A Calculated Risk. Evan M. Wilson
own military organization, the underground Haganah (meaning “defense”). So well organized was the Yishuv that all of us who followed the Palestine scene knew long before the Jewish state came into being that if the Jews were to secure their state Weizmann would be the president, Ben Gurion the prime minister, Shertok the foreign minister. Kaplan the finance minister, and so on. And this is what came to pass. Eventually I got to know all of the persons named and can testify that, individually and collectively, for sheer ability they were superior to the members of most European cabinets of the day.
The Yishuv was divided into a complex of political parties, with the Labor party, known as Mapai, which provided most of the leadership, generally having the support of the majority. To the right of the political spectrum were the religious parties and the so-called Revisionists, or New Zionists, a radical splinter group founded by the late Vladimir Jabotinsky which called for a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan. The Revisionists had their own illegal army, the Irgun Zvai Leumi or National Military Organization, headed by Menachem Begin who was to attract considerable world attention in later years and who in May of 1977 became Prime Minister of Israel.
It should be added that in the left wing of the Yishuv there was a substantial minority of Jews who favored a binational state of both Jews and Arabs.
THE ARAB COMMUNITY IN PALESTINE
The Arab community could not have been more different from the Jewish. The Arabs were split into factions and had never been successful in organizing themselves as a political entity. First of all, they were divided along religious lines, with the Muslims in the majority but with substantial Christian and Druze elements. In addition, there had always been great rivalry between the big landholding families, of which the most prominent were the Husseinis, who were violently anti-British, and the Nashashibis, who tended to be more conciliatory toward the Mandatory power. The head of the Husseini clan, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti, or chief Muslim dignitary of Jerusalem and president of the Supreme Muslim Council, had also headed an Arab Higher Committee formed in 1936 in an effort to unite all the different Arab factions during the revolt which the Arabs launched in that year in protest against continued Jewish immigration. Following the collapse of this rebellion in 1937, the Higher Committee was outlawed by the British authorities. The Mufti fled to Iraq, while his cousin and chief lieutenant, Jamal al-Husseini, escaped to Syria.
By the start of the Second World War, the Palestine-Arab community was in complete disarray, with no effective leadership. Although the White Paper had been designed chiefly as a bid for Arab support, it was not welcomed by most of the Arabs in the country, who agreed with the exiled Mufti in opposing any further Jewish immigration.
During the critical early years of the war, there were no disturbances on the part of the Palestine Arabs, but they showed next to no enthusiasm for the war effort. Arab enlistments in the British forces never came to more than nine thousand—another contrast with the Jews.
THE SITUATION IN THE ARAB EAST
By early 1942, the status of the various portions of the Arab world was as follows: Trans-Jordan was officially a part of the Palestine Mandate but had been exempted from the application of the Jewish National Home as early as 1922 and had its own regime under the Emir Abdullah, a member of the Hashemite dynasty;9 the Levant States (Syria and Lebanon) were a French mandate; Iraq, which had been a British mandate until 1932, was an independent kingdom ruled by another Hashemite, the young King Feisal. Since 1936 Egypt had been nominally independent, also with a young king, Farouk, who was beginning to show marked Italian sympathies. The British were permitted by treaty to maintain sizable bases in Egypt and to station troops there (as they also were in Iraq). After war broke out, Egypt became virtually an armed camp and was the principal base for British military operations in the Western Desert.
In the Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia had been united and independent under the strong leadership of King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, one of the giants of the Arab world. Yemen was the only other independent state in the Peninsula, as the various sheikhdoms along the Persian Gulf were under one form of British protection or another.
Thus at the time of the Second World War substantial portions of the Arab world were still under various types of Western tutelage, with the British in the paramount position nearly everywhere. The situation in the Arab countries was characterized, then as now, by acute rivalries, notably that between the Hashemites and the House of Saud. An Arab national movement had been in existence since before the First World War but had not yet proved to be an effective instrument of cooperation between the Arabs, even over the issue of Palestine. Indeed, when I went out to Egypt in 1938, there was some doubt on the part of many of us—and of many Egyptians—as to whether Egypt should be considered an Arab state. In briefing me for my assignment, the desk officer in the Department did not even mention the Palestine problem as a factor in U.S.-Egyptian relations. He confined himself to telling me that there was only one subject at issue between the United States and Egypt: our quota on long-staple cotton (which incidentally remains an issue to this day).
It is safe to say that up until the time of the British victory at Alamein in the Western Desert in the fall of 1942, the prevailing opinion among the Arabs was that the Allies were going to lose the war. In view of the gains made by the Axis in the Balkans and North Africa, this is not surprising. In the years preceding the war, moreover, the Arabs had been subjected to an intensive propaganda campaign on the part of the Germans and Italians. This was now stepped up. The Mufti, from his base in Iraq, engaged actively in anti-British intrigues throughout the Arab countries. In April 1941, he was instrumental in bringing about a coup in Iraq which installed a pro-Axis regime there under Rashid Ali al-Gailani. The British invoked their treaty and intervened militarily, overthrowing the Rashid Ali government in a short time. The Mufti again escaped, and by the end of the year had made his way to Germany. He was to spend the rest of the war in Berlin, directing Axis propaganda activities aimed at the Arabs and raising a Muslim force to fight against the Allies.
THE WORLD ZIONIST ORGANIZATION
The Zionist Organization, founded in 1897 by Theodor Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement, was an international body which by the late 1930s had branches in approximately fifty countries and a membership of just under one million Jews. The president of the Zionist Organization always served also as president of the Jewish Agency. Since 1920, with the exception of a short interval in the 1930s, these two positions had been held by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who was of Russian birth but had been a British subject for many years. He was to become the first president of Israel.
The highest Zionist organ was the biennial Congress, which had last met in August 1939 in Geneva, on the eve of the war. Sensing that a world crisis was fast approaching, the members of the Congress had delegated the supreme policy-making authority to the Inner General Zionist Council, which was based in Palestine.
The outbreak of war and the swift Nazi occupation of so large a part of Europe of course rendered Zionist activity impossible in many parts of the continent, as Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. The result was that in the first two years of the war the chief centers of Zionist activity were Jerusalem and London, where Dr. Weizmann continued to reside (he did not go to Palestine between 1939 and 1944).
Weizmann, although in his late sixties when war came and in failing health, remained a powerful figure in the movement. A chemist by profession, he had been of great service to the British government in the First World War, because of his discovery of a new process for making acetone, used in the manufacture of smokeless powder (it was said that schoolchildren all over England were put to gathering horse chestnuts, which formed the basis for Dr. Weizmann's formula). Through his connections with members of the British War Cabinet, he was largely responsible for getting the British government to issue the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
In subsequent years Weizmann had served as chief spokesman for the Zionists with the Mandatory government. He was a skillful negotiator and a believer in the policy of “gradualism,” that is, of working with the British to fulfill Zionist goals within the framework of the Mandate. This policy, however, had been severely shaken by the White Paper. The Zionists in fact were beginning to realize that the White Paper was going to be responsible for a fundamental change in their relations with the British, since it meant that they could no longer count