In times when the month—by—month march of events is of such a character as to give little comfort to the hopes of men in general, and perhaps of Jews in particular, it is the thankless but necessary task of the writer of this department to winnow out the facts from the welter of belief, propaganda, actuality, and emotion that constitutes present—day public information and opinion.
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Mohandas Gandhi lay dead, and the world was a poorer place. He had embodied, as perhaps no other statesman had, mankind’s will to an order based not on force, but on justice. At any time, and under any circumstances, his death would have brought a sense of immediate personal tragedy to hundreds of millions, in his own and other lands. True, one knew that at seventy-nine he had already survived three times the average span of life among his countrymen. Even his jesting statements that he would live to the age of a hundred and forty could not erase the consciousness that he, who had surmounted so many human frailties, was subject to the ultimate one. But though one might know that Gandhi must some day die, one could never fully accept it. For he was too much needed.
Yet even Gandhi’s death, at a time when he seemed to stand almost alone as a bulwark against the outbreak of unchecked slaughter, was less terrifying than the manner of it. The death by an assassin’s bullet of this man, who had sought no man’s harm and every man’s good, seemed to challenge the assumptions on which the existence of a rational society was possible, and to call upon every man to examine himself for the roots of the evil which had flowered and threatened the moral security of all. For Gandhi died because of his virtues, not in spite of them, and at the hands of one whom he had benefited, not injured. Nor was his assassin acting in the darkness of ignorance, for he was an educated man—as were those who devised Maidanek, and those others who defended lynching in the halls of the United States Congress. But, at the same time, Gandhi’s life offered testimony to the power of love and truth. For without arms and in all humility, he had humbled the armed might of a proud empire. He had made his voice heard among fratricidal mobs, and they had desisted from mutual slaughter. He had been gentle with the weak and lowly, and stem with the exalted and those in the seats of the mighty, and both had loved and followed him. He had reached through prison bars to embrace his jailers, and had made them his friends and admirers. And his death was mourned, not only by those he had liberated and served, but by those from whom he had freed them.
The work of Gandhi, like that of any statesman, could not be fully judged until long after his death. How much of it would stand, and how much be swept away, remained to be seen. So, too, did the extent to which it might be necessary in the light of the future to alter the direction of his building. But, whatever might come, he had never worked with methods which were in any measure self-defeating. And in this he was alone among the leaders of his time.
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India after Gandhi
For the moment, Gandhi in death seemed even more powerful than he had been in life. The preachers of communal hate, against whom he had fought and who had been responsible for his death, shrank back before the force of the popular reaction to his murder. The secret armed societies which had been arousing and conducting internecine strife were outlawed by a hitherto hesitant government, and their leaders arrested. The leading communal groups, partly from fear of public resentment and partly because they were genuinely shocked by the realization of what their activities had led to, announced their voluntary dissolution or withdrawal from politics. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian Socialists, who had consistently fought against communalism, found themselves strengthened.
The struggle which Gandhi had conducted for Indian freedom was over, and he had lived long enough to know at least the triumph of that achievement. The struggle, even more absorbing to him, for human brotherhood, was still and would long be unwon.
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In Palestine, the forces of a communalism similar to that against which Gandhi had fought, raged unchecked. (Indeed, the major groups which had carried on the propaganda of communal hate in India found in the Palestinian conflict a microcosm of their own. Thus Mohammed Ali Jinnah, whose Moslem League had precipitated the Indian clashes to serve its ends, pledged the support of Pakistan to the Arabs, as brother Moslems. And the Hindu Mahasabha, from whose ranks Gandhi’s murderer had come, saw the Zionists as allies in the struggle against Islam and—alone among Indian groups—endorsed their aims.)
Others, too, saw the struggle in Palestine as a part of their own conflict. In particular, the Russians regarded it as an opportunity to undermine Anglo-American hegemony in a strategically vital area. And to many in the United States and Great Britain, the problem of how to consolidate the position of the Western powers in the Middle East, and to combat Russian infiltration, took precedence over all other considerations. These threads ran through all the debates, and all the measures taken or avoided, in regard to Palestine. In the case of Russia, such considerations of power politics had produced support first for the Mufti and then for the Zionists. In the case of the Western powers, they were inextricably intermingled with other very different considerations as well. It was this merger of incompatibles which was, in great measure, responsible for the inconsistencies and hesitations which had characterized Western policy on Palestine.
But if the clashing forces in Palestine often seemed little more than pawns of big power politics, they were also forces which had an independent existence of their own. Political Zionism had made its first entrance on the stage of history under the tutelage of the British, for whom it was an instrument of policy in the First World War. But it had soon demonstrated that it was a genie that could not be returned to the bottle with the same gesture which had evoked it. Once Britain’s foster—child, political Zionism today had elevated Anglophobia almost to the rank of a basic principle.
Arab nationalism, similarly, had been encouraged by the powers for their own purposes, and at least some of its phenomenally rapid growth in the last quarter century could be traced to this fact. (It was perhaps this which had led Zionists—as well as others—to underestimate its real force and the depths of its roots in the Arab masses.) Today, however, it was a movement which might make alliances with one power or another, but could not be harnessed to any chariot. Nor was it, as events increasingly made clear, merely the instrument of a little clique of feudal rulers. True, the Arab princes were still, for the most part, able to ride the wave—as long as they were willing to go in its direction. When they attempted to defy it, however, they soon found themselves faced with the choice of giving in or going under. This was true even when they were acting in concert with one or another of the great powers. In Iraq, the British treaty, agreed to by Regent and cabinet, was defeated by popular resentment against the subordination to Britain which it appeared to entail. The cabinet of Premier Sayed Saleh Jabr was forced to resign, and the Premier himself to flee the country. As for Iraq’s princely rulers, they had no choice but to accept the result of the revolution, or to join the Premier abroad. In Egypt, the time when an anti-nationalist government could have held power by force was long since past. Now, the King and his court politicians felt themselves constrained to compete with the Wafd opposition in demonstrating the intensity of their Arab—and Egyptian—nationalism. In Lebanon, those politicians who had attempted to ally themselves with the declining power of France rather than the rising force of nationalism had found themselves swept into discard.
Indeed, although Palestine was still the cement of the Arab League, and its most spectacular field of action, the League’s activities in North Africa were perhaps of even greater potential importance. Here, it was in close contact with nationalist movements in Algeria, Tunisia, and both French and Spanish Morocco. Exiled leaders from all these countries frequented its headquarters and received moral and even occasional material support from it. The best known of these, of course, was Abd—el—Krim, hero of the Riff war against France and Spain, whose escape from French custody had been made possible by Egypt’s readiness to grant him asylum. It was interesting to note that the Arab League appeared to accept him, rather than the Sultan of Morocco, as leader of the nationalist forces in Morocco. Perhaps this indicated that the leaders of the League believed he possessed more popular support in Morocco than did the Sultan; perhaps it was the result of a suspicion on their part that if it came to a showdown the young Sultan, despite his demonstrative nationalism, would hesitate to risk his position by taking the lead in outright rebellion against his French and Spanish “protectors.” Whether they followed Abd—el—Krim or the Sultan, however, the people of Morocco were increasingly restive. Periodic riots in French Morocco had risen to a pitch not far short of rebellion at times; now in Tetuan, capital of Spanish Morocco, demonstrators defied Franco’s terror on a scale which was still unthinkable in Spain itself. And Spanish governments had fallen, before this, because they could not hold Morocco.
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The War in Palestine
But for the time being, whatever trouble Franco had to face in Morocco was fairly certain to come from the Moroccan people themselves, not from any assistance they would receive from the Arab League. For the latter had plans for Palestine which left it neither volunteers nor arms available for use in Morocco. As yet, the Arab states had committed only relatively small and poorly armed forces to the invasion—or, as the Arabs termed it, the defense—of Palestine. The British estimated the number of volunteers from other Arab states who had already entered Palestine at about 3,000. Zionists in Palestine thought that the actual number was about twice as great. Some estimates current in New York ran as high as 15,000. In any case, most of the invaders seemed as yet to have taken little or no part in the actual fighting, but to have distributed themselves through Arab Palestine to serve as stiffening for the indigenous population, and to set up a skeleton government and army for the day when the British left.
So far, too, Haganah was still able to point to the disproportion between its casualties and those of the Arabs as proof that its forces were far better trained and armed. But the superiority of Haganah’s armament was clearly decreasing. The Arabs, who in the first two months of fighting had seldom had any weapons more effective than rifles, were now frequently equipped with machine guns and sometimes with mortars as well. It was generally believed that these weapons came from the armories of Syria and Lebanon. So far, there was nothing to indicate that the richer and better—armed states of the Arab League had actually sent either volunteers in any significant numbers or armaments. It seemed probable that they were biding their time until the British left, and would then supply both.
It was this prospect, rather than any present inferiority, which made Zionists so anxious to secure access to additional stocks of arms for Haganah, and to replace or supplement it by a formally organized militia before the termination of the mandate. They feared the arrival of airplanes from Egypt, tanks from Saudi Arabia and Iraq—and perhaps whole regiments of well—equipped soldiers from the Arab Legion.
For the moment, the embargo on the shipment of arms from the United States to the Middle East cut off one major potential source of supply from both Zionists and Arabs. But other sources would be available to the new states. Britain was bound by treaty to supply arms to the Arab states, and it did not seem likely that any precautions she might take would prevent such arms from reaching the Arabs in Palestine. And Russia, whose oil had fueled Mussolini’s planes in Ethiopia and Spain, was no more averse to supplying both sides from her own stocks and those of her satellites than she had been then. Likewise, both the Arab League and the Zionists were said to be negotiating with Czechoslovakia for the products of the Skoda works.
Thus there seemed little prospect that a shortage of arms on either side would cause any notable reduction in the present rate of something over a hundred deaths a week in the civil war, even while the British remained. And in some circles there was talk of a rate of a thousand a day, once the restraining influence of the British was gone.
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Every day made it clearer that, if bloodshed on a terrible scale was to be avoided, the United Nations would have to take steps either to enforce the decision in favor of partition, or to revise it. The latter approach was implied in a wireless message from Dr. Judah L. Magnes to the New York Times. Dr. Magnes declared:
“In discussions of the Palestine question, it seems to be taken for granted that the Council can provide for the security of Palestine only through dispatch here of armed forces.
“But before using force the Security Council must first of all, in accordance with Article 33 of the Charter, call upon parties to a dispute to ‘seek solution by negotiation, enquiry, conciliation, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements or other peaceful means of their own choice.’ In this regard the Council has had real success in Indonesia. . . .
“Why should not some similar procedure, with appropriate modifications, be tried as a first measure in reference to Palestine? There has been sufficient trouble here, and who knows what suffering and sorrow the morrow might bring? . . . Arabs have been aggressors. Jews have put up stout defense. But defense soon becomes ‘active’ and we are now confronted day by day with reprisals on one side and on the other. . . . It comes within the prescribed functions of the Council to seek first of all a solution of this conflict through ‘peaceful’ means of their own choice.
“It is not yet too late. There are still many Jews, Arabs, Christians and Moslems who are eager for a great concerted effort at conciliation and cooperation.
“The first need in the Palestine situation is for a truce. Will not the Council invite the Arabs and Jews to lay down their arms so that the Council may have an opportunity of canvassing possibilities of mediation and conciliation?”
The response of Zionist leaders, and of their political advocates, was to denounce any talk of compromise and to repudiate all “so—called moderates.” They demanded the full Assembly plan, and called for the immediate arming of a Jewish militia and the creation of an international force to supplement and assist it.
If such a force was to be constituted, action at Lake Success was overdue. When, on November 29, the Assembly adopted the Partition Report, it already knew that Britain would be surrendering the mandate on May I 5. It knew, too, that the Arabs were determined to resist the “solution” which it was adopting. If an international force was to be formed for the purpose of implementing the Assembly’s decision, five and a half months hardly seemed more than an adequate time—particularly since there was not even an approach to agreement on the constitution of such a force. Yet the Partition Commission permitted half that time to elapse before, on February 6, it finally “decided to refer to the Security Council the problem of providing that armed assistance which alone would enable the Commission to discharge its responsibilities on the termination of the mandate.”
Certainly it was easy for the Commission to demonstrate that, if partition were to work, it would have to have the support of an international force. The Commission pointed out that the security situation was steadily worsening, and that from the beginning all indications had pointed to this development. It cited the “organized efforts by strong Arab elements inside and outside Palestine to prevent the implementation of the Assembly’s plan of partition and to thwart its objectives by threats and acts of violence.” It added that “certain elements of the Jewish community in Palestine continue to commit irresponsible acts of violence which worsen the security situation, although that community is generally in support of the recommendations of the Assembly.”
The Commission made it clear that it did not regard the provisions in the Assembly’s partition plan for militias in the Jewish and Arab states as an adequate answer to the problem of enforcement. While declaring its intention to make every effort to seek the cooperation of the Arabs of Palestine, the Commission declared: “Under the present circumstances . . . the Commission would not be able to select and establish in the proposed Arab state a Provisional Council of Government which would act ‘under the general direction of the Commission’ and would at the same time enjoy sufficient authority and popular support to function effectively. It will be equally impossible . . . to establish in the Arab state an armed militia over which the Commission is to exercise ‘general political and military control.’”
The Commission went on to say that the refusal of the mandatory power to permit the formation of a militia for the Jewish state before the termination of the mandate would make the security problem of that state much more difficult. It also indicated a more fundamental limitation to the usefulness of such a militia, asserting that: “The militia of the Jewish state . . . can, however, be responsible only for the security of that state, and it would be contrary to the Assembly’s plan if a militia were to be used on the other side of the border for preventive or retaliatory action, however necessary such action might appear to be.” Here, its point of view was directly opposed to that of David Ben Gurion, who a week before had declared: “We shall reply with force, not only in the Jewish areas of Palestine but in the Arab areas and in those countries where Arab bands are concentrating.”
The Commission also saw no possibility of depending on the militia of the Jewish state in the city of Jerusalem, declaring that this “would not only be contrary to the plan of the General Assembly but would inflame passions and might provoke religious war.” And it stated that to permit the commission delimiting the boundaries of the two states to work under the protection of the militia of one “obviously would not be considered by the Commission.” And it warned that: “If, prior to the termination of the mandate, the policy of the mandatory power should not permit the formation of the militia envisaged in the Assembly’s plan, it may be taken for granted that the armed organizations in the two communities will continue to pursue their clandestine recruiting, with the result that on the termination of the mandate more or less disciplined and unified underground forces will abruptly emerge in the guise of security forces and will probably be arrayed against each other in organized combat, a development which was certainly not contemplated in the resolution of the General Assembly.” It was difficult to see, however, in what way this eventuality would be avoided by permitting the underground forces to assume the guise of security forces before the termination of the mandate, as some were actually suggesting.
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The Theory of Enforcement
The Commission, and others who saw implementation of the partition plan by an international army as the only possible way out, held that the prestige and future value of the United Nations were at stake. Thus the Commission asserted: “A basic issue of international order is involved. A dangerous and tragic precedent will have been established if force, or the threat of the use of force, is to prove an effective deterrent to the will of the United Nations.”
Unfortunately, however, it could be held that there already existed ample precedent for the forcible nullification by both member and non-member states of the decisions of the General Assembly. That body had set up the Balkan and Korean commissions in precisely the same manner as it had set up the Palestine Commission, and by much larger majorities. It had charged them with specific duties. But the Balkan Commission had been successfully defied by the governments of Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria, all of whom had gone so far as to bar it from their territory. And the Korean Commission had been prevented by the Soviet authorities from entering the northern half of Korea—an area in which Russia did not even claim sovereign rights. Again, the Union of South Africa had ignored decisions of the Assembly in regard to its treatment of its Indian inhabitants and its administration of Southwest Africa. If, after all this, the UN still had enough prestige for the Palestine issue to be a threat, it was even conceivable that it might survive failure there, too.
It was also suggested that the United Nations would not necessarily suffer a defeat of the first magnitude if, on re-examining an Assembly recommendation arrived at on the basis of certain assumptions, it should find these assumptions erroneous and revise the decision. And perhaps the basic assumption of the entire partition scheme had been that it would be practically self-enforcing. Whether there had ever been any reason, other than the difficulty of devising an agreed method of enforcement, for arriving at this conclusion, was beside the point. The fact remained that this assumption had been accepted and acted upon and was every day proving itself more incorrect.
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The Practice of Enforcement
Apparently, the United States, when it supported partition, had not done so with the expectation that it would require the kind of armed enforcement that was now clearly needed. On the other hand, it was morally indefensible to permit the situation to degenerate into mass slaughter. It was the merging of these two considerations that was in all likelihood behind the insistence of Warren R. Austin, U. S. delegate to the Security Council, that an armed force be limited to the preservation of peace and have no part in the enforcement of partition.
It was suggested in some quarters that this would still permit the creation of a force which would preserve the peace while the Palestine Commission carried out the partition resolution. While Mr. Austin’s words did not appear to make this interpretation impossible, they gave little substantial ground for reaching it.
Perhaps more important, however, than the precise relation of the preservation of peace to the enforcement of partition, was the question of whether there would actually be any force available to do either. The perspective here did not give grounds for optimism. For the procedure suggested by Mr. Austin involved further delay—and even that procedure had not been agreed on, and would not without consideration of other proposals and further debate.
Meanwhile it was doubtful whether Zionists fully understood the implications which the sending of such a force would have for their position. It seemed at least probable that the existence of an international force would require the complete subordination to it of the militia of the Jewish state, and would give that body little scope for independent action. Certainly any international force would feel itself in duty bound to prevent, so far as lay within its power, the type of “aggressive defense” which formed so important a part of Haganah’s current tactics. And conflict with the Irgun and Sternists could scarcely be avoided by it, if they persisted in their present policy, and there was no sign whatsoever that they intended to change. Again, the British had permitted defensive operations by Haganah in the city of Jerusalem. But since the presence of any partisan armed groups within that city was specifically forbidden under the Assembly plan, this offered another source of potential trouble.
At the same time, it was not altogether clear exactly what the Commission hoped to accomplish with the aid of its army, if it got one. If it merely planned to assist the militia of the Jewish state in defending the boundaries of that state and preventing internal disorder in it, its task seemed practicable, though probably long drawn out. But if it hoped also to set up a friendly government within the territory of the Arab state, or to create a functioning economic union, or to establish harmony in the city of Jerusalem, more than force seemed requisite. Hence even the creation of an effective implementing force would not be adequate to carry out the partition resolution if the Arabs remained hostile and non-cooperative.
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Palestine in Washington
Whatever aspects of the problem of implementation might still remain doubtful, one thing was certain. The Red Army’s newspaper, Red Star, was barking up the wrong tree when it charged that the United States was assembling forces in the Mediterranean preparatory to “invading” Palestine. Nothing was farther from the wishes and thoughts of American statesmen than the dispatch of American forces to Palestine. Nor was this only a consequence of the fear, prevalent in the Defense and State Departments as well as elsewhere, that any further involvement on the part of the United States would make the destruction of American oil installations in the Middle East almost inevitable. Important as this prospect undoubtedly was in the minds of many, there was also the fear, among both government officials and American Jews, that United States army casualties would have implications for the position of Jews in America that neither was anxious to contemplate. This would be true even if American soldiers were killed by Arabs while “defending Jewish interests”; but what if, as would be almost inevitable, some were killed by the Irgun and the Sternists?
It was the fear of the effects of the “Jewish vote,” actually or allegedly placing Palestine aspirations over American interests, that led to the call in various quarters for bi-partisan agreement to take the Palestine question out of American politics. But there were far too many American politicians of both major parties who had made “playing politics with human misery” their stock in trade for this policy to have much chance of success.
From another quarter, too, every effort was being made to exploit the emotions of American Zionists for political ends. The Communist party and Henry Wallace were laying it on with a trowel, and for the moment very profitably. Political observers agreed in finding this one of the chief factors in the victory of the American Labor party candidate, Leo Isacson, in a special Congressional election in the Bronx. True, Isacson’s Democratic and Liberal party competitors attempted to compete with him in protestations of pro-Zionism. (This was especially true of the Liberal party candidate, Dean Alfange, a leading figure in various pro-Zionist organizations. That did not prevent Isacson’s supporters, however, from charging that the campaign of Alfange was financed by King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia!) But they were limited in what they could promise by the fact that they were campaigning as supporters of the Administration. Isacson and his stump speakers such as Henry Wallace, on the other hand, needed only to denounce. Perhaps the high point of this campaign was Wallace’s charge that President Truman “still talks Jewish but acts Arab.” (The newspapers reported that Wallace had said “acts Aryan.” But Wallace—who has seldom opened his mouth in the presence of the press without finding subsequently that he has been embarrassingly “misquoted”—corrected this subsequently to “acts Arab.”) As for the Republican candidate, it seemed apparent when the totals were published that only Arabs in the district had voted for him.
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The defection of New York and California votes to Wallace might quite conceivably cost Mr. Truman the election in November. But its long-term effect on American politics seemed likely to be less than that of the increasing division between the Democrats of the North and those of the solid South. The fact that the revolt of the Southern Bourbons appeared to be turning into a regular quadrennial event, and that in 1940 and 1944 it had petered out by election day, was apt to obscure its real importance. It was just possible that there was a limit to the length of time that the Ku Klux Klan and Northern liberals could be expected to pull in double harness. If the liberals did not object, the Klan did.
This year, the revolt was precipitated by President Truman’s special message to Congress on civil rights. In this, he called for the implementation of many of the proposals for the elimination of racial discrimination which had been offered by his Committee on Civil Rights in November. Negro leaders pointed out, however, that while the President asked Congress for legislation on such subjects as a permanent FEPC, he had not wiped out discrimination in the army and navy, where it was a matter of administrative discretion. Some of them pointed out that even Northern states were forced to maintain Jim Crow militias, and that the army had only grudgingly permitted New Jersey an exception when it had amended its constitution to include an absolute ban on discrimination or segregation. These things were indisputable, despite the President’s formal directive to eliminate discrimination from the armed services “as rapidly as possible.” But they failed to reconcile the unreconstructed South.
Most violent of the rebels was Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi, who proposed that the Southern states instruct their electors to vote for a Southern candidate for President, so as to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where each state would have only one vote. A similar movement had started in Mississippi in 1944, and had received substantial support in Texas and Louisiana. However, the move miscarried in all three states. In Texas, where a relatively large part of the population voted, a rank—and—file revolt swept the secessionists out of control of the party. In Louisiana, the remnants of the Huey Long machine rallied to the defense of party unity, and the rebellion was squelched. And in Mississippi, the late Senator Theodore G. Bilbo saved the state for the New Deal.
Now, however, Bilbo was dead and Mississippi was again in doubt. But there seemed little chance that any of the other Southern states, except possibly South Carolina, would consider going to the length of withholding electoral votes in November. What several of the Southern organizations did announce their intention of doing, however, was withholding from the national organization any share of the funds collected at their local Jefferson—Jackson day dinners. This was a gesture which made sense in terms of keeping the boys at home well-fed, without seriously jeopardizing their chances of continuing to eat adequately during the next four years if Truman were re-elected.
However, if Truman lost the election, much of the Southern rebellion might begin to take a permanent form. The South was still held to the Democratic party—despite its disapproval of the racial egalitarianism advocated by Roosevelt and fought for by Truman—by the power of federal patronage. But if the Democrats were to lose control of the federal government, it seemed altogether likely that a more realistic political alignment would soon develop both nationally and within the South. There was no guarantee that such a realignment would make life more comfortable for minorities.
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If the civil rights legislation recommended by the President seemed to have little chance of getting past the almost certain filibuster which it faced, the Stratton bill was generally regarded as likely to pass this year. Even without it, however, the United States was expected to admit more displaced persons than any other country in the course of the coming year. (The great majority of these—like the great majority of all those in the displaced persons camps—would of course not be Jews.) To assist in the resettlement of an expected 375,000 displaced persons in the course of the coming year—75,000 in Palestine, 100,000 in the United States, and 200,000 in all other countries put together—the International Refugee Organization had allocated $56,000,000 of its $155,000,000 budget. But this allotment, some $60 a person, seemed little for the need.
Moreover, it seemed regrettably likely that the supply of displaced persons would for some time continue to outstrip the demand. This was true especially of those who had fled their native lands for political reasons. Gleichschaltung was going on apace in the countries of Eastern Europe, and even rigid police control of the frontiers seemed unlikely to stop the flow of refugees in the near future. In Hungary, where a rank and file revolt in the Social Democratic party had a few months before threatened to take control from the leaders who had made it an appendage of the Communists, it was now suddenly announced that all those leaders who had opposed Communist domination had “resigned” from their party and government posts. In Bulgaria and Rumania, the puppet parties which had given the Communist regimes of those countries the appearance of “united fronts” were now being officially absorbed into the Communist party. At the same time, other organizations which had retained any trace of independence were being similarly brought into line. Thus, the Rumanian Government dissolved the executive board of the Federation of Rumanian Jewish Communities and installed a new—and Communist—led—one.
In one country of Eastern Europe, however, democracy seemed to be dying hard. When the Communist Minister of the Interior of Czechoslovakia began to dismiss all non Communist policemen, all the other parties—which together still possessed a majority in Parliament—joined in protest. The non-Communist Minister of Justice, furthermore, went so far as to expose the participation of the Ministry of the Interior in an attempt to hush up the illegal acquisition of arms by Communist groups. The response of the Communists was to seize all government offices by armed force. They still maintained the facade of a multi—party government, assisted by the capitulation of most Social Democratic party leaders and President Benes. But the end seemed near.
Life for the Jews—and others—in Eastern Europe did not seem likely to be altogether peaceful for some time to come. But, unfortunately, as matters stood today, they seemed to have little more chance of finding a solution to their problems elsewhere than they did at home.
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