In last Tuesday’s
column I quoted part of Baron Davies of Llandinam’s speech in the House of
Lords on 10 March 1942 condemning, inter alia, the Palestine Censor’s ludicrous
savage cuts to an eminent Jerusalem-based Church of Scotland minister’s
Christmas message intended for the Palestine
Post in 1940. Also speaking in that
debate was a firm friend to Jewry and the Yishuv, the recently ennobled Baron
Wedgwood of Barlaston (1872-1943), better known to history as Colonel Josiah
Wedgwood MP. This member of the famous
pottery family was a genuine philosemite – I won’t belabour that point here,
since I hope to address the issue of philosemitism in a subsequent column or
columns and to discuss him as an exemplar.
Suffice it to say, for our purposes here, that in his book The Seventh Dominion (1928) he
advocated an independent Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan as an
integral part of the British Commonwealth, and that he supported the Zionist
cause through thick and thin. On 9 June 1942, during the course of a
pro-Jewish speech laden – to quote the Jewish Chronicle of 12 June – with
“deep emotion,” he told the House of Lords that it had been “years” since any
speech of his had been reported in Palestine.
He added that a recent broadcast he made to America had been censored
despite British assurances to the contrary.
Furthermore, an official Mandate Administration radio program for the
Arabs had advised that he and Baron Davies were not genuine bluebloods but
social upstarts who had been created peers for party reasons.
Also deeply troubled by the behaviour of the
Palestine Censor was Lewis Bernstein Namier (1888-1960), the distinguished
Polish-born Professor of Modern History at Manchester University, who was a
convinced Zionist. In a letter to the
staunchly pro-Zionist Manchester Guardian early in April 1942, he
complained that the Censor had deleted the following concluding paragraph from
a leading article in the Palestine Post (27 February 1942) about the Struma
tragedy:
“It is
yet too early and the shock too fresh for responsibility to be allotted and the
guilt to be established. But that there must be an inquiry goes without saying.
That is one of the most established traditions of the Empire under whose
protection we live. Catastrophes such as these have led more than once in
British history to far-reaching decisions. But whatever investigation is
conducted, whatever action taken, one thing is certain: This must never happen
again.”
Namier wondered whether the similar
sentiments regarding the Struma expressed
by British Colonial Secretary Viscount Cranborne (1893-1973; later the 5th
Marquess of Salisbury) had been cut by the Censor, and wrote of the excised
passage:
“Surely
this is legitimate comment and, indeed, remarkably restrained in the
circumstances.”
Meanwhile, the Manchester Guardian, in a leader about the same incident,
observed that the Palestine Censor appeared to be encroaching on new territory
in his evident desire not to offend the Arabs:
“This
particular exercise, if it is confirmed, would mean that the censorship was
protecting the Administration not only from criticism but even from possible or
implied criticism, for the passage does not impute responsibility from anyone.”
In another leader quoted
in the Jewish Chronicle (10 April 1942), the Manchester Guardian
stated that the Palestine Censor had obfuscated the political situation in the
Middle East. That leader went on: