A History of Zionism (100 page)

The War Office appointed a brigadier as liaison officer with the Jewish Agency and another to command the Jewish division. Methods of recruitment, rates of pay and allowances had already been discussed, when Weizmann was suddenly informed by Lord Moyne, who had succeeded Lord Lloyd, that Churchill had decided that owing to the shortage of equipment the project was to be put off for six months. But the real obstacle was the opposition of the mandatory officials as well as of General Wavell, C-in-C Cairo. After six months had passed, Weizmann was informed that new technical difficulties had arisen which made it necessary to keep the project in cold storage for the time being. On 23 October 1941 there was a further communication from Lord Moyne: since the government had to give all possible help to Russia, shipping space could not be spared and it would not be possible to form a Jewish division.

There was no progress at all during 1942 and 1943. But in November 1943 Weizmann and Namier saw Grigg, secretary for war, who submitted the proposal for the creation of a Jewish fighting force to the cabinet. In August 1944 Weizmann was told by Churchill that the War Office would soon be in a position to discuss concrete proposals. A few days later a positive decision was reached and Palestinian Jewry were asked to help in mobilising 3,500 men and 150 officers for a Jewish unit. The brigade came into being and saw action in Italy towards the end of the war. A statement of the Jewish Agency executive, while noting the delay in the formation of the brigade, interpreted it as an acknowledgment of services rendered and of the Jewish desire for national recognition.

The creation of the brigade has been called an important achievement, the ‘greatest political accomplishment’ of Zionist diplomacy during the war.
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But it was a modest achievement, and it came much too late. Nor did the existence of a Jewish fighting force have great political significance; it was by no means a guarantee that the Zionist movement would be represented at the postwar deliberations on the future of the Middle East. Even the more modest hope that the brigade would one day form the nucleus of a Jewish army was only partly fulfilled. For meanwhile Palmach had come into existence, the strategic reserve of the Hagana, which based on the kibbutzim, was to play the central role in the war of independence.

Although the war cabinet included a majority of sympathisers with the Zionist cause, the issue was not important enough to warrant a major effort in the middle of the war to overcome administrative routine and the anxiety of the local authorities to keep Palestine quiet. This consideration was given greater weight than the possible benefits of a course of action which might ‘upset the whole situation either by conscription or by favouring the nationalistic ambitions of one of the rival races’.
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This is not to say that the decision to form a Jewish fighting force, precisely because it was of marginal importance, might not have gone the other way in 1940 after Churchill came to power. But it is unlikely that it would have made much difference in Zionist postwar politics.

The overall picture of Anglo-Zionist relations was not, however, one of unrelieved gloom. When Weizmann lunched with the prime minister and Attlee, the deputy prime minister, in October 1943, Churchill, in one of his famous monologues, announced that the Jews would have to be established, after Hitler had been crushed, ‘where they belong … I have had an inheritance left to me by Balfour and I am not going to change’.
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Partition and the formation of a Jewish state seem to have been on Churchill’s mind, together with many other second-rank problems. In July 1943 a cabinet subcommittee was set up to consider the future of Palestine. In its report to the cabinet in December of that year it suggested partition on lines more favourable to the Jews than any previous British scheme.

Whatever British policy was going to be after the war, it seemed to be a foregone conclusion that there was to be no return to the White Paper. As Churchill wrote in a memorandum to Lord Ismay in January 1944: ‘There cannot be any great danger in our joining with the Jews to enforce the kind of proposals which are set forth in the Ministerial paper. … Obviously, we shall not proceed with any plan of partition which the Jews do not support.’ In April 1944 the national executive of the Labour Party, a partner in the wartime coalition government, recommended measures for the establishment of a Jewish state which went further than the demands of the Zionist leaders themselves. If there had been a strong case for a Jewish majority in Palestine before the war, it said, the case had become irresistible after the unspeakable Nazi atrocities: ‘Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in. Let them be compensated handsomely for their land, and their settlement elsewhere be carefully organised and generously financed.’
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The resolution was pushed through — as usual on such occasions — by a small, active minority, but significantly it met no opposition.

Again, when Weizmann saw Churchill on 4 November 1944 the prime minister seemed very willing to discuss Palestine and said that he was in favour of the inclusion of the Negev in the Jewish state: ‘If you could get the whole of Palestine it would be a good thing, but I feel that if it comes to a choice between the White Paper and partition — you should take partition.’
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Churchill stressed that active American participation was needed, whereas Weizmann was disturbed by rumours concerning a partition scheme which would result in a state too small to be viable. To reassure him, Churchill revealed that a government committee was dealing with the question and hinted that Lord Moyne, the minister resident in the Middle East, had moved to a position which the Zionists would find acceptable. Unknown to Weizmann, Moyne, who had been thought to be an enemy of the Zionist cause, had in effect recommended partition to the cabinet some time before.

Two days after this interview Moyne was assassinated in a Cairo street by two members of the Stern gang. All further discussions between the Zionist executive and the British government were suspended. The detailed memorandum submitted by the Jewish Agency at about this time was ignored, as was the appeal to inaugurate a ‘new era’ by drawing the logical conclusion from the Balfour Declaration and the demand for the quickest possible increase of the Jewish population as a prerequisite for Jewish statehood. Weizmann sent Churchill a long memorandum asking for an immediate decision to establish Palestine as a Jewish state, and for giving the Jewish Agency the necessary authority to bring to Palestine as many Jews as it might be found necessary and possible to settle. In June 1945 he received a brief and almost hostile reply: ‘There can, I fear, be no possibility of the question being effectively considered until the victorious Allies are definitely seated at the peace table.’ There was no mention of a commitment, of the many promises made before and during the war. It seemed the final failure of all Weizmann’s efforts and he intended to resign in protest. The victory of the Labour Party in the elections shortly thereafter induced him to change his mind.

The demand for a Jewish state, generally accepted by most Jews by the end of the war, had only gradually gathered momentum. Weizmann had been the first though not the most consistent advocate of a state that was to comprise less than the whole of western Palestine ever since he had voted in favour of partition in 1937. ‘We shall have on our hands [at the end of the war] a problem of at least three million people,’ he had written in 1941. ‘Even on purely financial grounds a Jewish state is essential in order to carry out a policy of such magnitude.’
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In a long programmatic article in
Foreign Affairs
in 1942 he wrote that a Jewish state was more than the necessary means of securing further immigration and development, it was a ‘moral need and postulate, a decisive step towards normality and true emancipation’. As for the Arabs, ‘they must be clearly told that the Jews will be encouraged to settle in Palestine and control their own immigration’.
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Lewis Namier, Weizmann’s faithful supporter and collaborator in London, echoed his demand with reference to the situation likely to arise in Europe after the war. Most of the remaining Jews would want to emigrate, and in the Moslem countries, too, they were endangered by virulent nationalism. The transfer of two or three million was a formidable task but it was manageable if the refugees had a commonwealth of their own to go to.
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Weizmann did not, however, envisage the emergence of a Jewish state as something isolated from other developments in the Middle East. Like Ben Gurion, he repeatedly predicted that at the end of the war an Arab federation and a Jewish commonwealth would emerge, and he stressed the desirability of close cooperation between them. Nor did he regard a state as an end in itself: ‘I do not think that any of us want a Jewish state for the sake of the paraphernalia which are bound up with a state,’ he declared at the 1944 annual conference of the British Zionist Federation. ‘We ask for the state because we believe that through the state we shall be able to do the maximum of good to the maximum number of people.’
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Ben Gurion’s conversion was more gradual, but once he had adopted the concept of Jewish statehood there was no more radical advocate. He too had been in favour of partition in 1937, but during the early phase of the war, as already mentioned, he thought that conditions were not opportune for discussing the
Endziel.
Only after his first wartime visit to America did he tell his colleagues that Palestine ought to be turned into a Jewish state, ‘not as a final goal, but as a means of moving millions of Jews to Palestine after the war, at the fastest possible rate’. In his view it was the only possible remedy for postwar Jewish misery, ‘and we are determined to achieve it’.
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In their speeches Ben Gurion and his colleagues usually referred to a Jewish commonwealth or a Jewish authority in Palestine, but they clearly meant a state. As to ways and means, Ben Gurion was not dogmatic. At one time he considered dominion status in the British commonwealth, and at another advocated armed struggle if they failed to gain British support for Jewish statehood. He seems to have anticipated Arab opposition and favoured a voluntary exchange of population. But he promised that Arabs who did not want to leave would be assured of full civic, political and national equality. The Jews would make an effort to bring their standard of living up to the Jewish level in every respect.
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On two vital issues Ben Gurion’s views differed from Weizmann’s; he emphasised more and more America’s growing importance for the future of Zionism. Weizmann had not been encouraged by his visits to the United States: he had found real sympathy with Zionism among the political leaders, but the State Department was hostile: ‘Our difficulties were not concerned with the first rank statesmen. … It was always behind the scenes, and on the lower levels, that we encountered an obstinate, devious and secretive opposition which set at nought the public declarations of American statesmen. And in our efforts to counteract the influence of these behind-the-scenes forces we were greatly handicapped because we had no foothold there.’
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President Roosevelt had been friendly but non-committal, and Weizmann was too old a hand in the diplomatic game to give much weight to sweeping but vague professions of sympathy. Ben Gurion, on the other hand, was deeply impressed by America’s growing strength and confidence. He was convinced that at the end of the war the United States would be in a very strong position and that American Jewry, in view of its numbers and influence, would be able to play a decisive role in shaping the future of Zionism if only its energies were channelled in the right direction. Gradually he reached the conclusion that a change in British policy in Palestine could be brought about only as a result of American pressure.

The other point on which he disagreed with Weizmann was one of approach and emphasis rather than of substance. In his
Foreign Affairs
article Weizmann had written that two million Jews would have to be transferred to Palestine at the end of the war, and on another occasion he mentioned a figure of five million.
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But whereas Weizmann seems to have used these figures as a political slogan, Ben Gurion believed in the possibility of an immediate transfer to Palestine of millions of Jews. This in Weizmann’s eyes was sheer fantasy; Palestine was not capable of absorbing more than about one hundred thousand new immigrants a year. He thought that to use such enormous figures would antagonise potential supporters. It seems in retrospect that Ben Gurion might have understood American psychology better than Weizmann, whose way of thinking was more attuned to Britain. Ben Gurion instinctively felt that they would not make an impact on American public opinion unless there was a great vision, unless the Zionists were willing to ‘think big’.

Biltmore

Ben Gurion’s new programme was formulated between 6 and 11 May 1942, at the Biltmore conference, a gathering of some six hundred delegates representing the main Zionist groups in New York, who met to discuss and reformulate,
inter alia
, the aims of their movement. The eight-point programme adopted reflected the new militant thinking of American Zionism. Its demands were considerably more radical than those previously voiced outside the ranks of revisionism, and it was to play a central role in Zionist debates for years to come. The programme called for the fulfilment of the ‘original purpose’ of the Balfour Declaration and the mandate, and reaffirmed the Zionists’ unalterable rejection of the White Paper. It demanded recognition of the right of the Jews of Palestine to play their full part in the war effort and the defence of their country through a Jewish military force fighting under its own flag. The most important part was the last paragraph: