A Calculated Risk. Evan M. Wilson
in that they show that the text of every one of these messages was specifically approved by the President. Each of the messages in the Foreign Relations carries a notation to this effect, and the original copies of the messages in the archives bear the President's initials. There can thus no longer be any basis for alleging, as has been done, that these messages were sent out by the Department behind the President's back.9 Admittedly the messages were not made public at the time, but this was at the instance of the White House, not the Department.
The “full consultation” formula did not mean, as has also been alleged, that the consent of the Arabs had to be obtained before there was any change in the “basic situation.” Our commitment to the parties in the dispute was to consult them, and in 1946, as will be explained in Chapter 6, we carried out consultations with Arabs and Jews and thereafter maintained that in so doing we had discharged our commitment.
Like so many aspects of our Palestine policy, our formula was not acceptable to either Jews or Arabs. When it was eventually made public in late 1945, AZEC protested on the grounds that the Arabs did not have any standing in the dispute. The Arabs for their part always maintained that they had never been adequately consulted, especially on the crucial issue of Jewish immigration into Palestine. They saw our actions as supporting the Zionists, whatever our words might say. Indeed, it has always seemed to me that the attempt to carry water on both shoulders was an all but impossible task which for the most part convinced only ourselves in the Near East Division that we were being objective.
While Ibn Saud and Roosevelt were exchanging letters, important events were taking place on several war fronts. The British were winning the battle of the Atlantic against the German submarines, and by mid-May the Axis powers had been driven out of North Africa. During the summer came the Allied capture of Sicily, the resignation of Mussolini, the invasion of the Italian mainland, and the surrender of the Italian government, although fighting was to continue in the north of the country for another year and a half.
In May of 1943 Dr. Weizmann announced that the Jewish Agency was opening an office in Washington, to be headed by Dr. Nahum Goldmann, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive and president of the World Jewish Congress, a Zionist body affiliated with the American Jewish Congress. Goldmann was one of the most distinguished of the Zionist leaders. This was another indication of the importance which the leadership was now attaching to the role of the U.S. government in the Palestine question. Wallace Murray reacted to this news in characteristic fashion. He sent a memorandum to the Secretary, pointing out that the Mandate for Palestine, which had created the Jewish Agency, had stipulated that the Agency should operate at all times “subject to the control” of the British authorities. Murray recommended not only that no official recognition be accorded to the Washington office of the Jewish Agency, but also that if any communication be received from that office it be returned with the request that it be submitted to the Department through the British Embassy (which of course was hardly to the liking of the Zionists in view of their strained relations with the British government). I doubt that this procedure was actually followed, but later on Murray did go so far as to instruct us that if for any reason we should find it necessary to communicate with Dr. Goldmann we should address him at his street address without mentioning the Jewish Agency. After Loy Henderson took over from Murray as our chief in 1945, this policy was relaxed. The representatives of the Agency were welcomed to NE and I readily obtained Henderson's concurrence in our using its full name in our letters from then on.
A matter that was the subject of considerable discussion on several occasions during 1943 was the question of issuing a joint Anglo-American statement on Palestine. This project, which was strongly advocated by Hoskins and Murray and opposed by the Zionists, would have taken the position that any decision on Palestine should be postponed until after the war. The statement would have included the “full consultation” formula. In Murray's words, the purpose would have been to “put an end to the current agitation for a Jewish state.”
Welles, incidentally, opposed the plan. The British and American governments several times reached agreement to issue a statement, and Roosevelt twice approved a text (see Appendix G). However, when Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, who was serving as Special Counsel to the President, leaked the proposed text to the Zionist leadership in July 1943, there was immediate protest. Hull then decided to seek the backing of the War Department, but when Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson informed him that the military situation in the Middle East did not justify issuing such a statement, the matter was dropped, to the consternation of the British. The subject arose again later in the year and early in 1944, but no action was ever taken. The question may well be asked whether a statement of this sort would have achieved its stated objective of warding off pressures on both governments. Indeed, in an interview in June 1974, the late Colonel Hoskins agreed with me that in retrospect it was unlikely that the statement would have had the effect desired at the time.
One of the more bizarre episodes of the year resulted from a decision taken by Roosevelt, Welles, and Weizmann, on their own without consulting the Near East Division, to send Hoskins to see King Ibn Saud and try to arrange a meeting between him and Weizmann so that they could work out a settlement of the Palestine question. The idea had been broached to Weizmann some years earlier by the British Arabist H. St. John Philby, a confidant of Ibn Saud's, who thought that the Arabs might be persuaded to let the Jews have Palestine in exchange for a payment to Ibn Saud of some twenty million pounds, and Weizmann had, it appears, brought it up with both Churchill and Roosevelt on several occasions. We in NE were very skeptical of the whole idea when we heard of it, for it seemed highly unlikely that Ibn Saud would ever agree to any such proposal, and certainly not at that time, when the Arabs were so suspicious of the Zionists because of the increased agitation over Palestine and when, furthermore, Ibn Saud was no longer in urgent need of revenue.11
We were right. Ibn Saud refused to see Weizmann or to have anything to do with the scheme. The only concrete result of the incident was that when Hoskins saw Roosevelt in September to report on his mission, Roosevelt made a number of interesting comments regarding the Palestine question. In the course of a long conversation, Roosevelt said that he thought that after the war most of the European Jews would not want to go to Palestine but would want to return to their homes (this view was shared by many officials at the time, although opinions were to change later on). On the future of Palestine, he told Hoskins that he was thinking of a trusteeship with a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim as trustees.
This idea of the President's formed the basis of a paper prepared in the Near East Division in late 1943, which was the first attempt in the Department to put together some thoughts on the future of Palestine. As we soon came to realize, this early trusteeship plan was hardly realistic. Essentially, what was proposed was a body comprising three Christians, two Muslims, and a Jew which was to advise the trustee (Great Britain) regarding the desires and complaints of the different religious groups having an interest in the Holy Land. Details of the plan were not elaborated, but it is hard to see how anyone could have expected such a simplistic scheme, based on religious considerations alone, to have coped with the complex political issues inherent in the Palestine problem.
It was not long before we saw the shortcomings of any proposal along these lines. A paper that we prepared for the 1944 talks with the British, as will be noted in Chapter 3, states flatly that “a trusteeship exercised by the three religious groups would be a failure.” It was again recommended that Palestine be constituted as an international territory with Great Britain as the trustee, but it was now provided that the Arab and Jewish communities should form “autonomous political entities with wide powers of local self-government.” There was to be a board of overseers representing the three world religions, but its role would be a minor one and the emphasis was to be on the development of self-governing institutions.12
With some refinements, the thinking of the Near East Division concerning a future solution for Palestine continued to run in this direction right up to the adoption of the partition plan by the General Assembly of the United Nations in late 1947. Such a solution was reasonable, but it did not, of course, take sufficiently into account the domestic political imperatives that were to come more and more to the forefront of the U.S. government's handling of the Palestine question during these years. Nor did it take sufficiently into account, as we were later