Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Margaret Thatcher e gli ebrei

http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/87027/thatcher-and-the-jews/
 
 
Thatcher and the Jews
 
Margaret Thatcher was a staunch defender of Jewish causes and a
supporter of Israel in her political career, unlike most Tory
politicians before her
 
 
When asked about her most meaningful accomplishment, Margaret
Thatcher, now embodied by Meryl Streep in the biopic Iron Lady, did
not typically mention serving in the British government, defeating the
Argentine invasion of the Falkans, taming runaway inflation, or
toppling the Soviet Union. The woman who reshaped British politics and
served as prime minister from 1979 to 1990 often said that her
greatest accomplishment was helping save a young Austrian girl from
the Nazis.
 
In 1938, Edith Muhlbauer, a 17-year-old Jewish girl, wrote to Muriel
Roberts, Edith’s pen pal and the future prime minister’s older sister,
asking if the Roberts family might help her escape Hitler’s Austria.
The Nazis had begun rounding up the first of Vienna’s Jews after the
Anschluss, and Edith and her family worried she might be next. Alfred
Roberts, Margaret and Muriel’s father, was a small-town grocer; the
family had neither the time nor the money to take Edith in. So
Margaret, then 12, and Muriel, 17, set about raising funds and
persuading the local Rotary club to help.
 
Edith stayed with more than a dozen Rotary families, including the
Robertses, for the next two years, until she could move to join
relatives in South America. Edith bunked in Margaret’s room, and she
left an impression. “She was 17, tall, beautiful, evidently from a
well-to-do family,” Thatcher later wrote in her memoir. But most
important, “[s]he told us what it was like to live as a Jew under an
anti-Semitic regime. One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my
mind: The Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets.” For
Thatcher, who believed in meaningful work, this was as much a waste as
it was an outrage. Had the Roberts family not intervened, Edith
recalled years later, “I would have stayed in Vienna and they would
have killed me.” Thatcher never forgot the lesson: “Never hesitate to
do whatever you can, for you may save a life,” she told audiences in
1995 after Edith had been located, alive and well, in Brazil.
 
Other British politicians and their families housed Jews during the
war, but none seems to have been profoundly affected by it as Thatcher
was. Harold Macmillan, a Thatcher foe and England’s prime minister
from 1957 to 1963, provided a home for Jewish refugees on his estate,
but his relations with Jews were always frosty, the mark of a
genuflecting anti-Semitism common among the Tory grandees.
 
During the controversial Versailles peace talks that ended World War
I, Macmillan wrote to a friend that the government of Prime Minister
Lloyd George was not “really popular, except with the International
Jew,” the mythic entity thought to be behind all of Europe’s troubles
and made famous by Henry Ford’s eponymously titled book. Macmillan
often made snide jokes about Jews and Jewish politicians, derisively
calling Leslie Hore-Belish, a Liberal member of Parliament and a
critic of appeasement in the years before World War II, “Horeb
Elisha,” a jabbing reference to Mount Horeb, where the Ten
Commandments were handed down to Moses. Viscount Cranborne, a Tory
member of Parliament and a Foreign Office official in the 1930s,
undermined attempts to ease the entry of Jews into Britain or
Palestine, shutting out those other would-be Ediths from finding
safety under the British Union Jack. And together, Cranborne and
Macmillan were among the Tory parliamentarians who forced Hore-Belish
out of the government in the early 1940s for allegedly conspiring to
force Britain into a war on behalf of the Jews on the mainland.
 
Thatcher, by contrast, had no patience for anti-Semitism or for those
who countenanced it. “I simply did not understand anti-semitism
myself,” Thatcher confessed in her memoirs. Indeed, she found “some of
[her] closest political friends and associates among Jews.” Unique
among British politicians, she was unusually free of even “the
faintest trace of anti-Semitism in her make-up,” wrote Nigel Lawson,
her chancellor of the Exchequer, in 1992. Lawson knew of what he
spoke. Alan Clark, a senior Tory politician, wrote in his diaries that
some of the old guard, himself included, thought Lawson could not, “as
a Jew,” be offered the position of foreign secretary. Lawson’s “Jewish
parentage was disqualification enough,” the Sunday Telegraph wrote in
1988, without a hint of shame. Rumors and speculation persisted well
into the 1990s about why this or that Jewish member of Parliament
couldn’t be made leader of the Conservative Party.
 
Early on in her career—even before she entered politics—Thatcher had
worked alongside Jews as a chemist at J. Lyons and Co., a Jewish-owned
company. (She had graduated from Oxford in 1947 with a degree in
chemistry.) After quitting chemistry, she became a barrister and grew
increasingly involved in politics. She ran for office in some of the
more conservative districts and lost each time. Thatcher finally won
when she ran in Finchley, a safe Tory seat in a north London borough.
Finally she had found her constituents: middle-class, entrepreneurial,
Jewish suburbanites. She particularly loved the way her new
constituents took care of one another, rather than looking to the
state: “In the thirty-three years that I represented [Finchley],” she
later wrote, “I never had a Jew come in poverty and desperation to one
of my [town meetings],” and she often wished that Christians “would
take closer note of the Jewish emphasis on self-help and acceptance of
personal responsibility.” She was a founding member of the Anglo-
Israel Friendship League of Finchley and a member of the Conservative
Friends of Israel. Aghast that a golf club in her district
consistently barred Jews from becoming members, she publicly protested
against it. She even joined in the singing of the Israeli national
anthem in 1975 at Finchley.
 
The Jews of Finchley were “her people,” Thatcher used to say—certainly
much more so than the wealthy land barons that dominated her party.
 
***
 
When Thatcher became leader of the opposition in 1975, it was
suggested that her closeness with British Jews might imperil the
country’s foreign policy. Official correspondence released in 2005
shows the unease with which bureaucrats at the Foreign Office treated
Thatcher’s affiliations in the run-up to her election as prime
minister in 1979. Michael Tait, an official at the British embassy in
Jordan, worried that Thatcher might be too readily seen as a “prisoner
of the Zionists” unless she severed her official ties with pro-Jewish
groups. Tait even suggested that Thatcher give up her beloved Finchley
constituency for Westminster, a less Jewish district, and distance
herself from the “pro-Israel MPs” that might make Middle East peace
impossible. In the end, Thatcher reluctantly agreed to quit the Jewish
groups she belonged to, but she kept her district and her
relationships with pro-Israel parliamentarians.
 
Once she became prime minister, Thatcher appointed a government of
outsiders. “The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet,” Macmillan would later
say, “is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old
Etonians.” (Eton, the famous prep school, required that its students’
fathers be British by birth, so as to keep out the Jews.) British
politics had always been a club for genteel gentiles; Thatcher wanted
to make it a meritocracy.
 
Thatcher appointed whomever she liked to positions in her government,
whatever their religious or family background. Chaim Bermant, the
Anglo-Jewish writer, probably went too far when he said Thatcher has
“an almost mystical faith in Jewish abilities,” but he wasn’t
completely off the mark. In addition to Nigel Lawson, she appointed
Victor Rothschild as her security adviser, Malcolm Rifkind to be
secretary of state for Scotland, David Young as minister without
portfolio, and Leon Brittan to be trade and industry secretary. David
Wolfson, nephew of Sir Isaac Wolfson, president of Great Universal
Stores, Europe’s biggest mail-order company, served as Thatcher’s
chief of staff. Her policies were powered by two men—Keith Joseph, a
member of Parliament many thought would one day be the first prime
minister who was a practicing Jew, and Alfred Sherman, a former
communist turned free-market thinker.
 
With Thatcher, Joseph and Sherman formed the Centre for Policy Studies
in 1974 to inject classical liberal ideas into Britain’s Conservative
Party. Joseph, son of one of the wealthiest families in Britain,
wanted to “fundamentally affect a political generation’s way of
thinking.” It wasn’t enough to win elections, he believed; there had
to be a change in how people thought of politics. He took his cue from
his ideological nemesis, the Fabian Socialists, a group of British
intellectuals who wanted to make Britain a socialist country through
gradual change. Joseph would copy the Fabians’ style by writing policy
papers, giving speeches, and writing to famous Brits to try to change
public opinion. One of those forays became a co-written book,
Equality, published in 1979, which argued that equality of opportunity
“requires that no external barrier shall prevent an individual from
exploiting his talents. No laws shall permit some men to do what is
forbidden by others.” It was Thatcherite to the core.
 
Thatcher’s philo-Semitism went beyond the people she appointed to her
government; it had clear political implications as well. She made
Jewish causes her own, including by easing the restrictions on
prosecuting Nazi war criminals living in Britain and pleading the
cause of the Soviet Union’s refuseniks. She boasted that she once made
Soviet officials “nervous” by repeatedly bringing up the refuseniks’
plight during a single nine-hour meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, “The
Soviets had to know that every time we met their treatment of the
refuseniks would be thrown back at them,” she explained in her book
The Downing Street Years. Thatcher also worked to end the British
government’s support for the Arab boycott of Israel. During the Yom
Kippur War of 1973, Thatcher criticized Tory Prime Minister Ted
Heath’s refusal to supply Israel with military parts or even allow
American planes to supply Israel from British airfields. In 1986,
Thatcher became the first British prime minister to visit Israel,
having previously visited twice as a member of parliament.
 
Yet despite her support for Israel, and though she rejected the
stridently pro-PLO stance of some members of her government, she
believed Israel needed to trade land for peace, wishing in her memoirs
that the “Israeli emphasis on the human rights of the Russian
refuseniks was matched by proper appreciation of the plight of the
landless and stateless Palestinians.” She also condemned Israel’s
bombing of Osirak, Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor, in 1981. “[The
Osirak attack] represents a grave breach of international law,” she
said in an interview with London’s Jewish Chronicle in 1981. Israel’s
bombing of another country could lead to “international anarchy.”
 
In fairness, Thatcher wasn’t alone in this position. Jeanne
Kirkpatrick, the U.S. ambassador to United Nations at the time,
compared Israel’s bombing of the nuclear reactor to the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. The U.N. Security Council unanimously
condemned the raid. “Just because a country is trying to manufacture
energy from nuclear sources, it must not be believe that she is doing
something totally wrong,” Thatcher said in the House of Commons.
Iraq’s facility, she noted, had just been inspected and so it was
particularly unhelpful for Israel to have attacked. Reagan agreed—at
least, officially. “Technically,” Reagan wrote years later, “Israel
had violated an agreement not to use U.S.-made weapons for offensive
purposes, and some cabinet members wanted me to lean hard on Israel
because it had broken this pledge … but I sympathized with [Israeli
Prime Minister Menachem] Begin’s motivations and privately believed we
should give him the benefit of the doubt.”
 
That Thatcher did not give Israel the benefit of the doubt is
disconcerting, though she made good by later calling for the
liberation of Kuwait and eventually the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
But in this Thatcher ought not to have let the mandarins in the
Foreign Office get the better of her judgment: She should have trusted
her philo-Semitic instincts.

 Margaret Thatcher was a staunch defender of Jewish causes
 
non sarebbe stata una bottegaia nemica del proletariato, altrimenti..:D

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wow, ecco qualcosa di sinistra.