With Arthur Creech-Jones’ announcement in the UN of Britain’s intention to withdraw from Palestine, and with the first steps of this withdrawal reported under way, a bitter and perplexing historical episode is approaching its end. One of the most difficult problems for present-day political analysts has been Great Britain’s policy in Palestine. How has it come about that the British Labor party, for many years a warm friend of Zionist aspirations, should, after gaining political power, pursue a course so antipathetic to Zionism? Jon Kimche, who here attempts to explore the realities behind this apparent enigma, has had close personal contact with the men and issues involved.
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The Labor party had been for twenty-eight years among the staunchest advocates of the Balfour declaration, and among the severest critics of British failure to see it fully implemented. The attitude of the British Labor government during the last two years therefore stands out all the more incongruously, beginning with its hesitations immediately after it came to power in July 1945, and becoming increasingly lukewarm until it turned into forthright hostility to the cause that it had formerly so firmly supported.
This transformation cannot be attributed to personal or political ill-will, or to direct betrayal of promises previously made. It was the outcome largely of a long series of political misunderstandings, arising more from ignorance than ill-will, and also from change of outlook inside the Labor movement that resulted from the party becoming a government, instead of remaining an opposition without responsibility.
The original sympathy of the Labor movement for the Balfour declaration and the mandate was the result largely of the strong humanitarian and liberal elements recruited to Labor from the Liberal party. It showed itself, as a rule, in resolutions passed by the annual conferences of the party, and in an occasional paragraph in the annual speech by the member of the executive, expressing support and sympathy for Zionism. There were, of course, also strong personal links between some members in the Labor party executive and leading Zionists. Mr. Herbert Morrison was a close friend of the late Dov Hos, and was deeply influenced by him until Dov Hos’s death in an accident. Mr. Hugh Dalton, until recently Chancellor of the Exchequer, had similar associations with Zionists. There was thus a strong community of interest between many leading figures in the Labor party and leading Zionists in Palestine.
But it is clear now that far too much importance was attached by the Jews in Palestine and by the Zionist movement as a whole to the formal declarations of these Labor party conferences, and to the implications of these personal relationships. For in this connection between the Zionists and the Labor movement, there was an important absentee—the trade unions.
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It must be remembered that the structure of the Labor party is supported by the twin pillars of the trade unions and the local political groups of the Labor party. At the annual conferences of the party, the trade unions accounted as a rule for about three million votes, while the political Labor party accounted for about three hundred thousand. The trade unions could therefore, whenever they wanted, vote down any proposition brought forward by the political wing of the party—and they did so repeatedly. On the Palestine issue, where the resolutions were couched in general terms, the trade unions expressed themselves as neither pro nor con. They remained, in fact, neutral. The significance of this was however completely missed by those Zionists responsible for relations with British labor. The decisive importance of the trade union sector in the Labor party, should it become the government, was clearly overlooked.
The blame is not only on the Zionist side. Those leading Labor figures who were so generous with their support when they had no power to exercise it, encouraged, if anything, the belief that the Labor party would, when it became the government, be as energetic in changing policy as its public declarations appeared to suggest. The enthusiasm of these Labor leaders knew no bounds, and even during the war years they brought forward a proposal to a Labor conference that advocated that the whole of Palestine should be turned into a Jewish state, and that the Arab population should be compulsorily transferred to the Arab states. Only the most energetic protests from Zionists inside the Labor party resulted in the partial amendment of this proposal, but it was significant of the mood with which the party approached the Palestine problem.
If one looks back now on those days and compares them with the contemporary scene, the contrast is so great that the question almost asks itself: could these people have been serious when they claimed to be the friends of Zionists? Was it all really no more than a political maneuver by which Labor sought support from Zionists and the Jews, at a time when they were fighting for power?
Otherwise, how account for the resolution of the Labor party conference in December 1944, on the eve of victory, which said: “Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out of Palestine, as the Jews move in. . . .The Arabs have many wide territories of their own; they must not claim to exclude the Jews from the small area of Palestine, less than the size of Wales. Indeed, we should re-examine also the possibility of extending the present Palestinian boundaries, by agreement with Egypt, Syria, and Transjordan.”
This resolution was actually framed by the Executive Committee of the party, over which Mr. Hugh Dalton, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labor government, presided.
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Six months later, I remember Mr. Dalton speaking again before thirteen hundred delegates of the Labor party at the conference that decided to break the coalition and that was about to lay down the platform on which Labor was to fight the election of 1945. .It was the debate on international affairs. Both Mr. Dalton and Mr. Ernest Bevin took part in that discussion. Mr. Dalton spoke first. When he came to deal with Palestine, I remember how he stood up and raised his sonorous voice, and with all the emphasis at his disposal—it is a lot—he said:
“We consider Jewish immigration into Palestine should be permitted without the present limitations which obstruct it, and we have also stated very clearly that this is not a matter which should he regarded as one for which the British government alone should take responsibility. . . .In my view steps should be taken in consultation with the American and Soviet governments to see whether we cannot get that common support for a policy, which will give us a happy, a free, and a prosperous Jewish state in Palestine.”
There was great applause when Mr. Dalton sat down. A little while later, Mr. Ernest Bevin also spoke; he did not dissent from anything Mr. Dalton had said, nor did any of the delegates at the conference; the great awakening was still to come.
I spoke to many of the delegates after this speech, and it is fair to say that not one of them felt that they had committed themselves deeply to a policy in Palestine, but rather that Mr. Dalton had restated what was the accepted and traditional policy of Labor towards Zionism. The distinction is important in view of the weight which was given in Palestine to the Dalton statement. In particular, insufficient attention was given to the qualification made by Mr. Dalton that the future of immigration in Palestine should not be the responsibility of Britain alone. This was to become the corner-stone of the “great compromise” inside the Labor movement which resulted ultimately in the policy with which Mr. Bevin’s name has been associated so closely.
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After this conference came the election. Labor won, and the new Labor government was formed. It was not long before it was called upon to make decisions on policy in Palestine, and particularly about the rate of future Jewish immigration. The Cabinet appointed a sub-committee to consider the immediate issues. Mr. Bevin and Sir Stafford Cripps were its two leading members. They called for papers from the departments concerned, and then, for the first time so far as the Labor party was concerned, a new factor appeared on the scene. They found before them detailed briefs from the Foreign Office, the War Office, the Palestine Government, the Colonial Office, the Arab Office in Cairo, and from other Middle East centers. They all sang the same refrain: The Arabs in the Middle East were the key to the maintenance of Britain’s position there; dire perils would follow if their good-will were lost by accepting a Zionist orientation; nothing should be done in Palestine that would further antagonize the Arabs.
These were not foolish memoranda; they might have been partisan, but they were not ignorant. They provided chapter and verse of Britain’s link with the Arabs, and the dangers that would follow a rupture with the Arabs on the issue of Palestine.
The Cabinet sub-committee was not only impressed, it was overwhelmed. This was one aspect of the affairs of Palestine with which the members of the sub-committee had no previous acquaintance. The Arab problem, they had been told frequently, was not serious, and did not really affect the issue between Britain and the Zionists. The shock which that sub-committee suffered when it was presented with the official, traditional British view on the Arab situation, was in large part the measure of the Zionist failure to acquaint the British Labor leaders, during their period in opposition, with the accurate facts in the situation. It could be said that it was, in a sense, the penalty paid for the Zionists’ consistent underplaying of the importance of the Arabs in the Middle East.
The tide began to run out. Cripps was very impressed by these British memoranda, and Bevin perhaps even more, particularly as the immediate postwar clash between Britain and Russia was now making itself felt in the Middle East.
Bevin and Cripps and the other members of the sub-committee went back to the Cabinet. They were indignant; they said they had been misled by Zionist propaganda; here they were, tied up in a dozen different ways with the Arabs and the newly-formed Arab League, and yet for years the Labor movement had pretended that no Arab question existed in the Middle East. The reaction was acute. On the eve of the Day of Atonement, October 1945, the Labor government’s policy became known in Palestine; it was made clear that the White Paper policy and restricted immigration would be continued.
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It was my job at that time to talk to Labor ministers about this and other things. They were not happy about the decision, but felt strongly that they had been the victims of an over-facile approach by their Zionist friends. Ministers who had been more Zionist than the Zionists, now turned round and said that, alone, they could not settle this issue, and that at the beginning of their new administration they could not take the risk of becoming involved in conflict with the Arab states.
The wheel had now turned a full circle. Just as Labor leaders previously had listened so often to the Zionist propagandists’ version of the Middle East, and had seen no possible difficulty coming from the Arab side, so now they were overwhelmed with secret and confidential information from their departments, which tended to over-state and overemphasize the strength and importance of the Arab states. But as things stood then, the government welcomed anything that would give them time to reconsider the situation, and they accepted these military and political evaluations of the Arabs at face value.
At that point, they also began to consider seriously the possibility of bringing the Americans in, on the formation of a policy and more particularly the process of carrying it out. It was while the Cabinet was discussing this matter that President Truman’s letter arrived. This letter, addressed to Mr. Attlee, expressed the President’s view that one hundred thousand Jewish immigrants should be immediately admitted to Palestine. The reaction to this letter among all the members of the Cabinet—both friendly to the Zionists and unfriendly—was one of anger at such direct American intervention when, at the same time, the Americans refused to accept any responsibility for the execution of policy in the Middle East.
Then one member of the Cabinet—a close friend of the Zionist movement—said that this was the government’s great opportunity. President Truman “had stuck out his neck,” and it was now up to the British to make the most of it. He suggested that they should ask the United Nations to take over the Palestine issue. But after some discussion, this was rejected because the United Nations was still unformed, and the position of Russia was considered with some disquiet. Instead, it was suggested that President Truman should be invited to agree to an Anglo-American inquiry into the situation in Palestine in a manner that would commit the Americans to join with the British in the carrying out of any policy that would in due course be recommended by this joint committee of inquiry.
This was the second landmark in the evolution of the Labor government’s Palestine policy from its opposition views towards the ultimate attitude adopted by Mr. Bevin during the summer of 1947. .The Arabs had now come into the picture, and so had the Americans. The stage was now set for the entry of Mr. Bevin himself, and for the extraordinary part which, during the last two years, he has played in the fate of Palestine.
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The first sign that Bevin intended to take over the command of foreign affairs in the Labor government came at the annual conference of the party in May 1945. .There were then two candidates for the post—Dalton, the favorite, and Bevin, the outsider. When Bevin had finished addressing that conference about two hours after Dalton had spoken, there was only one candidate left for the post of Foreign Secretary—Ernest Bevin. Bevin’s qualities, and particularly his personality, which is most powerful in a mass conference, have been frequently underrated by his critics and opponents—and sometimes overrated by his friends.
Bevin spoke on that occasion for an hour, and though he said nothing very original, though he proclaimed no new policy, though his speech contained none of the felicitous Churchillian phrases, he dominated that conference, and held it in rapt attention. He convinced the doubters, and converted his opponents by the sheer massiveness of his personality, which has always found its most effective expression in the large emotional conference, and not in the cold logic of a small private gathering.
On that occasion, Bevin had nothing to say about Palestine, and it did not loom large in his imagination. He had expressed at various times a general idea which had found much accord in the Labor movement: that it was necessary by large-scale development work to raise the standard of life in the Balkans and in the Middle East. Unless that were done, he argued, political solutions would be of no avail.
But now, immediately after the Blackpool conference, once the election was won and the Potsdam conference concluded, Bevin found himself pushed headlong into the Palestine problem. He is not a man who likes reading long memoranda, he does not work on the basis of investigating the details of the case, but he relies as a rule on his intuition to guide him as to what is right and what is wrong, and more particularly he relies on his judgment in choosing his advisors. The advisor he picked on the Palestine question was Harold Beeley.
As the Labor government’s policy in Palestine and toward the Jews and Arabs was in large measure, in the two years that followed, Mr. Bevin’s own policy, it is rewarding to look for a moment at his own past connection with the Palestine problem. It was comparatively slight. He has himself described it in a speech he made in June 1946. .“I came into this Jewish problem,” he said, “in the days—I think it was—of the 1929 Labor government, when Lord Passfield was Colonial Secretary. For my sins, I had to support a candidate in Whitechapel. Naturally, there was excitement. On one side of Whitechapel there was excitement about Catholic schools, and on the other side about Lord Passfield’s White Paper, and we had to win with both of those obstacles, and we did. I knew about Palestine before, but I had not studied it to the extent I did on that occasion. I read the Hope Simpson report, and all the reports from the Mandate right the way up. Dalton will remember that I got MacDonald to make Arthur Henderson the chairman of the committee. This committee amended the White Paper, and the Jews were very pleased at that time.”
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But except for that one by-election in Whitechapel eighteen years ago, Mr. Bevin had little if anything to do with the Palestine question. But he had a lot to do with certain Jews in another connection and this deeply colored his outlook in the years to come. Bevin during these years was General Secretary of Britain’s most powerful labor union—the Transport and General Workers’ Union. He was the complete master of this four hundred thousand strong union until his leadership was challenged by Communist infiltration. He remained the master of the union until he joined the government in 1940, but in the intervening years he had to fight many hard and acrimonious battles with the Communists in order to keep his control. And in this battle Bevin found often that his bitterest opponents in the union were Communists who happened to be Jews, or Jews who happened to be Communists. Either way, the connection became firmly planted in Bevin’s mind.
But that was past. He had, after the formation of the Labor government in the autumn of 1945, to address himself to the immediate problem. The Cabinet committee had reported, President Truman had addressed his letter to Mr. Attlee, the government had agreed not to cancel the White Paper of 1939; it was Bevin’s next move.
On a Wednesday afternoon he summoned the entire British and foreign press corps in London to meet him at the Foreign Office. He had just made a statement in Parliament on the appointment of the Anglo-American Committee to report on Palestine. He now made his appeal to the press.
With Harold Beeley at his side, he read a brief which evidently had been prepared for him by his department. Now and again he stopped reading, and inserted a remark of his own, such as that he staked his future on the successful outcome of his endeavors. About eighty hard-boiled newspapermen listened to him; all but two or three came away deeply moved and convinced that here was a man who meant business, and who would bring a new, refreshing touch to the handling of the Palestine problem. Bevin himself was convinced that this was what he had done. The Anglo-American Committee would report within one hundred and twenty days, and then he would act. Such was the picture that swayed not only public opinion in Britain, but also the Labor movement and the government itself. They really believed that this was the new approach with which Labor would fulfill its earlier promises.
Once the issue had been referred to the Anglo-American Committee, there was no further discussion of it in the Cabinet. The Labor Ministers had their plate full with domestic and international problems, and they were only too pleased that the intractable Palestine issue should be removed from their agenda, while it was sub judice.
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Meanwhile, however, other factors were at work that were to affect the outlook of the Labor Ministers far more profoundly than the studies of the commission. British strategy was being transformed. At that time the Middle East was rated very highly by the government’s advisors on the Imperial General Staff. There was no talk of withdrawal, and no consideration given to any policy that might weaken the British position in the Middle East. The Foreign Office developed its relations with the Arab states, and argued increasingly that they were the whole basis of British strength in the Middle East, and it was at that crucial moment—the Anglo-American Commission was just concluding its deliberations—that the government’s military advisors submitted their views to the Cabinet, and also drew the same conclusions: Arab friendship was to come über alles in the Middle East.
The Anglo-American Committee report was interpreted by the government’s military and Foreign Office advisors as the equivalent of the opening up of the Arab states to the full blast of Russian influence. At that time there was a growing movement among the Palestine Arabs, among Egyptians, and among a large section of Syrians and Iraqis, that looked with growing favor and hope towards Russia. In Palestine, Dr. Khaledi, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, openly proclaimed that the Arabs would turn to Russia for help. In Egypt, the sections of the population that looked to Russia for assistance in getting the British out of Egypt extended considerably beyond the left-wing parties; some support for the idea was encouraged even by the entourage of King Farouk. In Iraq, pro-Russian ideas were infiltrating among the Kurdish tribesmen, and the left-wing movement was advancing rapidly—and it was pro-Russian, not pro-British. Finally, there was tension about Russian pressure on Turkey.
It was therefore against this background of near-panic among the ruling regime in the Middle East, with some of them prepared, apparently, to exchange Russian backing for British support, that the British military and Foreign Office experts read the recommendations of the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry. It was at a time also when it was the British, and not the Americans, who were involved in an open clash with the Russians; it was Bevin who was engaged in the Security Council in the struggle with the Soviet Union over the evacuation of Persia. All these combined issues were therefore brought before the Cabinet. The Labor Ministers were told that to implement the report would throw the Arabs into the hands of Russia, and jeopardize the independence of Turkey and British control of the eastern Mediterranean.
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This was the comment on the report as it came from the Foreign Office and the Chiefs of Staff to the Cabinet of twenty Labor Ministers. A word must be said here of the procedure of the Cabinet in such circumstances. The military report is presented in summarized form by the Prime Minister, who is also the Minister of Defence; the Foreign Office report is presented by the Foreign Secretary. Neither goes into details. Each speaks for perhaps ten minutes, certainly no longer than a quarter of an hour. The Labor Cabinet which listened to these reports included eight or nine avowed supporters of Zionists, but not a single authority on military affairs or on the Middle East. There was no one among them who had the knowledge or the authority to challenge the technical reports on which their conclusions were to be based. Even political discussions on the wider issues of policy are comparatively rare in the Cabinet. A Cabinet meeting rarely lasts more than two hours. In that time numerous decisions affecting the departments of the other Ministers present have to be taken.
Any Minister who raises general issues is liable to be unpopular for wasting the time of Ministers who are already overwhelmed with departmental work. Furthermore. this departmentalization has gone further in the present Labor government than in any previous administration. It is only on the rarest of occasions that a Minister will discuss issues which are the province of one of his colleagues in the Cabinet.
It would be fair to say, therefore, that in these last two years—certainly until the United Nations discussions reached a crisis—there was never a full discussion on the Palestine issue inside the British Cabinet. This was certainly true in this instance after the presentation of the Anglo-American Committee’s report. Following the warnings uttered by the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary in the light of their expert advice, the Cabinet simply referred the matter for further negotiations with the Americans, and left the details to be settled by the Foreign Office and the military authorities.
Meanwhile, another, and in some ways decisive factor appeared on the scene. Jewish public opinion in Palestine was becoming increasingly impatient of delays, and the answers by Labor Ministers were becoming increasingly sharp and intemperate; one had the impression that they were not only replying to public criticism, but also trying to still their own unquiet consciences by the very vehemence of their answers. The situation grew worse. Terrorism in Palestine increased and the British appeared helpless in the face of it. On the one hand, pressure on the Haganah leaders in Palestine not to leave the initiative in the hands of the dissidents was matched in London by pressure of the military for a free hand to deal with the Jews in Palestine by means of drastic measures. The government resisted or hesitated, but as the summer of 1946 wore on, the crisis was clearly coming to a head.
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The straw that broke the camel’s back was the blowing up of the bridges in Palestine by the Haganah. It was a challenge to British authority which even the government could no longer ignore without coming into open conflict with its own military advisors. At the crucial moment, the military was able to produce copies of intercepted messages that showed at least a degree of connivance by the Jewish Agency executive in the violent measures of the Haganah.
Matters were now no longer in the hands of the government. Approval was given to the arrest of Jewish Agency leaders and widespread searches in the settlements. Shortly afterwards there were second thoughts in the government about the wisdom of this policy, but before these found expression there came the Irgun’s blowing up of the King David Hotel, with its death-roll of over ninety.
This marked the breach that has not been repaired to this day. A new element now entered into the discussions, which had hitherto been completely absent, at least in the open expressions of the Labor Ministers. A deep bitterness against Palestine Jews now drowned most of the earlier sentiments, even among the Ministers who had favored Zionism. Anyone who was, at that time, in close touch with the Labor movement here and with its members in the government, could not fail to sense this transformation. It was a penalty of terrorism which its advocates had never calculated. For the first time, perhaps, the out and out pro-Arab policy of the Foreign Office had now the support of the majority of the British population, and also the support of the Labor movement. The emotional issue drowned all other calculations. There was now no one to challenge Mr. Bevin, for no great body in the Labor movement objected any longer to the road he had taken. However, the emotions did not last, and while Mr. Bevin took part in the satellite peace conference in Paris, something like a second honeymoon between the British government and the Jewish Agency seemed to be under way.
The Morrison plan had been proposed, and private talks with members of the Jewish Agency executive raised high hopes inside the British government that a settlement was at last possible. Then, suddenly, the Agency rejected the plan, and the informal talks ceased.
That was the turning point in Mr. Bevin’s own attitude. He became embittered. When later in the year there were further talks with the Arabs and the Jews in London, Mr. Bevin was inclined to listen to his advisors who argued that it was not necessary to make further concessions to the Zionist demands. Particularly Mr. Bevin was angered by the attitude of the American Zionists and the American government, and in this, too, he had the support of the great majority of British public opinion. Britain was increasingly facing economic difficulties at home, and was becoming increasingly sensitive to outside pressure. The evident failure of the British administration in Palestine was now a sore point; neither the government nor the public liked to face it. The sense of guilt was therefore easily transferred to the Americans, and it must be said that a great many individual members of all parties who were bitterly critical of British policy, also shared this anger at American pressure without American responsibility.
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The days when support for the Zionist cause ranked among the many high ideals that found adherents among the leading men of all parties had definitely passed, but the full depth of misunderstanding had yet to be plumbed. That came with the hanging of the two British sergeants in Nathanya. I am here not concerned with the faults of the British government and the errors of the military and civil administration in Palestine, which may have contributed in the end to this outrage. These facts simply did not rank in British calculations when the news was published that the two sergeants had been hanged. There had been other outrages and other acts of terrorism with far greater casualties which had not aroused such feeling among the British public. .(Even so, the excesses that took place in Manchester and Liverpool were those of a tiny minority.) It is of course difficult to describe what forty million people really feel and think, but on this issue it is safe to say that once again an emotional wave swept over British public opinion, and left behind it the silt of the present policy of the British government.
A revulsion of feeling that affected the government as much as public opinion of all parties found expression in the one demand: quit Palestine without delay. Mr. Bevin’s earlier claim that British control over the Middle East was vital, and that the withdrawal of British troops from Palestine would adversely affect the pay-packets of the British workers, was swept aside as irrelevant. Strategic, economic, and political arguments were impatiently overruled. The mood was set for the Creech-Jones and Cadogan speeches at the United Nations outlining Britain’s intention to leave Palestine.
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