A Calculated Risk. Evan M. Wilson
to the forefront after the war was over.
An important aspect of British rule in Palestine, and one which was bitterly resented by the Jewish community, who considered that with their generally European background they were superior to the native Arabs, was that Palestine for administrative purposes came under the Colonial Office. It thus frequently happened that an official would find a tour of duty in Jerusalem, Nablus, or Haifa sandwiched between service in Kenya, Malaya, Nigeria, or other outposts of the Empire.
In the Churchill government the Colonial Secretary was Colonel Oliver Stanley. The ranking permanent official of the Colonial Office was Sir George Gater. He was regarded as hostile by the Zionists, although I have not been able to unearth any evidence to bear out this allegation. A key official of the Colonial Office who had already had considerable connection with the Palestine question, having served as secretary of the Peel Commission in 1936-37, was John M. Martin (now Sir John Martin). During the war years he was a member of Churchill's personal staff, but he kept up his connection with Palestine, partly by lunching regularly with Dr. Weizmann, who was living at the Dorchester Hotel in London. This provided liaison between the Prime Minister and the head of the Zionist Organization. After the war, Martin returned to the Colonial Office and as Assistant Under Secretary supervising the Mediterranean Department (which quaintly enough dealt with Palestine, Cyprus, Malta, and Gibraltar) and later Deputy Under Secretary, was intimately concerned with the Palestine question right up to the events of 1947-48. He was always one of the most cooperative of our British colleagues, and he has helped me with the preparation of this book. During the war years the British High Commissioners in Palestine were first Sir Harold MacMichael, then Lord Gort, and finally Lt. General Sir Alan Cunningham. Cunningham stayed until 1948 and thus was the last to hold this post.
The Colonial Office handled only the day-to-day administration of Palestine affairs. Foreign policy matters relating to Palestine were of course handled by the Foreign Office, specifically by its Eastern Department which throughout these years was headed by C. W. Baxter, a career official who later became Minister to Iceland. Baxter reported to the Superintending Undersecretary of State, Sir Maurice Peterson, another career man who was later Ambassador to Turkey. Baxter's position corresponded more or less to that of Gordon Merriam in the U.S. State Department and Peterson's to that of Wallace Murray or, later, Loy Henderson. The Foreign Office Palestine desk during these years was held by a succession of officers, notably H. A. Caccia (now Lord Caccia), later Ambassador to Washington, H. M. Eyres, R. M. Hankey (now Lord Hankey), and finally Harold Beeley (now Sir Harold), who was not then a career Foreign Service officer but who came to the Foreign Office in 1945 from the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House).
Beeley quickly showed himself to be a master of the intricacies of the Palestine problem. He continued to be associated with it during the consideration of the question at the United Nations in 1947 and 1948. As will be explained in Chapter 6, he and I worked closely together in 1945-46 as secretaries of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. We have been associated together since, and he has been unfailingly helpful to me.
When the Churchill government was turned out of office by the British electorate in the summer of 1945. Ernest Bevin became Foreign Secretary in the new Labour government, replacing Anthony Eden. For a short time George Hall was the Labour Colonial Secretary, but he was soon succeeded by Arthur Creech-Jones, a former trades union official who was almost entirely subservient to Bevin, under whom he had worked for many years in the labor movement. From then on, it was often said that Bevin and Harold Beeley determined British-Palestine policy.
To summarize the attitudes of the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office toward the Palestine question, I should say that the Foreign Office tended to see matters from the Arab point of view throughout this period, while the Colonial Office never gave up the hope of bringing about an accommodation between the parties.
We now turn to the unfolding of United States Palestine policy during the critical years 1942-48.
1
THE BILTMORE PROGRAM CALLS FOR A JEWISH STATE
In the months that followed the commencement of hostilities in 1939 events came with great swiftness: the collapse of Poland, the “phony war,” the ill-fated British venture in Norway, the German attack on the Low Countries. the accession to power of Winston Churchill, the entry of Italy into the war, the fall of France, the battle of Britain, the German thrust through the Balkans and invasion of Russia, and the growing crisis in the Far East. During these months, I was serving in Egypt, where the war was brought home to us when Italy came in and fighting began in the Western Desert. We evacuated our families to a place of safety (ironically, Jerusalem) and began to cope with blackouts and air-raid precautions. In early 1941, the collapse of Mussolini's Ethiopian empire for a time lessened the pressure on the British forces in the Middle East and opened the Red Sea to American shipping.
Then came Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into the war—a United States which up to that time had maintained a curiously detached attitude toward the conflict, epitomized, in the fall of 1941, by the bare passage, with only one vote to spare, of the renewal of the Selective Service Act of 1940 by the House of Representatives. Roosevelt's sympathies were of course with the Allies and we had started to aid the British through the destroyers-forbases deal and Lend-Lease. In the summer of 1941 Roosevelt had had his first meeting with Churchill and they had agreed on the program of common goals known as the Atlantic Charter. But the American public was still essentially isolationist, relying on the 1937 Neutrality Act, prohibiting the shipment of arms and ammunition to belligerent powers, to keep the war at a distance.
Many of us greeted the news of Pearl Harbor with a sense of relief that we were at last in the battle against Hitler, but as the country plunged into war the prevailing mood was one of uncertainty. Roosevelt, as usual, struck the right note, in his State of the Union message in January 1942: “We have already tasted defeat. We may suffer further setbacks. We must face the fact of a hard war, a long war, a bloody war, a costly war.”1
Against this background, in the spring of 1942 the American Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs, which (like the Inner General Zionist Council in Jerusalem) had been set up as an interim body at the last prewar Zionist Congress in 1939, convened an “extraordinary political conference” to be held in New York City with the idea of formulating a new Zionist program in the light of wartime developments. The immediate causes for the conference were, first, an article in Foreign Affairs for January 1942 by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, which revived the idea of a Jewish state;2 and second, the February 1942 sinking of the refugee ship Struma off Istanbul with the loss of 763 Jewish refugees.3 The stated purpose of the conference was to discuss the future of Palestine, the possibilities for cooperation with non-Zionist bodies, and ways of obtaining a “united representation of Jewry” at the peace conference that would follow victory over the Axis.
More than 600 delegates, representing the four principal American Zionist bodies—the Zionist Organization of America, Hadassah, Mizrachi, and Poale Zion—met at the Biltmore Hotel in New York from May 9 through 11.4 Besides the Americans, there were representatives from Zionist organizations in Europe and Palestine, including Weizmann and Ben Gurion. Thus the meeting in many ways took the place of a World Zionist Congress, which could not be assembled because of the war. But it was particularly significant that for the first time a meeting of the entire Zionist movement had been convened by American Zionists, and in the city of New York, for this indicated an important shift in world Jewish focus from Europe to the United States.
The meeting at the Biltmore was addressed by, among others, Weizmann and Ben Gurion, and by Rabbi Silver, who now moved to a position of leadership among American Zionists. Weizmann, always the apostle of moderation, urged that nothing be done to interfere with the British war effort. Ben Gurion and Silver, however, took a more forthright line. Ben Gurion wanted the conference to reaffirm the original purpose of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, which he described as the establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine: Silver asked for the adoption of a militant program.
This was the stand the conference wanted, and in response the delegates overwhelmingly