A Calculated Risk. Evan M. Wilson
Jewish community in Palestine met in a museum in Tel Aviv and proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel: a remarkable achievement indeed. And the proclamation of Israel's independence came fifty years after the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, had predicted that the Jewish state of his dreams would come into being in fifty years’ time. The story of these six short years is the story of this book.
My aim is not so much to tell how these events came about as to explain what the role of the United States was, and why. Thus, after reviewing all the significant data for the period, I shall attempt to evaluate the conflicting pressures on the U.S. government with a view to advancing a definitive interpretation of our Palestine policy, as well as some thoughts for the future. Many of the sources employed have only recently become available. They include the U.S. diplomatic archives and the published Foreign Relations of the United States; material in the Roosevelt and Truman libraries—the British Public Record Office, and the Zionist archives in New York and Jerusalem, and the many books and articles on the period; interviews with key personalities of the period; and my own recollections while serving as Palestine desk officer in the Department of State for most of these six years.
Responsibility for Palestine affairs in those days came under the Division of Near Eastern Affairs, which was identified in the Department by the letters NE. My immediate supervisor was Gordon P. Merriam, and first Wallace S. Murray and then Loy W. Henderson as chief.* We reported to Secretary of State Cordell Hull (who was to be succeeded by Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., James F. Byrnes, and General George C. Marshall) and to the Under Secretary of State, first Sumner Welles, then Stettinius, Dean Acheson, and Robert A. Lovett. Because of the special way in which the Palestine question was handled by the U.S. government, we were also frequently in touch with White House Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.
The Near East Division in the early 1940s was something of a backwater. It was concerned with a part of the world that was relatively unknown and that accounted for only a minor part of our foreign relations. The thirteen or fourteen officers attached to the Division at the time, nearly all of whom had seen previous service in the Near East, had pretty much a free hand in dealing with such matters as came before them.
When I entered the Division as its most junior member, I had seen something of the Near East as a result of three years’ service in Egypt. I had asked to be assigned to that area because I was thinking of applying for training as an Arabic specialist. Although I later decided against this, it did turn out that almost all of my thirty-odd years of service was connected with the region.
From Egypt I had visited Palestine several times and had had my first exposure to the controversial Arab-Jewish problem. My wife and I went to Palestine on leave and traveled fairly extensively around the country after reading a few books on the subject. I can recall that, feeling we were getting pretty well acquainted with the Arab point of view, we asked someone to recommend something to read on the Jewish side. It thus was early on in my association with the Palestine problem that I became aware that there were two sides to the question and that one had to make allowance both for the desire of the Jews to build up the National Home and for the desire of the Arab population for self-government.
I think I can honestly say that in taking up my duties on the Palestine desk I was conscious of no prejudice or bias one way or the other. My general approach to the problem was one of trying to find an accommodation, a reconciliation, between the conflicting interests of the parties to the dispute. This attitude was consistent with my background and training as a member of the generation of the 1930s. At Haverford College I had acquired what the Quakers call a “concern” for international conciliation and world peace. It is no coincidence that Haverford should have contributed for many years a larger proportion, per capita, of graduates to our Foreign Service than any other college or university in the country.
At Oxford, and later at Geneva, I had studied international relations with the late Sir Alfred Zimmern and had acquired a deeper interest in world affairs. I had observed the workings of the League of Nations first hand and had seen that it was of primary importance that the United States should participate in any future world organization. I had spent the summer of 1933 in Germany, just after Hitler came to power. I had read Mein Kampf and attended Nazi rallies. I had witnessed the terrifying grip of the Nazi movement on the German people and had felt the rumbling of the fear that lay in store for the future.
Our generation was a generation of idealists. We read books like Clarence Streit's Union Now and Salvador de Madariaga's Disarmament and we were impressed by such writers as Walter Lippmann and Vera Michaelis Dean. In Washington, we followed the hearings of the Nye Committee and learned about the arms manufacturers-the “merchants of death” as they were called. This was the period of the Oxford Union's vote against fighting “for King and Country,” of the White Feather Society of Oxford, which, complete with appropriate tie, called for a policy of pacifism. These were the days when Winston Churchill was branded a warmonger for proposing that Great Britain should rearm against the menace of Nazi Germany, and when the Cliveden Set was advocating appeasement.
Many of us rejected both the pacifism and the isolationism that were so prevalent in the 1930s. What we sought was a better world order than the one that had followed the First World War. We wanted to avoid the mistakes of the preceding generation, mistakes which with the Treaty of Versailles and the imposition of reparations had sown the seeds of another war.
On the Palestine desk, and in later years of involvement in the Arab-lsrael problem, I always considered that I was able to avoid being biased toward one side or the other in the conflict. My approach was based on the premise that both Arabs and Jews had rights in Palestine, that the problem arose from a conflict between two rights.
In NE we very much had it in mind that Palestine was only one of more than a score of countries with which the Division had to deal. Our task, under Departmental directives, was to carry out United States policies toward the countries of the Near East and to proffer advice regarding the promotion and protection of U.S. interests. We in NE and NEA could take cold comfort from the fact that our failure to come down flatly on one side or the other in the Palestine dispute caused us to be regarded as pro-Jewish by the Arabs and pro-Arab by the Jews.
As my thinking on the substance of the Palestine question evolved, especially following a visit that I paid to Palestine in 1946 (as will be recounted in Chapter 6), I came to the conclusion that for our government to advocate the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine against the will of the majority of the inhabitants of that country (the Arabs) would be a mistake that would have an adverse effect upon world peace and upon U.S. interests.
In taking this position, which was shared by most of my colleagues in NE and NEA and abroad at the time, I realized that I was bound to be considered as anti-Zionist by the Zionist Jews, that is, those who sought the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. However, during the early and mid-1940s Jewish opinion, both in this country and elsewhere, was divided into Zionist, non-Zionist, and anti-Zionist factions. The closing of the ranks behind the Zionist position did not occur until the Palestine question was before the United Nations in mid-1947, after I had left the Department for the field. In handling the Palestine question I always was conscious of the fact that there was an important Jewish interest in Palestine and I made it a point to cultivate Jewish as well as Arab contacts.
To understand the Palestine problem as we encountered it in 1942-48, or indeed to understand the Arab-lsrael conflict today, it is essential to have some knowledge of the historical background. In fact, it is particularly important in the case of Palestine since, as the Peel Commission put it in 1937, “No other problem of our time is so deeply rooted in the past.” Anyone who attempts to summarize the history of the Palestine problem must approach the task with trepidation, however. The pitfalls inherent in such an effort have never been more cogently described than by the late George Antonius in his classic account of the Arab national movement, the Arab Awakening, as follows:
For the historian, the study of the Palestine problem is beset with particular difficulties. In the first place, the material is enormous and widely scattered. In the second place, it is to an unusual degree conflicting and inconsistent. Thirdly, a large proportion of it which on inspection appears relevant and promising