A History of Zionism (104 page)

*
J.L. Meltzer, ‘Towards the Precipice’, in M.W. Weisgal (ed.),
Chaim Weizmann
, London, 1962, p. 240. Meltzer and C. Sykes, who quotes him, give the date as an ‘early Saturday in February’. But the meeting must have taken place earlier for the commission was back in London on 30 January 1937.

†
Sykes,
Crossroads to Palestine
, p. 202.

‡
Meltzer, ‘Towards the Precipice’.

*
Cmd. 5513, London, 1937.

†
Kongress Zeitung
, 5 August 1937.

*
Ibid.
, 10, 11 August 1937.

*
Ibid.
, 11 August 1937.

*
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 393.

*
Cmd. 5634, London, 1938; Sykes,
Crossroads to Palestine
, p. 229.

†
ESCO, vol. 2, p. 873.

‡
Cmd. 5893, November 1938.

*
Jüdische Weltrundschau
, 20 March 1939.

†
‘Palestine and the British Empire’, in
In the Margin of History.

*
Quoted in Y. Yauer,
Diplomatia vemakhteret
, Merhavia, 1963, p. 31.

*
Ben Gurion, 12 February 1938,
ibid.
, p. 28.

†
Bauer,
Diplomatia vemakhteret
, p. 32.

*
Ibid.
, p. 30.

†
Ibid.
, pp. 31, 37.

*
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 410.

†
N. Noldmann to Ben Gurion, quoted in J.J. Jchechtman,
The United States and the Jewish State Movement
, New York, 1966, p. 22.

*
Cmd. 6019, 1939.

†
These two documents, as well as other relevant ones, have been published several times. They are quoted here from the special White Paper issue of
Jewish Frontier
, October 1943.

‡
Manchester Guardian
, 15 March 1940.

*
Quoted in Bauer,
Diplomatia vemakhteret
, p. 41.

*
Ibid.
, pp. 57–8.

†
Eton Hakongress
, 24 August 1939.

‡
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 413.

§
Eton Hakongress
, 21 August 1939:
Jüdische Weltrundschau
, 18 August 1939.

*
Eton Hakongress
, 24 August 1939.

*
Daily News Bulletin,
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
, 9 September 1939.

*
Quoted in
Jewish Frontier
, October 1943, p. 29.

*
Y. Yauer,
From Diplomacy to Resistance
, Philadelphia, 1970, p. 108.

*
Henry L. Leingold,
The Politics of Rescue
, New Brunswick, 1970, pp. 145, 159–66.

†
Sykes,
Crossroads to Palestine
, p. 258.

*
The Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency for Palestine,
Reports of the Executive submitted to the 22nd Zionist Congress at Basle
, Jerusalem, 1946, vol. 2, p. 13.

†
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, pp. 418–19.

‡
Political Report of the London Office of the Jewish Agency submitted to the 22nd Zionist Congress
, London, 1946, p. 13.

*
Eban, ‘Tragedy and Triumph’, p. 267.

†
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 439.

*
Quoted in Bauer,
From Diplomacy to Resistance
, p. 74.

*
Ibid.
, p. 350.

†
The Times
, 30 May 1942; quoted in G. Girk,
The Middle East in the War
, London, 1952, p. 246.

‡
Eban, ‘Tragedy and Triumph’, p. 267.

*
The International Post-War Settlement
, London, 1944, p. 7.

†
Eban, ‘Tragedy and Triumph’, p. 274.

*
Zionist Review
, 12 September 1941.

†
‘Palestine’s Role in the Solution of the Jewish Problem’,
Foreign Affairs
, January 1942.

‡
Zionist Review
, 19 November 1943.

*
Zionist Review
, 4 February 1944.

†
Bauer,
From Diplomacy to Resistance
, p. 231;
Zionist Review
, 2 January 1942.

‡
Bauer,
From Diplomacy to Resistance
, p. 231.

*
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, pp. 431–2.

†
In a letter to Leon Simon in November 1941, quoted in Bauer,
From Diplomacy to Resistance
, p. 234.

*
Full text in ESCO, vol. 2, pp. 1084–5.

†
R. Rilverberg,
If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem
, New York, 1970, p. 194.

‡
B. Balpern,
The Idea of the Jewish State
, Cambridge, 1961, p. 39;
Foreign Relations of the United States
, 1942, vol. 4, Washington, 1963, p. 552.

*
Bauer,
From Diplomacy to Resistance
, p. 242.

*
Zionist Review
, 15 May 1942.

†
Bauer,
From Diplomacy to Resistance
, p. 243.

*
S. Salpern,
The Political World of American Zionism
, Detroit, 1961, p. 27.

*
Quoted in Silverberg,
If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem
, p. 184.

†
Halpern,
The Political World of American Zionism
, p. 269.

‡
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 420.

*
Silverberg,
If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem
, pp. 187–9.

*
Quoted in
ibid.
, p. 228; Yeshayahu Vinograd,
Abba Hillel Silver
, Tel Aviv, 1957, p. 140
et seq.

†
Quoted in Schechtman,
The United States and the Jewish State Movement
, p. 94.

*
Ibid.
, p. 242.

*
Ibid.
, p. 239
et seq
; Schechtman,
The United States and the Jewish State Movement
, p. 74
et seq.

*
Jewish Telegraphic Agency Bulletin
, 3 December 1944.

*
Quoted in Eban, ‘Tragedy and Triumph’, p. 273.

*
Feingold,
The Politics of Rescue
, p. 257.

*
D. Den Gurion,
Medinat Israel hamekhudeshet
, vol. 1, Tel Aviv, 1969, p. 65.

11
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE JEWISH STATE

Three years after the end of the war the state of Israel came into being. They were years of mounting tension between the Palestine Jewish community and the British government, which eventually reached the conclusion that abandoning the mandate was the only course of action open to it. In the interval there were further commissions of enquiry, of complex blueprints for a solution, of arrests and acts of terror, ending with the British withdrawal and bitter fighting between Jews and Arabs. The birth of the Jewish state was the fulfilment of the Zionist dream. But it had taken the destruction of European Jewry to realise this aim. Zionism had not been able to prevent the catastrophe. On the contrary, the state owed its existence to the disaster. The Jewish Agency continued to exist, there were Zionist conferences and even a full-scale congress. But the real significance of these years is that they witnessed the birth of the state of Israel. It was the most critical period in the history of the Zionist movement.

Immediately after the end of the war, on 27 May 1945, the executive of the Jewish Agency petitioned the British government to declare Palestine a Jewish state. It also submitted a programme for a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth to the San Francisco conference of the United Nations. The appeal to Britain was no doubt made for the record; there was not the slightest chance of a favourable response. Anglo-Zionist relations had reached their nadir. Weizmann, as already mentioned, contemplated resignation at the time. The advent of the Labour government was hailed by one Zionist journal as an epoch-making event of world-wide significance which opened up hopeful new perspectives for Zionism.
*
Past experience with British governments should have taught the Zionist leaders to be cautious; there was always a lag between promise and performance. With Labour in power the distance between the two was particularly striking, simply because the Tories promised less in the first place.

The outlook in Washington was equally uncertain: Rabbi Wise saw Harry Truman on 20 April 1945, in his second week as the new president. Truman had been forewarned by Stettinius, the secretary of state, that the Zionists would try to get some commitment from him. With unconscious irony Truman assured Wise that he would carry out Roosevelt’s policy. He was totally unaware of the bundle of incoherent and contradictory promises he had inherited. Truman was by no means a Zionist. In early August he said at a press conference that he had no desire to send half a million American soldiers to Palestine to make peace in that country. A few weeks later he received the report of Earl Harrison, whom he had sent to Europe on a fact-finding tour, concerning the refugee situation. The report said that the situation was intolerable and that the Jewish refugees in the camps wanted to be evacuated to Palestine. One week later Truman sent a copy of the report to Prime Minister Attlee with the suggestion that one hundred thousand immigration certificates should be granted forthwith.

This move aroused a great deal of indignation among some leading members of the Labour government, and in none more than in Ernest Bevin, the new foreign secretary. Bevin, like his chief Attlee, was neither pro- nor anti-Jewish. He simply believed that the Jews, unlike the Arabs, were not a nation and did not therefore need a state of their own. The Jews, as he and Attlee saw it - and as the Foreign Office had told him - were ungrateful, devious and cantankerous. The Arabs, on the other hand, were a simple, straightforward people with a deep liking for Britain.
*
When Weizmann went to see Bevin on 10 October 1945, he had a frosty reception, and in a statement on 13 November the foreign secretary announced that the White Paper policy would be continued. He had not the slightest intention of carrying out the Labour Party plank on Palestine; even the demand for the hundred thousand certificates was resented. He implied that Truman had been impelled by electoral considerations (the New York Jewish vote) to support the Zionist demand. Bevin’s stubbornness, his unwillingness to make any compromise even with regard to the displaced persons, put him on a collision course, not only with the Jewish community of Palestine, but with Americans and others to whom such behaviour seemed unreasonable.

Such are the ironies of history that, as far as the birth of the state of Israel is concerned, Bevin’s obstinate adherence to the policy recommended by his Foreign Office aides (such as Harold Beeley) played an important, probably essential role. It is quite likely that had the Foreign Office gone to Hugh Dalton or someone else less stubborn, the demand for the hundred thousand certificates (as well as some other urgent Zionist demands) might have been met. The problem might then have lost its acute character and the unendurable tension and thus the need for the state of Israel would have lessened.
*
The Middle East policy of Bevin and his advisers was based on the assumption that the Arab states were essentially pro-western and, if properly handled, factors of stability in the area, whereas Zionism meant the intrusion of an alien and disruptive element which was bound to weaken the western position.

Palestinian Jewry, naturally, was not interested in calculations of imperial interest and global strategy. They had heard the arguments too often and felt that it was always at their expense. The war effort had always been invoked to explain the impossibility of diverting resources to save Jewish lives. But the war was now over, and even before Bevin’s statement in November there had been talk in Jerusalem, and not only talk, about armed resistance. At a meeting of the Inner Zionist Council in October, Dr Sneh (formerly Kleinbaum), then commander-in-chief of the Hagana, said that the Zionist movement had never faced a more serious crisis; it had to show the British that they would have to pay a high price for pursuing the White Paper policy. At the same meeting Rabbi Berlin said: ‘Soon perhaps we may all have to go underground.’
†
It is difficult to imagine such a conspicuous figure as Rabbi Berlin in illegal conditions. In October also, the Palmach, the Hagana elite corps created during the war, sank three small naval craft which had been operating against ships carrying illegal immigrants, and blew up railway lines in fifty different places. In the same month a clandestine radio station, ‘Voice of Israel’, began broadcasting.

There had been hints concerning armed resistance even earlier, at the World Zionist Conference in London in September, the first international Zionist meeting after the war. While Weizmann again predicted that the road ahead would be long and arduous, the Americans claimed that it was a question of ‘now or never’. ‘If our rights are denied to us’, Rabbi Silver said, ‘we shall fight for them with whatever weapons are at our disposal.’ He told Weizmann to demand not certificates but a Jewish state, and suggested that on occasion it might be the height of statesmanship to be unstatesmanlike. Ben Gurion, too, advocated more intense pressure to bring a Jewish state into being. There was the usual wrangling in committee - Mizrahi once again wanted more power and announced that it would resign, but at the last moment withdrew the threat. The plenary meetings showed that there was a broad consensus, and resolutions were passed endorsing the demand for a Jewish state which ‘will be based upon full equality of rights of all inhabitants without distinction of religion or race in the political, civic, religious and national domains and without domination or subjection.’
*

The constitutional status of the conference and the legal validity of its resolutions were doubtful, but since there had been no time to call a congress, it simply assumed the prerogatives of a congress. A new executive was elected, consisting of Weizmann, Ben Gurion, Shertok, Kaplan, Berl Locker, Dobkin, Nahum Goldmann, Lipsky; Rabbis Wise, Silver, and Goldstein; Rose Halprin, Chaim Greenberg; and Rabbi Fishman and Moshe Shapira of the Mizrahi.

The new executive immediately began to negotiate with the British, but the results were disappointing. They were offered a monthly immigration schedule of fifteen hundred from which, however, illegal immigration was to be deducted. As a result of these restrictions, immigration to Palestine in 1945 was in fact slightly less (13,100) than in the previous year (14,500). This, of course, was totally unacceptable to the Zionists. When Bevin charged the Jews with trying too hard to get to the head of the queue, Weizmann asked whether it was too much if, after the slaughter of six million, those who remained sought the shelter of a Jewish homeland and asked for a hundred thousand certificates.
†

If the British were refusing immigration certificates, the Jews had made up their minds to come anyway. There were tens of thousands of them in the camps. At the end of the war some fifty thousand, both displaced persons and local residents, found themselves in Germany and Austria. But the stream from the east, mainly from Poland, continued. There were ups and downs in this steady migration. After the pogrom in Kielce (Poland) in which forty-one Jews were killed, the influx increased considerably. It is estimated that altogether some 300,000 Jews passed at one time or another through the camps of Austria, Germany and Italy.
*

The initial impetus for immigration to Palestine was spontaneous, or, to be precise, originated among those former members of Zionist youth movements from eastern Europe who had survived and were now the main organisers in the DP camps. They were joined later by emissaries from Palestine and the Jewish brigade. The British government claimed that the wish to go to Israel was the result of the work of Zionist propagandists. Richard Crossman, the Labour MP who had visited the camps as a member of the Anglo-American commission in early 1946, wrote that the Jews would have opted for Palestine even if not a single foreign emissary or a trace of Zionist propaganda had reached the camps. This, no doubt, was a correct account of the situation during the first year or two. Later the mood began to change, partly as a result of the demoralisation which was the inevitable result of the enforced stay in the camps. But it is also a fact that many survivors wanted above all a quiet life after all they had been through, and Palestine in 1947 hardly promised this. An American Jewish adviser to the military government wrote in late 1947 that the emergence of the Jewish state was not substantially affecting the
Drang nach Amerika.
Given equal opportunity to go to Palestine or to the States, 50 per cent would join the unfortunate
Galut
Jews in America.
†

Illegal immigration had never ceased altogether and Hagana began to organise it after the end of the war on a much bigger scale than before. Refugee ships appeared regularly off the shores of Palestine. A few succeeded in breaking the blockade, but most were apprehended and their passengers detained - first in Palestine, and from summer 1946 on in camps in Cyprus. The story of illegal immigration culminated in the case of the
President Garfield
, an old 4,000-ton Chesepeake Bay steamer which, acquired by Hagana and renamed
Exodus 1947
, carried some 4,200 illegal immigrants. To discourage any further exploits London decided to turn the ship back to Port de Bove near Marseilles. After the passengers refused to disembark there, they were forcibly disembarked at Hamburg. There were violent scenes and some casualties on this as on previous similar occasions. The British government claimed, correctly no doubt, that in organising illegal immigration into Palestine the Jews had defied the law of Palestine and of other countries from which the traffic had been carried on: ‘It is no answer to this to say that the law is unacceptable or that it is illegal, when it is not.’
*
Legal arguments were not, however, likely to persuade those who felt that it was an outrage to compel Jewish refugees to return to Germany.

In answer to Truman’s repeated demands for a hundred thousand certificates, and also, no doubt, to gain time, the Labour government proposed on 19 October 1945 the establishment of an Anglo-American committee to investigate the wider issue of Jewish refugees and to make recommendations for both an interim and a permanent solution. The offer was received with less than enthusiasm by Jews and Arabs, who agreed that they had seen enough commissions and that the issues were already clear enough. Truman, on the other hand, accepted the proposal after he had succeeded in more strictly defining its scope and timetable: it was to examine the suitability of Palestine as a shelter for the refugees and to have its report ready within four months.

Truman had grown weary of the constant pressure exerted by the American Zionists. Palestine is not ours to dispose of, he wrote at the time; to impose a political structure on the Middle East could only result in conflict. On the eve of the final approval by Congress of the Taft-Wagner act, Truman announced that he no longer believed in resolutions aiming at the creation of a Jewish state. This was a severe blow to the American Zionists, who believed they had at long last achieved a decisive breakthrough. Bevin, on the other hand, was elated and promised the committee that, provided it turned in a unanimous report, he would do everything in his power to put it into effect. He was soon to regret this rash promise.