Minister in the Government’ that he may be allowed to express his views on the subject which he held very strongly. He then referred to the easing of restrictions on Jews in Russia and then waxed lyrical:
… at the very time when these Jews have been acknowledged as Jewish Russians and given all liberties, it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognized by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the ‘national home of the Jewish people.’ I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mohammedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews, and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans [sic] in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country - but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.229
EVERYTHING THAT MONTAGU SAID CAME TRUE, AND EVEN MORE DEVISTATING.
[I don’t know that much about anti-Semitism in Russia at the time. I am researching it now.]
Montagu wrote this memorandum in August 1917 without the benefit of hindsight. Over the next three decades Jews were encouraged to relocate from many places in Europe and move to Palestine, thereby effectively becoming ‘strangers’ in their former countries of multi-generational origin. And after Israel was created in 1948, its legislature enacted a Law of Return which grants citizenship only to Jews, on the basis of Halakha (Jewish religious law), precisely as Montagu had predicted.230 But this was not the only prescient observation Montagu made. He went on to set out four principles in the memorandum, the second of which makes rather prophetic reading:
2. When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine, drawn from all quarters of the globe, driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best land in the country, …231
Indeed, Montagu’s fears were not unfounded. Only two years after he wrote this memorandum, the “anti-Semitic Britons”, was founded by Henry Hamilton Beamish, which continued to publish English translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion* as late as the 1970s.232 He advocated removing all Jews from Britain, encouraging their ‘return’ to Palestine, and nationalizing their property.233 (*The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion, is a fabricated forgery, purporting to detail a Jewish plot for global domination, written by Sergyei Nilus, a Russian.)
Indeed by 1920, and even before then, the ideas contained in the Protocols were gaining popularity with The Spectator (of London) going so far as to describe them as ‘brilliant in (their) moral perversity and intellectual depravity’ and as ‘one of the most remarkable productions of their kind’.234 The Protocols would not be exposed as a forgery until the following year by The Times newspaper,235 and even then many people continued to peddle its falsehoods and myths.236 In fact, throughout the 1920s and 1930s sales of the Protocols were astronomical – it was said to be the most widely distributed book in the world after the Bible.237 In the 1917 edition of the Protocols, its Russian author Sergyei Nilus added the following tract making a direct link between Zionism and a Jewish conspiracy to control the world which he claimed had been hatched up at the Zionist Congress in 1897:
… only now, in 1917, have I learned authoritatively from Jewish sources that these Protocols are nothing else than a strategic plan for the conquest of the world, putting it under the yoke of Israel, the struggle against God, a plan worked out by the leaders of the Jewish people during the many centuries of dispersion, and finally presented to the Council of Elders by ‘The Prince of the Exile,’ Theodor Herzl, at the time of the first Zionist Congress, summoned by him at Basel in August, 1897.238
Now of course there was no truth to this. But was it a coincidence that in the year in which Nilus added this passage, the British Government had been debating for months over whether to issue the Balfour Declaration? From the point of view of someone wanting to create fears of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world an organized Jewish movement which had received the British Government’s sympathy to create a ‘home’ in Palestine made a good story. It also provided fodder for the anti-Semites. Montagu was therefore right to fear its consequences. In this connection the following extract which appears in a book published by Henry Beamish sheds some light on the thought processes of a vicious anti-Semite, (Beamish), and explains why Montagu so derided Balfour for coming out in favor of Zionism in 1917 because it would give ammunition to the anti-Semites. (Beamish):
It is of vital importance that the Jews do not leave [Palestine] once they are established there, and for this purpose the ‘League of Nations,’ which at present is simply a Jew-devised and Jew-controlled affair, should be transformed into a ‘League of Christian Nations,’ and be given the task of seeing (1) that no Jew leaves the Promised Land; (2) that no Christian enters the country. Similar tactics as to segregation are being adopted in South Africa with regard to the Natives there, and in dealing with the Jews, nothing short of complete segregation will avert the menace, destroy the all-polluting International Finance, and permit the Christian races to live at peace with each other.239
Montagu’s well-founded fears can only be understood in the social and political context of the times in which the Balfour Declaration was announced and its impact on furthering the causes of the anti-Semites within Britain and elsewhere. Hence it was hardly surprising that he wrote: ‘I would be almost tempted to proscribe the Zionist organization as illegal and against the [British] national interest.’240 Nor was Montagu a lone voice amongst Anglo Jewry. This is what he wrote in his third memorandum on the subject:
3. I have obtained a list of a few distinguished anti-Zionists. It will be noticed that it includes every Jew who is prominent in public life, with the exception of the present Lord Rothschild, Mr. Herbert Samuel, and a few others.
These are all men who lead an English life as well as acknowledging and rendering their services to their fellow-religionists in this country and abroad. They contain among them ultra-orthodox as well as certain heterodox Jews’.241
That Montagu felt compelled in his third and final memorandum to go to the length of actually compiling a list of prominent British Jews who were opposed to Zionism and opposed to the Balfour Declaration, is perhaps a sign that he knew he was facing a losing battle. (Although these men did not write letters on their opposition, they did willingly lend their names to Montagu’s third Memorandum to parliament.)
As far as Balfour was concerned these British Jews were only a minority. The ‘real’ Jews, in Balfour’s eyes – that is, the Ostjuden – were Zionists; and that, as far as he was concerned, was all that mattered. Zionism was going to have the British Government’s sympathy.
Remember, From Lord Arthur James Balfour, Memorandum, August 11, 1919, he wrote: “For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the formality of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country . . . Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder and import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.
These men were in opposition:
Dr. Israel Abrahams, M.A., University of Cambridge Sir Lionel Abrahams, K.C.B. Professor S. Alexander, M.A., University of Manchester D.L. Alexander, Esq., K.C., J.P. Captain O.E. d’Avigdor-Goldsmid Leonard L. Cohen, Esq. Robert Waley Cohen, Esq. Dr. A. Eicholz. S.H. Emanuel, Esq., B.A., Recorder of Winchester. Ernest L. Franklin, Esq. Professor I. Gollancz, M.A., Secretary of the British Academy Michael A. Green, Esq. P.J. Hartog, Esq., M.A., Registrar, University of London. Captain Evelyn de Rothschild, New Court, E.C. Major Lionel de Rothschild, New Court, E.C. Captain I. Salmon, L.C.C. Sir Harry S. Samuel, Bart. Edmund Sebag-Montefi ore, Esq. Oswald J. Simon, Esq. Dr. Charles Singer, M.A., Esq., 33 Upper Brook Street, W. H.S.Q. Henriques, Esq., M.A. Sir Charles S. Henry, Bart., M.P. J.D. Israel. Esq. Benjamin Kisch, Esq. Rev. Ephraim Levine, M.A. Joshua M. Levy, Esq., Chairman of the Council, Jews’ College. Major Laurie Magnus. Sir Philip Magnus, Bart., M.P. Sir Alfred Mond, M.P. C.G. Montefi ore, Esq., M.A. A.R. Moro, Esq. Sir Matthew Nathan, G.C.M.G. J. Prag, Esq. J.P. The Right Hon. Viscount Reading, G.C.B, K.C.V.O. Captain Anthony de Rothschild, New Court, St. Swithin’s Lane, E.C. Sir Isidore Spielman, C.M.G. Marion H. Spielmann, Esq. Meyer A. Spielman, Esq. Sir Edward D. Stern. Lord Swaythling. Philip S. Waley, Esq. Professor A. Wolf, M.A., University College, London Lucien Wolf, Esq. Albert M. Woolf, Esq.
However, the fact was, that even amongst the Ostjuden - Zionism had a small following. Balfour had been hoodwinked by Chiam Weizmann into thinking that Zionism was a bigger and more powerful movement amongst ‘international Jewry’ than it ever really was.
Of course, not all British politicians were anti-Semitic or blind to the rift that a national home for the Jews in Palestine, however one understood it, would cause with its indigenous inhabitants. On 21 June 1922, a motion was passed in the House of Lords by a majority of 60 to 29-rejecting a mandate for Palestine that incorporated the Balfour Declaration.242 Since the great majority of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants opposed Zionism, Lord Islington (John Poynder Dickinson), who served as Under-Secretary of State for India and the Colonies, urged that ratification be postponed until amendments were made annulling the Balfour Declaration.243 The Motion provided:
That the Mandate for Palestine in its present form is unacceptable to this House, because it directly violates the pledges made by His Majesty’s Government to the people of Palestine in the Declaration of October, 1915, and again in the Declaration of November, 1918*, and is, as at present framed, opposed to the sentiments and wishes of the great majority of the people of Palestine; that, therefore, its acceptance by the Council of the League of Nations should be postponed until such modifications have therein been effected as will comply with the pledges given by His Majesty’s Government.244
(*These are the agreements forged between n Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, and King Hussein, the Sherif of Mecca), over whether or not Palestine was pledged to be Arab and independent. In his letter of 24 October 1915 McMahon replied by saying ‘Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the Sherif of Mecca’ with the exception of those areas in which it would have been detrimental to France.
The House of Lords non-binding motion was, however, ‘signally overruled’ by the Government of the day and consequently the British Mandate of Palestine included Balfour’s pledge for a Jewish national home there.245 Nevertheless, this was not the end of the matter as there was also opposition to British policy in Palestine in the House of Commons. Sir William Johnson-Hicks MP, who would go on to become the Home Secretary during the premiership of Stanley Baldwin, enquired whether there was such a thing as self-determination.246 He asked the House:
‘Surely you must ask the inhabitants of the country to let the Jews in as friends and neighbors, but not to lead ultimately to the establishment of a Jewish nation ultimately forming a Jewish commonwealth.’247 He continued: ‘… if the Zionists are able to import thousands and thousands until they get a majority over the Arabs, the Arabs are entitled, in the first place, to say, “We represent 90 per cent of the population. We are entitled to self-determination …”’248
In response to these murmurs of discontent, Winston Churchill, who seemed to be laboring under the impression that the Zionists’ claim to be able to control the politics of both the United States and Russia had some credence, which as it turns out was not the case, reminded his colleagues of the reasons underlying British policy in Palestine:
“Pledges and promises were made during the War, and they were made, not only on the merits, though I think the merits are considerable. They were made because it was considered they would be of value to us in our struggle to win the War. It was considered that the support which the Jews could give us all over the world, and particularly in the United States, and also in Russia, would be a definite palpable advantage.”249
If Churchill sincerely believed what he was saying to the House of Commons, then he had fallen for the canard which Montagu had sought to dispel, and which the Zionists had played on – the myth that ‘the Jews control the world’. Just because a few Jews were prominent in American society in the judiciary, such as Felix Frankfurter and Justice Louis Brandeis, being friendly with Woodrow Wilson and that many of the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution, such as Leon Trotsky, were Jewish, did not mean that they controlled the corridors of power nor were they necessarily pro-Zionist.250 (Trotsky was violently anti-Zionist.) However, at the time the forged Protocols were thought to be genuine by many British statesmen and Churchill even received a copy.251 We can never know whether he read the Protocols but its ideas certainly seemed to have made quite an impression on him. In an article he published in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on 8 February 1920 entitled ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism’, Churchill categorized Jews into ‘Good and Bad Jews’, ‘National Jews’, ‘International Jews’, and ‘Terrorist Jews’.252 Under the heading ‘International Jews’, Churchill wrote:
“In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing”.253
Churchill saw in Zionism the Jewish answer to international communism and called on Jews in every country to come forward and assume a prominent role in combating the Bolshevik conspiracy. ‘In violent contrast to international communism’, Churchill wrote, ‘[Zionism] presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character.’254 This was one of the reasons why the British Government, according to Churchill, came out in support of Zionism. But Churchill’s views of the Jews did not pass without controversy. Indeed, they sounded eerily similar to the Protocols. Hence it was hardly surprising that the Jewish Chronicle took strong objection to his article and subsequently published an editorial in which it condemned Churchill.255
But if a man of the stature of Churchill could think like this, then what of other British politicians and diplomats? Did they too draw the false conclusions about the supposed link between ‘good and bad Jews’, ‘international Jews’, ‘terrorist Jews’ and the Bolshevik revolution? After all, had this ‘worldwide Jewish conspiracy’ not all been predicted in the Protocols? And were they not called the Elders of Zion as opposed to the Elders of Israel or the Elders of Jewry?256
In 1919, Churchill made a speech in which he referred to the Hungarian Communist leader as ‘Bela Kun or Bela Cohen’, trying to draw a connection to his Jewish roots.257 And when Prime Minister Lloyd George asked Churchill for his opinion concerning changes to his cabinet and the return of Herbert Samuel, he replied: ‘… there is a point about the Jews which occurs to me – you must not have too many of them’.258 At that time it did not occur to Churchill and his contemporaries that the Protocols were a malicious and anti-Semitic document which had no basis whatsoever in fact, and would bring untold misery to millions of Jews once it got into Hitler’s hands, whose Nazi propaganda machine did propagate it, the world over.259 In 1934, Nahum Sokolow even had to defend himself in a South African court to the charge that he and his fellow Zionists had concocted the whole plan behind the scenes at the first Zionist Congress in 1897.260
More pertinently, as regards the Palestine question, Churchill was forgetting that pledges and promises were also given to the Arabs in exchange for their actual material and logistical support in that war, and these were given two years before the Balfour Declaration was issued. (Even before that there were secret British promises given to France in the Sykes-Picot treaty.) Evidently, British policy must have therefore changed at some point, which may explain why it had to backtrack on its wartime pledges to the Arabs, and annul Sykes-Picot. However, at no time was it envisaged that the whole of Palestine was to be converted into a Jewish State. As the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defense noted in a memorandum he was instructed to draft for the Ministry of Defense when Britain was contemplating partitioning Palestine in the 1930s as part of its policy of imperial defense: ‘… the Balfour Declaration was not originally intended to provide for the conversion of Palestine from an Arab into a Jewish State, or to establish a policy which – as is now recognized – can only end in the suppression or eviction of its native population’.261 It was partly because the British Government eventually came to recognize that the aims of the Balfour Declaration were essentially irreconcilable with the rights of the Arab population in a single Palestinian state, which led them to come out in favor of partition throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The fact was that Zionism was to provoke a violent reaction from the Palestinian Arabs, who saw it as an attempt by a group of foreign immigrants to take their country away from them. (I can post more about the Arab reaction in the future.)
Notes
227. See Dov S. Zakheim, ‘The British Reaction to Zionism: 1895 to the 1990s’, 350 The Round Table (1999), pp. 321–32.
228. See Edwin Montagu and The Balfour Declaration (London: Arab League Office, 1966) reproducing the original memorandum from the Public Records Office, Cab. 24/24, 23 August 1917.
229. Ibid., p. 6.
230. See generally, Daud Abdullah (ed.), The Israeli Law of Return and its Impact on the Struggle in Palestine (London: Palestine Return Centre, 2004); Mark J. Altschul, ‘Israel’s Law of Return and the Debate of Altering, Repealing or Maintaining its Present Language’, 5 University of Illinois Law Review (2002), pp. 1345–71; Nancy C. Richmond, ‘Israel’s Law of Return: Analysis of its Evolution and Present Application’, 12 Dickinson Journal of International Law (1993), pp. 95–133.
231. See Edwin Montagu and The Balfour Declaration, supra note 228, p. 6.
232. See e.g. World Conquest through World Government, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, trans. from the Russian of Sergyei A. Nilus by Victor Marsden (Britons Publishing Co., 1972).
233. See Gisela C. Lebselter, Political Anti-Semitism in England 1918–1939 (London: Macmillan 1978), p. 60.
234. See Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 168 quoting The Spectator in its issue of 15 May 1920.
235. See The Truth about ‘The Protocols’ A Literary Forgery, from The Times of August 16, 17, and 18, 1921 (London: Printing House Square, 1921).
236. The Protocols were a forgery of an earlier book published in France entitled, ‘Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu; or, the Politics of Machiavelli in the Nineteenth Century’, which had nothing to do with the Jews. See John S. Curtiss, An Appraisal of the Protocols of Zion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), (comparing passages between the two books). See also, Lucien Wolf, The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs or the Truth about the Forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1921).
237. Stephen Eric Bronner, A Rumour about the Jews: Reflections on Anti-Semitism and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 2 (‘International sales of the pamphlet were astronomical during the 1920s and 1930s; Henri Rollin, the French scholar of anti-Semitism, called the Protocols the most widely distributed book in the world other than the Bible, and its distribution was accompanied by a mountain of secondary literature comprising well more than one thousand titles’).
238. This quote is reproduced in Curtiss, An Appraisal, supra note 236, p. 22 citing an American translation entitled The Protocols and World Revolution (Boston, 1920), pp. 6–7.
239. The Jews’ Who’s Who. Israelite Finance. Its Sinister Influence, Popular Edition (London: The Judaic Publishing Co., H.H. Beamish, Proprietor, 1921), p. 45 (emphasis in original). Inside the front cover of this book are two cartoons. One is an illustration of Jewish members of the Privy Council along with their names (Edwin Montagu, Herbert Samuel, Lionel Rothschild and Sir Eric Cassel, among others) with the words, ‘Jewish control of Finance, Land, Gold, Silver, Diamonds, Base Metals, Petroleum, Electrical, Chemicals, Food, Clothing etc’. The second illustration shows two gentlemen, presumably Jewish, drinking ‘vin de Frankfurt’ and smoking cigars with the captions ‘Britannia rules the waves’ and then ‘Yeth, but we rule Britannia’. There are also selective quotations from Deuteronomy saying that the Jews can lend money but never borrow it so that they can ‘rule over many nations’. The book also contains a list of German Jewish surnames which had been Anglicised. For example, Grunwald became Greenwood, Gugenheimer became Gilbert and Schwabacher became Shaw.
240. See Edwin Montagu and The Balfour Declaration, supra note 228, p. 7.
241. See ‘Zionism’ by Edwin Montagu, Cab. 24/28, 9 October 1917, ibid., pp. 12–17.
242. See 50 Parliamentary Debates, Lords, 21 June 1922, cols 994–1034.
243. See 50 Parliamentary Debates, Lords, 21 June 1922, col. 1008.
244. Ibid.
245. See Huneidi, A Broken Trust, supra note 191, p. 58 citing at endnote 62: United States, Department of State, Records of the Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of Turkey, 1910–1029. Telegram, Green to Secretary of State. Record Group. Microcopy No. 353, Roll No. 80, National Archives.
246. See 156 Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 4 July 1922, cols 292–342. Kattan 02 chap08 288 22/4/09 08:14:10
247. Ibid., p. 298.
248. Ibid.
249. Ibid., p. 329.
250. Whilst Brandeis was a Zionist, Trotsky was not, and he attacked Zionism as imperialist. Strangely, Churchill even recognized this when he wrote in an article published in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on 8 February 1920, that: ‘Nothing could be more significant than the fury with which Trotksy has attacked the Zionists generally and Chiam Weissmann, [sic] in particular.’ A copy of this article is republished in Lenni Brenner (ed.), 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis (New Jersey: Barricade Books, 2002), pp. 23–8. The statement regarding Trotsky appears at p. 27.
251. Michael Makovsky, Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 82 (‘Consideration of Jewish power played a role in Churchill’s premier foreign policy fixation as secretary of state for war and air (1919–1921) and even as colonial secretary (1921–1922): confronting the Bolshevik threat to western civilization and European stability. In late 1919, he received a copy of the Protocols; it is unclear whether he read it, but he certainly advanced a number of its themes and the anti-Semitic conspiratorial ideas propagated by it and other sources. He genuinely considered the Bolsheviks an illegitimate minority consisting mostly of Jews ruling over the majority “real” Russians’).
252. See Brenner, 51 Documents, supra note 250 where the full text of the article is reproduced.
253. Ibid., p. 27.
254. Ibid.
255. See Michael J. Cohen, Churchill and the Jews (London: Frank Cass, 1985), pp. 55–6.
256. See Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, supra note 234, pp. 112–13 (‘One would normally expect the mysterious rulers to be called Elders of Jewry or Elders of Israel. There must be some reason why they bear the absurd name of Elders of Zion, and there is in fact a very plausible one. As we have seen, the first Zionist Congress at Basel was interpreted by anti-Semites as a giant stride towards Jewish world-domination. Countless editions of the Protocols have connected that document with the congress; and it does seem likely that this event inspired if not the forgery itself, then at least its title’).
257. Makovsky, Churchill’s Promised Land, supra note 251, p. 82.
258. Cohen, Churchill and the Jews, supra note 255, p. 51. (Churchill then added for good measure: ‘Three Jews among only seven Liberal cabinet ministers might, I fear, give rise to comment.’)
259. On Germanic racism, Hitler, and the Protocols, see Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, supra note 234, pp. 187–213.
260. See Hadassa Ben-Itto, The Lie that Wouldn’t Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005), pp. 249–55. (Ben-Itto reproduces the testimony of Nahum Sokolow who was questioned at a trial in 1934 in Grahamstown in South Africa about the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which the Court condemned as a forgery. During the cross-examination Sokolow was asked whether the Protocols was promulgated by Dr Herzl at the first 1897 Zionist Congress at Basel. Sokolow replied: ‘There is not one word of truth in this allegation.’)
261. Palestine Defense Policy: Military Aspects of Partition. Memorandum by the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defense, 1937–38, CAB 104/5
.