“We Who Have Urged Patience on the Jews ... Have No Right To Do So Any Longer, Least of All For What the Gangster Terrorist May Think Or Say”: Remembering the English MP who recommended rebellion against Britain to the Jews of Palestine

Daphne Anson
17 October '10

(Unbelievable story! A must read. Y.)

The deteriorating situation in Palestine since the Arab Riots of 1936, and the British Government’s appeasement of the Arabs by its dilution of its commitment to the Balfour Declaration, led the president and office-bearers of an organisation calling itself the Jewish Former Army Officers’ Association of Tel Aviv to write on 10 May 1938 to a non-Jewish British MP celebrated for his dedication to the Jewish cause.

Colonel Josiah Wedgwood (1872-1943), came from the famous Staffordshire pottery family, and was a naval architect by training. From 1906-19 he sat as a Liberal MP, and from 1919-42, when he received a barony, as a Labour MP. In contrast to, say, nineteenth-century prime minister W. E. Gladstone, who once described himself as “anti-anti-semitism”, Wedgwood was a genuine philosemite, who wrote: "The Anglo-Saxon, more than any other race, wants to sympathise with the Jews. . . no doubt we understand the Jew better than can those to whom the Old Testament is not familiar from infancy. To the foreigner the word Jew is a hissing in the street; to us the word suggests Solomon and Moses, and a thousand cradle stories. So often have we used their names for our own children that they seem now to be our fathers, especially our Puritan forefathers. . . Towards such a people one has a feeling almost of awe. . ."

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