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After Turkey's defeat in the First World War,
several of her former territories were handed
over to Britain as "mandates" to be reared for
nationhood. One of these - Palestine - involved
Britain in a tragic and intractable dilemma.
Here in a harsh land with a sparse but predominantly Arabic population,
Jews had already
begun the attempt to re-establish the Jewish
nation destroyed and scattered 20 centuries
before. Paradoxically, Britain had assumed
obligations to both communities - a recipe for
disaster. An influx of Jewish immigrants, eager
to see Jerusalem once again the capital
of a Jewish nation, alienated the Arabs. British
efforts to control the rush set Jew against
Briton. After 30 years of mutual bitterness
and violence, Britain departed; leaving
Israel to come to birth in a welter of blood
Palestine was never legally or
technically a part of the British
Empire, but from 1920 to 1948,
when the State of Israel was established,
It looked as if it was. During
those years it was a Mandate, and the
sovereign of Palestine was not the British
King but the League of Nations and then,
after the Second World War, the United
Nations. Up to 1939 "the mandatory"
(the British government) reported every
year to the League.
The mandate system was devised by the
Allies of the First World War at the
Peace Conference of 1919. Its avowed
purpose was to prepare politically inexperienced
people for national independence
and to rescue them from
previous misrule. It was applied only to
the colonial possessions of Germany in
Africa, and the subject provinces of the
Turkish Empire in Asia, which included
the area of Palestine. An early proposal
that the "mandated territories" should
be ruled by Allied commissions was condemned
as impracticable, and the powers
who accepted mandate responsibilities
were instructed by the League to rule
alone in their territories.
Sceptics and enemies declared - and
still declare - that the mandate system
was a piece of imperialist cunning. But
this view ignores the great measure of
sincerity in the establishment of the
mandate system. Proof of this came in
1931 when the British mandate in Iraq
was withdrawn and replaced by a treaty
between Great Britain and the then independent
Iraq.
British rule had been instituted in
Palestine with the conquest of Jerusalem
in December, 1917. At the end of the
First World War few British authorities
foresaw any very great complications in
the new undertaking despite the fact that
assurances of support had been given to
both Arab nationalists in the Middle East
and Jewish nationalists - the Zionists in
England, encouraging them to work
for a Jewish "national home" in Palestine.
That there was some contradiction and,
many alleged, a radical contradiction in
British promises was apparent only to
men on the spot. This does not mean that
the British leaders were blind or stupid;
it does mean that they were over-influenced
by theory.
In the major documents conveying the
British pledge to support Arab nationalism
Palestine was not mentioned. There
was good reason for this. Until 1920 there
was no such political entity as Palestine
for many hundreds of years. It was
reasonably argued that without a nation
you cannot have nationalism, and certainly
not a nationalist problem. The
area still called Palestine by outsiders
was a conglomeration of Turkish provinces,
without any unified authority.
Furthermore this politically complex
area was made yet more confused by the
presence of large and influential minorities
who enjoyed special privileges. The
most ancient of these minorities was the
Jewish one. However, through emigration,
Turkish expulsions and a rise in the
death-rate from disease during the war
the number of Jews had sunk by 20,000,
leaving about 60,000 in all by the time
the British Army took on rule in Palestine.
The little Jewish community represented
less than 10 per cent of the
Palestine population, most of whom were
Arabic-speaking Muslims.
Chiefly under the influence of the
British Prime Minister, Lloyd George,
and the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour,
the British government had added
a further complication. It is known to
history as the Balfour Declaration. It
took the form of a letter written by Balfour
on November 2, 1917, to Lord Rothschild,
a Jewish financier and supporter of
Zionism. It ran as follows:
"I have much pleasure in conveying to
you on behalf of His Majesty's Government,
the following declaration of sympathy
with Jewish Zionist aspirations
which has been submitted to, and
approved by, the Cabinet:
'His Majesty's Government view with
favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,
and will use their best endeavours to
facilitate the achievement of this object,
it being clearly understood that nothing
shall be done which may prejudice the
civil and religious rights of the existing
non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or
the rights and political status enjoyed by
Jews in any other country.'
I should be grateful if you would bring
this declaration to the knowledge of the
Zionist Federation.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur Balfour."
These now often quoted words made
surprisingly little stir at the time. In the
Commons it was the subject of some forgotten
questions and answers. The French
and U.S. governments had already
accepted a pro-Zionist Allied policy with
little argument, or perception of what it
implied. Odder still, after some assurances
that a Jewish State was not intended, the
nominal leader of the Arabs in their wartime
revolt against Turkey, Hussein,
King of the Hejaz, was soon put at ease.
Even odder, except for members of the
Zionist party, the Jews of Europe and
Asia were not greatly interested, and
some of the loudest clamour (never very
loud) against the Declaration came from
British Jews who feared that it would
force all Jews into divided loyalties.
Why did the British government make
this declaration? No one has found a
wholly satisfactory answer to that question. Contemporary documents show
plainly enough that in the British military
and political world there was a great
desire to take Palestine into the British
sphere of influence to counter the imperial
ambitions of France in the Near East.
Since the time of Napoleon, British
governments had been obsessed with
fears that a French establishment of
power in the eastern Mediterranean would
block the way to India, and the wartime
alliance had not lessened British anxiety.
This attitude, irrelevant as it was by
1918, was still to be found throughout all
the British services, civil and military.
There was thus a readiness, especially
in the lower echelons of government, to
take Palestine into the British Empire,
temporarily or permanently, by acting
as the guardian of Zionism. The idea was
less popular at ministerial level. Indeed, it was positively opposed by Arthur
Balfour. He felt, though less strongly
than his colleagues, the ancient British
fear of a French base in the Near East.
But if he was averse to a French regime
in Palestine, he was equally averse to a
British one. He wanted a Mandate for the
country to be accepted by the United
States, whose President, Woodrow
Wilson, had so powerfully enunciated
the principle of freedom for colonial subjects.
Balfour tried hard for this at the
Peace Conference of Paris, and at a meeting
with President Wilson, Balfour found
Wilson receptive. He assured Balfour
that he shared his hopes and could get
American acceptance. As hardly needs
saying, things fell out differently.
Of the reasons prompting those who
organized the Declaration, only those of
Balfour and the Zionist leadership can be
known with certainty. Both were idealistic.
Both believed that the establishment
of a territorial national Jewish home would
redeem the Jews from the habits of mind
towards which centuries of ill-treatment
had contributed. Balfour, Dr. Chaim
Weizmann, the Zionist leader and other
Zionists and sympathisers, took a rather
exaggeratedly gloomy view of the effects
of segregation and anti-Semitism on the Jewish
character. For example Balfour believed,
and persuaded his colleagues in
the government, that the Bolshevik party
in Russia was Jewish. One fully attested
reason why the Balfour Declaration was
made when it was, lay in his hope and
belief that it would, by holding out the
promise of a Jewish homeland, detach
Jews from Lenin, thus completely emasculating
his party, with the result that
Russia would remain with Britain, France
and the U.S.A. as a combatant ally. One
can hardly think of a greater political
miscalculation.
The government were also alarmed by
reliable reports that a political party in
Germany was trying to influence the
German government towards supporting
the Zionist wish for a national home in
Palestine. Dr. Weizmann warned the
Foreign Office in 1917 that this might
result in Zionists turning to Germany for
support. The British government and the
Zionists overlooked the fact that, as
Turkey's ally, Germany was unable to
embark on a Zionist policy.
To return to Palestine. From 1917 on
the military regime, known as O.E.T.A.
(Occupied Enemy Territory Administration)
was in great difficulties. On O.E.T.A.
fell the full weight of the contradictions
in British policy. It was found that,
though it was a perplexed and incoherent
force, there was such a thing as Palestinian
nationalism, in the sense that most
Arabs of Palestine shared the ideas and
emotions of the Arab national movement.
The task of O.E.T.A. was not made easier
by the presence of a Zionist Commission
sent to Palestine to prepare the establishment
of the Jewish homeland. The Commission
had British government approval
but was not welcomed by O.E.T.A.
The Zionist Commission needed to
establish its rights and they thus could
hardly help acting as a second and
simultaneous government of Palestine.
This activity, of course, stimulated Arab
Palestinian nationalism yet further. Of the
two political forces in the country, nascent
Arab nationalism and nascent Jewish
nationalism, O.E.T.A. found the former
easier to deal with. The Arabs had a clear
case, easy to understand sympathetically;
the Zionists a somewhat sophisticated
case, which was opposed by the
conservative section of the Jewish population
settled in the country.
O.E.T.A. had before it a formidable
political problem, but it had no professional politician of outstanding ability to
give advice. Most staff had been casually
collected from the demobilizing armies.
In these circumstances, it is not surprising
to learn that O.E.T.A. made many
mistakes. The most absurd was its suppression
of the text of the Balfour
Declaration in Palestine, in the hope that
by this act of censorship it might come
to be forgotten and tranquillity thus
restored. As nearly every Jew and many
Arabs had a copy, the hope was a
peculiarly empty one.
As time went on, anti-Zionism increased
in O.E.T.A. and most officials became
openly pro-Arab. The reason was not far
to seek. Palestinian Arabs of those days
welcomed British rule because it was a
great improvement on Turkish rule, and
they trusted in O.E.T.A. as an effective
shield against Jewish ambition.
The Zionist immigrants had welcomed
British rule at first, believing that the
Balfour Declaration guaranteed a 100
per cent pro-Zionist British administration.
When they found that this was not
so, and that the British administration
interpreted its "sacred trust" as "an
equality of obligation," they became
disillusioned and distrustful. They had
some reason for that distrust. Many
politicians in Great Britain, mostly Conservatives,
were working for a rescinding
of the Balfour Declaration and they
encouraged O.E.T.A. in their bias.
Lacking in experience, O.E.T.A.
stumbled into bringing about the opposite
of what the pro-Arab party sought.
Exasperated at the continual meddling
of the Zionist Commission, the O.E.T.A.
chief, Lieutenant-General Sir Louis Bols,
wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Lord
Curzon, in April, 1920, asking for the
Commission to be abolished. O.E.T.A.
could not have timed its request more
disadvantageously to themselves. Lord
Curzon was at the time attending the
Conference of San Remo with Lloyd
George and Arthur Balfour. The last two
were the strongest Zionists in the Cabinet.
When Bols's despatch was forwarded to
Curzon and he consulted them, they were
both incensed at what they took to be
Bols's incompetence, bias and disloyalty.
In large part the Conference had been
convened to discuss the partitioning of
the former Turkish provinces in the Arabic-speaking world. With the approval
of the Conference, the text of the Balfour
Declaration was included in the terms of
the Mandate for Palestine. The Liberal
leader Sir Herbert (later Lord) Samuel,
an eminent British Jew and a Zionist,
accepted the post of first High Commissioner.
O.E.T.A. was abolished. It was a
great triumph for Zionism.
These decisions took effect on July 1,
1920, when Samuel arrived in Palestine.
The Jews received him with acclaim and
in the belief that the wrongs of many
centuries would now be cancelled in the
rebuilding of a Jewish State. The Arabs
received him with gloom, dreading their
swift reduction to servitude under new
Jewish masters. Both soon found that
they were mistaken. The most prominent
feature in Samuel's character was fairness.
He made his aims very clear to his
Chief Secretary: "You know my policy
with regard to the non-Jewish population
- not only to treat them with absolute
justice and every consideration for their
interests in matters relating to the establishment
of the Jewish National Home, but also to adopt active measures to promote
their well-being." Samuel wanted
an equitable adjustment of Jewish and
Arab claims on a basis of adequate
representation. He remained loyal to a
moderate Zionism which took no account
of Jewish statehood in the foreseeable
future. This fairness was of little if any
interest to Jews or Arabs. The former
wanted not fairness but the New Jerusalem;
the latter did not want to be fair
to the Jews, but to expel them. Only an
extremely able man, as Samuel undoubtedly
was, could have survived the
unpopularity which his attitude brought
on him from both sides.
Almost immediately Samuel ran into
serious trouble that was not resolved till
March, 1921. It began in the north where
King Hussein's second son, Feisal, had
been made King of "United Syria," comprising
modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan,
and Palestine, the area at the time being
divided between British and French
administrations. His capital was Damascus in French mandated Syria. His position
was only tenable if he maintained
good relations with the French Mandatory
power, but whenever he attempted to do
this, his subjects accused him of being
no more than a French pawn, and so he
was forced into anti-French attitudes.
His only champion among the great
powers was Britain who felt an obligation
towards him for his part in the Arab
Revolt in the war. But his nationalist
ministers forced him into courses which
lost him this support. He was manoeuvred
into giving reluctant approval to murderous
Syrian attacks on Zionist settlements
in Palestine and in 1920 aided an
uprising against the British in Iraq. He
was then further manoeuvred into anti-Zionist
resolutions which became his
official policy.
Feisal's anti-Zionist activity was particularly
culpable, for in 1918 he had
signed an agreement with Dr. Weizmann
that was hailed then - and by some is still
hailed - as a noble act of state which
could have led to a lasting Arab-Zionist
accord. A helpless puppet in the hands of
his ministers and advisers, Feisal was
ultimately pushed into directly challenging
the French Army. By July, 1920, he
had lost all his allies and the allegiance of
most of his subjects. With needless cruelty, the French flung him out.
The situation was made all the more
complicated by the fact that the British
Mandate included the territory east of
the Jordan, which now forms the State of
Jordan. Before his ejection in July, 1920,
Feisal, as the King of United Syria, had
held a shadowy rule over this territory,
unlike his merely theoretical rule over
Palestine. Tactfully, Feisal's Trans-Jordan
rule had not been officially questioned or
disapproved by the British government
or the Mandatory. With Feisal's fall, however,
the matter needed close examination.
Suddenly the inhabitants of this Trans-Jordan
area found themselves without
their Chief of State and they hastened to
establish new authority. There followed
one of the curiosities of history, one that
has been very little remarked. The area
broke up into autonomous sheikdoms,
one of which was "The National Government
of Moab" under the Presidency of
the local British official, Alec Kirkbride.
Moab even minted its own coinage.
Sir Herbert Samuel wisely waited on
events. He issued no instructions, for
which he was blamed at the time but was
blessed after. He left the initiative to the
local rulers, of whom Kirkbride was the
most influential. Events soon challenged
the little Trans-Jordan republics. In January,
1921, Feisal's elder brother, the Emir Abdullah, appeared on the southern
frontiers of Palestine at the head of a
small army and declared his intention to
march to Damascus to expel the French.
Abdullah was not a warlike man and
he was easily dissuaded from his revengeful
intentions, especially after he had
been acclaimed as their ruler by the little
republics who were by now conscious of
isolation in a dangerous world. By public
consent and with Britain's tacit blessing,
Abdullah became Emir of Transjordan.
After the San Remo Conference British
responsibility for the Palestine Mandate
passed from the Foreign Office to the
Colonial Office, then under Winston
Churchill. Unlike his predecessors of the
Foreign Office, Churchill had had no part
in the original negotiations leading to the
existing position in Palestine, and he
could start afresh. Without much hope
of success he and Samuel urged on all
parties the desirability of an elected
legislative council and the erection of a
constitution which would replace the
High Commission's arbitrary rule.
With their long association with liberalism, the Jews accepted the proposition
though they saw the considerable danger
to themselves. With inconceivable folly,
the Arabs rejected the institution of a
legislative council so effectively that in
the first part of 1922 the High Commission
had to abandon the whole enterprise
(though the idea was briefly raised
again several times later).
The Arab argument was that by taking
part in the elections they would be forced
to admit the legality of the Balfour
Declaration and of the Zionist endeavour
in Palestine. This was quite true. What
they overlooked, and continued to overlook
until it was too late, was that by cooperating
in a council and making it work
they would have had the Zionists at a
permanent disadvantage through holding
a permanent working majority unless (as
was most improbable) the "official members,"
that is members appointed by the
High Commissioner, were to vote regularly
and unanimously with the Zionists. The
Arabs underestimated the sympathy they
enjoyed within the administration. And
it is in fact hard to see how, if the council
had been accepted by the Arabs, a State
of Israel could ever have come into being.
But the parliamentary game has never
suited Arab temperaments and they preferred
to go a more heroical and, as it
turned out, a suicidal way. Much blame
attaches to some British politicians and
publicists in England who encouraged the
Arabs in these foolish courses.
From 1921 to 1929 there was peace in
Palestine: difficult, often broken peace,
but peace nevertheless. The credit is
largely due to the very remarkable
characters of the first two High Commissioners.
Unpopular as Samuel was with
Jewish and Arab politicians, he commanded
respect, and the honesty and
generosity of his whole approach to his
impossibly difficult task was apparent to
everyone in Palestine. His successor in
1925 was Field-Marshal Lord Plumer,
dissimilar from Samuel in all superficial
respects, but his equal in uprightness and
determination.
He was the typical British senior
officer of his time. He wore large white moustaches and was severely correct in
the discharge of his official duties. This
disguised his acute political sense. When
asked what was his policy, he replied in
his sharpest military manner: "I have no
policy. I am here to carry out that of His
Majesty's Government." He looked unintelligent
but had much perception. He
looked a martinet, but he was tolerant,
with a broad sense of humour.
Plumer was received joyfully by the
Arabs and with gloom by the Jews. Both
communities regarded his appointment
as a return by the British government to
the pro-Arab policy of the O.E.T.A. As with
Samuel, both were wholly mistaken. Like
his predecessor, Plumer was dedicated to
the principle of fair dealing, but, unlike
Samuel, who was somewhat aloof in
manner, this companionable military
commander was popular both with Arabs
and Jews and was long remembered with
affection by those who had lived in former
Palestine and Transjordan.
Plumer was not a natural Zionist or a
natural Judeophile. But he had an instinctive
admiration for courage and hardihood,
and he recognized this in Zionism
in Palestine. This does not mean, however,
that he was an opponent of the Arab
parties of whom it may be said he took a
far too optimistic view. Seeing that under
his rule there had been no great disorders
he mistakenly recommended a reduction
in the size of British units. He reckoned
without Haj Amin Hussein, an instigator
of anti-Jewish and anti-British riots,
whom Sir Herbert Samuel, with typical
generosity had not only amnestied but
had recommended as the Mufti of Jerusalem,
a post to which that secretive,
crafty, persuasive, evil-minded man was
immediately appointed.
Lord Plumer, suddenly overcome by ill-health,
asked to be relieved of his post in
1928. He left Palestine in the summer.
His farewell audience with the main Arab
delegation was of some historic importance.
By this time the majority of Arab politicians recognized that in refusing a
legislative council in 1922 they had made a
serious blunder. At this audience they
formally requested the formation of such
a body. Lord Plumer duly conveyed the
request to the British government.
Not long after Plumer's departure the
peace began to break down. It began in
one of those foolish religious quarrels
about conflicting ceremonies that
often disgraced the Holy City. This time
the trouble was between Muslims and
Jews, and the Muslims appear to have
acted as aggressors throughout. But the
trouble was not widespread, and the new
High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor,
could hope that with patience and goodwill
it would pass.
Chancellor was a man of great administrative
ability and successfully inaugurated
the construction of the harbour at
Haifa along with other valuable industrial
and economic undertakings. He also
reopened negotiations for the establishment
of a legislative council. Unfortunately
he was without the political
flair of his predecessors.
In 1929 the peace really broke down in a
general and hideous fashion. The religious
quarrel was still going on in Jerusalem,
but what caused the outbreak cannot be
said for certain. It was probably the consequence
of several factors. The 16th
Zionist Congress, which announced the
establishment of a world-wide Jewish
Agency to represent Jewish interests in
Palestine, met in Zurich in August, 1929.
The extremist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky,
took the occasion to make bellicose
speeches. He spoke of an immediate Jewish
State in Palestine, of "great colonizing
masses" of Zionists founding a Jewish
Empire "on either side of the Jordan." He
derided any Zionist policy that aimed at
the conciliation of Arabs. His ferocious
utterances naturally alarmed Arabs, at a
moment when the tide of destiny was perceptibly
turning and, after a serious
economic setback, the Jewish National
Home showed signs of revival. Jabotinsky
had numerous followers in Palestine, and
in the manner of extremists they demonstrated.
Arabs thereupon organized frequent,
provocative and insulting counter demonstrations
in Jerusalem. These are
the usually accepted causes of the disorders
of 1929. Anyone who has studied
the evidence, however, cannot resist
suspecting another likely one: the intrigues
of the Mufti.
Such suspicions were entertained by
the Palestine Police at the time, but in the
absence of proof their views made no
impression on the later Commission of
Inquiry who accepted the Mufti's protestations
of innocence.
The atrocities of the 1929 rising were
appalling. It was now that Plumer's misjudgement
in reducing the military and
police forces became evident. It required
three days for British reinforcements to
arrive from Egypt, and those three days
were fatal. In the last week of August
mass Arab attacks on Jews spread
throughout the whole country. Several Jewish settlements were laid waste between
Jerusalem and Haifa and in the
south. The most horrible of the atrocities
took place at Hebron where 60 Jews,
including children, were murdered, and
at Safed in the north where 23 were murdered.
The lightly armed Administration
was hampered by the fact that Muslim
policemen often refused to take action
against Muslim rioters. In all, 133 Jews
were killed and 399 wounded. A rather
lower figure for Arab casualties was
returned but with a great difference: all
the Jewish casualties were due to Arab
action, all the Arab ones (excepting six)
to British police or military action. It is
clear that the Arabs were the aggressors.
The High Commissioner was
absent in London when these
events occurred. Filled with indignation
he issued a manifesto
during his swift journey back,
denouncing the Arab leadership for the
abominable crimes of the last week of
August and breaking off the negotiations
for the establishment of a legislative council. He wrote in passionate wrath,
but without proof. The Arab leadership,
defective in understanding but never in
cunning, protested. Chancellor was forced
to retract. He assured the Arab leaders
that the matter would be submitted to a
Commission that would adjudge the
responsibilities of both sides. This expression
of British fairness did not delight the
Jews of Palestine, for the victims were
put on the same level as their murderers.
The Arabs were not much appeased. Like
Samuel, Chancellor innocently incurred
the hatred of both sides.
The Zionists were in an unfortunate
position. Though the High Commissioner
was sympathetic he had been manoeuvred
into taking a cruelly aloof attitude towards
them in a bitter moment. Even
worse for them, the new Socialist Colonial
Minister, Lord Passfield, better known as
Sydney Webb, was clearly anti-Zionist.
Sydney Webb, with his wife Beatrice
Webb the sociologist, belonged to an old-fashioned
continental type of socialism
that looked with suspicion on Jewish big
business, organizations that undoubtedly
supported much of the Zionist effort. In
addition, the Webbs had little regard for
the rights of small nations. They looked on the very existence of small nations as
mischievously reactionary and a hindrance
to true socialism. In the idea of a
National Home they detected a small
nation in the making.
Passfield was keen to revive the idea of
a multilateral legislative assembly. The
Zionists had not opposed this in 1928 and
they did not oppose it now. It was the
cause of much anxiety to them, but they
need not have worried. In December, 1930,
the government invited the Zionists and
the Arab leadership to a Round Table
Conference on the subject. The initiative
had come from Dr. Weizmann, for which reason, perhaps, the Arabs decided to
boycott the Conference. Thus the constitutional
issue lapsed for six more vital
years, during which Hitler came to power
and Jewish immigration into Palestine
increased enormously. The Arabs had
thrown away their advantage for ever.
After the events of 1929 there was an
uneasy peace in Palestine once more. In
July, 1931, Sir John Chancellor resigned
and he was succeeded in November by
Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wauchope
who remained as High Commissioner till
February, 1938. Wauchope was little
known outside the army but among his acquaintances he enjoyed a high and
deserved reputation as a cultivated man
of ability. He was generous and public spirited.
He was a bachelor and spent a
large part of his private fortune on public
benefactions in Palestine. It was hoped
that under him Palestine would enjoy a
repeat performance of the happy Plumer
episode. These hopes were swiftly dashed,
not through his fault but that of the
ghastly times in which he lived.
The cause of distress here as elsewhere
was the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. This
obvious fact has to be emphasized, as
Zionist propaganda made strenuous efforts to persuade
the world that the woes of Palestine were
exclusively due to British anti-Semitism.
This is factional nonsense. The would-be
destroyer of civilization was Adolf Hitler,
not the inadequate Stanley Baldwin.
Jewish immigration into Palestine,
which in spite of some recent increase had
continued to be a matter for Zionist disappointment,
changed character after
1932 and became the cause for new
anxieties and redirections of policy.
From 1929 to 1932, immigration had
averaged 4,000 to 5,000 a year. Then as
the menace of Hitler and Nazism became
apparent, the figures shot up. In 1933
over 30,000 Jews entered Palestine; in
1934 there were 42,359 immigrants, the
greatest number hitherto recorded; yet
in 1935 this figure was surpassed by one
of 61,854. Inevitably this radical change
in the population figures affected the Arab
nationalist elements in the country. Inevitably,
too, the immigration in three
years of over 134,500 had given rise to
mass disorders and would give rise to more.
The Mandatory authorities on the spot
deserve praise for urging, against many
warnings and anti-British rioting, that in
their desperate need Jews should be
allowed to take full advantage of the
regulations, but the British government
who agreed to this deserves less credit. It
was clear that Palestine alone could not
solve the problem caused by Hitler's anti-Jewish
mania. The only way to relieve
the strain on Palestine was to open doors
elsewhere, and Great Britain could in fact
have absorbed the whole German Jewish
population. But to allow any large foreign
immigration would not have been a
popular move; it might add to the already large unemployment figures and would
be resented by many trades unions. The
British authorities never sent Jewish
refugees back to Germany, but they made
no public move. The lethargic Baldwin
always preferred to do the minimum. The
burden continued to fall on Palestine; the
number of immigration visas was cut;
illegal immigration increased. Britain
could certainly have done much more.
The expected major trouble broke out
in 1936. An immediate cause was the constitutional
issue. Through 1935 Sir Arthur
Wauchope doggedly pursued the goal of
a legislative council, and the Arab leaders,
of whom the Mufti was now openly the
chief, realized that their previous rejections
had made them the only Arab community
in Asia without independence or a
representative chamber. They accepted
Wauchope's invitation in principle. But
this time the Zionists emphatically
rejected it. They cannot be blamed, but
they acted with remarkable ineptitude,
claiming that a council "would merely
serve as an instrument for... spreading
anti-Zionist propaganda and intensifying
racial strife." Such an argument flatly contradicted
all former statements on the subject by the Zionist leadership, and
inevitably drew ill-will and suspicion.
Undismayed Wauchope continued to
hold out the offer, but the issue was
shelved with the outbreak on April 18,
1936, of the Arab Rebellion.
With terrible casualties (the highest
being Arabs killed by rebels as collaborationists)
the rising continued till
October, 1936, after which the British
government promised a Royal Commission
to inquire into the causes of unrest.
The Commission was led by Lord Peel
and had a distinguished membership.
Although it failed in its attempt to find
a solution, as all these commissions did,
it is historically important because it
ultimately influenced events. Its main
recommendation was for a partition of
Palestine into Jewish-ruled and Arab-ruled
areas.
The idea received unintentional support
from the attitudes of the two sides.
Though the Jews had already somewhat
weakened their case by absurd propaganda
(such as when an eminent lawyer
tried to prove that the term "non-Jewish
communities" in "the Balfour Declaration
did not refer to the Muslim Arab inhabitants) they gave the scheme a wary
acceptance, and thus proved themselves
pliable and moderate. But the Mufti and
his party made the rashest Jewish witness
seem reasonable. The Mufti himself insisted
that Turkish rule had been humaner
and more freedom-loving than the British,
and he tried to scare the Commissioners
with melodramatic tales of lurid conspiracies
organized by Rabbis in the
Balkans to seize Muslim shrines. The chief
Arab apologist, George Antonius, tried
to persuade Lord Peel that the Arabs
suffered a profound sense of injustice
from the disintegration of United Syria
which everyone, Jew and Arab, had long
forgotten. The lasting impression was of
fanaticism against reason.
Before submission to the League of
Nations, the Peel recommendations
needed to be approved by the Houses of
Parliament. The Commissioners included
no member of either House except Peel
himself who was ill and nearing the end of
his life. He defended his work feebly, as
did the government. The man who killed
the recommendations was Lord Samuel
who was listened to as a former High
Commissioner. In a brilliant speech in the Lords he pointed out the disconcerting fact that in a time of peace it is literally
impossible to move populations except by
force and with an accompaniment of
cruelty which would revolt national and
world opinion and that the Jewish population
of Palestine was not concentrated
or large enough for the proposed partition
to be put viably into effect by other
means. His argument proved irresistible.
The government gradually put Lord
Peel's proposals aside. When they were
rejected by the League of Nations in
August, the British Government did not
contest the verdict.
In the summer of 1937 the Arab Rebellion
flared up again in response to the
agitation of the politicians who were
alarmed by what seemed the pro-Zionist
bias of the Peel Report, and were too
ignorant to take note of its political
failure. In October, Arab terrorists murdered
Lewis Andrews, the District Commissioner
of Nazareth. The Rebellion
persisted for two years. In February,
1938, Wauchope was succeeded by Sir
Harold MacMichael who had served successfully
in the Sudan as a Colonial
Governor, but who proved ill-suited to the Palestine High Commission.
Two events of 1938 should be remembered.
A young Scots officer in the British
Army, Orde Wingate, got permission
from the Palestine Military Commander,
Sir Archibald Wavell, to raise small units,
recruited from Jews and officered by
British, to counter-attack Arab guerrillas
who were attacking Jews at night. Wingate
called them the Special Night Squads.
They first went into action in June, 1938,
and they operated successfully till the
summer of 1939 when they were disbanded.
The S.N.S. gave the Jews, restless
under the official Zionist policy of
"self-restraint," a new self-confidence.
The other event was a melancholy
fiasco. Appalled by the suffering of the
Jews in Europe, President Roosevelt
invited the non-Fascist world to an international
conference held at Evian in July,
1938. Thirty-one countries sent delegates.
With the sole exception of the Dominican
Republic, which offered asylum to 100,000
Jews, the countries represented contented
themselves with edifying speeches and
no new action. The main load remained
on Palestine alone.
Early in 1939 Neville Chamberlain and his Colonial Secretary, Malcolm Macdonald,
summoned a Palestine conference
in London which was attended by an
Arab and a Jewish delegation, and delegations
from the Arabic-speaking world.
Since the Arabs refused to meet the Jews
it was held as two conferences: Anglo-Arab
and Anglo-Jewish. (The Mufti, suspected
of complicity in the murder of
Andrews, had fled Palestine and was
absent.) Though the army was slowly
mastering the Arab Rebellion, the Palestine
Arabs were in a strong position. The
neighbouring Arab countries had grown interested in Zionism after 1935 and some
of them were large suppliers of oil, which
would be needed in the coming war. The
Jews had no oil. It would have been madness
for a British government in 1939 to
open a serious quarrel with the Arabs.
Still believing that reason would prevail
if only there could be frank discussion, the government hoped vainly that
they would not have to be cruel to the
Jews. (There could be little frank discussion
with the Arab delegates because
they feared that any concessions would
bring on them the murderous wrath of the
Mufti.) Faith and Hope the government
had; they found it impossible to practise
Charity and after the abortive conference
they imposed their own solution in what
all Zionists call "the infamous White
Paper" of May, 1939.
It was a milder version of a proposal
(later withdrawn) by Lord Passfield in
1930, but now it had an effect unknown
in Passfield's day: it distressed not only
the Zionist party but all Jews, especially
in the English-speaking world. What
most exasperated opponents was the
rigid limit set on Jewish immigration.
They amounted to this: 10,000 Jewish
immigrants a year for the next five years,
with an additional immediate immigration
of 25,000. Later immigrations would
be with Arab agreement, and this meant
none. The proposed figures, great by
former standards, were minute in wntrast
with the numbers victimized by
Nazi Germany and her anti-Semitic
followers elsewhere. It was psychologically
impossible for a Jew to accept
the White Paper of 1939.
The Jews were in a helpless position.
They protested vigorously and when the
Permanent Mandates Commission of the
League of Nations rejected the White
Paper in June, 1939, the Jews declared it
illegal. (In fact only the League Council,
which was never called again, could veto
a Mandatory's decision). But the Jews
could do no more than protest, for it was
also psychologically impossible for them
to take the anti-British side in the
manifestly approaching war with Germany.
The Arabs, who had no such
inhibitions and many of whom tended to look with
admiration on Hitler, also protested
against what they held to be a British
surrender to Zionism, but their indignation
may have been less sincere. For in
fact the White Paper achieved its immediate
political aim. The incentive to
the Rebellion weakened and it slowly
ceased. Oil supplies to the Middle East
Command from Arab areas were not
interrupted during the Second World
War. But the dubious morality of this appeasement had later to be paid for by
the British.
Early in the war, in 1940, the Palestine
Administration and the government of
Winston Churchill came into sharp disagreement.
Dr. Weizmann and the Zionist
leaders wanted above all things to
form a Jewish army to fight Nazism.
Churchill was in full sympathy with them
as were several of his colleagues including
the Colonial Secretary, Lord Lloyd. Sir
Harold MacMichael, backed by the Commander-
in-Chief Middle East, Sir Archibald
Wavell, vigorously opposed the
proposition, for they believed that the
Zionists would use such an army for
political ends. Against the High Commission
and Wavell and his - successors
Churchill battled in vain.
After numerous attempts and disappointments
the Zionists obtained
official sanction - but not till the end of
1944 - for a Jewish Brigade Group
which went into action under its own
standards bearing the Star of David.
However, most Palestine Jews who fought
in the war took the simple course of joining
the British Army, and their numbers
and records in this regard were high. In
the Middle East Command these numbers
included a larger proportion than was
then suspected of men under secret
Zionist orders. But their existence was
often discovered and explains in some
part the objections of the Mandatory to
encouraging a Jewish army.
But the Jewish army, though a burning
issue, burned less ferociously than the
difference between the British and the
Zionists over the question of Jewish
immigration into Palestine. Zionist propaganda
painted throughout the Second
World War and after a horrific picture of
brutal British imperialists turning back
helpless Jewish immigrants and handing
them back to their persecutors. The facts
suggest other interpretations of events.
Before the war the High Commission
committed an act of gross insensitivity.
Three boats, filled with Jewish refugees
whose passports had false immigration
visas supplied by the Gestapo, arrived in Palestine during March and April, 1939.
They were sent back to their port of
embarkation. This cruel action produced
a storm of rage in the House of Commons,
and the government found itself in danger.
Zionist propagandists (notably the writer
Arthur Koestler) insist that there was
repetition of such incidents throughout
the war, but they give no names of boats
after April, 1939. In fact there are no
recorded cases of this kind after April, but
British policy remained repugnant to
the Jewish Agency none the less.
The new Mandatory policy was to receive Jewish immigrants only up to the
White Paper quota, from which the number
(never large) of known illegal immigrants
was harshly deducted. Further
immigrants were not sent back but given
asylum in British overseas territory.
The Jewish Agency wanted a Zionist
solution of the refugee problem, and was
not interested in others. This led to the
tragedy of the S.S. Patria in November,
1940. Some 1,800 refugees were in the
course of being transferred from three hulks anchored in Haifa to the French
boat Patria with a view to their shipment
to Mauritius. The Jewish Agency arranged
for saboteurs to put the engines out of
working order, but a miscalculation with
the explosives resulted in the sinking of
the ship and the death of over 250 people.
The Jewish Agency then represented the
disaster as an act of mass-suicide. The
survivors from the Patria itself were
allowed to remain in Palestine, a fact not
always mentioned by Zionist writers. The
rest were sent to the island of Mauritius
where the climate is agreeable and the
death rate was low, another rarely mentioned
fact. They were warned that they
would not be authorized to return to
Palestine, but in fact many of them did
return while Lord Gort was High Commissioner,
another fact seldom mentioned.
Another ship, the Struma, holding 769
refugees reached Istanbul in December.
The Turks refused asylum. The Jewish
Agency insisted that visas for Palestine,
and no other sort of visa, should be issued
to the refugees. They were not interested
in propositions that the refugees should
be sent to Cyprus, Mauritius, Egypt, the
Sudan, or elsewhere in Africa and the
East where the British had authority to settle them temporarily. It was to be
Palestine or nothing. MacMichael, the
High Commissioner, refused, then relented,
agreeing to Palestine visas for
those between 11 and 18. Before this
decision reached the refugees the Struma,
in February, 1942, was towed into the
Black Sea where it blew up and sank. It
may have struck a mine. There was only
one survivor.
MacMichael incurred blame through his
weakness. Like his uncle, Lord Curzon,
he had the manners and obstinacy of a
strong man, but in times of crisis could
be irresolute and afraid. One may wonder
why he did not act strenuously on his
own, independently of the Jewish Agency,
and thus save these wretched people.
By the end of 1942 boatloads of refugees
had become rare. Hitler's "Final Solution"
- the wholesale execution of millions
of Jews - was in full operation. Gestapo
aid to refugees in the earlier phase, furnishing
them with false visas, etc., may
puzzle some readers. It was partly due to
bribery, and mostly due to a policy aimed
at confusing British rule in Palestine. In
1942 German policy became less devious,
and the "Final Solution" aimed simply
at the ultimate finalty - extermination.
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In 1942, the High Commission had
to face a new problem: the Biltmore
Programme. This originated in a
Jewish Conference held in the Biltmore
Hotel, New York, in May,
1942, and demanded that the Jewish
Agency should be the judge of immigration
quotas and "that Palestine be established
as a Jewish Commonwealth." This
programme meant the rise of Ben Gurion,
the dynamic leader of the Mapai Party,
best described as the Labour and Trades
Union party of the National Home. As
the agitator for a Jewish State to be
formed as soon as possible he had, during
the previous three years, gained an increasing
following among Zionists in
Palestine, and he was rapidly becoming
a recognized leader among the Jews of the
world. The Biltmore resolution also meant
the gradual disappearance of Chaim
Weizmann as the Zionist leader. Weizmann
was the originator of the Biltmore
Programme, but he had put it forward in
an article published by the New York
monthly Foreign Affairs - as an ideal
gradually to be attained. Ben Gurion
backed it at the Biltmore Hotel meeting
as an aspiration immediately to be realized.
Weizmann, the master of diplomacy
but a lesser master than Ben Gurion of
mass appeal, was outraged. The two men
came into bitter party conflict. As antagonists
they were unequally matched.
Weizmann was prematurely aged by grief
at the death in action of his sonMichael,
an officer in the R.A.F. Ben Gurion had
a lasting youthful vigour. Weizmann did
not return to Palestine till November,
1944. Ben Gurion returned in 1942.
Coincidentally, and in no way through
Ben Gurion's fault, there was a growth of
Jewish terrorism in 1943. It was the
natural consequence of the "Final Solution"
which had, almost literally, driven
some Jews into a state of madness. Of this
the unconsciously self-revealing memoirs
of Menachem Begin (later the chief of the
terrorist gang "Irgun") give evidence.
The reader cannot but be appalled by the
hatreds, the delusions, the incapacity for
any but narrow views, which Begin expresses.
Let Begin be praised for this: he
disposed decisively of the fallacy that
suffering invariably enobles the mind.
On November 6, 1944, terrorists of the
Stern Gang (unconnected then with
Begin's Irgun) murdered the British
Minister of State in Cairo, Lord Moyne,
who was in no sense an enemy of Zion.
This meaningless crime followed shortly
after the retirement of Sir Harold MacMichael
and his succession by Field Marshal
Lord Gort, a former British
Commander-in-Chief who had won the
admiration of the free world - by his
courageous and statesmanlike conduct
as the Governor of Malta from 1942 to
1944. The murder of Lord Moyne put an
end to promising negotiations between
Weizmann, still the official Zionist leader,
and Churchill, but it was also followed
by a revulsion of the Jewish Agency
against terrorism which further resulted
in an improvement in their relations with
the High Commission and Lord Gort.
The next month, December, 1944, the
Labour Party in Britain made a memorable
political blunder. Foreseeing a general
election in the near future, Mr. Attlee
committed his party to a programme of
total pro-Zionism including unlimited
Jewish immigration and the transfer of
the bulk of the Arab population to the
neighbouring countries. Remembering
Lord Samuel's unanswerable arguments
in 1937, the Zionist leadership expressed
pleasure but were careful not to commit
themselves.
The year 1945 saw the end of the war,
Labour in power, and the Jews of Europe
demanding the right to go to Palestine.
The High Commission had new and
daunting problems to face. First Attlee's
rash commitment. Second a revival of
Arab nationalism in Palestine, following
on the formation of the Arab League in
1945. The League members included all
of Palestine's neighbours and Iraq, and
were united on very little except anti-Zionism.
Third and most decisively a
renewed American interest in the Middle East
since the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia.
United States politicians had to appease
both a pro-Arab oil-lobby and a Jewish
vote.
Like his predecessor, President Truman
was genuinely grieved at the suffering of
European Jewry, and simultaneously he
had to contend with an oil-lobby grown
more important after that most magnificent
of American acts of state, the Marshall
Plan. The Plan's success depended
on the availability of oil in great quantity. Like the British in 1939, the U.S.A. could
not afford to quarrel with the Arab world.
In 1945 Truman sent a personal emmissary
to Europe, Earl G. Harrison, to
ascertain the situation of the Jews. The
Jewish Agency had made earlier inquiries.
Both reached the same conclusion:
100,000 Jews stood in immediate need of
emigration from Nazi-desecrated Europe.
Following a Zionist conference in London
in August, Ben Gurion led a delegation to
the Colonial Office and demanded sanction
for a Jewish immigration of 100,000
and the recognition of Palestine as a
Jewish State. In the same month Truman
sent Attlee Harrison's report urging him
to act on its recommendations. Both
representations met emphatic refusal
from the British side.
The figure of 100,000 had a long and
chequered career of which only a bare
outline need be given here. First, one must
note a change in the structure of the
Mandatory. Responsibility was now
shared between the Foreign Office (under
Ernest Bevin) and the Colonial Office.
Then, in November, 1945, Lord Gort was
forced to retire when he was found to be
ill with cancer. Thus was removed a
remarkable character who might have
slightly eased the situation. Gort was
succeeded by General Sir Alan Cunningham,
the last High Commissioner. In the
winter of 1945-46 an "Anglo-American
Committee of Inquiry" went to Europe
and Palestine. In London they met Bevin
who declared that if they turned in a
unanimous report he would give it full
backing. In April, 1946, their unanimous
report recommended the continuance of
the British Mandate and the admission
of 100,000 Jews. Bevin and the British
government rejected the report. Truman
publicly welcomed it.
Palestine was moving to a state of civil
war with three combatants: Jews, Arabs
and British. The terrorists had formed an
alliance with the Jewish defence force
"Haganah"; sabotage and atrocities increased.
In June the High Commission in
desperation arrested the Zionist leaders.
In July, 1946, Irgun blew up the wing of
the King David Hotel that housed British
Military Headquarters in Jerusalem, killing
91 people, including British, Arabs
and Jews. Inevitably this major provocation,
accompanied by many minor ones, bred anti-Semitism among British troops.
Anti-Semitism found expression, not only
in some sporadic outbreaks but in trends
in military policy. The army took to inflicting
corporal punishment on arrested
terrorists until counter-atrocities of the
same kind by terrorists brought this
particular folly to an end. But the trend
in policy did not cease. In the winter of
1946-47 the British government foolishly
raised a special unit to combat terrorism
by counter-terrorism. The policy (like all
such policies) manifestly failed and only
brought the British name into disrepute.
It was abandoned in spring, 1947.
To return to 1946: the Arab League
began to band together for an invasion of
Palestine. Then in late July, 1946, there
was a serious Anglo-American attempt to
obtain peace.
In Bevin's absence through illness
Herbert Morrison acted for the Foreign
Office. The American negotiator was
Ambassador Henry Grady. They worked
out a scheme of Arab and Jewish cantons
for Palestine, but the most important
provision was British agreement to the
immediate immigration of 100,000 Jews,
and American agreement to help in their
transport. The plan came too late. The
Zionists had by now recognized that in
asking for 100,000 they had blundered.
If their request had been granted they
would have been seriously handicapped.
A Jewish State was their aim and for that
they needed at least three times more than
100,000. This time the emphatic rejection
of the plan came from Zionists, both in
Britain and America.
The last 18 months of the British
Mandate is a story of confusion, inconsistency,
loss of nerve, loss of direction,
and complication. Irresolution was infectious
and everyone who attempted a
solution lost his way before long. Nor is
this surprising because the problem always
had been insoluble except by war.
In February, 1947, Bevin declared that
Great Britain would hand back the
trusteeship to the United Nations, the
natural successor to the League of Nations.
He was not believed then or later, and little
wonder. The High Commission, acting on
governmental orders, did everything possible
to frustrate the U.N. as its successor.
But the government did mean to leave
Palestine none the less. British political
behaviour at this moment was hardly sane
and was probably attributable to post-war
demoralization.
The U.N. made a bold but unavailing
attempt to solve the problem by partition
through the U.N. Special Committee on
Palestine (U.N.S.C.O.P.), in 1947. While
U.N.S.C.O.P. was in Palestine there
occurred the affair of the refugee boat
Exodus. The facts may be briefly recalled.
Zionist sympathizers in America had
bought this boat and renamed it Exodus
1947. The boat arrived in Haifa in June,
1947, carrying some 4,500 Jews from Germany.
The coincidence of the boat's
arrival and U.N.S.C.O.P .'s investigations
in Palestine may have been fortuitous,
but, if so, as may be doubted, it was most
fortunate for the Zionist cause. The traumatic
memories of the Patria and the
Struma had made the Jews of Palestine
sensitive to what may be called "boat-propaganda,"
and the refusal of the
British authorities to allow the passengers
to land led to wild scenes of protest
in Haifa and Jerusalem. If Bevin had
been clever he would have allowed the
passengers in as a special concession while
U.N.S.C.O.P. were the government's
guests. But Bevin had the short-sightedness
of an angry temperament.
The ship, with a British military escort
on board, was sent back to its port of
embarkation near Marseilles. When the
French authorities were assured by the
official Zionist spokesman that none except
a few extreme invalids wished to
land, the French refused to interfere. In
the meantime further Irgun and other
terrorist atrocities, notably the hanging
of two British sergeants with explosive
booby-traps concealed on one of the
bodies, had inflamed British opinion,
and there followed some anti-Semitic disorders
in several British cities where
there were large Jewish populations. The
government feared that these disorders
might increase if the 4,500 were landed
in Britain. Therefore, the Jews in Exodus
were sent back to Hamburg for asylum
in the British zone of occupied Germany.
The Exodus affair gave the propagandists
their cue. Jews had
been sent back to Germany! Here
was proof indeed, so the propagandists
claimed, of Nazi-minded
British cruelty! Articles, books, a film
gave the affair of the Exodus a Zionist slanted
world-wide fame. In its blaze, the
memory of the many innocent victims in
the King David Hotel assassination, and
much else of horror, was dimmed, almost
extinguished. But the fierce scenes of
struggle when the ship reached Hamburg
and the passengers were forced to disembark
does seem to prove that this successful
propaganda effort was based on a
considerable and, for the British, inconvenient
measure of truth.
Propaganda was a large cause of the
outbreak of the Arab-Jewish War of 1948.
The Arab League members had intoxicated
themselves with anti-Zionism so
fervently that they could not retreat now.
After 1945 Egypt had reluctantly agreed
to join the League's aggressive policies,
following King Farouk's absurd ambitions to make of himself not only the head
of the Arab League, but a de facto Caliph,
the leader not only of the Arabic-speaking
but the whole Muslim world, a role for
which he was grossly unfitted. The
Zionists, having convinced themselves
with their own propaganda, had put
themselves in a position where compromise
became very difficult, though the
leadership did try compromise in accepting
U.N.S.C.O.P.'s partition plan. The
leaders of neither side wanted war, but
the dragon's teeth had already been sown.
If the British wanted to maintain
peace, they went the worst way about it.
The Mandatory had a sound case when
they allowed the well-disciplined British officered
Arab Legion into the Arab area
allotted by the U.N.S.C.O.P. partition,
but they showed only irresponsibility
when they allowed irregular troops from
Syria and Lebanon to march into Palestine
during the first weeks of 1948. The
war in effect started while the Mandatory
was still in nominal control and British
military opinion anticipated a swift Arab victory. The fallacy of this opinion was
soon obvious. At the end of March the
Zionist forces received secretly a massive
supply of arms from Czechoslovakia. For
that reason Czechoslovakia has sometimes
been saluted as the saviour of Zion,
but the Czech interest seems to have been
only mercenary. The Czechoslovakian
government sold equal quantities of arms
to Arabs. However, Zionist agents organized
a theft of the last-mentioned arms
and redirected them to Jewish fighters.
Though the Jewish Army was compelled
a little later than this to surrender almost
the whole Jewish quarter of the Old City
of Jerusalem, a most bitter sacrifice, they
were able at the beginning of April to
fight a long battle with decisive success
west of Jerusalem. This victory enabled
them to keep the road to the coast open
and, with great difficulty, to retain the
new part of Jerusalem, west of the historic
city. Before this battle was concluded
on April 9, the Zionist terrorists
were guilty of the most ghastly of all
atrocities perpetrated in modern
Palestine. On April 8, at the village of
Dir Yassin, they slaughtered 254 men,
women and children, nearly the whole
village population. Three days later Arab
guerrillas replied with a counter-atrocity
by massacring Jewish doctors and nurses
caught in an ambush. There was a further
Jewish reprisal in a suburb of Jerusalem.
Since January, 1948, there had been an
increasing flight of Arab peasants from
the country, and, as panic grew, the fleeing
thousands turned to tens and then
hundreds of thousands. The British had
lost the will and now the capacity to
impose order. As helpless spectators they
watched a policy undertaken with rash
idealism go down amid hate and bloodshed.
A day earlier than announced, on
May 14,1948, the last High Commissioner
left Palestine. On the same day Ben
Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel. By
a secret agreement with Dr. Weizmann,
President Truman immediately signified
the recognition of the new State by the
USA. For reasons different from Truman's,
Stalin signified U.S.S.R. recognition.
Before such a combination Great
Britain had no choice and finally recognized
the new State in January, 1949. |
