Ian Gilmour

The most appealing Zionist slogan has always been ‘the land without a people, waiting for the people without a land’. What, in that case, could be more natural than for Palestine to become the land of the Jews? The trouble was that the epigram was not true: Palestine already had a people. On belatedly discovering this, Max Nordau, Herzl’s friend and follower, exclaimed to his leader: ‘we are committing an injustice.’ Much later Arthur Ruppin, who directed Zionist colonisation in the 1920s, warned ‘that Herzl’s concept of a Jewish state was only possible because he ignored the presence of the Arabs.’ Undeterred, Zionists continued to implement what in other circumstances might have been the wholly creditable objective of ruling Palestine and colonising it with Jews. Yet in the circumstances which actually existed – a country already populated with Palestinian Arabs – the building of a Jewish state involved not just brave pioneering or even ordinary imperialism but the displacement of most of the indigenous population and the subordination of the rest. The basic falsity of the slogan has remained to plague political Zionism.’

In 1903 Winston Churchill said that if the Conservatives adopted protection, the old Conservative Party would disappear, and something like the American Republican Party would probably take its place. Churchill was wrong, in that the Conservative Party had already largely disappeared – not for the last time. By the end of the 19th century the disintegration of the Whigs had led to the Conservative Party’s becoming for the first time in its history the natural choice of the wealthy; the Party already resembled the Republican Party in the United States and was near to being dominated by a single interest, the rich. The difference was that under the Republicans American capitalism flourished, while the British economy was already in relative decline.’

American foreign policy since 1945 has often been a force for good. Much of ‘the free world’ has felt the need of US protection, and some of it has been grateful. In recent times, however, many people have come to regard the United States as a power as dangerous as any other. In reaction to the quietism of the Carter era, American foreign policy has become ultra-activist in both word and deed. This has gone down well with the voters. American public opinion was intensely proud of the successful invasion of the tiny island of Grenada. There was similar exaltation when the resources of the Sixth Fleet proved capable of forcing down an unarmed Egyptian airliner. And after some of Colonel Gadaffi’s military installations were bombed, together with five embassies and the killing of 39 civilians, there was almost universal jubilation. There is a dangerous process whereby the Administration stirs up American public opinion, and public opinion in turn spurs on the Administration to further military adventures. US foreign policy usually needs a target, and American public opinion a crusade. With the USSR, Reagan’s ‘evil empire’, too powerful to take on directly, Gadaffi has succeeded Stalin, Mao, Nasser, Castro and Ho Chi Minh as the current hate figure. Terrorism is now the vogue evil, and anti-terrorism the fashionable crusade, and few stop to consider the wisdom of the course the US is pursuing.

Harold Macmillan reversed the normal progression. Few young men are pompous; that comes later. Pomposity overtook Macmillan when he was still young; long before he was old he had shed all traces of it. The young are seldom boring; as a young man Harold Macmillan was a bore, and in time he became supremely entertaining. In manner and style people usually change little after early middle age, and then seem increasingly old-fashioned. Until quite late in life Macmillan appeared out-of-date – when he became Prime Minister, Malcolm Muggeridge said he always had around him a faint whiff of mothballs. It was only after he had retired that his manner seemed entirely to suit both him and the times. He became an ever better speaker, even in his eighties.