Читать книгу A Calculated Risk - Evan M. Wilson - Страница 12

The year 1943 opened with some encouraging developments for the Allies. In the Pacific we finally wrested control of Guadalcanal from the Japanese, while on the Russian front the Germans were forced to surrender at Stalingrad. In January, Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca to discuss the North African campaign and to issue their “unconditional surrender” declaration.

In terms of U.S. Palestine policy, 1943 was a crucial year in that our government for the first time, under pressure of circumstances, adopted a definite line of policy. Since this was also the year that I joined the Near East Division (after an interval of nearly two years following my departure from Cairo in late 1941, during which I did economic warfare work in Mexico City and Washington), I had an opportunity to become familiar with this policy in the early stages of its development.

Up to this time, the United States had not had to have more than a vague attitude toward the Palestine problem. Most Americans, if asked, would probably have said that the Jewish people should be allowed to return to their ancient homeland as the Bible said, but there was very little if any real knowledge or understanding of the Middle East among the public at large. During the 1920s and early 1930s, American Jews had not brought much pressure to bear on the U.S. government to follow a particular line of policy with respect to Palestine, and since we had only a limited involvement in the Near East, the basic conflict of interest—Jewish versus Arab in Palestine—was of no great or immediate concern to us. Of course the dilemma was there, as our policy makers well knew, and it was thus all the more understandable that they should have preferred to have us stand on the sidelines and leave this particular headache to the British.

Secretary of State Hull definitely took the attitude that Palestine was a British responsibility. He directed that this, and no more, should be said in reply to inquiries received by the Department. From 1936 through 1939, in response to the urging of American Jews and their supporters in Congress that we intervene with the British government respecting some particular aspect of the Palestine question, Hull had authorized the American Embassy at London to make an approach to the British, but mainly this had been in the form of informal, oral inquiries.

After Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into the war, the Palestine problem began to come more actively to the notice of officials in Washington. By 1943, it was evident that our government could no longer confine itself to generalized statements based on United Nations principles, or on the Atlantic Charter. This was because of the interaction of two factors: the growing Zionist agitation in this country and the reaction to this in the Arab world.

Zionist activity, which began building up after the Biltmore Conference in May 1942, was steadily increasing. In January 1943, representatives of thirty-two national Jewish membership organizations met in Pittsburgh with the purpose of organizing a representative body to develop a common program of action respecting “the postwar status of Jews and the upbuilding of a Jewish Palestine.” This led to the American Jewish Conference, numbering 501 delegates, which met at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City later in the year. Of the delegates, 379 were elected by local and regional Jewish groups and 122 were appointed by the national organizations. The Zionists worked hard to secure the selection of a preponderant Zionist majority among the delegates, with the result that approximately four-fifths of the total number were regarded as having Zionist sympathies.

The Conference passed a number of resolutions, of which the most important endorsed in its entirety the Biltmore Program. This resolution was adopted as the result of an impassioned speech by Rabbi Silver, who repeated his remarkable oratorical performance of the previous year at the Biltmore Conference. Asserting that the Balfour Declaration had not been intended to be merely “an immigrant aid scheme,” Silver argued that the establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine was “essential for the salvation of a people fighting for its very life” and that rescue of European Jews, free immigration into Palestine, and statehood were “inseparable links” in a single chain.

Silver's speech met with an emotional response on the part of the assembled delegates, many of whom were moved to tears. “Hatikva,” the Zionist anthem, was sung over and over and Silver was roundly cheered. From then on, it was clear that the Conference would come out for the full Biltmore program, even though some delegates, notably those representing the non-Zionist American Jewish Committee, questioned the wisdom of this. When the final vote was taken, there were only four delegates who dissented.

This vote was particularly significant because it came from a convention of delegates representing the whole spectrum of the Jewish community, not just Zionists, as had been true of the Biltmore Conference. This point was stressed by a delegation of the Conference leadership that called on Secretary Hull to present him with a set of its resolutions, which were described as “the expression of the will and opinion of the overwhelming majority of the American Jewish community.” The subsequent withdrawal of the American Jewish Committee from the Conference (which was a continuing body) did not minimize its importance, for it was now clear that the vast majority of American Jewish opinion supported the Biltmore appeal for a Jewish state.

The Interim Committee of the Conference immediately launched an intensive propaganda campaign with the goal of bringing American public opinion to sympathize with Zionist aims and of eliciting pledges of support from public officials at all levels. The ultimate purpose was to win the U.S. government over to the concept of a Jewish state in Palestine. The campaign was designed to appeal first to those who were impressed by the humanitarian argument and by the need to rescue the victims of Hitler's persecution; second, to those who believed that the return of the Jewish people to Zion was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy; and third, to those who saw the Zionist Jews in Palestine as a liberal, progressive, and democratic element in the Middle East. The link between the plight of the Jewish refugees and the necessity for a Jewish state was always stressed. The line taken was often strongly anti-British.

The American Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs was reorganized as the American Zionist Emergency Council, which took over the direction of the campaign with an annual budget of $500,000. Rabbi Silver and Rabbi Wise were named co-chairmen. The Emergency Council, generally known as AZEC, with headquarters in Washington, operated through a network of local committees, of which there were two hundred by 1944 and 380 the following year. A series of AZEC circulars, in the Zionist archives in Jerusalem, reveals the scope of the operation and the methods employed: members were to be prepared on short notice to organize a letter- or telegram-writing campaign and to conduct demonstrations; contact was to be maintained not only with Jewish groups but also with non-Jewish, especially Christian Protestant, groups; speakers bureaus were to be set up and the publication of books and press articles was to be subsidized. One million leaflets were distributed every year.²

As a result of all this, the White House, Congress, and the State Department were buried under an avalanche of paper. Frequently the same individual would send identical telegrams, for which I recall being told the Zionists had obtained a cut rate, to the President, his two Senators, his Congressman, and the Secretary of State. Eventually the telegraph company did not even separate these messages but would bind them in bundles and truck them over to the Department where they were stacked in the basement. (In 1938, during an earlier campaign, stacks of telegrams had been brought into the Near East Division and piled on the Palestine desk. The press had carried photographs of the desk officer, a relatively short man buried under the accumulation, leading to a tradition in the Division that holders of the desk had to be six feet tall or taller.) The campaign became world wide and reports were received by the Department from virtually every Foreign Service post, giving the text of petitions from local Zionist groups.

Only one member of Congress, Senator Josiah W. Bailey of North Carolina, refused to endorse the Zionist position and wrote to the President opposing it.³ The main opposition to the AZEC and its activities, however, came not from supporters of the Arab side in the dispute, including the oil companies, but from other Jewish organizations, non Zionist and anti-Zionist.

As Zionist activity grew in this country, the Arab world became anxious, and its leaders began to inquire as to the U.S. government's attitude. Their concerns were made known in three principal ways: (1) through representations by Arab diplomats in Washington, of whom there were only a handful in those days; (2) through messages from our posts in the field; and (3) most significantly, through reports from two envoys who visited the Near East during the year on special missions for the President, Lt. Colonel Harold B. Hoskins and Brig. General Patrick J. Hurley.

The Egyptian Minister, Mahmoud Hassan, called at the Department twice during the year to register protests against the activities of the Zionists. On the first occasion he saw Secretary Hull and on the second, Under Secretary Welles. Hassan made it clear that his government had every sympathy for the homeless Jews, but considered that the Zionist agitation for a Jewish state was having the most serious effects in the entire Arab and Muslim world. When Hull inquired what the Minister saw as a solution for the problem of the Jewish refugees, Hassan made the interesting suggestion that the members of the United Nations (then twenty-nine in number) should each “take their proportional share of Jews from all over the world.” Later in the year, the Iraqi Minister, Ali Jawdat called on Wallace Murray in NE to lodge a similar protest.

Our Minister in Cairo, Alexander Kirk, reported to the Department on a number of occasions during 1943 that the activities of the American Zionists were arousing some anxiety in Egypt and were threatening to undermine the “longstanding heritage of good will toward the United States in this area,” as well as adversely affecting the war effort, Kirk, who was also accredited at the time to Saudi Arabia, reported in April after a visit to that country that King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud had asked him to convey to President Roosevelt his deep concern with respect to Palestine and the effect that Zionist activities were having on U.S.-Arab relations.

Later in the year we appointed a separate Minister Resident in Saudi Arabia, James S. Moose, Jr., who reported to Washington that during his first call on the Emir Feisal, Ibn Saud's son and Minister of Foreign Affairs (later king), Feisal at once brought up the question of Palestine and urged that it was only “elementary justice” that the Arabs should not be called upon to “suffer further” at the hand of the Jews.

Hoskins, who as implied in the Introduction held a reserve commission in the Army but was on detail to the State Department, spent three and a half months in the Near East in late 1942 and early 1943 on a mission for the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which had the strong backing of Welles. He reported under date of January 23 from Cairo that if matters were allowed to drift further, “a very bloody conflict is in the making” which would “inflame not simply Palestine but in varying degrees all of the Muslim world from Casablanca to Calcutta.”⁴ He particularly noted the “ever-present Arab fear of American support for political Zionism” and asserted that the Arabs were “uncompromisingly against” the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, which in Hoskins's view could only be achieved by force.

Hurley, who had been Secretary of War under President Hoover and in 1942 had become the U.S. Minister to New Zealand was designated by Roosevelt as his Personal Representative in the Middle East to act as an observer and report directly to him on general conditions in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia. (The sending out of special envoys like Hoskins and Hurley was characteristic of Roosevelt's handling of our foreign affairs and was symptomatic of his underlying distrust of the career Foreign Service officers, for whom it caused innumerable headaches.) Hurley's report, dated May 5, 1943, was submitted direct to the White House and was later forwarded by the President to the Department for comment. Hurley, like Hoskins, took a gloomy view of the prospects for U.S. relations with the Arab world, unless something could be done to curb the Zionists. He told the President that he had found “deep-seated Arab hostility” to any attempt to promote Jewish immigration into Palestine with the aim of creating a Jewish majority, and eventually a Jewish state, in that country. He added that throughout the Arab countries he had encountered the conviction that the United States was intent on establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.⁵

Although Arab anxiety was mounting as a result of the activities of the American Zionists, the Arab propaganda effort was pitiful. An Arab Information Office was not opened in Washington until 1945, and, partly because our media were not as friendly to the Arabs as to the Jews, it never succeeded in getting its message across to the public. The Arab-Americans, furthermore, mostly Christians with no strong feelings about Palestine and numbering some five hundred thousand as compared with five hundred thousand American Jews, were never an effective force. ⁶

The occasion for a more positive formulation of our attitude toward Palestine came in the spring of 1943, when King Ibn Saud wrote a letter to President Roosevelt expressing his grave concern and the concern of all Arabs about Zionist aspirations in Palestine. The President's reply, dated May 26, 1943, is important because it contains the first expression of the so-called “full consultation” formula “It is the view of the Government of the United States,” Roosevelt said, “that no decision altering the basic situation of Palestine should be reached without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews.”⁷ The letter thus marked the beginning of a formal U.S. policy toward Palestine, in great contrast to the vague generalities of public statements on the subject up to that time. None of my former colleagues in the bleak East Division whom I have consulted can recall, nor do the archives reveal, who it was who was responsible for our first using the “full consultation” formula. It was, however, being employed by the British at this time and indeed had its origins in a statement made by Lord Cranborne, now Lord Salisbury, in the House of Lords in May 1942.

This formulation, with slight variations in wording, became the cornerstone of our Palestine policy and was used repeatedly by our government over the next few years. The pledge was loosely worded and subject to differing interpretations, but it proved invaluable to the Department (and to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman) when, as became increasingly the case, the Zionists elicited from the President some statement favorable to their cause. Inevitably such statements would lead to Arab protests, and messages would be prepared in the Near East Division, for the President's signature, assuring the Arabs that whatever might have been said did not denote any change in the “basic situation” and that it was still our policy that they (as well as the Jews) should be consulted.⁸

The recent publication of the U.S. diplomatic correspondence for the 1940s in the Foreign Relations series and also the opening up of the Department's archives have performed an important service in that they show that the text of every one of these messages was specifically approved by the President. Each of the messages in the Foreign Relations carries a notation to this effect, and the original copies of the messages in the archives bear the President's initials. There can thus no longer be any basis for alleging, as has been done, that these messages were sent out by the Department behind the President's back.⁹ Admittedly the messages were not made public at the time, but this was at the instance of the White House, not the Department.

The “full consultation” formula did not mean, as has also been alleged, that the consent of the Arabs had to be obtained before there was any change in the “basic situation.” Our commitment to the parties in the dispute was to consult them, and in 1946, as will be explained in Chapter 6, we carried out consultations with Arabs and Jews and thereafter maintained that in so doing we had discharged our commitment.

Like so many aspects of our Palestine policy, our formula was not acceptable to either Jews or Arabs. When it was eventually made public in late 1945, AZEC protested on the grounds that the Arabs did not have any standing in the dispute. The Arabs for their part always maintained that they had never been adequately consulted, especially on the crucial issue of Jewish immigration into Palestine. They saw our actions as supporting the Zionists, whatever our words might say. Indeed, it has always seemed to me that the attempt to carry water on both shoulders was an all but impossible task which for the most part convinced only ourselves in the Near East Division that we were being objective.

While Ibn Saud and Roosevelt were exchanging letters, important events were taking place on several war fronts. The British were winning the battle of the Atlantic against the German submarines, and by mid-May the Axis powers had been driven out of North Africa. During the summer came the Allied capture of Sicily, the resignation of Mussolini, the invasion of the Italian mainland, and the surrender of the Italian government, although fighting was to continue in the north of the country for another year and a half.

In May of 1943 Dr. Weizmann announced that the Jewish Agency was opening an office in Washington, to be headed by Dr. Nahum Goldmann, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive and president of the World Jewish Congress, a Zionist body affiliated with the American Jewish Congress. Goldmann was one of the most distinguished of the Zionist leaders. This was another indication of the importance which the leadership was now attaching to the role of the U.S. government in the Palestine question. Wallace Murray reacted to this news in characteristic fashion. He sent a memorandum to the Secretary, pointing out that the Mandate for Palestine, which had created the Jewish Agency, had stipulated that the Agency should operate at all times “subject to the control” of the British authorities. Murray recommended not only that no official recognition be accorded to the Washington office of the Jewish Agency, but also that if any communication be received from that office it be returned with the request that it be submitted to the Department through the British Embassy (which of course was hardly to the liking of the Zionists in view of their strained relations with the British government). I doubt that this procedure was actually followed, but later on Murray did go so far as to instruct us that if for any reason we should find it necessary to communicate with Dr. Goldmann we should address him at his street address without mentioning the Jewish Agency. After Loy Henderson took over from Murray as our chief in 1945, this policy was relaxed. The representatives of the Agency were welcomed to NE and I readily obtained Henderson's concurrence in our using its full name in our letters from then on.

A matter that was the subject of considerable discussion on several occasions during 1943 was the question of issuing a joint Anglo-American statement on Palestine. This project, which was strongly advocated by Hoskins and Murray and opposed by the Zionists, would have taken the position that any decision on Palestine should be postponed until after the war. The statement would have included the “full consultation” formula. In Murray's words, the purpose would have been to “put an end to the current agitation for a Jewish state.”

Welles, incidentally, opposed the plan. The British and American governments several times reached agreement to issue a statement, and Roosevelt twice approved a text (see Appendix G). However, when Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, who was serving as Special Counsel to the President, leaked the proposed text to the Zionist leadership in July 1943, there was immediate protest. Hull then decided to seek the backing of the War Department, but when Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson informed him that the military situation in the Middle East did not justify issuing such a statement, the matter was dropped, to the consternation of the British. The subject arose again later in the year and early in 1944, but no action was ever taken. The question may well be asked whether a statement of this sort would have achieved its stated objective of warding off pressures on both governments. Indeed, in an interview in June 1974, the late Colonel Hoskins agreed with me that in retrospect it was unlikely that the statement would have had the effect desired at the time.

One of the more bizarre episodes of the year resulted from a decision taken by Roosevelt, Welles, and Weizmann, on their own without consulting the Near East Division, to send Hoskins to see King Ibn Saud and try to arrange a meeting between him and Weizmann so that they could work out a settlement of the Palestine question. The idea had been broached to Weizmann some years earlier by the British Arabist H. St. John Philby, a confidant of Ibn Saud's, who thought that the Arabs might be persuaded to let the Jews have Palestine in exchange for a payment to Ibn Saud of some twenty million pounds, and Weizmann had, it appears, brought it up with both Churchill and Roosevelt on several occasions. We in NE were very skeptical of the whole idea when we heard of it, for it seemed highly unlikely that Ibn Saud would ever agree to any such proposal, and certainly not at that time, when the Arabs were so suspicious of the Zionists because of the increased agitation over Palestine and when, furthermore, Ibn Saud was no longer in urgent need of revenue.¹¹

We were right. Ibn Saud refused to see Weizmann or to have anything to do with the scheme. The only concrete result of the incident was that when Hoskins saw Roosevelt in September to report on his mission, Roosevelt made a number of interesting comments regarding the Palestine question. In the course of a long conversation, Roosevelt said that he thought that after the war most of the European Jews would not want to go to Palestine but would want to return to their homes (this view was shared by many officials at the time, although opinions were to change later on). On the future of Palestine, he told Hoskins that he was thinking of a trusteeship with a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim as trustees.

This idea of the President's formed the basis of a paper prepared in the Near East Division in late 1943, which was the first attempt in the Department to put together some thoughts on the future of Palestine. As we soon came to realize, this early trusteeship plan was hardly realistic. Essentially, what was proposed was a body comprising three Christians, two Muslims, and a Jew which was to advise the trustee (Great Britain) regarding the desires and complaints of the different religious groups having an interest in the Holy Land. Details of the plan were not elaborated, but it is hard to see how anyone could have expected such a simplistic scheme, based on religious considerations alone, to have coped with the complex political issues inherent in the Palestine problem.

It was not long before we saw the shortcomings of any proposal along these lines. A paper that we prepared for the 1944 talks with the British, as will be noted in Chapter 3, states flatly that “a trusteeship exercised by the three religious groups would be a failure.” It was again recommended that Palestine be constituted as an international territory with Great Britain as the trustee, but it was now provided that the Arab and Jewish communities should form “autonomous political entities with wide powers of local self-government.” There was to be a board of overseers representing the three world religions, but its role would be a minor one and the emphasis was to be on the development of self-governing institutions.¹²

With some refinements, the thinking of the Near East Division concerning a future solution for Palestine continued to run in this direction right up to the adoption of the partition plan by the General Assembly of the United Nations in late 1947. Such a solution was reasonable, but it did not, of course, take sufficiently into account the domestic political imperatives that were to come more and more to the forefront of the U.S. government's handling of the Palestine question during these years. Nor did it take sufficiently into account, as we were later to realize, the driving force of nationalism among both Arabs and Jews which more than thirty years later is still the dominant feature of the conflict.

In November 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin held their first meeting at Tehran. The meeting resulted in some far-reaching decisions regarding the conduct of the war, but there was very little discussion of Middle Eastern questions, and none at all of Palestine; it was an indication of the relative priorities in the thinking of the wartime leaders.

March 1944 was the expiration date of the five-year period during which Jewish immigration into Palestine was to be allowed to continue under the terms of the 1939 White Paper. In anticipation of this date, Jews in this country had been exerting constant pressure on our government to intervene with the British to extend the date and expand the immigration. On December 13, 1943, Hull sent for the British Ambassador, Lord Halifax, and told him that he and the President were in favor of the extension of the immigration quota after the March deadline. ¹³The Ambassador replied that the British government was already planning to take action along these lines, as not all the certificates available had been used. This in fact was done, and the intention had been already announced in the House of Commons on November 10 (though Hull in his Memoirs claims credit for the action).¹⁴ But the Jews were eager for the American government, too, to take some positive steps. At the Anglo-American refugee conference held in Bermuda in April 1943 the British had refused to have Palestine placed on the agenda, but as more and more stories of Nazi atrocities were reported, the Zionists kept up their campaign for Palestine.

In December, Roosevelt, who had had several ideas of havens in various parts of the world for Jewish refugees, sent a well-known attorney and personal friend, Morris L. Ernst, to London to explore the possibilities with British officials.¹⁵ But Ernst soon found that any suggestions for an alternative to Palestine would never get anywhere either with the Zionists or with politicians generally in the United States. Reluctantly, he abandoned the project.

For a number of reasons U.S. immigration quotas during these years were substantially unfilled—the difficulties of travel were an obstacle in themselves, and also, for reasons of national security, visa applications were being scrutinized with extra care to prevent enemy agents from entering the country. There were a good many complaints alleging red tape and obstructionism on the part of the State Department's personnel dealing with the refugee problem and with visa matters, but there is no basis for claiming, as has been done, that these officials were responsible for the loss of European Jewry.

I think it is safe to say in this connection that all of my colleagues who were dealing with the refugee question in those years were distressed by the frustrations and disappointments which their work entailed. The security issue was an especially thorny one: how was the overworked, conscientious consular officer to be sure that the visa applicant with the concentration camp number plainly tattooed on his forearm was indeed one of Hitler's victims and not a Nazi spy? As the visa regulations became more and more voluminous, the entire process became more and more cumbersome, and visa officers quite naturally grew cautious in the extreme. But that is not the same as deliberately delaying the process, or being anti-Semitic. as some critics have charged.¹⁶

As the year 1943 drew to a close, the following was the situation in the Near East Division as far as Palestine policy was concerned. We had evolved some language (the “full consultation” formula) which we hoped might serve as a statement of U.S. government policy but which might have the drawback of meaning all things to all men. We had advanced a tentative plan for the future of Palestine but were becoming aware that the plan needed modification. And we had been unsuccessful in getting agreement at the highest level to issuing a public statement of policy, which in any event might not have achieved the primary purpose that its sponsors had in mind. All the time, while we were turning in this not very impressive record of accomplishment, the flood of Zionist pressure mail was rising higher and higher in anticipation of the coming election year.