Читать книгу A Calculated Risk - Evan M. Wilson - Страница 8

It was in May 1942 that the leaders of the world Zionist movement met in a hotel in wartime New York City and set as their goal the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

It was in May 1948, only six years later, that a group of embattled leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine met in a museum in Tel Aviv and proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel: a remarkable achievement indeed. And the proclamation of Israel's independence came fifty years after the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, had predicted that the Jewish state of his dreams would come into being in fifty years’ time. The story of these six short years is the story of this book.

My aim is not so much to tell how these events came about as to explain what the role of the United States was, and why. Thus, after reviewing all the significant data for the period, I shall attempt to evaluate the conflicting pressures on the U.S. government with a view to advancing a definitive interpretation of our Palestine policy, as well as some thoughts for the future. Many of the sources employed have only recently become available. They include the U.S. diplomatic archives and the published Foreign Relations of the United States; material in the Roosevelt and Truman libraries—the British Public Record Office, and the Zionist archives in New York and Jerusalem, and the many books and articles on the period; interviews with key personalities of the period; and my own recollections while serving as Palestine desk officer in the Department of State for most of these six years.

Responsibility for Palestine affairs in those days came under the Division of Near Eastern Affairs, which was identified in the Department by the letters NE. My immediate supervisor was Gordon P. Merriam, and first Wallace S. Murray and then Loy W. Henderson as chief.* We reported to Secretary of State Cordell Hull (who was to be succeeded by Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., James F. Byrnes, and General George C. Marshall) and to the Under Secretary of State, first Sumner Welles, then Stettinius, Dean Acheson, and Robert A. Lovett. Because of the special way in which the Palestine question was handled by the U.S. government, we were also frequently in touch with White House Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.

The Near East Division in the early 1940s was something of a backwater. It was concerned with a part of the world that was relatively unknown and that accounted for only a minor part of our foreign relations. The thirteen or fourteen officers attached to the Division at the time, nearly all of whom had seen previous service in the Near East, had pretty much a free hand in dealing with such matters as came before them.

When I entered the Division as its most junior member, I had seen something of the Near East as a result of three years’ service in Egypt. I had asked to be assigned to that area because I was thinking of applying for training as an Arabic specialist. Although I later decided against this, it did turn out that almost all of my thirty-odd years of service was connected with the region.

From Egypt I had visited Palestine several times and had had my first exposure to the controversial Arab-Jewish problem. My wife and I went to Palestine on leave and traveled fairly extensively around the country after reading a few books on the subject. I can recall that, feeling we were getting pretty well acquainted with the Arab point of view, we asked someone to recommend something to read on the Jewish side. It thus was early on in my association with the Palestine problem that I became aware that there were two sides to the question and that one had to make allowance both for the desire of the Jews to build up the National Home and for the desire of the Arab population for self-government.

I think I can honestly say that in taking up my duties on the Palestine desk I was conscious of no prejudice or bias one way or the other. My general approach to the problem was one of trying to find an accommodation, a reconciliation, between the conflicting interests of the parties to the dispute. This attitude was consistent with my background and training as a member of the generation of the 1930s. At Haverford College I had acquired what the Quakers call a “concern” for international conciliation and world peace. It is no coincidence that Haverford should have contributed for many years a larger proportion, per capita, of graduates to our Foreign Service than any other college or university in the country.

At Oxford, and later at Geneva, I had studied international relations with the late Sir Alfred Zimmern and had acquired a deeper interest in world affairs. I had observed the workings of the League of Nations first hand and had seen that it was of primary importance that the United States should participate in any future world organization. I had spent the summer of 1933 in Germany, just after Hitler came to power. I had read Mein Kampf and attended Nazi rallies. I had witnessed the terrifying grip of the Nazi movement on the German people and had felt the rumbling of the fear that lay in store for the future.

Our generation was a generation of idealists. We read books like Clarence Streit's Union Now and Salvador de Madariaga's Disarmament and we were impressed by such writers as Walter Lippmann and Vera Michaelis Dean. In Washington, we followed the hearings of the Nye Committee and learned about the arms manufacturers-the “merchants of death” as they were called. This was the period of the Oxford Union's vote against fighting “for King and Country,” of the White Feather Society of Oxford, which, complete with appropriate tie, called for a policy of pacifism. These were the days when Winston Churchill was branded a warmonger for proposing that Great Britain should rearm against the menace of Nazi Germany, and when the Cliveden Set was advocating appeasement.

Many of us rejected both the pacifism and the isolationism that were so prevalent in the 1930s. What we sought was a better world order than the one that had followed the First World War. We wanted to avoid the mistakes of the preceding generation, mistakes which with the Treaty of Versailles and the imposition of reparations had sown the seeds of another war.

On the Palestine desk, and in later years of involvement in the Arab-lsrael problem, I always considered that I was able to avoid being biased toward one side or the other in the conflict. My approach was based on the premise that both Arabs and Jews had rights in Palestine, that the problem arose from a conflict between two rights.

In NE we very much had it in mind that Palestine was only one of more than a score of countries with which the Division had to deal. Our task, under Departmental directives, was to carry out United States policies toward the countries of the Near East and to proffer advice regarding the promotion and protection of U.S. interests. We in NE and NEA could take cold comfort from the fact that our failure to come down flatly on one side or the other in the Palestine dispute caused us to be regarded as pro-Jewish by the Arabs and pro-Arab by the Jews.

As my thinking on the substance of the Palestine question evolved, especially following a visit that I paid to Palestine in 1946 (as will be recounted in Chapter 6), I came to the conclusion that for our government to advocate the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine against the will of the majority of the inhabitants of that country (the Arabs) would be a mistake that would have an adverse effect upon world peace and upon U.S. interests.

In taking this position, which was shared by most of my colleagues in NE and NEA and abroad at the time, I realized that I was bound to be considered as anti-Zionist by the Zionist Jews, that is, those who sought the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. However, during the early and mid-1940s Jewish opinion, both in this country and elsewhere, was divided into Zionist, non-Zionist, and anti-Zionist factions. The closing of the ranks behind the Zionist position did not occur until the Palestine question was before the United Nations in mid-1947, after I had left the Department for the field. In handling the Palestine question I always was conscious of the fact that there was an important Jewish interest in Palestine and I made it a point to cultivate Jewish as well as Arab contacts.

To understand the Palestine problem as we encountered it in 1942-48, or indeed to understand the Arab-lsrael conflict today, it is essential to have some knowledge of the historical background. In fact, it is particularly important in the case of Palestine since, as the Peel Commission put it in 1937, “No other problem of our time is so deeply rooted in the past.” Anyone who attempts to summarize the history of the Palestine problem must approach the task with trepidation, however. The pitfalls inherent in such an effort have never been more cogently described than by the late George Antonius in his classic account of the Arab national movement, the Arab Awakening, as follows:

For the historian, the study of the Palestine problem is beset with particular difficulties. In the first place, the material is enormous and widely scattered. In the second place, it is to an unusual degree conflicting and inconsistent. Thirdly, a large proportion of it which on inspection appears relevant and promising turns out, when sifted, to rest upon false assumptions and questionable data. Lastly, the passions aroused by Palestine have done so much to obscure the truth that the facts have become enveloped in a mist of sentiment, legend, and propaganda, which acts as a smokescreen of almost impenetrable density. (p. 386)

Until the First World War, there was no Palestine problem. Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire and the population was overwhelmingly (about 90 percent) Arab. It was the introduction, under the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, of Jewish immigrants in such numbers as to lead the Arabs of Palestine to believe themselves threatened that caused the conflict, a conflict that has not been resolved to this day. The problem in the twenties was complicated by the rise of Arab nationalism and by the contradictory nature of the promises respecting Palestine made by the British in the course of wartime negotiations with the Arabs, the Jews, and the Allies.

To the Arabs, in order to gain their support in the war against Turkey, the British promised independence in an area which, though not precisely defined, had always been considered by the Arabs to include Palestine.

To the Jews, whose connection with Palestine had never been broken since antiquity and whose interest in the land had been enhanced by the rise of Zionism (the movement which promoted the return of the Jews to Palestine and was eventually to seek the establishment of a Jewish state there), the British promised in the Balfour Declaration to work for the establishment in Palestine of “a national home for the Jewish people” (likewise not defined), with the important provisos that nothing be done to prejudice the rights of what were called the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” (that is, the Arabs), or the rights of Jews elsewhere in the world. The pledge was given to the Jews largely for the purpose of enlisting Jewish support in the war and of forestalling a similar promise by the Central Powers. At the time, according to the best information available, Jews cannot have accounted for more than 9 percent of the population of Palestine.

During secret negotiations with the French, the Imperial Russians, and the Italians concerning the disposition of Ottoman territories after the war, the British promised that Palestine would be placed under international administration. However, at the San Remo Conference in April 1920, attended by Great Britain, France, and Italy, with the United States as observer, it was decided that Great Britain should be given the Mandate for Palestine. The text of the Mandate repeated the entire text of the Balfour Declaration and placed the British under obligation to “facilitate Jewish immigration” and encourage “close settlement by Jews on the land.” Unlike the other mandates covering former Turkish territories, there was no provision for termination of the Mandate and only a vague reference to self-determination.

The early years of the Mandate were relatively quiet. Few Jews came to Palestine and in fact in the 1920s there was a net emigration of Jews. Almost immediately, however, a gulf began to develop between the Arab and Jewish communities. Arab resentment was voiced, and as early as 1920 there were Arab riots.

Immigration increased markedly with the rise of Hitler in Germany and indeed it can be said that had it not been for Adolf Hitler there would be no Jewish state today. By 1939 Jews numbered 450,000, or 30 percent, of a total population of 1.5 million, and Jewish-owned land had increased from 148,500 acres after the First World War to 383,250 acres.

As tension grew between the communities, the British sent out a series of commissions to study the problem, but none of them was able to resolve the basic contradiction between the Arab claim to self-government and the development of the Jewish National Home.

In 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, at a time when the Axis powers were cultivating the Arabs assiduously, the British issued a White Paper setting a quota of seventy-five thousand for Jewish immigration over the next five years, at the end of which the consent of the Arabs of Palestine would be required for any further immigration. By this time it was clear that the basic issue in Palestine was the continuance of Jewish immigration, since this would determine the nature of the future Palestine state.

In the chapters that follow, I shall examine the story of our growing involvement in Palestine between 1942 and 1948 in the light of what I conceive to be three main themes which run through the narrative. I present these themes here as questions. In the Epilogue I shall re-examine them and try to make some assessment of our Palestine policy during the period under review. The contributions of the two presidents, Roosevelt and Truman, to that policy will be assessed as we go along.

The first question is whether the steady trend of U.S. policy in the direction of the Zionist position in these years, ending in our outright endorsement of the concept of a Jewish state, was inevitable or whether it could have been prevented. In other words, could the dilemma in our Palestine policy stemming from the conflict between the Jewish interest and the Arab interest have been resolved in any other way except by our coming out, as we eventually did, on the Jewish side of the dispute, with all the consequences that this implied for our relations with the Arab world?

Second, given a “tilt” in our policy toward the Jews, did this mean that we would adopt a wholly pro-Jewish attitude or would we seek to achieve the greatest possible degree of accommodation between the two conflicting points of view?

A third question is that of the extent to which the career men in the State Department, of which I was a junior member, were able to influence the decisions which presidents Roosevelt and Truman had to take respecting Palestine, in the context of a variety of considerations (domestic, political, global, economic, and humanitarian) that confronted them. Also, just how aware were the two presidents of the probable consequences of their decisions so far as the situation in the Middle East was concerned?

After an introduction, which will provide the setting for the events to be related, I launch into the narrative portion of the book, starting with the year 1942.