Chaim Weizmann was preferable for Israel over his White Paper. He also agreed that Israel should annexe the Negev desert, where no one was living. However, when Lord Moyne, the British Governor of Palestine, met Churchill, he was surprised that he had changed his views in two years. Eleven days later Moyne was assassinated for his trenchant views on immigration in November 1944; the immigration question was put on hold. In February 1943, the British government also rejected a plan to pay $3.5 million and just $50 per head to allow 70,000, mostly Romanian, Jews to be protected and evacuated that Weizmann
Chaim Weizmann would be more support among politicians for the then-current offer in Uganda, called the British Uganda Programme. Following mainstream Zionist rejection of that proposal, Weizmann was credited later with persuading Balfour, by then the Foreign Secretary, for British support to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the original Zionist aspiration. The story goes that Weizmann asked Balfour, "Would you give up London to live in Saskatchewan?" When Balfour replied that the British had always lived in London, Weizmann responded, "Yes, and we lived in Jerusalem when London was still a marsh." Nevertheless, this did not prevent naturalization as a British