When governments acted, as they usually do, primarily from motives of “realism,” that is, of simple self-interest, then the Arabs held trumps. The Zionists or Israelis managed to prevail only in those rare instances when “idealism” prevailed.
Without two such moments—born of the convictions of an English foreign minister and an American president—Israel would not have come into existence. The first of these was the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 pledging the British government to foster “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This took on the force of international law when it was incorporated in treaties that formally settled World War I, establishing new countries and borders and a fragile new international order.
Arthur James Balfour was foreign secretary in the government of David Lloyd George, whom historian Paul Johnson describes as “a philosemite and a Zionist . . . also a Bible-thumper.”2 Following an audience he had granted to Zionist spokesman Chaim Weizman, Lloyd George was quoted as commenting that “when Weizman was talking of Palestine he kept bringing up place-names which were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.”3 The prime minister’s mind-set was mirrored in Balfour whose successor, Robert Vansittart, once said, perhaps in pique, that Balfour had cared for nothing but Zionism.4
To say that the two ministers acted out of unalloyed altruism would be an exaggeration. Historian Walter Laqueur notes that they “were aware that the goodwill of world Jewry was an important if intangible factor. The year 1917 was not a happy one for the Allies and they needed all the assistance they could get.”5 Yet, “by the time the Balfour Declaration was published, America had joined the Allies and there was no longer any urgent need to appease American Jewry.” Thus, Laqueur concludes, “self-interest by itself cannot provide a satisfactory explanation for British policy on Palestine in 1917.”6
Lloyd George’s pro-Zionism was opposed from many sides within his own administration. Less than two years after its promulgation, “General Money, head of the British military administration in Palestine, advised London to drop the Balfour Declaration,” writes Laqueur. “The people of Palestine were opposed to the Zionist program, and if Britain wanted the mandate [from the League of Nations to rule the territory] it was necessary ‘to make an authoritative announcement that the Zionist program will not be enforced in opposition to the wishes of the majority.’”7
When, in 1924, Labour was entrusted for the first time to lead a government, Zionists might have taken heart. In general, around the world, their vision enjoyed more sympathy from the Left than the Right. But the Labour government proved to be steely realists with respect to Palestine. The colonial portfolio was placed with Sidney Webb, the avatar of Fabian socialism. He was stone cold to the Zionist idea and indeed to the plight of the Jews.
Following Arab riots in 1929 that left 133 Jews dead, Webb appointed Robert Shaw to head an investigation. Shaw found that the Arabs were to blame, but recommended nonetheless that the solution was to choke off Jewish emigration into Palestine in order to assuage Arab anger.
This scenario was enacted again the following decade in more ominous circumstances. The “Arab revolt” of 1936 to 1939 was led by the mufti of Jerusalem and apparently financed by Adolf Hitler’s government. By the time it petered out, a few hundred Jews had died at Arab hands. Arab casualties were much higher, numbering thousands. Some of these were victims of Jewish retaliation but the large majority fell as the British suppressed the uprising or in Arab-on-Arab violence.
In response, London adjusted its policies. As the Los Angeles Times described it:
Just as Hitler’s cruelties were becoming apparent to the world, the British issued a white paper that partially reneged on the Balfour declaration’s promises. In deference to Arab feelings, the British established a limitation on Jewish immigration into Palestine. The Zionists were furious, but they were helpless to do anything about it.8
Even while the Arab revolt raged, some three dozen governments had convened at Evian in 1938 at the invitation of President Franklin Roosevelt. The first signs of Hitler’s “final solution to the Jewish problem” were already visible, and the subject of the conference was the rescue of the imperiled Jews. The outcome was nil. The British government insisted that the possibility of haven in Palestine for European Jewry not even be discussed.
Germany’s final defeat laid bare the full horror of the Holocaust, but even this did not soften London’s attitude toward Zionism or the Jews. Labour’s Clement Atlee had replaced Winston Churchill as prime minister, with Ernest Bevin as his foreign minister. Both men were anti-Semites, especially Bevin. (Or, as the British Labour historian, Kenneth O. Morgan, put it: “Bevin was not . . . anti-Semitic. But, without doubt, he was emotionally prejudiced against the Jews.”9)
Nonetheless, British policy was shaped less by prejudice than by recrudescent realism. London did not want to “fly in the face of the Arabs,”10 explained Lord Halifax, Britain’s ambassador in Washington.
The issue at hand was the fate of the Jewish survivors in European displaced persons camps. Their situation was desperate; and this steeled the determination of the Zionists, exemplified by the fictional Ari Ben Canaan, to bring them to Palestine. London’s adamant refusal was exemplified by the fate of the Exodus, a real ship from which Uris took the title of his novel. Bound from France for Palestine with 4,500 refugees, it was intercepted by the Royal Navy, and its passengers were shipped back to Europe where they were incarcerated in the British occupation zone of Germany, under the watch, eerily, of “local” guards.
It was at this moment that a second figure stepped forward, as Arthur Balfour had, and placed idealism above realism in endorsing a Jewish state. This was U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who fumed that Attlee’s policies lacked “all human and moral considerations.”11 Truman’s decision to support the 1947 resolution of the UN General Assembly that partitioned Palestine between Jews and Arabs, and to recognize the Jewish state almost as soon as it had declared its existence, tipped the scales on this historic issue.
While a senator in 1941, Truman had joined the American Palestine Committee, a pro-Zionist group. He claimed his interest in Palestine “went back to his childhood,” write historians Allis and Ronald Radosh. “Raised as a Baptist, he had read the Bible ‘at least a dozen times’ before he was fifteen.”12 After the war, Truman received a report on the shockingly bad conditions in displaced persons camps housing European Jews who had managed to avert the genocide. Absorbing the grim details, he called their plight a matter of the “highest humanitarian importance” and fought with the British to allow them to go to Palestine.13
Roosevelt, too, had harbored Zionist sympathies. But Roosevelt had been warned sharply by the State Department that support for a Jewish homeland would compromise vital American interests with the Arabs. Roosevelt hoped he could square this circle through a personal meeting with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. But, as with Stalin at the wartime summit meetings, the president overestimated the effects of his own charm and powers of persuasion. Not only did Ibn Saud refuse to countenance a Jewish state in the Middle East, he opposed adamantly the entry of even a single additional Jew into Palestine. Following his meeting with the Saudi monarch, Roosevelt privately voiced his newfound conviction that “the project of a Jewish state in Palestine was, under present conditions, impossible of accomplishment.”14
During the Roosevelt and Truman years, public opinion sympathized with the Jews and thus supported Zionist aims, insofar as it was aware of them. This, however, flew in the face of America’s diplomats and generals. Government cables, revealed to a postwar commission examining the Palestine problem, showed that each time the White House had made promises to the Jews, the State Department hastened to tell Arab leaders to disregard them. And, after one Truman statement supporting further Jewish emigration to Palestine, senior American diplomat Loy Henderson went so far as to apologize to the British ambassador for the department’s inability to control the president.15
Needless to say, Truman was a politician, and there were more Jews in America than in Britain or any other country, especially after the annihilation of European Jewry by Hitler. But