The Chariot of Israel: Britain, America and the State of Israel is a 1981 book by the British politician and former Prime Minister Harold Wilson about the relationship and foreign policy of the United Kingdom and the United States towards Israel. The book includes Wilson's personal account of his role in the Six-Day War in 1967. It received mixed reviews upon publication.
It was published in May 1981 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Michael Joseph in the United Kingdom and in 1982 by W. W. Norton & Company in the United States.
Wilson's biographer Ben Pimlott wrote that the book "drily appraised relations between the three states". The British businessman and Wilson confidant Lord Kissin said at the launch party for the book that Wilson had "written the book with all his heart and put everything of himself into the job".
Wilson attended a book signing event for The Chariot of Israel at Selfridges department store on Oxford Street in London in May 1981.
Reception
It was reviewed by Richard Owen in The Times. Owen was critical of the need for another book about the rise in Zionism and the foundation of Israel feeling "neither of which can reasonably be said to have been neglected by previous authors" and that it is "only toward the end that the book takes on some life" when Wilson "enters the stage as a figure in the drama of Israel's struggle for existence" in his account of the Six-Day War in 1967. Wilson recounts in detail the telephone conversations between himself and the American President Lyndon B. Johnson, the President of France Charles de Gaulle, and the Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin. Wilson was critical of De Gaulle's sympathy toward Arab countries. Owen wrote that with the speed with which Israel won the war rendered "a lot of this to-ing and fro-ing irrelevant" and that the Western leaders "couldn't make up [their] mind how to respond" to the blockade of the Straits of Tiran by the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Wilson told Roy Jenkins, who served as Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Wilson, during his reservations about the war that "Look Roy", I said, "I've accommodated your (expletive deleted) conscience for years. Now you're going to have to take account of mine – I feel as strongly about the Middle East as you do about the Common Market". Jenkins subsequently described the book as "one of the most strongly Zionist tracts ever written by a non-Jew".
The book received a mixed review in Kirkus Reviews upon publication. Kirkus felt that Wilson narrated the history of the relationship between the United Kingdom and Israel "without stirring up much fuss or adding anything significant to our understanding of Israel's origins" and "As a Prime Minister, Wilson was cautious and noncommittal; and so he is here". Wilson was sympathetic in his book to the Balfour Declaration and Kirkus felt that he failed to explore the "enormous muddle created by the Declaration's ambiguity, aside from the presumptions of the British in issuing it". Wilson also wrote about the "interminable wrangling" and the resultant limited foreign policy of the Attlee administration which enabled the United States under President Harry Truman to "take the initiative". Wilson endorses Hugh Gaitskell's position on the Suez Crisis that it should have been handled by the United Nations and the legitimacy of the original British position of the "inviolability" of the canal.
The Chariot of Israel was reviewed alongside John Darwin's Britain, Egypt and the Middle East in The Economist. The reviewer wrote of The Chariot of Israel that the book "tends towards the anecdotal" and that "as a whole is a very fair and competent account" and a "sober work". Wilson critiqued the policies of the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the conclusion of the book.