November 23, 2022

Finest Hour 195, First Quarter 2022

Page 21

By David Freeman

David Freeman is editor of Finest Hour. Quotations in this article are from Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews (London: Simon and Schuster, 2007).


Of the scientists whose lives intersected with that of Winston Churchill’s, none knew him longer than Chaim Weizmann, the first President of the State of Israel. Born in Russia just three days before Churchill in 1874, Weizmann was educated in Germany and Switzerland before moving to Britain to teach chemistry at the University of Manchester.

The two men first met in 1905, when Churchill, having just been appointed under secretary at the Colonial Office, spoke in Manchester against the maltreatment of Jews in Tsarist Russia. Five years later, as Home Secretary, Churchill signed the naturalization papers that made Weizmann a British citizen.

By 1915 Churchill had become First Lord of the Admiralty, and the First World War drastically increased the Royal Navy’s demand for cordite, the smokeless powder used as a propellant in ammunition. Cordite production required acetone, of which the British were in short supply.

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In his lab, Weizmann had been able to produce small quantities of acetone using a process of bacterial fermentation. The head of the Admiralty’s powder department therefore recommended that the First Lord meet with the research chemist. Weizmann remembered that Churchill’s first words to him were, “Well, Dr. Weizmann, we need thirty thousand tons of acetone. Can you make it?” Afraid to say “no,” Weizmann replied that it could be done with the proper resources. The answer proved satisfactory: “I was given carte blanche by Mr. Churchill,” Weizmann recalled, “and I took upon myself a task which was to tax all my energies for the next two years, and which was to have consequences which I could not foresee.”

Those consequences would be the crucial support for Zionism that Weizmann subsequently received. Churchill’s immediate successor at the Admiralty was former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. Impressed by Weizmann’s work as Director of the British Admiralty Laboratories and his arguments for a Jewish National Home in Palestine, Balfour, as Foreign Secretary in 1917, issued the famous declaration that committed the British government to support for this cause.

After the war, as Colonial Secretary in 1921–22, Churchill had primary responsibility for implementing the Balfour Declaration. Weizmann carefully cultivated Churchill’s support during this period, but the foundation had already been laid. According to biographer Sir Martin Gilbert, “Churchill always recognized that the British Government’s pledge to the Jews had been made as a result of the urgent needs of the war, and could not be set aside when, in later years, it became awkward to fulfil.”

Weizmann and Churchill remained in regular communication during the tumultuous years leading to the birth of Israel in 1948. Their affection for one another had been renewed when Weizmann’s younger son, Michael, was killed flying for the RAF during the Second World War. After President Weizmann’s death in 1952, Churchill remembered him as “a man of vision and genius.”

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