A Calculated Risk. Evan M. Wilson
platform, drafted by Weizmann's associate Meyer W. Weisgal, which called for the abrogation of the White Paper, for the opening of the doors of Palestine to Jewish immigration under the control of the Jewish Agency, for the creation of a Jewish army, and finally for the establishment of Palestine “as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated into the structure of the new democratic world”—that is, as a Jewish state.
Ben Gurion returned to Palestine and later in the year obtained the acceptance of the Biltmore Program (as it came to be called) by the Inner General Zionist Council, the top policy-making body of the Zionist Organization.
This was not accomplished without considerable effort, since many of the Jews in Palestine preferred either a binational state or partition into separate Jewish and Arab states, rather than a Jewish state in the whole of Palestine. By that time, however, more and more details of the Nazi extermination policy were coming out of occupied Europe and this helped Ben Gurion obtain approval for the program.
The real importance of the Biltmore Program was that here for the first time the Zionist movement came out officially for a Jewish state in Palestine. This was a radical new departure attributable chiefly to the influence of the American Zionists, a majority of whom had been in favor of a state since the late 1930s. From now on it would be the American wing of the movement that would spearhead the drive for a state. In other words, the American Jews assumed the role of leader in the campaign for statehood, a campaign that was to prove victorious in only six years’ time.
It must be repeated that the Biltmore provisions were a good deal more advanced than any that had so far been voiced by the official Zionist movement. Indeed, the program was reminiscent of the position of the Revisionists. This very point was made by the British Embassy in Washington in an aide-memoire to the Department of State. The Embassy commented that “official Zionist policy had now been shown publicly to be maximalist,” and that this could have severe repercussions in Palestine and elsewhere.5
The Biltmore Program, like Weizmann's Foreign Affairs article, was based on the assumption that after the war there would be at least two million Jews wanting to go to Palestine. The decimation of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis undermined this assumption, and as we shall see, the movement eventually came around to the idea of partition, that is, of a Jewish state in a part of Palestine. For the next few years, however, the Biltmore Program determined Zionist policy. The Weizmann policy of “gradualism” was now virtually abandoned, and Weizmann began to lose influence to a more militant group who looked to the Ben Gurions and the Silvers for guidance. These latter saw the Biltmore resolutions as a mandate for immediate action, whereas Weizmann tended to think of them as a statement of maximum demands.6
Meanwhile, the course of the war had been going against us and our allies. The Japanese had taken Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, the Netherlands East Indies, and the Philippines, and had advanced into Burma. In the Western Desert, German and Italian forces under the leadership of Field Marshal Rommel had begun their all-out attack on Egypt. In Russia, the Germans registered their farthest advance and soon were at the gates of Stalingrad. With these stirring events taking place in so many theaters of war it is not surprising that the news of the Biltmore Conference should have been buried on page 37 of the New York Times.
Much Zionist activity during the year 1942 centered about the proposal for a separate Jewish fighting force. The Zionists promoted this project because it gave concrete expression to the principle of Jewish nationalism and because the force could be the nucleus of a future Jewish army in a Jewish state. They also hoped that the establishment of such a detachment could gain them a seat at an eventual peace conference, corresponding to the forces of the various members of the United Nations.
A full-scale campaign was launched by a New York organization calling itself the “Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews,” a number of whose sponsors had Revisionist sympathies. When Churchill visited Washington in June, hundreds of letters were addressed to him on the subject. The Zionist leadership joined in the appeal for a Jewish army, and Weizmann, who happened to be in Washington at the same time, was active in pursuing the project with British and American officials. Neither the British government nor the American government, however, was willing to endorse the proposal, because of its nationalistic overtones. Eventually, in 1944, the British yielded to repeated Zionist appeals and permitted the formation of a separate Jewish Brigade Group, which participated in the fighting in North Africa and Italy on a fairly limited scale.7
It is now known that the decision to exterminate the Jewish population was taken by the Nazi leadership at a meeting at Wansee on January 20, 1942.8 Several times during 1942, as word of the extermination program began to filter out of occupied Europe, Jewish leaders approached the U.S. Administration, either to seek confirmation of these reports or to ask for a statement of sympathy with the plight of the persecuted Jews. Often these approaches were made to Roosevelt or Welles by Rabbi Wise. In May and again in July, Roosevelt, at Wise's urging, sent messages to Jewish rallies in Chicago and at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It was Wise's practice to send to the President a draft of what he would like the President to say on such occasions, but often these drafts were toned down by the White House, since the President, while sympathetic, did not wish to commit himself completely to the Zionists.
In September the Jewish Affairs Institute of the American Jewish Congress, a Zionist body of which Wise was the head, published what was stated to be the first documented account of the Nazi extermination policy. The existence of this policy was not confirmed by the State Department until late in November, when Welles informed Wise of a message received from the American Minister in Switzerland giving details of the Nazi program. Wise then took a delegation of Jewish leaders to call on Roosevelt. They urged the President to issue a statement denouncing the Nazi policy, which he did on December 17, pledging that those responsible for these atrocities would be punished. Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a similar statement.
However, although Roosevelt and Churchill were prepared to condemn the Nazi leaders for their persecution of the Jews, they were unwilling to raise the matter with the German government, either directly or indirectly, because of the “unconditional surrender” policy. In retrospect, there is a real question as to what could have been done, in wartime, to save the Jewish population of occupied Europe. Even if these unfortunate victims of Hitler's hatred could somehow have been removed from Nazi control, public opinion in the United States, including a majority of Jewish opinion, was firmly opposed to changing our immigration laws to permit any substantial number to come to this country, and the prospects for finding havens elsewhere in the world were decidedly limited. In any event, in spite of the disturbing reports that now began to come more and more to world attention, no one, not even the Zionist leadership, really believed that there would be a wholesale extermination that would eventually result in the loss of some six million Jewish lives.
The Zionists reacted sharply to the formation, in November, of an anti-Zionist body, called the American Council for Judaism, which had as its main premise the assertion that the Jews were a religious group, not a nation. The name of the group was chosen by Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron of Baltimore, Maryland, one of the organizers. Others prominent in the Council were Lessing J. Rosenwald, the former chairman of Sears, Roebuck & Company, who became its president; Rabbi Elmer Berger, its executive director; Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times; and Sidney Wallach of the American Jewish Committee. Although the Council for Judaism never attained a membership of more than 15,000, its leaders were highly articulate and their activities soon began to annoy the Zionists, who wanted the American Jewish community to present a united front on the question of Palestine. In response, the Zionists set up a special organization called the Committee on Unity for Palestine with the express purpose of combating the Council for Judaism.
Meanwhile, in Palestine, another American Reform rabbi, Dr. Judah Magnes, president of the Hebrew University, had started an organization called Ihud (Union) which called for a binational state-and was for that reason also opposed by the official Zionist leadership.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration (November 2) the Zionists obtained a statement from 63 Senators and 192 members of the House of Representatives reaffirming support for the Jewish National Home and urging that “now more than ever” there