3 min read
ByRobert Philpot, Robert Philpot
In October 1975, Harold Wilson attended his last Labour Party conference as Prime Minister.
At the close of the Labour Friends of Israel annual dinner, the leftwing MP Ian Mikardo offered a tribute to its keynote speaker. Wilson, he declared, was "not only Israel's most important friend in the Labour Party, but also her most consistent friend".
Six months later, the only occupant of Downing Street to have won four general elections shocked the country by announcing his resignation. Reflecting later on Israel's "most consistent friend", Mikardo offered a backhanded, but perhaps more telling, compliment. "I don't think Harold Wilson had any doctrinal beliefs … except for one, which I find utterly incomprehensible, which is his devotion to the cause of Israel."
As Marcia Falkender, Wilson's long-standing political secretary, later suggested, his view of Israel was "in many ways a romantic one", seeing as he viewed the fledgling state as "a wonderful experiment in socialist politics".
Certainly, Wilson was friendly with many of the leading figures on the Israeli left, such as Yigal Allon, Abba Eban and Teddy Kollek, and followed its machinations and in-fighting with a vicarious pleasure.
Wilson himself offered a slightly different clue as to the roots of his Zionism - a term which his biographer, Philip Ziegler, suggested the Prime Minister disliked, despite the fact that "he most emphatically was one". In The Chariot of Israel: Britain, America and the State of Israel, Wilson's post-premiership history of the tangled history of the Jewish state's creation, he notes the strong public support for Israel on both sides of the Atlantic.
He attributes it in part to admiration for the "courage and tenacity of the Israelis". But, he continues, as in his own case, it also stems from "the teaching of religious history in our day schools and Sunday schools, chapels, churches, kirk and conventicles".
In reality, like many of his Labour contemporaries, Wilson's attitudes and outlook were shaped by a mix of nonconformism and socialism.
But Wilson's commitment to Israel perhaps also had a psychological element. Elected to parliament in Labour's landslide of 1945, he was horrified by what he viewed as his party's betrayal of its historic commitment to the establishment of a Jewish homeland.
"There cannot have been in 20th century British history," he later wrote, "a greater contrast between promise and performance than was shown by the incoming government over Middle East issues."
He laid the blame squarely on Ernest Bevin. The Foreign Secretary, he charged, viewed the Balfour Declaration and the commitments of "Lloyd George, Baldwin, Churchill and a generation of Labour leaders... as tiresome undertakings to be got round".
At the two greatest hours of Israel's need - in 1967 and 1973 - Wilson was thus determined to expunge this stain on his party's record.
When the Egyptian leader, Colonel Nasser, declared the Straits of Tiran closed in May 1967, Wilson pledged to Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to "promote and secure free passage".
In Cabinet, the Prime Minister angrily batted away the objections of his Defence Secretary, Denis Healey, and Chancellor, James Callaghan, that such an exercise would be costly and militarily difficult. As Abba Eban later recalled, Wilson was prepared "for the maximum degree of commitment compatible with his country's real strength and responsibility".
When Israel struck, Wilson was clear in his own mind that "the first act of aggression" had been committed by Nasser.
By the time the Arab world sought vengeance in 1973, Wilson had been replaced in Downing Street by Ted Heath. When his successor imposed an arms embargo on both sides, Wilson - who spoke to the Israeli Ambassador every day to keep abreast of the fighting - was incensed. As a debate in parliament loomed, the now-Leader of the Opposition insisted the Shadow Cabinet impose a three-line whip to oppose the government's line.
When Roy Jenkins objected, Wilson lashed out: "Look, Roy, I've accommodated your f---ing conscience for years. Now you're going to have to take account of mine. I feel as strongly about the Middle East as you do about the Common Market."
With pro-Israeli Tories revolting against their government, Wilson attempted to quell a pro-Arab revolt on Labour's backbenchers. In the debate, he raised the spectre of appeasement and likened the government's position to the policy of non-intervention in the Spanish civil war.
Britain must not give into blackmail by "oil-rich monarchs and presidents", he argued, but must instead stand with "democratic socialist" Israel. Later he sacked one of the Labour rebels, Andrew Faulds, from the frontbench, telling him it was because of his "uncomradely behaviour" in suggesting that Jewish MPs had dual loyalties.
Wilson's first overseas trip after leaving office was to visit Israel. There, he inspected a forest that had been named after him in Nazareth. It was a fitting tribute - and one the Israeli state would never, quite rightly, have offered to Bevin.
