Churchill, Palestine and Zionism, 1904-1922 - Douglas J. Feith

Palestine and Zionism, 1904-1922 259
With this endorsement in hand, the government finally sought confirmation
of the mandate from the council of the League of Nations, which
it obtained on 24 July. Through a League resolution invoking Article 25,
which Churchill had added to the mandate for this purpose back in
1921, Britain then formalized the exclusion of Transjordan from the
Jewish national home.137 When the Conservatives brought down the Lloyd
George coalition government in October, Churchill lost his job as colonial
secretary.
CONCLUSION
The term "appeasement" in international affairs acquired a disreputable
ring largely through Winston Churchill's prescient excoriation in the
1930s of the Neville Chamberlain government's policy toward Nazi Germany.
Before the Second World War, however, proponents of appeasement
proudly embraced the term. Churchill himself often employed it
favorably.
Appeasement can be a sensible and honorable method of terminating
a quarrel, as any parent of small children or any government official who
must resolve differences with independent-minded foreign friends will
attest. Britain's appeasement policy of the 1930s failed not because of any
inherent flaw in the methodology, but because the other side was not
appeasable. Chamberlain is judged harshly for failing to recognize that
Hitler's ambitions were neither limited nor manageable and that Nazi
grievances could not be assuaged through reasonable accommodation;
Churchill receives credit for apprehending that appeasement would not
work with the German regime.
As colonial secretary in 1921 and 1922, however, Churchill refused
to see or admit that Arab opposition to Zionism was beyond appeasement.
In a historical review prepared after the Second World War by
the British administration in Palestine, the failure of appeasement in the
early days of the Palestine mandate was explained with impressive directness:
"It had become obvious that the Arab objection was, not to the way
in which the Mandate might be worked, but to the whole policy of the
Mandatory and that by no concession, however liberal, were the Arabs
137 Memorandum by the British representative on Article 25 of the Palestine mandate,
approved by the council of the League of Nations, September 16, 1922, in Moore,
Documents, 83-4.