A Calculated Risk. Evan M. Wilson
to assure the continuation of Jewish immigration, which they hoped would lead to an eventual Jewish majority in Palestine. If the White Paper were to remain in force, the British would become the chief hindrance, rather than the chief help, to the achievement of their aims. These considerations raised the possibility that in the future the movement would pass into the hands of activists who, unlike Weizmann, were prepared to mount a direct challenge to the British government.
Dr. Weizmann, however, still had immense prestige among Zionists and he was to dominate the movement for some time to come. I recall vividly the impression he was to make on the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946 (see Chapter 6), with his powerful personality, his thoughtful presentation, and his close physical resemblance to Lenin (we were told that during the First World War, when both men were living in Switzerland, they were often mistaken for each other.)
THE AMERICAN JEWISH COMMUNITY
By 1942 the Jewish community in the United States numbered between four and five million. In 1939 it had accounted for only 29 percent of world Jewry, but this percentage was to rise substantially with the wartime extermination of European Jews by the Nazis. By the end of the war, roughly half of the Jews in the world would be located in the United States.
American Jews enjoyed an influence in politics out of proportion to their numbers because they were concentrated in a small number of key cities and states. They were highly organized and were active participants in a variety of causes but traditionally had not shown much enthusiasm for Zionism. Membership in American Zionist organizations, which stood at 150,000 in 1918, had declined to fifty thousand by 1938. As a result, however, of such developments in the middle and late 1930s as the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States, the Arab revolt in Palestine, and the White Paper, Zionist membership had climbed back to the 150,000 figure by 1942. (By way of comparison, total membership in all U.S. Zionist groups reached just under one million by 1948, the year of Israel's independence.)
Leading American Zionists at the time of our country's entry into the war, each of whom at one time or another served as president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), were such figures as Louis Lipsky, Emmanuel Neumann, Rabbi Israel Goldstein, and of course Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver.
Wise and Silver, who will appear frequently in this narrative, were very different in personality and approach. (Observers often compared Wise with Weizmann and Silver with Ben Gurion.) Both were Reform rabbis. Wise, the senior of the two, had served as president of the ZOA in the 1930s. From 1925 to 1949 he was president of the American Jewish Congress, a Zionist body which was virtually indistinguishable from the ZOA. Rabbi Wise was a Democrat and a great admirer of President Roosevelt, with whom he carried on an extensive correspondence for many years—it was said that Roosevelt took his well-known expression “the forgotten man” from one of Wise's sermons. Wise believed in working through the administration in Washington and following more conventional methods. Silver, a Republican, distrusted Roosevelt and government officials in general. His motto, which he took from the Old Testament (Psalm 146:3) and frequently cited when criticizing the administration, was: “Put not your trust in princes.” He believed in techniques of mass persuasion and was eminently successful in applying them.
Any account of the Jewish community in our country should also mention the influential American Jewish Committee, the leading non-Zionist body in the United States. This group did not come out for a Jewish state in Palestine until 1947, but it was in frequent touch with us in matters affecting the Jewish National Home (to which it gave general support) and the refugee question. Maurice Wertheim was president of the Committee in 1942; he was succeeded the next year by Justice Joseph M. Proskauer, who remained at the head of the group for many years. Another prominent figure on the Committee was Jacob Blaustein, who was chairman of the Executive.
Between the outbreak of war in 1939 and Pearl Harbor, the mood of American Jews was ostrichlike, characterized by isolationism and apathy. In the months immediately following our entry into the war, they showed a reluctance to agitate the Palestine question, fearing this might be harmful to the war effort. Their attitude had not yet been influenced by the Nazi extermination program, which did not become generally known until late in 1942.
U.S.INTERESTS
In December 1941 when the United States entered the war, our interests in the Middle East were not extensive. The isolationism that had dominated our foreign relations in the 1920s and 1930s had contributed to our playing a minor role in the area. It was true that every American president beginning with Woodrow Wilson had gone on record in favor of the Jewish National Home and that this was the purport of a resolution passed by the Congress in 1922. These declarations of policy, together with the support extended over the years by individual Americans of the Jewish faith to the development of the National Home, had undoubtedly created an American interest in the Jewish side of the Palestine dispute. On the other hand, such stake as we had in the Middle East at the time seemed to be more on the Arab side than on the Jewish. Our commercial interests, our missionaries and educators (going back to the mid-nineteenth century, the American University of Beirut, for example, having been founded in 1866) all combined to start us off on a good footing with the Arab world in the years following the First World War. It was already evident that there was a latent conflict between our Jewish and our Arab interests in Palestine. This conflict was to become much more obvious in the next few years.
Since it has sometimes been alleged that, even by the time of Pearl Harbor, United States’ oil interests were so deeply involved in the Arab world as to affect our handling of the Palestine question, it might be worthwhile to put this matter in perspective. Up to 1942, American companies had invested in oil exploration and production in four Arab countries: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iraq, and Kuwait. Only in the first two of these was there 100 percent American participation, and in all four of them production, which amounted to only a fraction of that attained in later years, was greatly curtailed after war broke out in 1939. In Saudi Arabia, oil had not been found in commercial quantities until 1938. In that year, output totaled just over one thousand barrels per day, as compared with between seven million and eight million. It was not until after the war was over that the United States started becoming involved in the development of Middle East oil on a massive scale.
The conflicting pledges respecting Palestine made during the First World War remained to plague the British administrators during the more than thirty years that they governed the country. They had in fact undertaken a virtually impossible task—as the Peel Commission itself recognized in 1937 when it pointed out that the Mandate was “unworkable.” How, indeed, to establish a national home (whatever that meant) in Palestine for the Jewish people (however defined) without prejudicing the rights of the great majority of the population (the Arabs), was a problem which the British were never able to solve. It is hardly surprising that they often seemed to vacillate between the rival claims of the two parties.
As the situation in the Middle East evolved in the prewar period and as the Axis powers intensified their bid for Arab support, the British found themselves more and more in the position of making decisions that ran counter to Jewish aspirations, culminating in the White Paper of 1939. By this time, the British were really making decisions about Palestine for reasons that had little to do with Palestine, that is, for reasons related to the situation in the Arab world and its implications for British strategic interests.
After war broke out, the major British concern, as far as the Middle East was concerned, was to maintain the lifeline to India and to prevent the Germans and Italians from taking over the area. The decision taken in August 1940, shortly after the fall of France and just before the Battle of Britain, to reinforce the British Eighth Army in Egypt at the expense, if need be, of the defense of the British Isles, shows better than anything else the vital importance that British strategists attached to the region. Further evidence of this was provided in June 1941 with the creation in Cairo of the post of Minister of State Resident in the Middle East, with cabinet rank a position held successively by Oliver Littleton (later Lord Chandos), Richard G. Casey, and Lord Moyne.
Although a majority of Winston Churchill's war cabinet, which held office from May 1940 to July 1945, were in sympathy with the Zionist cause (notably the Prime Minister himself), the issue was not of immediate urgency, certainly not in comparison with the problems of the war,