Once suspicion, mistrust and the occasional dose of establishment Arabism and anti-Semitism were the norm when considering British Conservative Party attitudes to the State of Israel. Today, such attitudes have been replaced by an embrace that is so warm it has caused more than once critic of Israel to write disparagingly about it.

In part, this changing state of affairs reflects a more general realignment of political attitudes globally. Parties of the Left which once championed Israel as a kibbutz-dwelling, socialist, fellow traveller have come to consider it in more nuanced terms, particularly when considering Israeli-Palestinian relations and the vexed question of settlements. In its most extreme form, such former friends of Israel can be found giving tacit and active support to the slurs of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement globally. Meanwhile, parties of the Right which used to sneer disparagingly at the Jewish state have, broadly, come to see it as an ally, surviving in a tough neighbourhood that does not have much love for the West, facing shared threats. But the British case has particular factors which warrant examination if we are to explain why the Conservative Party – and in particular the pronouncements of Prime Minister David Cameron – can now be seen as the most pro-Israel in Europe.

It was not always this way. The philo-Semitism and Christian Zionism of Conservative leaders in the early 20th Century such as Arthur Balfour – whose famous 1917 declaration promised British support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine – and Winston Churchill may have been well known, but many of their counterparts held very different views. Future Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan typified Conservative establishment positions with his suggestion to a friend during the Versailles peace talks at the end of the First World War that Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s government was not ‘really popular, except with the International Jew.’ Showing that his antipathy – to Jews at least ­– was lifelong, Macmillan was widely attributed as the source of a quip in 1986 that Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet ‘includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.’

Read the article in full at Fathom Journal.