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THE OLD STATE DEPARTMENT

Dean Acheson remarks in his book Present at the Creation that the State Department of the early 1940s was closer to the State Department of the nineteenth century than to the department that he was to head shortly after the Second World War. It therefore seems logical to begin with a few words of description of the setting in which the officers of the Department carried out their duties. The ornate building at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street, dating from the 1870s, with its high ceilings, white-painted swinging doors, and long corridors paved with alternating black and white marble squares, was reminiscent of some exclusive club. The total personnel was so small that everyone knew everyone else. A good deal of attention was paid to tradition and to doing things in the Department's customary style.

Critics of the Department sometimes said that its policies and way of life were as Victorian as the building itself. In 1947 the Department moved into a new building that had been designed for the War Department and that now forms the nucleus of the State Department complex in Foggy Bottom. It was hoped that this move might result in a streamlining of Departmental procedures, but whether this has come about is debatable.

At the head of the Department we knew was Cordell Hull, a veteran of the Spanish-American War and a distinguished-looking man who had a distinguished record in Congress before becoming Secretary of State in 1933. Hull approached every problem with deliberation and caution, whether in his office or on the croquet lawn where he found his favorite relaxation. It was commonly known in Washington that he and the Under Secretary, Sumner Welles, were not on good terms, and that Hull resented Welles’ inside track to the White House. Hull, in fact, was never one of President Roosevelt's intimates: for example, the President never even showed the minutes of the 1943 Tehran Conference to his Secretary of State.²

Welles was a patrician who had a long diplomatic career in Latin America. He had been a schoolmate of Roosevelt's at Groton. In the extensive correspondence between the two men preserved at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, he addresses the President as “Franklin.” Also at the library are copies of letters addressed to Hitler, Mussolini, and a number of other leaders at the time of Welles's 1940 mission to Europe, in which Roosevelt refers to him as a “boyhood friend.”

Welles had pronounced Zionist sympathies, more so perhaps than we realized at the time. This emerges from the many references to him in the literature of the period and especially in the correspondence of the Zionist leadership to be found at the Zionist archives in New York and Jerusalem. Many of Welles's own statements, as recorded in the published Foreign Relations of the United States (Near Eastern series) and in his own writings in later years, provide further confirmation of this. Indeed, he was the principal high-level contact of the Zionist leaders, and in early 1943, for example, it was he who took Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization and of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, to call on Roosevelt.

In the summer of 1943, matters came to a head and Hull asked the President to remove Welles. As Under Secretary, Roosevelt selected Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., then serving as administrator of Lend-Lease. Stettinius, a former steel executive, had the reputation of being a capable administrator, but Roosevelt clearly expected that in matters of policy Stettinius would follow his lead.

The next year (1944) Hull, in failing health, submitted his resignation, and Stettinius moved up to the Secretaryship. Joseph C. Grew, a veteran career diplomat who had been Ambassador to Japan at the time of Pearl Harbor, became Under Secretary.

Stettinius's administrative good sense resulted in a far-reaching and much needed reform of the Department's organization, but with Roosevelt in charge he made relatively little impact on foreign policy. In 1945 he presided over the San Francisco Conference, at which the United Nations Organization was set up, and thereafter devoted much time and attention to the world body.

Shortly after assuming office in April 1945 on the death of Roosevelt, President Truman replaced Stettinius with James F. Byrnes. In doing so he yielded to widespread criticism that Stettinius, who under the law then in effect would succeed to the presidency, lacked wide governmental experience and indeed had never held elective office. Byrnes was a prominent member of the Democratic party who had served as Senator, Justice of the Supreme Court, and in the Executive Office of the President. Simultaneously, Dean Acheson, formerly Assistant Secretary of State, was appointed Under Secretary.

Not long after Byrnes took over the Department, I attended a meeting in his office to discuss the Palestine question. Byrnes, who had the courtly manner of an old-fashioned Southern politician, sat at his desk, rocking back and forth in his big chair, his feet in their high-button shoes barely touching the floor. From time to time, as the meeting progressed, he took shorthand notes—he had been trained as a court reporter and the accounts of several conversations he had with the British Ambassador regarding Palestine appear in the Foreign Relations in the form of dialogue, just as he recorded them.

Byrnes's time was largely taken up with attendance at interminable meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers and he devoted little attention to Palestine. In fact, he rather pointedly washed his hands of the problem and repeatedly stated that he was leaving it to the President to handle. Thus it was Acheson with whom we usually dealt on such matters as required top-level consideration in the Department. In taking on this assignment Acheson managed to overcome a certain reluctance which he felt at becoming involved in Palestine affairs because of his close friendship with Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was a prominent Zionist supporter (their daily walk downtown from their Georgetown homes was a familiar sight to the celebrity-watchers of the period).

Acheson, who had an outstanding legal career and who later was to serve as Truman's fourth Secretary of State, was an impressive figure who looked the perfect diplomat. He had a keen mind and an incisive wit and our frequent contacts with him were always enjoyable as well as educational. With his very considerable skill in drafting he imposed on us the same high standards that he set for himself.

Truman tells us in his memoirs that he soon became dissatisfied with Byrnes and his free-wheeling tactics. In January 1947 he availed himself of Byrnes's resignation, which had been in the President's desk drawer in the Oval Office for a year, and appointed General George C. Marshall as Secretary. Marshall, the wartime Army Chief of Staff and one of the most respected figures in the country, had recently been serving in China on a special mission for the President.

Like his predecessor, Marshall resisted getting involved in Palestine, preferring to focus on the problems of European recovery and East-West relations. In mid-1947, Robert A. Lovett, a New York lawyer and member of the Wall Street firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman, succeeded Acheson as Under Secretary. This was of importance to the Department's work on Palestine, as Marshall delegated almost all of it to his Under Secretary.

The Division of Near Eastern Affairs, under which Palestine came, was headed in the early 1940s by the redoubtable Wallace S. Murray whose previous Near Eastern experience had been in Iran. He had been with the Division since 1925 and Chief since 1929. To be precise, Murray had the title Adviser on Political Relations, while his deputy, Paul H. Alling, was the nominal chief of the Division, but since the two of them worked very closely together as a team, the titles made no real difference. Immediate supervision over the work relating to Palestine came under Gordon P. Merriam, assistant chief of the Division and one of the earliest crop of Arabist Foreign Service officers.

In 1944, as a result of the Stettinius reorganization, an Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs was created with Murray as Director and Alling as Deputy Director. This office was the forerunner of the Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs of today. The Division of Near Eastern Affairs, with Merriam as chief, then became one of the component elements of the Office. In early 1945, Murray was appointed Ambassador to Iran while Alling went to Morocco as Diplomatic Agent and Consul General. Murray's successor was Loy W. Henderson, then serving in Baghdad. First George V. Allen, then Henry S. Villard, and later Joseph C. Satterthwaite held the position of Deputy Director; all three were career Foreign Officers with area experience. These changes took place as the State Department and the Foreign Service were beginning to expand to meet our nation's postwar global responsibilities. Additional staff was taken on, and many of our legations were raised to embassy status.

THE OLD NEAR EAST DIVISION: ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PERSONALITIES

A 1937 article on the Department made the comment that the Near East Division “is not often marked with excitement … our relations with these peoples are not important.”³ A similar attitude of condescension prevailed in other offices of the Department, to the extent that when I was assigned to Cairo in 1938, a friend in the European Division commiserated with me by saying: “The Near East! Nothing ever happens there.”

That the problems of the Near East were indeed not of primary importance in the Department of prewar days is revealed in a passage from Hull's memoirs in which he lists the pressing matters which were on his desk when he became Secretary of State. Although he mentions over a dozen problems, not one of them relates to the Near East.

The Division was still rather quiet when I entered it in 1943. The entire Division numbered only fourteen officers: by way of comparison, today's Bureau has a staff of over 150. As an indication of the workload, Palestine was handled by a desk officer along with Egypt and Iraq. The Palestine work, however, was soon to register a dramatic increase, as is shown by the number of pages devoted to it in the Foreign Relations volumes: 1942, 21 pages; 1943, 82; 1944, 97; 1945, 166; 1946, 167; 1947, 330; and 1948, one entire volume.

We were housed in a few offices along the west side of the third floor of the old Department. Two other desk officers (dealing with Turkey and Saudi Arabia), a secretary, and I were crowded into a room (No. 345) which had accommodated a single officer up to the outbreak of the war. Merriam was squeezed into an adjoining cubbyhole. Working conditions were chaotic most of the time. In the long Washington summers the heat became almost unbearable as the afternoon sun beat down. There was of course no air conditioning and though it was customary in those days to dismiss the government employees when the thermometer touched the mid-90s, the urgent nature of our work and the small size of our staff did not generally make it possible for us to leave early. With the aid of the salt tablets which we kept handy we managed to put in a full six-day week, rarely leaving before six or seven in the evening.

Even under normal conditions our room would have been full enough, and we often were crowded beyond capacity when officers arriving from the field or awaiting transportation to a post abroad—and there were always delays under the aircraft priority system—made the Division their headquarters. As soon as the doors of the Department opened in the morning these individuals would rush to preempt the chairs standing by our desks. We called them the “kibbitzers.” This invasion caused problems when any of us had visitors, as frequently happened.

The visitors to the office gave us plenty of problems in any event. Once, when the Saudi desk officer and the Turkish desk officer both had a number of callers grouped around their desks, the Saudi desk officer asked a question and one of the Turkish visitors replied. Fortunately there were not too many instances of this sort, but things could get rather touchy when the Saudi desk officer, for example, was receiving an Arab visitor and I was receiving a Jewish one. Simultaneously the Turkish desk officer, who had a wide acquaintance among the members of the press covering the Department, was apt to be entertaining some correspondent who might not be above taking advantage of the opportunity to overhear what the rest of us were saying.

On top of this general va et vient, the phones kept ringing incessantly and our lone secretary kept pounding away at her typewriter. Incidentally she was the only person in the room who was allowed to have one, as all typewriters had been taken away from the officers when the war began. It was this same secretary, Marilyn Woods, who unwittingly provided me with an anecdote which I often used afterward in my work, when she remarked one day in bewilderment: “Mr. Wilson, I don't understand why you let yourself get so bothered about Palestine when everyone knows it says in the Bible that the Jews are going back there some day!” Miss Woods, in the end, literally got herself to a nunnery, and gave up the Department in favor of a convent.

In the field, the Division had supervision over some thirty-nine Foreign Service posts, including one embassy (Turkey), ten legations, and twenty-eight consular or other offices. Beginning in 1944 there was also an officer attached to the Embassy in London (Raymond A. Hare) who followed Near Eastern developments from that vantage point and reported to the Division. Hare subsequently had a distinguished career, and held a number of high level positions in the Department, as well as serving as ambassador to several Near Eastern countries.

Within the Department, the officers concerned with Palestine had frequent contact with two scholars who had been brought in from academic life to work on postwar planning in the Division of Territorial Studies—Dr. Philip W. Ireland and Professor William Yale, who with several members of our Division made up the so-called Interdivisional Area Committee on Arab Countries. One of their colleagues was Ralph Bunche, who although not working directly on Palestine at this time was to be intimately associated with the problem later on as the second United Nations Mediator for Palestine and for many years thereafter as Under Secretary-General of the U.N. In the early 1940s, Bunche was one of the few African Americans holding positions at the officer level in the Department. Washington was a very different place in those days. I recall that when any of us wanted to go out to lunch with him there were only two places where we could go-Union Station and the YWCA.

Then there was Lieutenant Colonel Harold B. Hoskins, who had been born in Beirut and was sent out to the Near East on special missions in 1942 and 1943. Though not a member of the Division, Hoskins participated in many of the important discussions of the Palestine question and his name appears frequently in the official documents for the period. Because of his background and his contacts in the White House and the Pentagon, Hoskins sometimes played a key role, as for example in the case of the resolutions introduced into Congress in early 1944 respecting Palestine. Although the published documents do not reveal it, he was largely responsible for the shelving of the resolutions at that time. He was a cousin of Colonel William A. Eddy, also born in Beirut and Arabic-speaking, who interpreted for FDR and Ibn Saud.

The Foreign Service posts under the supervision of the Near East Division, like the Division itself, were staffed largely by officers who had had experience in the area. This was natural enough from the administrative standpoint, but there was also a sound reason why it should be so. As one authority on the Department and the Foreign Service pointed out at the time, the Near East Division, like its counterpart the old Far Eastern Division, dealt with “questions that often have little or no resemblance to the problems of Western nations.”⁴ Not only were there profound cultural differences between the peoples of the Near East and ourselves, but the work of the Division was set apart by special problems stemming from capitulary rights (still in force in certain countries as late as the mid-1940s) and the presence in the area of important American educational, medical, missionary and archaeological institutions. In other words, the Division handled many problems outside the range of ordinary diplomatic and consular work. It had thus become a sine qua non that its personnel should have experience in the area. Indeed, it should be noted that shortly after the Near East Division was established in the year 1909, it was made a Departmental requirement that the Division be staffed by officers who had served in the Near East. This policy was still being generally followed when I joined the Division in 1943.⁵

There was nothing sinister in this, but it gave rise to accusations that the officers dealing with the Palestine problem tended to side with the Arabs against the Jews. This led to repeated requests by the Zionists that jurisdiction over Palestine be taken out of the Division and placed in a special office dealing with Jewish affairs. It also led to allegations that some of the officers in question were anti-Semitic, a charge repeated, I am sorry to say, by Truman in his memoirs.

In point of fact, we in the Near East Division and in our posts overseas were simply trying to further United States interests. A corollary of this happened to be that most of us considered that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would be detrimental to our other interests in the Near East. The published diplomatic correspondence for these years contains many warnings to this effect, but this is not the same as promoting the Arab point of view in the dispute. Some of these officials may have been slow to recognize the significance of the American Jewish interest in Palestine, but the accusation of anti-Semitism (in the loose sense of anti-Jewish) is wholly unwarranted. We could take little comfort from the fact that we were often thought by the Arabs to be pro-Zionist because our work brought us into contact with Jews. This was just another consequence of the dilemma inherent in our Palestine policy.

The personality of Wallace Murray dominated the old Near East Division. Murray had a quick mind, a formidable knowledge of Near Eastern affairs, and a lively appreciation of the importance of the area to the United States. At the same time, he did not suffer fools gladly and he tended to show a proprietary attitude toward everything that he considered to be within his bailiwick. At this period the division chiefs were constantly feuding with one another and Murray was a past master at defending his prerogatives. Toward the Palestine question, he held very firm views, based on long exposure to that vexing problem. His manner toward the Zionists sometimes implied that he regarded them as intruders on an otherwise placid, or comparatively placid, Near Eastern scene. As a consequence, his meetings with the Zionist leadership, which were infrequent, were marked by a certain coolness on both sides and he was often a target of criticism on the part of the Zionists and their supporters in Congress. Dr. Weizmann, for example, states categorically in his memoirs (Trial and Error, Vol. II, 425) that Murray was “an avowed anti-Zionist and an outspoken pro-Arab.”

Certainly, the record contains a number of instances in which Murray expressed opinions that could not be regarded as sympathetic to the Zionist point of view. Among other things, as the Foreign Relations papers show, he warned President Roosevelt against the harmful effects of Zionist agitation on the war effort, and he recommended against approaching the British to keep Palestine open to Jewish immigration. Small wonder that when word spread in 1945 that he was to go out to the field, the Zionist leaders called on Acting Secretary of State Grew and urged Murray's replacement by someone who, as they put it, “understood the whole broad problem of the Jews and Palestine.”⁶

In all fairness to Wallace Murray, it should be pointed out that though he frequently gave voice to his deep-seated suspicion of Zionist motivations, and though he was never one to remain silent when the occasion called for forthrightness, he was a devoted public servant whose overriding concern was to do what he thought was right for the American interest. His reports to his superiors were notable for the prescience which they displayed and for accurately forecasting, at this comparatively early date, the effect that the adoption of a pro-Zionist policy would have on the standing of the United States in the Near Eastern region.

So formidable was Murray's reputation that our opposite numbers in the British Foreign Office regarded him with some trepidation. The British record of his 1944 visit to London, in the Foreign Office Palestine files at the Public Record Office, London, contains a number of comments expressing surprise that he turned out to be, unexpectedly, quite affable in his dealings with British officials.

Murray's deputy, Alling, had likewise served in the area and had been in the Division for many years, but he was the antithesis of Murray in personality. He had a genial, kindly manner and was universally popular. He succeeded in calming down many a visitor who found Murray's acerbic approach a bit hard to take. Like his chief, he had a wide-ranging knowledge of Near Eastern matters, particularly those pertaining to Syria and Lebanon, where he had seen service.

Merriam, too, was experienced and knowledgeable. His approach to the explosive Palestine issue was marked by a calm, business-like manner. His drafting ability was a tremendous asset in dealing with the subtleties and nuances of the problem.

Henderson, Murray's successor, was a very different type. His Foreign Service background, prior to going to Iraq, had been in Eastern European affairs and his approach to the problems of the Near East showed a broader perspective than that of many who had concentrated on that one area. He was objective and fair in his attitude toward the Palestine question, and sincerely interested in finding a solution. In view of this it is ironic, though perhaps inevitable, that he should later have been so fiercely attacked by the Zionists. Henderson encouraged those of us who were concerned with Palestine to have Jewish as well as Arab contacts, and Departmental meetings with the Zionists became less stiff and formal than in the past. A revealing comment on the contrasting styles of Murray and Henderson is to be found in Lord Trevelyan's little book on diplomacy. Trevelyan, who served in Washington during the war as a representative of the government of India, writes: “We had first to deal with Mr. Wallace Murray, whom we found difficult and openly hostile to the British in India. He left and was succeeded by Mr. Loy Henderson. The whole situation was transformed by his friendly and helpful approach.”⁷ Even so consistent a critic of the Department and its Palestine policy as the chairman of the Political Committee of the extremist United Zionists-Revisionists of America, Dr. Joseph B. Schechtman, found Henderson to be sincere, not an anti-Semite, and seeking what he conceived (mistakenly, Schechtman thought) to be the American interest.

THE OLD NEAR EAST DIVISION: RESPONSIBILITIES AND OPERATIONS

In considering the way in which the Palestine question was handled by the Near East Division, it must be borne in mind that the Division was responsible for our relations with over a score of countries, of which Palestine was only one. Essentially our task was to carry out United States policy toward the countries of the area and to protect and promote U.S. interests. Sometimes the latter were in conflict, as in the case of Palestine. In such an event, we did not consider that it was incumbent on us to pursue any single interest at the expense of another, but rather to attempt to reconcile the conflicts to the extent that seemed to be possible within the context of overall policy objectives. It follows that the criticism sometimes made by Zionists to the effect that we were remiss in not promoting the Jewish National Home more assiduously was wide of the mark. Not only was this not our principal task, but also (and this is the essential point) we never received instructions from the Secretary of State or the President that it should be so. Conversely (and this is equally important), we never were instructed to favor the Arab side in the dispute. It goes without saying that to carry out our duties in the light of the dilemma imposed by our conflicting commitments required a high degree of detachment and objectivity.

The responsibilities of NE, as listed in the 1946 Register of the Department of State, are reproduced in Appendix B. It will be noted that we were specifically charged with making recommendations to the Secretary with regard to the area of our jurisdiction, including Palestine. There thus can be no basis for alleging, as has sometimes been done in Zionist circles, that NE was interfering in our government's Palestine policy—this was our duty.

The day-to-day operations of the Near East Division were generally similar to those of the other geographical or political divisions of the Department. Divisional papers, whether calling for action or simply transmitting information, customarily originated at the lowest level, that is, the desk officer, and proceeded up through channels to higher authority, with the most important papers, those intended for the President, receiving approval of the Secretary or Acting Secretary. A given paper, by the time it reached the top level, might have been redrafted one or more times to incorporate the suggestions of officers along the way. Through the system of clearances, though this was not so burdensome as it became later on, the papers were made to reflect the views of all officers having an interest in the matter in hand, in other divisions, at higher levels of the Department, or even in other agencies. This process naturally involved a certain amount of give and take, but it could be said that by the time it had been completed a consensus of U.S. policy on the subject had been reached.

Because of problems peculiar to the Palestine issue, there were two important respects in which the work of the Near East Division differed from that of the other divisions. In the first place, a very considerable portion of the paperwork relating to the Palestine problem had to receive the personal attention of the President—which brought the desk officer into much closer touch with the White House than was the case elsewhere in the Department. Secondly, the special way in which matters pertaining to Palestine were handled by the U.S. government gave rise to a whole range of problems that were unique as well as frustrating in the extreme. Frequently we were kept in the dark about important developments that took place at higher levels. We were dependent on the press for learning which Zionist leaders had been received at the White House, and what the President had said to them, or, in some cases, allowed them to make public in his name. Perhaps the worst example of this occurred in August 1945 when President Truman wrote Prime Minister Clement Attlee of Great Britain urging the immediate entry into Palestine of one hundred thousand displaced Jews. A month later, the Division was still seeking confirmation of press reports that Truman had approached Attlee on the subject.

There were many other examples of this sort of thing, especially when the Palestine question was before the United Nations in 1947 and 1948. Indeed, an examination of the material available today in the Roosevelt and Truman libraries, as well as in the Zionist archives, has provided me with a number of surprises in the way of things of which I had not been aware during the time I was on the Palestine desk.

A fact of life to which we had to resign ourselves was that we were generally unable to find out what U.S. policy toward Palestine was. As early as 1942, Murray proposed that President Roosevelt should be asked to define our policy, but no answer was forthcoming. Later on, in spite of many attempts, the Department never obtained from President Truman any clear set of instructions as to the line to take. Thus we were forced to operate more or less in a vacuum.

One thing, however, was certain: whenever a Presidential statement favorable to the Jewish side gave rise to Arab protests, as was frequently the case, it was the Near East Division that was called on to smooth things over and prepare a reply. After we had exercised our ingenuity in an effort to provide some plausible explanation, a grateful President would initial our draft and the reply would go out. We became quite accustomed to this syndrome: Presidential statement, Arab protest, reply prepared by NE, Presidential approval.

It is not surprising that with these frustrations some of us developed ulcers and that at times we despaired of ever being able to carry out the duties assigned to us. In retrospect the wonder is that a handful of officers, working mostly under difficult wartime conditions, should have been able to achieve so large an output of important policy papers as appears in the annual Foreign Relations volumes and still to have kept up with our other daily tasks.

THE WHITE HOUSE AND PALESTINE

Palestine was an issue both in our foreign relations and in our domestic politics. Thus it tended to be handled in two separate ways, and the State Department often did not know what the White House was doing. Roosevelt had an assistant David K. Niles—who dealt with minority groups, including the Jewish community, and thus served as the Jews’ point of contact at the White House and was often consulted by the President regarding Palestine. Ironically, Niles was housed in the old State Department building, directly below Murray and Henderson, but we never saw him and had no idea of his activities.

Under Truman, Niles continued to be one of the most influential Presidential advisers on Palestine. Another was Judge Samuel Rosenman, who was Special Counsel to the President from 1943 to mid-1946, when he was succeeded by Clark M. Clifford, who was to play a key role at the time of Truman's recognition of Israel.

The advice regarding the domestic aspect of the Palestine problem which the President received from members of the White House staff, from Congress, or from the Democratic National Committee, was something that was never passed to us in NE. Forrestal Diaries first made public the intervention in the Palestine question of Chairman Hannegan of the Democratic National Committee. Considerably more information on this general subject is now available in the Roosevelt and Truman libraries.

The papers in the two Presidential libraries, as well as in the Niles collection and in the Zionist archives, provide ample evidence of the involvement of the White House in the Palestine question. As will be brought out in this book, at times the intervention of the White House staff was decisive, notably in 1947-48 but on certain earlier occasions as well. The consequences in terms of our Middle Eastern policy as a whole are evident to this day.

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN PALESTINE AT THE TIME OF PEARL HARBOR

“We shall fight the war as if there were no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war.” This characteristic assertion by David Ben Gurion, the fiery chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive in Jerusalem, conveys very expressively the mood of the Jewish community in Palestine during the early years of the Second World War. With the outbreak of war in September 1939, Palestine had become relatively quiet as the focus of world attention shifted elsewhere, to the Western Desert and to Europe. This was in marked contrast to the years immediately preceding, when the country had been in constant turmoil.

Initially, the Jewish community offered its full cooperation to the British in the war against Germany. There was of course no question as to where the Jews stood as far as Hitler was concerned, and many of them hoped that their cooperation might lead to a relaxation of the White Paper restrictions on Jewish immigration and land settlement. Some 18,000 Palestine Jews enlisted in the British forces, and the community did a great deal to help the British war effort, particularly in connection with military orders placed with Jewish industry, Jewish terrorist activity, which had sprung up immediately after the release of the White Paper, now declined.

However as the months passed, with no sign that the British had any intention of modifying the White Paper policy. Jewish resentment grew. The Jews of Palestine began to seek ways of bringing in as many refugee Jews as possible from occupied Europe, legally or illegally, and to agitate for a separate Jewish fighting force.

The Jewish community, the Yishav, was highly organized. Its most important body was the Jewish Agency, which was created specifically by the Mandate and which represented in Palestine the interests of the World Zionist Organization. The Agency had the responsibility of promoting the development of the Jewish National Home. At this time, Dr. Chaim Weizmann was serving as president both of the World Zionist Organization and of the Jewish Agency. The chairman of the Agency's Executive, as already noted, was Ben Gurion; the head of the Political Department was Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), and the treasurer was Eliezer Kaplan. A prominent figure in Zionist circles in Palestine was Goldie Myerson (later Golda Meir) who at the time was a member of the Vand Hapoel, the Executive of the Histadrut, the influential General Federation of Jewish Labor, which had connections with every segment of Jewish life in the country.

The Jewish community had already developed into something of a state within a state, with its own executive (the Jewish Agency), legislature (the Vaud Leumi or National Council) trade union system (the Histadrut), and even its own military organization, the underground Haganah (meaning “defense”). So well organized was the Yishuv that all of us who followed the Palestine scene knew long before the Jewish state came into being that if the Jews were to secure their state Weizmann would be the president, Ben Gurion the prime minister, Shertok the foreign minister. Kaplan the finance minister, and so on. And this is what came to pass. Eventually I got to know all of the persons named and can testify that, individually and collectively, for sheer ability they were superior to the members of most European cabinets of the day.

The Yishuv was divided into a complex of political parties, with the Labor party, known as Mapai, which provided most of the leadership, generally having the support of the majority. To the right of the political spectrum were the religious parties and the so-called Revisionists, or New Zionists, a radical splinter group founded by the late Vladimir Jabotinsky which called for a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan. The Revisionists had their own illegal army, the Irgun Zvai Leumi or National Military Organization, headed by Menachem Begin who was to attract considerable world attention in later years and who in May of 1977 became Prime Minister of Israel.

It should be added that in the left wing of the Yishuv there was a substantial minority of Jews who favored a binational state of both Jews and Arabs.

THE ARAB COMMUNITY IN PALESTINE

The Arab community could not have been more different from the Jewish. The Arabs were split into factions and had never been successful in organizing themselves as a political entity. First of all, they were divided along religious lines, with the Muslims in the majority but with substantial Christian and Druze elements. In addition, there had always been great rivalry between the big landholding families, of which the most prominent were the Husseinis, who were violently anti-British, and the Nashashibis, who tended to be more conciliatory toward the Mandatory power. The head of the Husseini clan, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti, or chief Muslim dignitary of Jerusalem and president of the Supreme Muslim Council, had also headed an Arab Higher Committee formed in 1936 in an effort to unite all the different Arab factions during the revolt which the Arabs launched in that year in protest against continued Jewish immigration. Following the collapse of this rebellion in 1937, the Higher Committee was outlawed by the British authorities. The Mufti fled to Iraq, while his cousin and chief lieutenant, Jamal al-Husseini, escaped to Syria.

By the start of the Second World War, the Palestine-Arab community was in complete disarray, with no effective leadership. Although the White Paper had been designed chiefly as a bid for Arab support, it was not welcomed by most of the Arabs in the country, who agreed with the exiled Mufti in opposing any further Jewish immigration.

During the critical early years of the war, there were no disturbances on the part of the Palestine Arabs, but they showed next to no enthusiasm for the war effort. Arab enlistments in the British forces never came to more than nine thousand—another contrast with the Jews.

THE SITUATION IN THE ARAB EAST

By early 1942, the status of the various portions of the Arab world was as follows: Trans-Jordan was officially a part of the Palestine Mandate but had been exempted from the application of the Jewish National Home as early as 1922 and had its own regime under the Emir Abdullah, a member of the Hashemite dynasty;⁹ the Levant States (Syria and Lebanon) were a French mandate; Iraq, which had been a British mandate until 1932, was an independent kingdom ruled by another Hashemite, the young King Feisal. Since 1936 Egypt had been nominally independent, also with a young king, Farouk, who was beginning to show marked Italian sympathies. The British were permitted by treaty to maintain sizable bases in Egypt and to station troops there (as they also were in Iraq). After war broke out, Egypt became virtually an armed camp and was the principal base for British military operations in the Western Desert.

In the Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia had been united and independent under the strong leadership of King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, one of the giants of the Arab world. Yemen was the only other independent state in the Peninsula, as the various sheikhdoms along the Persian Gulf were under one form of British protection or another.

Thus at the time of the Second World War substantial portions of the Arab world were still under various types of Western tutelage, with the British in the paramount position nearly everywhere. The situation in the Arab countries was characterized, then as now, by acute rivalries, notably that between the Hashemites and the House of Saud. An Arab national movement had been in existence since before the First World War but had not yet proved to be an effective instrument of cooperation between the Arabs, even over the issue of Palestine. Indeed, when I went out to Egypt in 1938, there was some doubt on the part of many of us—and of many Egyptians—as to whether Egypt should be considered an Arab state. In briefing me for my assignment, the desk officer in the Department did not even mention the Palestine problem as a factor in U.S.-Egyptian relations. He confined himself to telling me that there was only one subject at issue between the United States and Egypt: our quota on long-staple cotton (which incidentally remains an issue to this day).

It is safe to say that up until the time of the British victory at Alamein in the Western Desert in the fall of 1942, the prevailing opinion among the Arabs was that the Allies were going to lose the war. In view of the gains made by the Axis in the Balkans and North Africa, this is not surprising. In the years preceding the war, moreover, the Arabs had been subjected to an intensive propaganda campaign on the part of the Germans and Italians. This was now stepped up. The Mufti, from his base in Iraq, engaged actively in anti-British intrigues throughout the Arab countries. In April 1941, he was instrumental in bringing about a coup in Iraq which installed a pro-Axis regime there under Rashid Ali al-Gailani. The British invoked their treaty and intervened militarily, overthrowing the Rashid Ali government in a short time. The Mufti again escaped, and by the end of the year had made his way to Germany. He was to spend the rest of the war in Berlin, directing Axis propaganda activities aimed at the Arabs and raising a Muslim force to fight against the Allies.

THE WORLD ZIONIST ORGANIZATION

The Zionist Organization, founded in 1897 by Theodor Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement, was an international body which by the late 1930s had branches in approximately fifty countries and a membership of just under one million Jews. The president of the Zionist Organization always served also as president of the Jewish Agency. Since 1920, with the exception of a short interval in the 1930s, these two positions had been held by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who was of Russian birth but had been a British subject for many years. He was to become the first president of Israel.

The highest Zionist organ was the biennial Congress, which had last met in August 1939 in Geneva, on the eve of the war. Sensing that a world crisis was fast approaching, the members of the Congress had delegated the supreme policy-making authority to the Inner General Zionist Council, which was based in Palestine.

The outbreak of war and the swift Nazi occupation of so large a part of Europe of course rendered Zionist activity impossible in many parts of the continent, as Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. The result was that in the first two years of the war the chief centers of Zionist activity were Jerusalem and London, where Dr. Weizmann continued to reside (he did not go to Palestine between 1939 and 1944).

Weizmann, although in his late sixties when war came and in failing health, remained a powerful figure in the movement. A chemist by profession, he had been of great service to the British government in the First World War, because of his discovery of a new process for making acetone, used in the manufacture of smokeless powder (it was said that schoolchildren all over England were put to gathering horse chestnuts, which formed the basis for Dr. Weizmann's formula). Through his connections with members of the British War Cabinet, he was largely responsible for getting the British government to issue the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

In subsequent years Weizmann had served as chief spokesman for the Zionists with the Mandatory government. He was a skillful negotiator and a believer in the policy of “gradualism,” that is, of working with the British to fulfill Zionist goals within the framework of the Mandate. This policy, however, had been severely shaken by the White Paper. The Zionists in fact were beginning to realize that the White Paper was going to be responsible for a fundamental change in their relations with the British, since it meant that they could no longer count on the Mandatory to assure the continuation of Jewish immigration, which they hoped would lead to an eventual Jewish majority in Palestine. If the White Paper were to remain in force, the British would become the chief hindrance, rather than the chief help, to the achievement of their aims. These considerations raised the possibility that in the future the movement would pass into the hands of activists who, unlike Weizmann, were prepared to mount a direct challenge to the British government.

Dr. Weizmann, however, still had immense prestige among Zionists and he was to dominate the movement for some time to come. I recall vividly the impression he was to make on the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946 (see Chapter 6), with his powerful personality, his thoughtful presentation, and his close physical resemblance to Lenin (we were told that during the First World War, when both men were living in Switzerland, they were often mistaken for each other.)

THE AMERICAN JEWISH COMMUNITY

By 1942 the Jewish community in the United States numbered between four and five million. In 1939 it had accounted for only 29 percent of world Jewry, but this percentage was to rise substantially with the wartime extermination of European Jews by the Nazis. By the end of the war, roughly half of the Jews in the world would be located in the United States.

American Jews enjoyed an influence in politics out of proportion to their numbers because they were concentrated in a small number of key cities and states. They were highly organized and were active participants in a variety of causes but traditionally had not shown much enthusiasm for Zionism. Membership in American Zionist organizations, which stood at 150,000 in 1918, had declined to fifty thousand by 1938. As a result, however, of such developments in the middle and late 1930s as the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States, the Arab revolt in Palestine, and the White Paper, Zionist membership had climbed back to the 150,000 figure by 1942. (By way of comparison, total membership in all U.S. Zionist groups reached just under one million by 1948, the year of Israel's independence.)

Leading American Zionists at the time of our country's entry into the war, each of whom at one time or another served as president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), were such figures as Louis Lipsky, Emmanuel Neumann, Rabbi Israel Goldstein, and of course Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver.

Wise and Silver, who will appear frequently in this narrative, were very different in personality and approach. (Observers often compared Wise with Weizmann and Silver with Ben Gurion.) Both were Reform rabbis. Wise, the senior of the two, had served as president of the ZOA in the 1930s. From 1925 to 1949 he was president of the American Jewish Congress, a Zionist body which was virtually indistinguishable from the ZOA. Rabbi Wise was a Democrat and a great admirer of President Roosevelt, with whom he carried on an extensive correspondence for many years—it was said that Roosevelt took his well-known expression “the forgotten man” from one of Wise's sermons. Wise believed in working through the administration in Washington and following more conventional methods. Silver, a Republican, distrusted Roosevelt and government officials in general. His motto, which he took from the Old Testament (Psalm 146:3) and frequently cited when criticizing the administration, was: “Put not your trust in princes.” He believed in techniques of mass persuasion and was eminently successful in applying them.

Any account of the Jewish community in our country should also mention the influential American Jewish Committee, the leading non-Zionist body in the United States. This group did not come out for a Jewish state in Palestine until 1947, but it was in frequent touch with us in matters affecting the Jewish National Home (to which it gave general support) and the refugee question. Maurice Wertheim was president of the Committee in 1942; he was succeeded the next year by Justice Joseph M. Proskauer, who remained at the head of the group for many years. Another prominent figure on the Committee was Jacob Blaustein, who was chairman of the Executive.

Between the outbreak of war in 1939 and Pearl Harbor, the mood of American Jews was ostrichlike, characterized by isolationism and apathy. In the months immediately following our entry into the war, they showed a reluctance to agitate the Palestine question, fearing this might be harmful to the war effort. Their attitude had not yet been influenced by the Nazi extermination program, which did not become generally known until late in 1942.

U.S.INTERESTS

In December 1941 when the United States entered the war, our interests in the Middle East were not extensive. The isolationism that had dominated our foreign relations in the 1920s and 1930s had contributed to our playing a minor role in the area. It was true that every American president beginning with Woodrow Wilson had gone on record in favor of the Jewish National Home and that this was the purport of a resolution passed by the Congress in 1922. These declarations of policy, together with the support extended over the years by individual Americans of the Jewish faith to the development of the National Home, had undoubtedly created an American interest in the Jewish side of the Palestine dispute. On the other hand, such stake as we had in the Middle East at the time seemed to be more on the Arab side than on the Jewish. Our commercial interests, our missionaries and educators (going back to the mid-nineteenth century, the American University of Beirut, for example, having been founded in 1866) all combined to start us off on a good footing with the Arab world in the years following the First World War. It was already evident that there was a latent conflict between our Jewish and our Arab interests in Palestine. This conflict was to become much more obvious in the next few years.

Since it has sometimes been alleged that, even by the time of Pearl Harbor, United States’ oil interests were so deeply involved in the Arab world as to affect our handling of the Palestine question, it might be worthwhile to put this matter in perspective. Up to 1942, American companies had invested in oil exploration and production in four Arab countries: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iraq, and Kuwait. Only in the first two of these was there 100 percent American participation, and in all four of them production, which amounted to only a fraction of that attained in later years, was greatly curtailed after war broke out in 1939. In Saudi Arabia, oil had not been found in commercial quantities until 1938. In that year, output totaled just over one thousand barrels per day, as compared with between seven million and eight million. It was not until after the war was over that the United States started becoming involved in the development of Middle East oil on a massive scale.

The conflicting pledges respecting Palestine made during the First World War remained to plague the British administrators during the more than thirty years that they governed the country. They had in fact undertaken a virtually impossible task—as the Peel Commission itself recognized in 1937 when it pointed out that the Mandate was “unworkable.” How, indeed, to establish a national home (whatever that meant) in Palestine for the Jewish people (however defined) without prejudicing the rights of the great majority of the population (the Arabs), was a problem which the British were never able to solve. It is hardly surprising that they often seemed to vacillate between the rival claims of the two parties.

As the situation in the Middle East evolved in the prewar period and as the Axis powers intensified their bid for Arab support, the British found themselves more and more in the position of making decisions that ran counter to Jewish aspirations, culminating in the White Paper of 1939. By this time, the British were really making decisions about Palestine for reasons that had little to do with Palestine, that is, for reasons related to the situation in the Arab world and its implications for British strategic interests.

After war broke out, the major British concern, as far as the Middle East was concerned, was to maintain the lifeline to India and to prevent the Germans and Italians from taking over the area. The decision taken in August 1940, shortly after the fall of France and just before the Battle of Britain, to reinforce the British Eighth Army in Egypt at the expense, if need be, of the defense of the British Isles, shows better than anything else the vital importance that British strategists attached to the region. Further evidence of this was provided in June 1941 with the creation in Cairo of the post of Minister of State Resident in the Middle East, with cabinet rank a position held successively by Oliver Littleton (later Lord Chandos), Richard G. Casey, and Lord Moyne.

Although a majority of Winston Churchill's war cabinet, which held office from May 1940 to July 1945, were in sympathy with the Zionist cause (notably the Prime Minister himself), the issue was not of immediate urgency, certainly not in comparison with the problems of the war, and thus it only came to the forefront after the war was over.

An important aspect of British rule in Palestine, and one which was bitterly resented by the Jewish community, who considered that with their generally European background they were superior to the native Arabs, was that Palestine for administrative purposes came under the Colonial Office. It thus frequently happened that an official would find a tour of duty in Jerusalem, Nablus, or Haifa sandwiched between service in Kenya, Malaya, Nigeria, or other outposts of the Empire.

In the Churchill government the Colonial Secretary was Colonel Oliver Stanley. The ranking permanent official of the Colonial Office was Sir George Gater. He was regarded as hostile by the Zionists, although I have not been able to unearth any evidence to bear out this allegation. A key official of the Colonial Office who had already had considerable connection with the Palestine question, having served as secretary of the Peel Commission in 1936-37, was John M. Martin (now Sir John Martin). During the war years he was a member of Churchill's personal staff, but he kept up his connection with Palestine, partly by lunching regularly with Dr. Weizmann, who was living at the Dorchester Hotel in London. This provided liaison between the Prime Minister and the head of the Zionist Organization. After the war, Martin returned to the Colonial Office and as Assistant Under Secretary supervising the Mediterranean Department (which quaintly enough dealt with Palestine, Cyprus, Malta, and Gibraltar) and later Deputy Under Secretary, was intimately concerned with the Palestine question right up to the events of 1947-48. He was always one of the most cooperative of our British colleagues, and he has helped me with the preparation of this book. During the war years the British High Commissioners in Palestine were first Sir Harold MacMichael, then Lord Gort, and finally Lt. General Sir Alan Cunningham. Cunningham stayed until 1948 and thus was the last to hold this post.

The Colonial Office handled only the day-to-day administration of Palestine affairs. Foreign policy matters relating to Palestine were of course handled by the Foreign Office, specifically by its Eastern Department which throughout these years was headed by C. W. Baxter, a career official who later became Minister to Iceland. Baxter reported to the Superintending Undersecretary of State, Sir Maurice Peterson, another career man who was later Ambassador to Turkey. Baxter's position corresponded more or less to that of Gordon Merriam in the U.S. State Department and Peterson's to that of Wallace Murray or, later, Loy Henderson. The Foreign Office Palestine desk during these years was held by a succession of officers, notably H. A. Caccia (now Lord Caccia), later Ambassador to Washington, H. M. Eyres, R. M. Hankey (now Lord Hankey), and finally Harold Beeley (now Sir Harold), who was not then a career Foreign Service officer but who came to the Foreign Office in 1945 from the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House).

Beeley quickly showed himself to be a master of the intricacies of the Palestine problem. He continued to be associated with it during the consideration of the question at the United Nations in 1947 and 1948. As will be explained in Chapter 6, he and I worked closely together in 1945-46 as secretaries of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. We have been associated together since, and he has been unfailingly helpful to me.

When the Churchill government was turned out of office by the British electorate in the summer of 1945. Ernest Bevin became Foreign Secretary in the new Labour government, replacing Anthony Eden. For a short time George Hall was the Labour Colonial Secretary, but he was soon succeeded by Arthur Creech-Jones, a former trades union official who was almost entirely subservient to Bevin, under whom he had worked for many years in the labor movement. From then on, it was often said that Bevin and Harold Beeley determined British-Palestine policy.

To summarize the attitudes of the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office toward the Palestine question, I should say that the Foreign Office tended to see matters from the Arab point of view throughout this period, while the Colonial Office never gave up the hope of bringing about an accommodation between the parties.

We now turn to the unfolding of United States Palestine policy during the critical years 1942-48.