A Calculated Risk. Evan M. Wilson
committees, of which there were two hundred by 1944 and 380 the following year. A series of AZEC circulars, in the Zionist archives in Jerusalem, reveals the scope of the operation and the methods employed: members were to be prepared on short notice to organize a letter- or telegram-writing campaign and to conduct demonstrations; contact was to be maintained not only with Jewish groups but also with non-Jewish, especially Christian Protestant, groups; speakers bureaus were to be set up and the publication of books and press articles was to be subsidized. One million leaflets were distributed every year.2
As a result of all this, the White House, Congress, and the State Department were buried under an avalanche of paper. Frequently the same individual would send identical telegrams, for which I recall being told the Zionists had obtained a cut rate, to the President, his two Senators, his Congressman, and the Secretary of State. Eventually the telegraph company did not even separate these messages but would bind them in bundles and truck them over to the Department where they were stacked in the basement. (In 1938, during an earlier campaign, stacks of telegrams had been brought into the Near East Division and piled on the Palestine desk. The press had carried photographs of the desk officer, a relatively short man buried under the accumulation, leading to a tradition in the Division that holders of the desk had to be six feet tall or taller.) The campaign became world wide and reports were received by the Department from virtually every Foreign Service post, giving the text of petitions from local Zionist groups.
Only one member of Congress, Senator Josiah W. Bailey of North Carolina, refused to endorse the Zionist position and wrote to the President opposing it.3 The main opposition to the AZEC and its activities, however, came not from supporters of the Arab side in the dispute, including the oil companies, but from other Jewish organizations, non Zionist and anti-Zionist.
As Zionist activity grew in this country, the Arab world became anxious, and its leaders began to inquire as to the U.S. government's attitude. Their concerns were made known in three principal ways: (1) through representations by Arab diplomats in Washington, of whom there were only a handful in those days; (2) through messages from our posts in the field; and (3) most significantly, through reports from two envoys who visited the Near East during the year on special missions for the President, Lt. Colonel Harold B. Hoskins and Brig. General Patrick J. Hurley.
The Egyptian Minister, Mahmoud Hassan, called at the Department twice during the year to register protests against the activities of the Zionists. On the first occasion he saw Secretary Hull and on the second, Under Secretary Welles. Hassan made it clear that his government had every sympathy for the homeless Jews, but considered that the Zionist agitation for a Jewish state was having the most serious effects in the entire Arab and Muslim world. When Hull inquired what the Minister saw as a solution for the problem of the Jewish refugees, Hassan made the interesting suggestion that the members of the United Nations (then twenty-nine in number) should each “take their proportional share of Jews from all over the world.” Later in the year, the Iraqi Minister, Ali Jawdat called on Wallace Murray in NE to lodge a similar protest.
Our Minister in Cairo, Alexander Kirk, reported to the Department on a number of occasions during 1943 that the activities of the American Zionists were arousing some anxiety in Egypt and were threatening to undermine the “longstanding heritage of good will toward the United States in this area,” as well as adversely affecting the war effort, Kirk, who was also accredited at the time to Saudi Arabia, reported in April after a visit to that country that King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud had asked him to convey to President Roosevelt his deep concern with respect to Palestine and the effect that Zionist activities were having on U.S.-Arab relations.
Later in the year we appointed a separate Minister Resident in Saudi Arabia, James S. Moose, Jr., who reported to Washington that during his first call on the Emir Feisal, Ibn Saud's son and Minister of Foreign Affairs (later king), Feisal at once brought up the question of Palestine and urged that it was only “elementary justice” that the Arabs should not be called upon to “suffer further” at the hand of the Jews.
Hoskins, who as implied in the Introduction held a reserve commission in the Army but was on detail to the State Department, spent three and a half months in the Near East in late 1942 and early 1943 on a mission for the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which had the strong backing of Welles. He reported under date of January 23 from Cairo that if matters were allowed to drift further, “a very bloody conflict is in the making” which would “inflame not simply Palestine but in varying degrees all of the Muslim world from Casablanca to Calcutta.”4 He particularly noted the “ever-present Arab fear of American support for political Zionism” and asserted that the Arabs were “uncompromisingly against” the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, which in Hoskins's view could only be achieved by force.
Hurley, who had been Secretary of War under President Hoover and in 1942 had become the U.S. Minister to New Zealand was designated by Roosevelt as his Personal Representative in the Middle East to act as an observer and report directly to him on general conditions in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia. (The sending out of special envoys like Hoskins and Hurley was characteristic of Roosevelt's handling of our foreign affairs and was symptomatic of his underlying distrust of the career Foreign Service officers, for whom it caused innumerable headaches.) Hurley's report, dated May 5, 1943, was submitted direct to the White House and was later forwarded by the President to the Department for comment. Hurley, like Hoskins, took a gloomy view of the prospects for U.S. relations with the Arab world, unless something could be done to curb the Zionists. He told the President that he had found “deep-seated Arab hostility” to any attempt to promote Jewish immigration into Palestine with the aim of creating a Jewish majority, and eventually a Jewish state, in that country. He added that throughout the Arab countries he had encountered the conviction that the United States was intent on establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.5
Although Arab anxiety was mounting as a result of the activities of the American Zionists, the Arab propaganda effort was pitiful. An Arab Information Office was not opened in Washington until 1945, and, partly because our media were not as friendly to the Arabs as to the Jews, it never succeeded in getting its message across to the public. The Arab-Americans, furthermore, mostly Christians with no strong feelings about Palestine and numbering some five hundred thousand as compared with five hundred thousand American Jews, were never an effective force. 6
The occasion for a more positive formulation of our attitude toward Palestine came in the spring of 1943, when King Ibn Saud wrote a letter to President Roosevelt expressing his grave concern and the concern of all Arabs about Zionist aspirations in Palestine. The President's reply, dated May 26, 1943, is important because it contains the first expression of the so-called “full consultation” formula “It is the view of the Government of the United States,” Roosevelt said, “that no decision altering the basic situation of Palestine should be reached without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews.”7 The letter thus marked the beginning of a formal U.S. policy toward Palestine, in great contrast to the vague generalities of public statements on the subject up to that time. None of my former colleagues in the bleak East Division whom I have consulted can recall, nor do the archives reveal, who it was who was responsible for our first using the “full consultation” formula. It was, however, being employed by the British at this time and indeed had its origins in a statement made by Lord Cranborne, now Lord Salisbury, in the House of Lords in May 1942.
This formulation, with slight variations in wording, became the cornerstone of our Palestine policy and was used repeatedly by our government over the next few years. The pledge was loosely worded and subject to differing interpretations, but it proved invaluable to the Department (and to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman) when, as became increasingly the case, the Zionists elicited from the President some statement favorable to their cause. Inevitably such statements would lead to Arab protests, and messages would be prepared in the Near East Division, for the President's signature, assuring the Arabs that whatever might have been said did not denote any change in the “basic situation” and that it was still our policy that they (as well as the Jews) should be consulted.8
The recent publication of the U.S. diplomatic correspondence for the 1940s in the Foreign Relations series and also the opening up of the Department's archives have