One of many ways Britain sought to puff up President Donald Trump during his state visit was with flattering echoes of the prime minister whom he most admires: Winston Churchill.
King Charles III served his banquet guest Pol Roger champagne, of which Churchill generally drank a pint every lunchtime. Trump, toasting the king, responded by mentioning that he’d restored a “beautiful bust” of Churchill to the Oval Office, from which President Barack Obama, who viscerally dislikes Britain, removed it in 2008 and sent it into storage.
From Windsor, the president went to Chequers, a grand house near London that’s been the official country residence of prime ministers since 1920. Churchill spent weekends with his family there during the Blitz (and it was where his teenage daughter, Mary, complained about her parents’ excessive protectiveness).
Chequers was given by Viscount Lee to the British state in 1917, the year of the Balfour Declaration, a document with which Britain committed itself to creating a national homeland for Jews in Palestine (a name imposed by Emperor Hadrian in the second century A.D. to extirpate Jewish identity after the ornery population revolted against Rome).
Britain had the most Zionist government in its history during the First World War, but ever since, it has distanced itself from its promise to the Jews. The first move was perhaps that of Churchill himself, with the unilateral creation of Transjordan in 1921 in three-quarters of the territory of Palestine as a home for the Arabs, without the simultaneous creation of Israel, which might have been a real two-state solution. Then came further British bactracking, some blatant, some nuanced, and finally the sloughing off of its responsibility entirely to the United Nations after the Second World War.
The U.N. has since then declined into utter corruption, and its Human Rights Commission — including such countries as Russia, Congo, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Cuba, and Nicaragua, among other cutthroats — has just falsely and tendentiously accused Israel of genocide.
The truth is that genocide is the project of Israel’s enemy, Hamas, Iran’s Islamist proxy. That was its proud boast during its barbarous attack on Oct. 7, 2023, with which the Palestinian Arabs started the war. The Jews have every right, even a duty, to finish it.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s stark policy difference from Trump on Israel has now produced another British betrayal. The prime minister has chosen this moment, as we approach the second anniversary of the worst pogrom of Jews since the Nazi holocaust, to reward the perpetrators with recognition of Palestinian statehood.
BRITAIN FETES TRUMP LIKE A KING, BUT HE KNOWS HE ISN’T ONE
Standing next to Trump at Chequers, Starmer blathered about the need to reach a two-state solution, an unreachable desert mirage, as the basis for Middle East peace. “Hopefully [that] takes us from the appalling situation we’re in now to the outcome of a safe and secure Israel, which we do not have, and a viable Palestinian state,” he said.
His policy of statehood is the triumph, if that is the right word, of hope over experience. In the unlikely event that it ever happens, it is sure to produce more bloodshed than peace. To return to echoes of Churchill, it is less likely to require celebratory Pol Roger champagne than it is to be a total bust.
