Sir Martin Gilbert CBE was once the pin-up boy of British pro-Israelis. Today, his monumental report documenting the final days of World War Two is studiously ignored. Why?

There wasn’t a Palestinian in sight at any of the concentration camps liberated by American and Allied soldiers.

Gilbert visited all of them. His methodology was to go to the source material. He took years reading letters, examining photographs as well as the meticulous notes kept by Nazi commandants.

When asked, Gilbert boasted: “I am a proud practising Jew and a Zionist”.

Years later it was revealed that the family name was Goldberg. It was deliberately changed to Gilbert so that Martin could climb the ladder of opportunity in line with other local boys.

I have included this revelation not to discredit his research, but to demonstrate the lengths people had to go to avoid the stigma of anti-Semitism. After World War Two the most notorious anti-Semite in Britain was Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

The Conservative Party which he led was riddled with Jew-hating Ministers, MPs, Right Honourable Members of the House of Lords and hugely wealthy supporters living in the English Home Counties and Scotland.

Churchill was loathed because of his savage role in breaking the 1926 General Strike. Tonypandy should not be forgotten either…. and it isn’t!

To this very day, Churchill is recalled for his brutal decision to send troops from England to crush miners in the Rhondda Valley who were in negotiations with the private owners over management’s new wage scheme.

The Tonypandy savagery is celebrated each year and some militant miners regard it as the trigger for nationalisation by Prime Minister Clement Attlee who led the first Labour government after World War II.

Martin John Gilbert was born in 1936, after those events, yet they would greatly influence his public career. He told a BBC interviewer he had been interested in “Jewish things” from an early age noting that at school he had “once or twice got in trouble for my Zionistic activities”.

He served for two years in the British Intelligence Corps working for Zionism. Then he was offered a place at Oxford’s Magdalen College which was furiously attempting to hide its “Christian” mission by recruiting Hindu Indians, Moslems, Persians and some Zionists.

In 1960 he graduated with First Class Honours before undertaking post-graduate research, moving to “Spook Central”, the nickname for St Antony’s College.

The spooks accompanied by the Zionists handled every aspect of his future career. For example, he was gifted the highly prestigious job of working on the biography of Tory Prime Minister Winston Churchill. When co-author Randolph Churchill died while drunk in 1968, Gilbert was commissioned to write the remaining six volumes.

Labour Party leader Michael Foot wrote a footnote review in the New Statesman in 1971, saying: “Whoever made the decision to make Martin Gilbert Churchill’s biographer deserves a vote of thanks from the nation. Nothing less would suffice.” The nation’s club on Hampstead Heath responded immediately by awarding Gilbert a knighthood.

Gilbert called himself an “archival historian” who used primary sources, gallantly provided by PhD students. They either wanted to be published or they were happy to share a by-line with academia’s senior historian. With his ego inflated Sir Martin Gilbert told a BBC interviewer: “Tireless gathering of facts will ultimately consign Holocaust deniers to history.’’

In June 2009 Gilbert was criticised in the House of Commons by William Hague (Tory), Clare Short and George Galloway because of concerns about his pro-American and pro-Zionist bias; he had been appointed to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war, despite his fervent support for the invasion.

In a later attack the knight of the realm saw a mild observation by Oliver Miles, the former British ambassador to Libya, as “motivated by anti-semitism”. At the time, Miles was on a scheduled visit to celebrate Colonel Muammar Gaddafy’s many years in power; it was much longer than most European leaders.

In 1990 Gilbert’s work for Zionism paid off handsomely; he was awarded the CBE. Showered with honours, Gilbert toured the United States collecting an honorary degree from the San Diego branch of the University of California and a doctorate from Gratz College, Pennsylvania.

But his biggest triumph was yet to come. He was awarded a PhD in Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem followed by an Honorary Doctorate from the Ben Gurion University of the occupied Negev.

His final salvo was delivered on his death-bed in London on 3 February, 2015. Sir Martin Gilbert left a mountain of 88 books, and some might think that his legacy is bound up with his service to history and Britain. That would be quite wrong. Gilbert insisted on being buried in Israel.

Would he approve of US President Donald Trump’s urging Israel to extend its borders into Lebanon, Syria and Iran? I think that Martin Gilbert would be leading settlers in their crazed quest to build Greater Israel. How about you?