An emphatic Zionist in both words and deeds

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 longstanding 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”.