The joint Anglo-American commission which is to report on the Jewish problem in Europe and Palestine has to deal with the most complex subject on our common political horizon. Its first duty is to ascertain the facts, and it is significant that two distinguished judges, expert in weighing evidence, will preside over its sittings. Its task is to report on the future of the remnants of this people which Hitler failed to exterminate.
With the politics of the question it is not directly concerned, nor is it asked to pronounce on the wider issues of Jewish destiny or to give a verdict on the rival solutions by assimilation or by Zionism. As little is it asked to study the complications which oil and strategy have introduced into the Palestinian problem. These ought to be irrelevant.
Nonetheless, all these issues must influence the commission. Can it disregard the immense cultural contribution which Jewish minorities, living among European peoples, have brought and can still bring to our common civilization? But Zionist nationalism, evolving from the Messianic mysticism of the past, is a dynamic fact with which it must reckon. It cannot recommend that even a few thousand Jews shall be settled in the national home without considering how its peace shall be assured.
On the fringe of this problem, beyond its terms of reference, lies a question that may supply a clue to all the rest. The whole of the Middle East is a neglected backwater, crying out for the development that engineering science might bring to it. If the United Nations and the International Bank could offer the Arab states a long-term plan of irrigation and restoration on T.V.A. lines, they might view the prospect of further Jewish settlement in Palestine with less hostility.
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What has first to be surveyed is the condition of European Jewry after Himmler’s massacre. How many of the survivors are homeless; how many are living in an intolerably hostile environment; how many look to Palestine as the Promised Land of refuge? The problem is not unmanageable in its dimensions. Excluding the permanent Jewish populations of the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, who are with rare individual exceptions content to remain where they are, the total Jewish populations of Europe today is only about 1,250,000. Among these the Jews of the liberal countries of the West constitute no problem. In France, Belgium and Holland they number, including refugees, about 206,000. Individuals among them may wish to join their families in the United States or in Palestine, but most of them are happy to share the life of these tolerant and hospitable lands. France, with a diminishing population, is willing and able to absorb her refugees and even to receive some more. Italy, purged of Fascism, may be reckoned, with her 32,000 Jews, in the same category.
Next to be considered are the refugees who found a shelter in other countries of the liberal West (Britain: 55,000, Sweden: 13,000, Switzerland: 32,000), most of them Germans or Austrians. Of the refugees in Britain only a very few, perhaps two or three thousand, can forget what they have suffered: it is only this small minority that will voluntarily return to Germany. Some wait for a chance to cross the Atlantic; very few wish to go to Palestine. The majority wish to stay in England. Most of them worked in the war effort or served in the forces and many of these are awaiting naturalization, a slow process. The policy of the Labour Government has been stated with the customary official caution, but certainly it means that they will be allowed to remain. The door has even been thrown open for the entry of other refugees who have relatives in Great Britain. I take it that the outlook for the fugitives in Sweden and Switzerland is not markedly different. So far, then, we have accounted for 338,000 European Jews.
Palestine enters into the picture only when we turn from the relatively kindly West to Central and Eastern Europe. I need not describe the number of about 70,000 that are still living behind barbed wire, ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clad, and without occupation, and this six months after our victory. It is their case that justified Mr. Truman’s urgent demand for the admission of 100,000 immigrants to Palestine. In fact a vote taken in Belsen camp showed that this is the destination to which 68 per cent of them wish to go. To these must be added some 8,000 refugees in Spain, Portugal and North Africa. Hardly less miserable are the 65,000 Jews who survive in Poland. They too have passed through hell and they also have lost most of their kinsmen and friends. The Warsaw Government is doing its utmost to assure them safety and equal rights, but its authority is limited. Anti-Semitism remains deeply rooted in the traditions of this country and the armed underground organizations of the right are still able to provoke pogroms.
It is harder to generalize about the 327,000 Jews in Rumania and the 175,000 in Hungary. Many of them are refugees; others are survivors of broken families; all have lived in an atmosphere of savage anti-Semitism. A high proportion would certainly emigrate, if a door were open. There must be many urgent cases among them, but most of them could wait, if they saw in front of them any hope to give a meaning to their lives. But both of these governments are friendly. In Greece, Bulgaria, and Jugoslavia the conditions of the 59,500 Jews living within their borders are at least tolerable. Finally, there are about 250,000 Polish Jewish refugees in Soviet Russia, of whose plight little is known. At least they need not fear a hostile government, and after the depopulation of its Western territories it probably wishes to retain them.
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Here, then, are the dimensions of the problem. Of the 1,250,000 survivors, perhaps 600,000 may wish to quit Europe eventually; of those in instant need of a refuge 100,000 is an underestimation. Where, then, are they to go? I will not trifle with the reader by discussing Alaska or Santo Domingo. Certainly the British Dominions can, and I believe will, take a certain number. Before I discuss Palestine, may I interpret the widely held opinion of Englishmen, that the United States has not yet played its full part in this matter? It has, indeed, received large numbers of German and Austrian Jews; but they came as desirable immigrants, under the quota system. Among them was a high proportion of exceptionally able men: scientists, technicians and musicians, who have enriched American culture. But was the door ever opened to admit the broken and destitute victims of the persecution? With trade booming, where was the risk? Even if exceptional legislation were required, ought not room to be found in the States now for a proportion of these cases, who should be admitted, not under the quota system, but as refugees and Jews? If any offer of this kind had come from Washington, British public opinion would have been much better disposed than it was towards the President’s demand for the opening of the gates of Palestine.
Even those Englishmen who feel most warmly towards the idea of the national home have to measure what it costs us in anxiety, unpopularity and military precautions. Finally it has to be remembered that while a high proportion of the Eastern Jews have come to look on Palestine as the land of hope, it does not call the Western or even the German Jews with the same romantic appeal. Most of them are not nationalists or Zionists and their choice, if they were free to choose, would lead them to the United States or a British Dominion.
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Let us turn, then, to the future of Palestine. Can it eventually receive a further half-million Jewish settlers? And if it can, have we the right to impose this immigration upon the Arabs against their will? Lastly, can we see our way to a plan under which the two races may live together in amity?
British policy in Palestine has been hesitating and inconsistent. The reason for this was not merely that Englishmen found their responsibilities under the Mandate thankless and burdensome; they were not quite sure that the enterprise was morally justifiable. Some had started by thinking of Palestine in biblical terms as the land promised to the Jews, forgetting that the Arabs have possessed it for as long as the English have inhabited England. Others were influenced by strategic arguments which have disappointed them as the years went on. The emotions of most of us were colored by a sense of guilt, as we reviewed the record of our ancestors in their dealings with the Jews. Today, however, we have acquired a new and contrary sense of disquiet, as we listen to the protests of the Arabs. To rule Palestine by force is an odious task.
The central issue, if our international conscience can decide it, is to discover how best this little country can be used in the general interests of mankind. In Palestine and throughout the Middle East the Arab record (broken, to be sure, by a brief period of medieval splendor under the Bagdad Caliphate) was one of catastrophic decline. What had been the most populous and wealthy area of the civilized world degenerated into a stagnant backwater of depression, where arid and vacant spaces sustained a mere fraction of this ancient population, sunk in illiteracy and chronically underfed. Arab Palestine had in 1918 a social structure under its feudal landlords, many of them receivers of tribute, who lacked both the ambition and the technical capacity to undo the ravages of the past.
How absolute in such a case are the rights of ownership? Do they confer monopoly? History in other cases has given its rough but conclusive answer. No one would maintain the right of a sparse and backward people to monopolize a country capable of sustaining a higher civilization and a more numerous population. It is our duty to scrutinize such arguments with vigilant skepticism. We do well to challenge the claim of armed empires to decide such questions for themselves. But so soon as mankind had in the League of Nations, albeit in a rudimentary form, its first representative assembly, this problem was transformed. Here was a disinterested authority which had a natural right to decide whether the present inhabitants of a given territory were making an adequate use of its resources.
That, I take it, is what the League did when it drew up its Mandate for Palestine. After many centuries of possession, the Arabs had not evolved the capacity to develop it. But in the Jews, because of their tragic need for a home and their passionate love for this land that once was theirs, it divined this capacity and it decreed that they should have their opportunity to use it. On the Mandatory Power it laid the double duty of furthering their settlement and protecting the rights and interests of the Arabs.
Troubled though the story of this experiment has been, there is much in it to prove that the League’s decision was right in principle. Palestine, which had only 700,000 inhabitants in 1919, now maintains its, 1,700,000 on an immensely higher level of comfort, health and culture. In its rapid economic progress the Arabs have shared.
The story of what the Zionists have done by draining marshes and irrigating sand dunes is by now familiar. All this is only a beginning. American engineers, using the experience gained under the Tennessee Valley Authority, have worked out a scheme on similar lines for the Jordan Valley. It provides an ample supply of cheap hydro-electrical power and utilizes the Jordan itself for irrigation. It goes on to adapt to local conditions the classical American technique for dealing with soil erosion. It should render possible a great expansion of light industry and promises to make the southern desert (Negeb), now almost uninhabited, a populous and prosperous region. The capital cost should in a reasonable time be recoverable. The estimate of its authors, who speak with unrivaled experience of similar work in the United States, is that this scheme would eventually justify an increase of the population of Palestine by an additional four million.
In the light of past achievements and future projects, the worst thing we could do would be to treat Palestine as a static quantity. It is still capable of an immense development. To veto such a scheme as this, by forbidding further immigration, would be something worse than an injustice to the Jews; it would be a sin against life itself.
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In this Jordan Valley scheme we have the clue to the future, not only of Palestine, but of all the Arab lands. Life in this climate means water. It is the Jews who have had the wit and enterprise to call in the engineers, but what they promise to do should be a boon as much to the Arabs as to the immigrant Zionists. The electrical power, the water for irrigation, the immunity from floods and malaria, the healthier climate—these will benefit the old as well as the new population. The scheme can, moreover, be used to supply both power and water to Transjordan as well as Palestine. If the Arab states will adopt a constructive and neighborly attitude, might we not go a great deal further? Syria and Iraq are in need of capital and engineering skill for similar projects. Mesopotamia had a population of twenty millions in antiquity; it has barely four today.
What stands in the way? The Arabs do not deny that in the economic sense they have profited by the Jewish development of Palestine. It may be that they dislike the quick tempo of life which this energetic people has introduced. The old feudal aristocracy dreads the new economic power. But the main fear of the Arabs is that they will be swamped in a limitless flood of Jewish immigration. This fear is exaggerated and out of date. With the figures that now confront us, it is hard to see how the eventual maximum of new settlers can exceed half-a-million persons. Given the present ratio of 600,000 Jews to 1,100,000 Arabs, that would still leave the Arabs a bare majority, since their natural rate of increase is higher than that of the Jews. Palestine, then, if the Jordan Valley scheme were adopted, could receive all the Jews who are likely to seek its shores and a big influx of Arab immigrants from the neighboring countries as well.
On this reasoning, the logical first step is: (1) Establish a Jordan Valley Authority charged with the physical development of Palestine. Its director, who must enjoy ample powers, might be appointed by the United States. He would work with a standing consultative committee of both Arabs and Jews. (2) Within the framework of this plan of development, immigration should go on, subject to the principle that prevailed up to 1939—the economic absorptive capacity of the country. Jewish victims of persecution must have priority, but when their needs are met, Arab settlers should be welcomed. (3) It is, I think, fundamental, that a constructive agrarian policy should be worked out for the Arab peasantry. They live under a shocking system of land tenure: the poor are exploited by owners who double in the roles of landlord and usurer. The big feudal estates should be broken up under a compulsory s4ystem of land purchase, which will give the cultivators security and self-respect. Until this is done, no Arab democracy can come into being.
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On these economic foundations what political structure should be built? To turn the whole of Palestine into a national state, whether Arab or Jewish, would be grossly unjust, nor is it now a possible course. The Jewish national home is a reality, guaranteed by an international charter. Nothing in the Mandate authorizes Britain to arrest its growth at the present level, as the White Paper of 1939 did. To place it under the rule of an Arab majority, even under paper safeguards, would be in effect to ruin it. As little can any impartial onlooker, however sympathetic with Jewish sufferings, think of placing the Arabs under Jewish rule. The Zionists, if I may say so bluntly, made a capital mistake when they took it as their aim to achieve a Jewish majority and create a Jewish national state. What then can be done? To partition this little country into three zones, one Jewish, one Arab and one neutral, as the Peel Commission proposed, is a possible but unattractive solution.
A happier alternative, difficult though it may be, is to make of Palestine a bi-national state, in which Jews and Arabs will enjoy not territorial, but communal autonomy.
Such a conception was familiar, though in a clumsy and ill-organized form, in the old Ottoman Empire. Each religious community, known as a Millet, enjoyed a sort of autonomy, chiefly cultural. Christian bishops, with a council of laymen, managed their schools and charities—that is to say, their social services. At present in Palestine, the Jews enjoy on a democratic footing a limited autonomy of this type. They run their own schools and their admirable health service. Through their trade unions, their cooperatives and the Jewish Agency, they manage the chief phases of their economy.
The Arabs have as yet no comparable communal life. A rapidly growing professional class is politically conscious, but the illiterate mass of the peasantry remains for the most part apathetic under the leadership of the feudal owning class. Given peasant ownership and a further growth of agricultural cooperation, as education does its work, an Arab democracy should in time be capable of managing its own social services.
The first step then is to create under a new organic statute two councils, each of them democratically elected by the Jewish and Arab communities. If each community controls its own more intimate affairs in this way, while the really contentious issues—economic development and immigration—are decided by the Jordan Valley Authority, what remains for the Palestinian state to determine need not enflame nationalistic passions. There need be few quarrels over such matters as road-building, posts, and sanitation. The chief justice, the head of the police, and some other officials must for a time be appointed by the trustee-power. But might they not eventually be chosen by a council representing the two communities on a basis of parity? The attempt is worth making, but it cannot be assumed with certainty that either Jews or Arabs have the rare qualities it demands. What can be said for this suggestion is (1) that it narrows the ground over which the two communities must work together; and (2) that it renders it relatively unimportant which of them has a numerical majority in the total population. Arab patriotism can find its ample satisfaction by constituting, with the Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan, a close federation of these neighboring states.
Here then is a compromise which promises to preserve the Jewish national home in Palestine and to ensure its growth. It opens the door to all the Jews who would wish to find a refuge within it. It gives to Jewry a soil and a cultural center of its own, but it asks from the Arabs no impossible sacrifices. It assumes, however, that the United States and the British Dominions will also open their doors. For the rest, it trusts the beneficent work of the engineers, who can, if we give them the means, transform with the magic of water the whole face of the Middle East.
