Читать книгу A Calculated Risk - Evan M. Wilson - Страница 13

As the year 1944 got under way, the Palestine question began taking on more and more importance as part of American domestic politics. The Zionist propaganda campaign launched in 1943 was intensified in an all-out effort to get the American government firmly committed to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

On the war fronts, the Allies went on the offensive during the early part of the year. The Red Army drove the Germans out of the Ukraine, crossed into Poland, and entered Romania, then started toward Odessa and the Crimea. In the Pacific, American forces landed in the Marshall Islands and attacked the Japanese at Truk. In Europe, the beachhead at Anzio was established in mid-January, and in March the long siege of Monte Cassino began. Round-the-clock aerial bombings of Germany also started.

In late January, the American Zionist Emergency Council succeeded in obtaining the introduction into both Houses of Congress of identical resolutions calling for unrestricted Jewish immigration into Palestine and for the “reconstitution” of that country as a “free and democratic Jewish Commonwealth” (see Appendix H). These resolutions, which had bipartisan backing, were a pet project of the Council's co-chairman, Rabbi Silver. Their language was very similar to that of the Biltmore Program, except for the substitution of the word “reconstitute” for “be established,” which clearly implied that the new Zion was the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Few people saw any inconsistency in “a free and democratic Jewish Commonwealth” that was two-thirds Arab.

Official Washington was flooded with petitions urging approval of the resolutions, but almost immediately Arab protests also began coming in. These were on a much smaller scale, but they were serious enough to cause anxiety in the Executive branch. Murray submitted a memorandum to his superiors drawing attention to the consequences to our position in the Near East if the resolutions should pass, and the Department sent out instructions to our Foreign Service posts telling them to take the line, in discussing the matter, that “passage of the resolutions by either or both Houses would be only an expression of the individual members of that House and would not be binding on the Executive branch or an expression of the foreign policy of the United States.”²

Chairman Sol Bloom of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives wanted the Department to testify at public hearings which he was holding, but Secretary Hull was reluctant to become involved and sought to pin responsibility for opposing the resolutions on the War Department. Secretary of War Stimson, with the President's approval, wrote a letter to the chairmen of the Senate and House committees stating that the resolutions were prejudicial to the war effort. The ever cautious Hull then wrote a letter to these same chairmen saying that “in view of the military considerations advanced in this regard by the Secretary of War, it is believed that, without reference to its merits, no further action on this resolution would be advisable at this time.” These letters were not made public.³

The House Foreign Affairs Committee conducted several days of hearings, at which the testimony was overwhelmingly in favor of the resolutions. All the major Zionist organizations were heard. The only opposition came from the American Council for Judaism and from three witnesses (two of them Arab-Americans) who supported the Arab point of view.⁴

As Zionist pressure for passage of the resolutions continued, so did the reaction in the Arab world. The Egyptian and Iraqi ministers together called on Acting Secretary Stettinius, to express the concern of their governments.

Later the Egyptian returned to the Department and handed Paul Alling of NE a note stating among other things that recent developments were giving rise to the impression among the Arabs that “America is supporting the Jews at the expense of the Arabs.”

Our representatives in Baghdad, Damascus, Jidda, and Beirut telegraphed the Department to relay the anxiety and dismay expressed to them by local officials. Loy Henderson, then serving as Minister at Baghdad, reported a conversation with the prime minister of Iraq, Nuri Said, a prominent leader in the Arab world, during which Nuri pointed out that the German radio broadcasts in Arabic were making frequent use of the Congressional resolutions in an effort to “create a lack of confidence among the Arabs in the sincerity of purpose of the Allies.” Henderson also reported that the chief officials of the Iraqi Senate and Chamber of Deputies were telegraphing their opposite numbers in our Senate and House expressing the hope that the resolutions would not pass. Our Charge d'Affaires in Damascus told the Department that similar representations were being made by officials of the Syrian Parliament.

An interesting byproduct of these Arab parliamentary protests was that they elicited a characteristic comment from President Roosevelt. When Speaker Sam Rayburn of the House forwarded to the President a telegram he had received from the Iraqi parliamentarians, Roosevelt replied somewhat cynically that this message “is merely one of a volume of protests which have come in from practically all the Arab and Moorish [sic] countries. It merely illustrates what happens if delicate international situations get into party politics.”⁵ In other words, the President was well aware of the Arab attitude and of the complications caused by moves in Congress such as this.

The President and Secretary Hull urged Secretary Stimson to make his letter to the committee chairmen public, but Stimson resisted this. Colonel Hoskins was then sent by the State Department to the Pentagon and it was agreed that General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the War Department General Staff, would go up to Capitol Hill and testify against the resolutions in a private meeting, which he did. It was hoped that Marshall's immense prestige would convince the members of Congress.

On March 9, Rabbi Wise and Rabbi Silver, who were becoming apprehensive that the resolutions might not pass because of Executive branch opposition, called on the President. They handed him a draft statement, much along the lines of the resolutions, which they asked him to issue. Roosevelt, according to Silver's later account of the meeting, spent some ten minutes reworking the draft and told them that on leaving the White House they could issue it as their statement.⁶

Wise and Silver told the press that the President had authorized them to say that the American government had never given its approval to the White Paper, and that he was happy that the doors of Palestine remained open to Jewish refugees. They also said that the President had given them assurances that “when future decisions are reached, full justice will be done to those who seek a Jewish National Home.”

It is pretty clear that the two rabbis had hoped for some forthright statement of sympathy with the Zionist aims, and that the President, fully aware of the delicate issues involved, watered down their draft. In other words, he deftly turned the tables on Wise and Silver, who had no alternative but to make the best of it.

Even in its modified form the statement led to an immediate Arab reaction. It was given extensive coverage by the news media in a number of Arab countries and we received inquiries from our posts as to how to treat the incident. Henderson reported that for days the activities of the Zionists in the U.S. had been the “chief topic of discussion” among politically conscious Iraqis. Both the Imam Yahya, king of Yemen, and the Emir Abdullah of Trans-Jordan sent messages of concern and apprehension to Washington.

To counter this adverse Arab reaction, the President approved a circular telegram to our posts which pointed out, with some subtlety, that although it was true that the American government had never given its approval to the White Paper, it was equally true that we had never taken any position with respect to it. (This was Gordon Merriam's idea, as I recall.) The message noted that the rabbis'statement had referred to a Jewish National Home, not a Jewish state, and added that our policy was still based on full consultation with both Arabs and Jews. Commenting in general on our attempts to put a gloss on Presidential statements, the pro-Zionist author, Frank Manuel, has some rather harsh words to say about what he calls the “clever doubledealing” of the members of the Near East Division. He says that we might think we were practicing astute diplomacy when our efforts were only a “clumsy imitation of the British.”⁷ I believe, on the other hand, that we did pretty well, here, and elsewhere, in getting the President out of a tight situation.

The shelving of the Congressional resolutions was eventually accomplished on March 17, when Stimson addressed another letter to Chairman Bloom of the House committee, reiterating that the passage of the resolutions would be “prejudicial to the successful prosecution of the war.” Bloom made this letter public and announced that his committee would take no further action.⁸ A similar statement was made by the Senate committee.

The entire episode turned out to be a bureaucratic muddle, with the State and War departments each trying to dodge responsibility for going on record as opposing passage. Silver claimed he had shown a draft in early January to Hull, who had offered no objection, but there is no record of this in the Department's files. Bloom also declared he had been given to understand there was no objection on the part of the Executive branch, as did Senator Robert A. Taft, one of the sponsors of the resolution in the Senate.

Later in the year, the War Department withdrew its objections to the resolutions and they were reintroduced into Congress. This was done in spite of the fact that Stettinius had told the Zionist leadership on November 15 that he and the President considered this step to be unwise. On December 6, Stettinius (who had succeeded Hull as Secretary of State at the end of November) was called before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on short notice and persuaded the committee to shelve the resolutions a second time. The committee insisted, however, that the Department issue a statement opposing passage “from the standpoint of the general international situation.” This was done and the resolutions were again withdrawn.⁹ The New York Sun commented on the Department's statement by running a cartoon showing the Palestine desk officer, in striped pants and cutaway, holding up his hand and saying “No” to a throng of homeless Jewish refugees. (I framed the Sun's cartoon and had it on the wall of my office throughout the rest of my tour in the Division.) Roosevelt later concurred in Stettinius's action and complimented him on the “fine manner” in which the problem had been handled by the Department.¹⁰ This was one of the last occasions on which the Department could be said to have played the decisive role in our Palestine policy.

The failure of the resolutions to pass caused a split between Wise and Silver, so serious that Silver, who had really instigated the resolutions in the first place and had been their strongest supporter, was forced to resign in late December as co-chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council. (He returned to this position six months later.) Other Zionist leaders, including Chaim Weizmann, Moshe Shertok, and Nahum Goldmann, joined Wise in opposing Silver's tactics.¹¹

To complete the story of the Congressional resolutions, they were revived and passed by both Houses in December 1945, although in a somewhat modified form providing merely for a “democratic commonwealth” rather than a “free and democratic Jewish Commonwealth.”¹² These resolutions were in the form of concurrent resolutions, which, unlike the original Congressional Resolution of 1922, did not require Presidential approval. By that time the war was over, attention had been diverted to other aspects of the problem, and there was very little reaction in the Arab world or elsewhere. One year earlier, the circumstances were such that passage of the resolution at that time would have had an unfortunate effect on the standing of the United States in the area.

One of the turning points of the war had come in June 1944, with the Anglo-American landings in Normandy that signaled the invasion of Nazi occupied Europe. Rome had fallen earlier in the month. Later in the summer came such events as the unsuccessful assassination attempt against Hitler and the Allied landings in southern France. Paris was liberated on August 25, and Allied advances continued on the Russian front and in the Pacific. In October, General MacArthur returned to the Philippines, and later that same month, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf—the biggest naval action ever fought—the destruction of Japanese naval power was accomplished. With these favorable developments on the war fronts, there was more opportunity for Washington and London to be thinking about such issues as Palestine.

During the summer of 1944 both the Republican and Democratic conventions, for the first time ever in a Presidential campaign, adopted platform planks expressing support for the Zionist position.¹³ On July 26, Hull, at our prompting, sent a memorandum to the President, calling attention to the adverse effect that these developments were having on Arab opinion and urging that the leaders of both parties refrain during the campaign from making further statements of this nature. The record does not show that there was any response from the President, and in any event, the Palestine question continued to be an issue in the campaign. In September, Presidential Counsel Rosenman urged Roosevelt to speak to Prime Minister Churchill, who had come over for the second Quebec Conference, about immigration into Palestine. Rosenman pointed out that the Republican candidate, Governor Thomas E. Dewey, was “making quite a play” about Palestine. He thought it would help the Democrats if it were known that the President had approached the Prime Minister on the subject.¹⁴