Recollections of a British Zionist
A Nation Reborn.
by Richard H. S. Crossman.
Atheneum. 171 pp. $3.50.
When the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry landed in Palestine in 1946, Chaim Weizmann referred to the “excellent men” like Richard Crossman who were on it. Crossman was a Labor M.P., picked for the commission job by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, and hence, one would imagine, without any particular bias in favor of Zionism. But Crossman was also an intellectual—an assistant editor of the New Statesman, an extramural lecturer at Oxford, and a noted writer on political theory—and he went singularly well-equipped, having first visited Dachau. Now, almost fifteen years later, Crossman tells us that his involvement with Palestine was “the most thrilling and probably the most useful episode in my political life.” In the years since, he has even become something of a Zionist’s Zionist: this book (an enlargement of three Chaim Weizmann Memorial Lectures which Crossman gave in Israel) is essentially a specialist’s work. It takes fundamentals for granted and grapples beguilingly with such problems as Weizmann’s relation with the British, what went wrong with the Mandate, and where Ben Gurion’s Israel now stands vis-à-vis England.
Although the book is subtitled The Israel of Weizmann, Bevin and Ben Gurion, it is in fact less about Israel than about the British: Crossman’s excuse for lecturing the Israelis about themselves is based not so much on what he knows as on what he is. The British Gentile Zionist is essentially a romantic—like the British Arabist. The appeal of the Arab for the British is in his primitiveness, his independence and inferiority; the Jew is cherished by the British Zionist because he was promised something both by God and by Balfour. There, however, the romantic impulses diverge, for the pro-Zionist is a radical; at a time when the Palestine issue was still open, he chose the whole-hog solution of Jewish statehood, while others fussed about the consequences. The British pro-Zionist is also an intellectual, with a feeling for history and a taste for argument—the Arabist is sentimental, with a hankering after Realpolitik. And while the Arabist simply moralizes, the pro-Zionist is, finally, an idealist, his vision is that of a great wrong righted, of a perfect culmination to the Jews’ tragic history.
Not that anything of all this is alluded to in Crossman’s book, but it is implicit in every line; what the author says is somehow less important than the sturdy British emotions that inform it. Thus in discussing Weizmann, Crossman appears a little put out with his hero for not being much of a socialist—indeed for being a bit of an imperialist. At the same time, he sees that this very contradiction in Weizmann gave him his special force. The problem of personal power and influence is of particular fascination for Crossman, and his browsing in the Weizmann Memorial Institute have yielded a scholarly and convincing picture of how Weizmann wielded such power: first in bringing about the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and again thirty years later in precipitating the partition vote at the United Nations.
Crossman’s thesis about the Mandate is that it failed not in its administrators or on minor policy errors, but because it came to represent an unworkable clash of obligations. Only in the 1920’s, and once again in 1945, might Jewish numbers have been vigorously and quickly built up (under a non-Jewish Governor, not Sir Herbert Samuel) ; but on the first occasion the Russian Revolution intervened to stop the flow of immigrants, and on the second the obstacle was Ernest Bevin and the entrenched Arabists in Whitehall. Thereafter, conflict was inevitable: the spirit of the age was for national self-determination, not imposed solutions, and no one in authority regarded the Jews as a nation at the time. Ernest Bevin, whose paranoia about Jewish influence Crossman charts with perspicacity, became so caught up in the web of his own policy that there was no going back even when its futility was obvious to him. All this is convincing because Crossman’s sense of history is informed by intuition. He does not even mind letting his sensibilities outrun his affiliations: his intense preoccupation with British “obligations” overseas is rare in a Laborite.
Crossman leaves us perhaps a little too unworried about Israel. He is proud of it—as the only stable democracy planted since the war—and he cannot resist a footnote to the effect that the first clerk of the Knesset borrowed his copy of Erskine May (the famous textbook on British parliamentary procedure) and has not yet returned it. We are left by Crossman with a feeling that Israel is a job done—instead of an adventure whose ultimate success is even now not assured.
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