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What Price Israel? (1953)
By Alfred M. Lilienthal
21/08/08 "ICH" -- - In
1919, President Woodrow Wilson sent the King-Crane Commission
(30) to Palestine and other places in the Near East for an
American survey of conditions in the former Ottoman Empire. On
its return, the Commission declared that a "National home for
the Jewish people is not equivalent to making Palestine a Jewish
State" and that such a "State could not be erected without the
gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing
non-Jewish communities in Palestine." This report was the only
official American study of the Palestine problem until 1946.
But the protective guarantees to
the Arabs of Palestine (and to non-Zionist Judaists of the
world), as contained in the Balfour Declaration and in
subsequent agreements, were gradually whittled away. Finally in
1947, the United Nations acted just as if the original Weizmann
draft had been fully embodied in the Balfour Declaration. And
nothing contributed so much to this unprecedented breach of
binding diplomatic promises as the political abuse of a
staggering human emergency-the plight of Jewish refugees in
Europe.
The end of World War II—if end
it did—created in Europe that epitome of distress, the Displaced
Person. These refugees from Hitler's gas chambers were actually,
not theoretically, homeless. They came from many lands: Austria,
Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and the Baltic Countries.
They were of all faiths: about 500,000 Catholics, 100,000
Protestants, and 226,000 Jews. (31) Of these last, some 100,000
were in the assembly camps of Germany, Austria and Italy; 50,000
undetained in the United Kingdom; 12,000 in Sweden; 10,500 in
Switzerland; the rest scattered over the Continent.
On August 31, 1945, President
Truman wrote Britain's Prime Minister Clement Attlee that the
issuance of 100,000 certificates of immigration to Palestine
would help to alleviate the refugee situation. Senator Guy
Gillette of Iowa made this letter public in the United States on
September 13, 1945. In a policy statement of November 1945, the
British Government declared it would not accept the view "that
Jews should be driven out of Europe or that they should not be
permitted to live again in these countries without
discrimination, contributing their ability and talent toward
rebuilding the prosperity of Europe." The Prime Minister invited
a joint inquiry into these matters by representatives of the
United States and the United Kingdom. President Truman favorably
received this proposal. But Zionists called it "a fresh
betrayal" to which they would never submit. (32)
The Anglo-American Committee of
Inquiry on Palestine was set up on December 10, 1945, with six
American and six British members. It was empowered to "examine
political, economic and social conditions in Palestine as they
bear upon the problem of Jewish immigration and settlement
therein," (33) and "to examine the position of European Jews" in
terms of estimating the possible migration to Palestine or
elsewhere outside of Europe. Among the Committee members were U.
S. Federal Judge Joseph C. Hutcheson, (Chairman); Dr. Frank
Aydelotte, Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at
Princeton; former American Ambassador to Italy, William
Phillips; Bartley C. Crum; James C. McDonald (later to be the
first American Ambassador to Israel) and R. H. S. Crossman,
prominent Laborite member of Parliament. The first meeting was
held in Washington early in January 1946. Representatives of
Jewish organizations as well as those who expressed the
Christian and the Arab viewpoints were heard. Sessions were
resumed in London in January 1946 and several sub-committees
carried on investigations in various countries of Europe. The
full Committee held further sessions in Egypt, at which the
Jewish Agency (the official liaison body between the Palestinian
Jewish community and Jewry outside) and organized Arab groups
were heard. Sub-committees also visited the capitols of Syria,
Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. These exhaustive
deliberations were completed in Switzerland and a report,
unanimously signed at Lausanne, was made public in London and in
Washington on April 30, 1946. (34)
The principal recommendation
(No.2 in the Committee report) called for the immediate issuance
of entrance certificates into Palestine for 100,000 Jews "who
had been the victims of Nazi and Fascist persecution." Had these
100,000 admissions actually been granted, the overwhelming
majority of Jewish Displaced Persons whose situation required
immediate action would have been saved and the revolting D. P.
Centers could soon have been closed. The report went on to state
that "Jew shall not dominate Arab and Arab shall not dominate
Jew in Palestine, which shall be neither a Jewish State nor an
Arab State. . . . Palestine is a Holy Land, sacred to Christian,
to Jew and to Moslem alike, and because it is a Holy Land,
Palestine is not, and can never become a land which any race or
religion can justly claim as its very own." (35)
But a Palestine which guarded
"the rights and interests of Moslems, Jews and Christians
alike," to quote the Committee, was never acceptable to
Zionists. To the leaders of political Zionism, nationalist
politics were immeasurably more important than humanitarian
concerns. For, indeed, Zionism has never been refugeeism and
refugeeism never Zionism.
When the Kerensky government
overthrew the Czarist regime in Russia, Weizmann minimized the
effect an emancipation of Russian Jewry would have on the
Zionist cause: "Nothing can be more superficial and nothing can
be more wrong than that the sufferings of Russian Jewry ever
were the cause of Zionism. The fundamental cause of Zionism has
been, and is, the ineradicable national striving of Jewry to
have a home of its own—a national center, a national home with a
national Jewish life," (36) This thought was later echoed by
Mrs. Moses P. Epstein, national president of the American Jewish
women's organization, Hadassah: "The Zionist movement is a
revolutionary program organized to bring about a radical and
fundamental change in the status of the Jews the world over. The
sooner the world knows it, the better." (37)
The Anglo-American Committee had
found that Palestine alone could never meet Jewish emigration
needs and that the United States and British Government, in
association with other countries, must endeavor to find new
homes for displaced persons. And this, more than anything,
doomed the Committee, so far as Zionism was concerned. The
Jewish Agency rejected the humanitarian acts offered by the
report because "the central problem of the homeless and
stateless Jewish people had been left untouched." (38) That
"central problem," of course, was the Zionists' need for a
national state.
Organized Jewry was willing to
endorse the Committee's plea for the admission of 100,000 Jews
to Palestine, but opened fire against the report's other nine
recommendations of which the accepted one was an integral part.
The American Zionists in New York, the British Zionists in
London, and the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, insisted in the
Committee hearings that nothing less than Jewish statehood would
do. This was in accordance with the Biltmore Program adopted in
New York four years earlier by Zionist groups.
Early in 1947, the British
Government tried to make a last attempt to conciliate the Arab
and the Zionist positions. The new proposal stipulated the
admission into Palestine of 4,000 Jews per month for two years,
and subsequent admissions depending on the future absorptive
capacity of the country. This second offer for the rescue of
almost 100,000 Jews was spurned too. The Jewish Agency denounced
it as incompatible with Jewish rights to immigration, settlement
and ultimate statehood.
There were other lands, besides
Palestine, to which the displaced persons could have gone.
President Roosevelt was deeply concerned with the plight of the
European refugees and thought that all the free nations of the
world ought to accept a certain number of immigrants,
irrespective of race, creed, color or political belief. The
President hoped that the rescue of 500,000 Displaced Persons
could be achieved by such a generous grant of a worldwide
political asylum. In line with this humanitarian idea, Morris
Ernst, New York attorney and close friend of the President went
to London in the middle of the war to see if the British would
take in 100,000 or 200,000 uprooted people. The President had
reasons to assume that Canada, Australia and the South American
countries would gladly open their doors. And if such good
examples were set by other nations, Mr. Roosevelt felt that the
American Congress could be "educated to go back to our
traditional position of asylum." The key was in London. Would
Morris Ernst succeed there? Mr. Ernst came home to report, and
this is what took place in the White House (as related by Mr.
Ernst to a Cincinnati audience in 1950):
Ernst: "We are at home plate.
That little island [and it was during the second Blitz that he
visited England] on a properly representative program of a World
Immigration Budget, will match the United States up to 150,000.
Roosevelt: "150,000 to
England—150,000 to match that in the United States—pick up
200,000 or 300,000 elsewhere, and we can start with half a
million of these oppressed people."
A week later, or so, Mr. Ernst
and his wife again visited the President.
Roosevelt (turning to Mrs.
Ernst): "Margaret, can't you get me a Jewish Pope? I cannot
stand it any more. I have got to be careful that when Stevie
Wise leaves the White House he doesn't see Joe Proskauer on the
way in." Then, to Mr. Ernst: "Nothing doing on the program. We
can't put it over because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership
of America won't stand for it."
"It's impossible! Why?" asked
Ernst.
Roosevelt: "They are right from
their point of view. The Zionist movement knows that Palestine
is, and will be for some time, a remittance society. They know
that they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors,
'There is no other place this poor Jew can go.' But if there is
a world political asylum for all people irrespective of race,
creed or color, they cannot raise their money. Then the people
who do not want to give the money will have an excuse to say
'What do you mean, there is no place they can go but Palestine?
They are the preferred wards of the world."
Morris Ernst, shocked, first
refused to believe his leader and friend. He began to lobby
among his influential Jewish friends for this world program of
rescue, without mentioning the President's or the British
reaction. As he himself has put it: "I was thrown out of parlors
of friends of mine who very frankly said 'Morris, this is
treason. You are undermining the Zionist movement.' " (39) He
ran into the same reaction amongst all Jewish groups and their
leaders. Everywhere he found "a deep, genuine, often fanatically
emotional vested interest in putting over the Palestinian
movement" in men "who are little concerned about human blood if
it is not their own." (40)
This response of Zionism ended
the remarkable Roosevelt effort to rescue Europe's Displaced
Persons.
On December 22, 1945, President
Truman directed the Secretaries of State and War, and certain
other federal authorities, to speed in every possible way the
granting of visas and "facilitate full immigration to the United
States under existing quota laws." Congress, which had often
shown its vulnerability to Jewish pressure groups, did not
implement the President's request regarding the application of
unused quotas to uprooted Europeans. Finally, Congressman
William G. Stratton in the so-called "Do-Nothing" 80th
Republican Congress introduced a bill in 1947, to admit
Displaced Persons "in a number equivalent to a part of the total
quota numbers unused (41) during the war years." Under the
Stratton Bill, up to 400,000 displaced persons of all faiths
would have been permitted admission into the United States. The
Committee hearings on this legislation (HR 2910) lasted eleven
days and covered 693 pages of testimony. But there were exactly
11 pages of testimony given by Jewish organizations. They
seemed, in fact, profoundly uninterested. But in 1944, when the
House Foreign Affairs Committee was considering the
Wright-Compton resolution that called for the establishment of a
Jewish Commonwealth, there had been scarcely a Zionist
organization that had not testified, sent telegraphed messages,
or had some Congressman testify in their behalf. In support of
the Wright-Compton resolution, 500 pages of testimony were
produced in four days, the vast bulk by Zionists and their
allies.
Yet on the Stratton Bill, which
would have opened America's doors to 400,000 Displaced Persons,
the powerful Zionist Washington lobby (otherwise most
articulate) was virtually silent. Only one witness appeared for
all the major Jewish organizations—Senator Herbert Lehman, then
the ex-Governor of New York. In addition to Lehman's statement,
there was a resolution from the Jewish Community Councils of
Washington-Heights and Inwood, and the testimony of the National
Commander of the Jewish War Veterans. Not a single word was
volunteered in behalf of Displaced Persons by any of the Zionist
organizations, which were at that moment recruiting members and
soliciting funds "to alleviate human suffering."
To a meeting at the Shoreham
Hotel in Washington, Congressman Stratton expressed his surprise
at the lack of support from certain organizations, which
normally ought to have been most active in liberalizing the
immigration law. Obviously, the Illinois Representative (now
Governor) had never heard the President of the Zionist
Organization of America exhort his membership:
I am happy that our movement has
finally veered around to the point where we are all, or nearly
all, talking about a Jewish State. That was always classical
Zionism... But I ask… are we again, in moments of desperation,
going to confuse Zionism with refugeeism, which is likely to
defeat Zionism? . Zionism is not a refugee movement. It is not a
product of the Second World War, nor of the first. Were there no
displaced Jews in Europe, and were there free opportunities for
Jewish immigration in other parts of the world at this time,
Zionism would still be an imperative necessity.
The generous admission of Jewish
Displaced Persons to the United States, and other countries,
would have eradicated the necessity for a "Jewish State." Yet
the human flotsam in former concentration camps impressed the
Zionist only in two respects—as manpower and as justification
for Jewish Statehood.
This is what a Yiddish paper
(42) had to say on the distressing subject: "By pressing for an
exodus of Jews from Europe; by insisting that Jewish D.P.'s do
not wish to go to any country outside of Israel; by not
participating in the negotiations on behalf of the D.P.'s; and
by refraining from a campaign of their own—by all this they [the
Zionists] certainly did not help to open the gates of America
for Jews. In fact, they sacrificed the interests of living
people—their brothers and sisters who went through a world of
pain—to the politics of their own movement."
And this is what the Jewish
Forward, largest Yiddish newspaper in the world, had to say on
December 11, 1943: "The Jewish Conference is alive only when
there is something in the air which has to do with a
Commonwealth in Palestine, and it is asleep when it concerns
rescue work for the Jews in the Diaspora."
Dr. Louis Finkelstein of the
Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, one of the country's
most renowned theologians, stated in an interview in 1951 it had
always been his feeling that "if United States Jews had put as
much effort into getting D. P.'s admitted to this country as
they put into Zionism, a home could have been found in the New
World for all the displaced Jews of Europe."
Speaking at the Eightieth
Anniversary of the Miztah Congregation at Chattanooga,
Tennessee, New York Times publisher Sulzberger pleaded that
"plans to move Jews to Palestine should be but part of larger
plans to empty these camps of all refugees, Jew and otherwise."
He called for a reversal of Zionist policy that put statehood
first, refugees last: "Admitting that the Jews of Europe have
suffered beyond expression, why in God's name should the fate of
all these unhappy people be subordinated to the single cry of
Statehood? I cannot rid myself of the feeling that the
unfortunate Jews of Europe's D. P. camps are helpless hostages
for whom statehood has been made the only ransom." (43)
All these voices of reason and
honest compassion were lost in the nationalist emotionalism of
the day. Zionism's real objective was hidden behind the
incessant denunciations of the British and anyone else who
opposed Zionist aspirations in Palestine. The non-Zionist
American of Jewish faith was engulfed by frenzied sentiment. A
letter to the Editor of the Washington Post, pointing out that
"it ill behooved Zionist sympathizers to shed crocodile tears
over the displaced persons," resulted in a violent fistfight on
Pennsylvania Avenue. The following stereotyped reminder
invariably hushed dissenting whispers against the partition of
Palestine: "How can you be so cruel as to prevent those poor
refugees from finding a home?"
Only after Israel had come into
being was a drastically limited Displaced Persons Bill enacted.
The ensuing long fight by the Citizens Committee on Displaced
Persons to liberalize this legislation was successful two years
later. The devoted man who organized this Committee, and rescued
thousands of homeless of all faiths, was Lessing Rosenwald, the
most maligned Jewish American opponent of political Zionism.
As the Palestine crisis
developed, unity and cohesive action amongst Jewish
organizations in America was achieved through a virulent "Hate
Britain" campaign.
Completely forgotten were the
consistent British acts of friendship in Palestine, dating back
to the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate. (44)
The Churchill White Paper of
1922 had disclaimed any intention of creating a Jewish State in
Palestine. It defined the "National Home" in terms of a
"culturally autonomous Jewish community" and looked toward an
ultimate bi-national Palestine. The White Paper specifically
denied that there would be any "imposition of a Jewish
nationality upon the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole" or
that there was any intent that Palestine should become "as
Jewish as England is English."
Weizmann himself characterized
the Churchill White Paper "as a serious whittling down of the
Balfour Declaration." (45) Article 6 of the Palestine Mandate
made Great Britain responsible for facilitating Jewish
immigration under suitable conditions, while insuring that "the
rights and position of other sections of the population be not
prejudiced. The Churchill White Paper construed this article to
mean that Jewish immigration could not exceed whatever might be
the economic capacity of the country to absorb new arrivals.
These restrictions, accepted at the time by the Executive of the
Zionist Organization, were the basis for the subsequent
Passfield White Paper and for the British policy that followed.
As the population of the
Palestinian community grew, Arab demands for independence began
to harass the British Government. Successive Royal Commissions
were unable to devise a workable plan for partition, which would
have been acceptable to both Arab and Jew. Two conflicting
nationalisms in a territory as large as Wales were demanding
sovereignty.
Increasingly serious disorders
brought the Peel Royal Commission to the Holy Land in 1937. The
Commission recommended a tripartite division into Arab and
Jewish states and a permanent British mandate to include
Jerusalem and surroundings. This solution, resolving what the
Commission declared were "irreconcilable obligations," was
rejected by Arabs and Zionists.
The MacDonald White Paper of
1939 followed the lead of the earlier Churchill and Passfield
documents and called for a unitary Palestinian state in which
control was to be shared by Zionists and Arabs. In such a
Palestine State, "Jews and Arabs would be as Palestinian as
English and Scottish in Britain are British." The British
Government had found it necessary to limit Jewish immigration to
Palestine in order to fulfill its protective guarantees given
the Arabs in the Balfour Declaration. Seventy-five thousand Jews
were to be admitted during the succeeding five years, further
immigration depending on Arab agreement. But when the Germans
invaded Poland, thousands of Jews were admitted to Palestine,
far above and beyond the legal quota. And while the U. S.
Congress was expressing its sympathy for persecuted Jewry in
resolutions, tens of thousands of refugees from Nazi barbarism
were being received in England and many of them supported with
Government funds. During the war, when the English people were
themselves hard pressed for shelter and supplies, thousands of
other refugees were allowed to enter Britain.
And what other acts did the
British commit to justify the charge of anti-Semitism? Under the
administrative system established by Britain in Palestine, self
-governing Jewish institutions were permitted to develop, a
Jewish Agency was established, and Jewish immigration was
facilitated. The end of World War II, despite the continued Arab
unrest, which the British sought to allay, had brought almost
500,000 new Jewish immigrants into Palestine. (Palestine's
Jewish population increased from 11 % in 1922 to 32 % in 1945.)
The British gave arms and other equipment to the Jews in
Palestine so that they might be prepared for their own defense.
The British Eighth Army, under Montgomery, broke the back of
General Rommel's Nazi forces and thus saved the Jewish
Palestinian community from extermination.
Yet the British Government, of
course, was unable to yield to the Zionist demand that Palestine
be made a Jewish State, though it expressed its willingness to
accept any reasonable settlement on which both the Zionists and
the Arabs would agree. The conflict between uncompromising
Jewish Nationalists and the Mandatory Administration led after
World War II to illegal immigration, violence and sabotage. The
Holy Land soon became an armed camp. The Arab Higher Committee
was buying arms for its adherents. On the Jewish side, there was
not only the Haganah (the more restrained and semi-official army
of the Jewish Agency) but also the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the
terrorist group that, since 1943, had been bombing Government
buildings and installations.
The most vicious of the illegal
bands was the Stern Gang, (46) which had broken away from the
Irgun. Throughout World War II, its members engaged in a series
of outrages, climaxed by the assassination of the British
Minister of State for the Middle East, Lord Moyne, in Cairo in
November, 1944. Weizmann at this time wrote to Churchill: "I can
assure you that Palestine Jewry will, as its representative
bodies have declared, go to the utmost limits of its power to
cut out, root and branch, this evil from its midst." (47) Two
years after that assurance, the Anglo-American Committee was
still requesting the Jewish Agency "to resume active cooperation
with the Mandatory Authority in the suppression of terrorism and
of illegal immigration and in the maintenance of that law and
order throughout Palestine which is essential for the good of
all including the new immigrants." (48)
In Europe, a well-organized
movement, supported by large financial contributions from
Zionist sources, had set up "the underground railway to
Palestine." Jews from all over Europe were moved down to ports
on the Mediterranean. There they were placed on ships, often
overcrowded and unseaworthy, under conditions of utmost
privation and squalor. A very large proportion of this human
freight was brought from countries of Communist-dominated
Eastern Europe. For, indeed, the Kremlin had begun to play its
Middle Eastern game of sowing unrest in the Arab world and
pushing Britain out.
To most Americans, however, the
Palestinian struggle was merely a drama of refugees fighting for
homes-this time against their new English oppressors. When the
British terminated all entry into Palestine, anti-British
feelings mounted in the United States.
Organized American Jewry exerted
utmost pressures on public opinion and politicians. This,
everyone was reminded, was the same kind of war the American
Revolutionists had waged against the very same imperialist
power. The tactics of the British in Palestine were compared
with those used for a long time against Ireland's fighters for
freedom. The blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and
the mob hanging of two British sergeants brought this hussah
from Hollywood's Ben Hecht: "Every time you let go with your
guns at the British betrayers of your homeland, the Jews of
America make a little holiday in their hearts."
It was perhaps unfortunate that
throughout this trying period Britain's Foreign Minister was
Ernest Bevin. This onetime Welsh miner's temperament was hardly
suited to reconcile two such intransigent forces as the Arabs
and the Zionists. Nor was he able to demonstrate to public
opinion, particularly in the United States, just how Britain was
being squeezed between two flaring nationalisms. At Bournemouth,
before a Labor Party gathering in 1946, Bevin charged that the
United States was pressing Britain to allow more Jews into
Palestine— because we did not want to allow them into America.
While he meant to attack the political exploitation of human
suffering, he brought down upon himself the totally unjustified
charge of being anti-Semitic. His quick temper constantly
handicapped his efforts to separate the problem of displaced
European Jewry from the political question of Palestine.
By early 1947, events in
Palestine clearly demanded international intervention. Zionists
were more than ever insisting on a Jewish majority in Palestine
in order to secure a Jewish Commonwealth. The British were
resisting all efforts to force them into a new policy. The
Arabs, fighting both the British and the Jews, were demanding an
independent Palestinian State.
In the United States, audible
public opinion supported illegal immigration. Such organizations
as the American League for a Free Palestine, the Hebrew
Committee for National Liberation, and the Political Action
Committee for Palestine, were each raising funds for their own
Palestinian terrorist group. Their competitive advertisements
defended terrorism and stressed the tax exemptability of
contributions for terrorist organizations. In New York,
Congressman Joseph C. Baldwin, scion of one of the city's oldest
families, and public relations adviser to the Irgun, defended
the flogging of four British soldiers and assured Menachem
Begin, Irgun leader, that he, Baldwin, would do everything to
make his, Begin's, position clear in this country. A confused
public became even more confused by the verbal barrages
exchanged between various Jewish factions. "Wise attacks Silver"
—"Ben-Gurion blasts the Hebrew Committee for National
Liberation"—"American League for a Free Palestine assails the
Jewish Agency"—"Haganah and Irgun members clash."
And then the British decided to
give up the Palestinian ghost. The Anglo-Arab Conferences, which
had started in September 1946, and had adjourned to January
1947, proved a total failure. A total failure, too, was the
so-called Bevin Plan which, revising the earlier Morrison-Grady
Plan, suggested semi-autonomous Arab and Jewish cantons for a
five-year period and the admission into Palestine of 100,000
Displaced Persons. Both Parties objected, whereupon Britain
announced it was not her intention to enforce any plan. At the
same time, the Zionist Jewish Agency proclaimed its refusal to
cooperate with Mandatory authorities in any action against
terrorists. Britain felt that there was nothing left but to
place the controversy before the United Nations. The U. N.
Secretary-General Trygve Lie called a special meeting of the
General Assembly.
Submitting the dispute to
international adjudication, Bevin let loose with a
characteristic barrage of words. He accused American politicians
of wrecking any chance for an amicable solution of the Palestine
problem and, quite undiplomatic ally, pointed the finger at the
White House. "I did reach a stage, however, in meeting the Jews
separately. . . when things looked more hopeful," Bevin
explained to the House of Commons. "There was a feeling. . .
when they left me in the Foreign Office that day, that I had the
right approach at last. I went back to the Paris Peace
Conference, and the next day. . —I believe it was a special day
of the Jewish religion —my right honorable friend, the Prime
Minister, telephoned me at midnight and told me that the
President of the United States was going to issue another
statement on the hundred thousand. I think the country and the
world ought to know about this. . " (49) Bevin was referring to
the Day-of-Atonement plea of President Truman to admit 100,000
refugees. The Paris Peace Conference was then in session and
Bevin implored Secretary Byrnes to intercede with President
Truman not to issue a statement that might upset current
delicate negotiations. Whereupon the Secretary of State told him
that "if the President did not issue a statement, a competitive
statement would be issued by Dewey."
In the New York Times of October
7, 1946, James Reston disclosed that several Administration
advisers had opposed the Truman statement in view of the fact
that Britain was on the verge of reaching a truce with the
Zionists. Attlee himself had asked the President to withhold the
statement, but the President made it nevertheless. It was
believed that Mead and Lehman, the Democratic candidates for
Governor and Senator in New York, would be helped by the Truman
declaration. On October 6th, Governor Dewey outbid Truman by
declaring the British should admit "not 100,000 but several
hundred thousand Jews." Senator Taft also joined in the fun of
raising the ante. It was all part of the national campaign which
had elected what Truman was later to call the "Republican
Do-Nothing Congress."
Whether the British talks with
the Zionists would have been successful if domestic American
politics had not interfered is questionable. But the whole
episode was extremely characteristic of the political pattern,
which the U. S. Government was following whenever Israel and the
Middle East were involved.
The Arabs were as clearly inept
in propaganda techniques as the Jewish Nationalists were
masters. But American national politics being what they are, the
chances of impressing this country with the Moslem point of view
were at best slim: there is a rather negligible Arab vote in the
U. S. Whatever the rights of Palestine's indigenous inhabitants
may have been, they were completely dismissed in the worldwide
propaganda battle between the Mandatory Administration and the
Jewish Agency.
The British were determined to
maintain law and order, pending the United Nations decision over
the ultimate fate of the Holy Land. The Zionists continued to
present their power play to the confused world in terms of
humanitarianism. Continuous clashes between wretched would-be
immigrants and the armed British authorities were the only issue
really discussed in the American press. The British seized the
S.S. "Abril," Ben Hecht’s boat, which was crowded with refugees.
Three British were killed and several injured in an effort "to
rescue or capture" (as the U. S. press reported) refugees who
plunged into the sea. Terrorists blew up the Iraq Petroleum
Pipeline. The Irgun declared open warfare. Dov Gruner and three
other terrorists who had attacked a Palestine police station
were hanged. The Stern Gang promised retaliation. And all that
time, the only contributions of the U. S. Government were words.
There was much talk about Displaced Persons and human suffering,
but no real effort to bring them into the United States.
Everybody knew, and said, what Britain should or should not do.
Every politician hurried to get in on the act, to exploit
"humanitarianism" for votes. Everybody urged unlimited
immigration to the Holy Land. Eleanor Roosevelt urged a luncheon
meeting of the Women's Division of the United Jewish Appeal to
tell Congress what to do on Palestine. "The time has come," she
said, "when we have to stand up and be counted. You have not
told Congress so they would hear one unmistakable voice." Did
organized Jewry really need such a reminder?
Day in and day out the press
carried such headlines as "The American Jewish Congress
demands"—"Senator Lehman again renews his plea to open up
Palestine," — "Congressman Javits of Manhattan suggests a
Congressional junket to Palestine to foster the establishment of
a Jewish commonwealth." The British Empire building in Radio
Center was picketed while William O'Dwyer, not yet a refugee in
Mexico, excoriated the British before the National Council of
Young Israel. Zionists flooded the capitol with letters trying
to link Palestine with aid to Greece and Turkey. "Tell the
British," some letters said, "there will be no aid for the
British policy in Greece and Turkey unless they follow the
United States lead on Palestine." The State and War Departments,
it is true, were constantly cautioning the White House and
Congress that an irresponsible vote-chasing policy for Palestine
might irreparably damage the American position in one of the
world's most strategic areas. But politicians, when following
the scent of "blocs," seem to be beyond the reach of reason. At
the climax of the Palestine crisis, at any rate, elections were
just around the corner (they always seem to be in this blessed
country of ours), and both parties were convinced that their
eloquent support of statehood for Israel was a prerequisite for
their conquest of pivotal states. There was, in fact, no need
for the Zionists to refute the solemn warnings that were coming
from the War and State Departments. All the Zionists had to do
was to make sure that the politicians remained hypnotized by
"the Jewish vote." Perhaps for the first time in history, a
decisive battle could indeed be won with the tools of
propaganda. It is to the credit of the Zionists' acumen that
they grasped their chance. But it is perhaps less to the credit
of America's non-Zionist Jewry that it permitted its
self-appointed Zionist leaders to bet the future of American
Judaism on the roulette of power politics.
Notes (30) The Commission
consisted of Dr. Henry Churchill King, President of Oberlin
College, and Mr. Charles R. Crane, Chicago industrialist and
member of the American Commission to Russia in 1917. The report
was suppressed until December 1922 when the N. Y. Times and
Editor & Publisher made it available.
(31) Official survey of the
Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry.
(32) Times (London), Nov. 15,
1945.
(33) Anglo-American Committee of
Inquiry, Report to the United States Government and His
Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom (Pub. by Department
of State, 1946), Preface.
(34) Three of the signers of
these unanimous recommendations later became the most ardent
Christian supporters of Jewish Nationalism: Bartley Crum, R. H.
S. Crossman and James G. McDonald reversed their position
complete, even before Israel became a political reality.
(35) Anglo-American Committee of
Inquiry, Recommendation, No. 3, p. 4.
(36) Weizmann, op. cit., p. 201.
(37) New Palestine, October 27,
1944.
(38) Hurewitz, op. cit., p. 249.
(39) For a full discussion of
the refugee problem, see Morris L. Ernst, So Far So Good (New
York: Harper, 1948), pp. 170-77.
(40) Ibid. p. 176.
(41) Fiscal Year 1942, only 10%
of quotas used; 1943, 5%; 1944, 6%0; 1945, 7%.
(42) Yiddish Bulletin, Free
Jewish Club, May 19, 1950.
(43) New York Times, October 27,
1946.
(44) The Supreme Council of the
allied powers agreed to assign the Mandate for Palestine to
Great Britain, April 25, 1920. The Council of the League of
Nations confirmed the draft Mandate, September 29, 1923.
(45) Weizmann, op cit., p. 290.
(46) The founder of this group,
Abraham Stem, was a Pole who had settled in Palestine in 1925.
He is reputed to have written Hebrew poetry between acts of
greatest violence and was killed in 1942 by Palestine Police.
(47) Weizmann, op. cit., pp. 437
and 438.
(48) Anglo-American Committee of
Inquiry Recommendations, No. 10 at p. 12.
(49) United Nations, Official
Records of the 2nd Session of the General Assembly (Lake
Success, 1947), II, 139.
Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal, a
graduate from Cornell University and Columbia Law School, served
with the U.S. Army in the Middle East as consultant to the
American Delegations at the organizing United Nations Conference
in San Francisco and in the State Department. He's the author of
several books on the Israeli-Palestinian issue (e.g., What Price
Israel? and The Zionist Connection I and II). He's spent the
past five decades advocating for a two-state solution to the
Middle East quagmire.
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