A Durable Peace (13 page)

In London the increasing distaste for Zionism and fear of Arab threats hobbled support for constructing a strong, pro-Western
Jewish Palestine, and British policy became mired in equivocation. The trend in matters of Jewish immigration and settlement
affected strategic issues as well, as Meinertzhagen found out in 1923, when he tried to arrange an agreement for future Jewish-British
military cooperation in Palestine:

[Churchill] did not wish me to bring it up to the forthcoming Committee on Palestine as it would have a hostile reception.
I asked if the government still stood by the Balfour Declaration; he said it did but that things must go slow for the moment
as the Cabinet would never agree to a policy which would antagonize the Arabs. Appeasement again.

We are backing the wrong horse and, my God, we shall suffer for it if and when another war is sprung on us.
⁵¹

Devotion to the Balfour Declaration flickered on in the form of a handful of British parliamentarians such as Lord Josiah
Wedgwood, Wyndham Deedes, and Leopold Amery but within a few years their influence had almost entirely waned.

In August 1929, on the Jewish fast day of Tish’ah beAv, which
marks the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, Arab mobs attacked Jews in Hebron, Jerusalem, Safed, and elsewhere. They
rampaged for eight days, killing 113 Jews, wounding hundreds more, and destroying six Jewish settlements entirely, including
the ancient Jewish community of Hebron. The British once again withheld fire but worked to confiscate any “illegal” arms they
found among the Jews. In despair, the Hebrew daily
Davar
asked, “Is there a law which compels our men to deliver their lives and the lives of their children to massacre, their daughters
to rape, their property to plunder? What theory and what kind of regime is it that demands such things of men?”
⁵²

Despite the fact that Jewish immigration to Palestine had declined sharply over the preceding two years, the Colonial Office
under Lord Passfield (Sidney Webb, the noted Fabian Socialist) again concluded that Jewish immigration had been one of the
causes of the bloodshed. Once again capitulating in the face of Arab demands, Lord Passfield announced the severe curtailment
of the land available for Jewish settlement, called for strict controls on Jewish immigration, and urged the Zionists to make
concessions on the idea of a Jewish National Home.
⁵³
The Arabs also demanded that Jabotinsky be banned from Palestine because he advocated a Jewish state, and in this, too, the
British administration obliged.
⁵⁴

For anyone with sober vision, it was suddenly and completely clear that Britain was prepared to betray the idea of the Jewish
National Home. But incredibly, many Jews did not see this. They were frustrated by Britain’s policies, but after each rebuff
they were mollified by the government’s public declarations of its friendliness and irrevocable commitment to the Jewish people.
Having been stateless for so many centuries, the Jews now suffered from an acute political myopia and refused to recognize
the true motives of British policies and the catastrophic consequences of failing to forcefully challenge them—much as Jews
in Europe did not recognize where Nazism was leading a few years later.

The handful like Jabotinsky who did understand had to overcome
the tendency of the majority not to
want
to understand, for this would necessarily involve a confrontation with Great Britain, then the preeminent world power. For
the majority of Jews, schooled in centuries of submission to the powers that be, such a confrontation with Britain was unthinkable.
As a result, the Jewish people remained largely docile during the period between the two world wars, as their patrimony and
national rights were progressively whittled away and as millions of their fellow Jews were being imperiled.

True, there was some reaction in public opinion to the anti-Zionist measures that the Colonial Office took in 1930. For example,
the League of Nations Mandates Commission stripped the British of their moral standing in the dispute by announcing in 1930
that Britain had caused the Arab riots in Palestine by failing to provide sufficient police protection.
⁵⁵
But what influence the League still had evaporated when it gaped helplessly while the Japanese violated the Kellogg-Briand
Pact and invaded Manchuria in 1931 and while Mussolini conquered Ethiopia in 1935. The idea that the new world order would
honor the commitments that the great powers had made to the smaller nations was on its last legs. And in the case of Britain
this was just the dress rehearsal for its final abandonment of Zionism, which was to come a few years later.

In 1933 Hitler came to power in Germany. Within three years, the Jewish population of Palestine had almost doubled. Anti-Zionists,
British and Arab alike, understood that the promise that Palestine would be a safe haven for Jews who were fleeing for their
lives was being acted out before their eyes. If action were not taken immediately, a Jewish majority would materialize in
Palestine within a few years, and then a Jewish state. The dream of a continuous Arab realm under the control of the British
Empire was in serious trouble.

On April 19, 1936, an Arab general strike was declared that was intended to cripple the country and bring it to its knees
if Jewish immigration were not suspended. The British collaborated by permitting
the strike. Gangs in the pay of the Mufti, numbering several thousand, imposed a reign of terror on the country. For three
years they maintained the “revolt” by torturing and murdering Arab dissenters, while seeking out Jewish victims when and where
they could get them. Through much of the uprising the British Army withheld fire, continuing its policy of disarming the Jews
while allowing weapons and Arab volunteers from neighboring countries to pour across the border into the Mufti’s hands. In
all, more than five hundred Jews were killed out of a total Jewish population of a few hundred thousand. Surveying the carnage,
Meinertzhagen sensed what was coming: “God, how we have let the Jews down. And if we are not careful we shall lose the Eastern
Mediterranean, Iraq, and everything which counts in the Middle East.”
⁵⁶

Even at this late date, there were still a precious few within the British administration who argued that the Arab violence
proved that only the Jews could be relied upon to protect the interests of Britain in the area. Most important among them
was Captain Orde Wingate, who largely on his own initiative recruited and trained Jewish antiterror units known as the Special
Night Squads, which were used to take offensive action against the Arab insurgents. Wingate explained the need for Jewish
troops:

The military, in spite of their superior armanent, training and discipline, are in comparison with the guerilla warrior at
a disadvantage as far as knowledge of the ground and local conditions are concerned; it is advisable to create mixed groups
of [British] soldiers and faithful local inhabitants. The Jews are the only local inhabitants who can be relied upon. They
know the terrain well and can speak the languages fluently. Moreover, they grasp tactical training quickly and are well disciplined
and courageous in combat.
⁵⁷

In 1939 Wingate was summarily removed from Palestine with the specific order not to return. He later died in Burma. In the
face of continual upheaval in Palestine, the inclination of most people in the British government was to capitulate to Arab
demands. They believed that it was Jewish immigration that was driving the Arabs to oppose the British and support the Nazis,
threatening everything they had worked so hard to create. As Evelyn Shuckburgh, attaché in the British embassy in Cairo, wrote
to his Arabist father, John, in 1937, succinctly capturing the essence of Western Arabism for the rest of the century, “How
can we risk prejudicing our whole position in the Arab world for the sake of Palestine?”
⁵⁸

London agreed. In July 1937, the Royal (Peel) Commission gave explicit sanction to Arabist policy. The Mandate for a Jewish
National Home in Palestine, it concluded, simply could not be filled in the face of Arab sensibilities. Instead, it recommended
that Palestine be partitioned: The Jews would receive their “state,” which was to consist of parts of the coastal strip and
the Galilee (roughly 5 percent of the original homeland granted the Jews by the Palestine Mandate), the British would retain
Jerusalem and Haifa, and an Arab state (to be merged with Transjordan) would receive everything else—more than 90 percent
of Palestine. Yet the Arabs, recognizing a complete loss of nerve when they saw one, rejected the plan unequivocally and demanded
everything. In September 1937, Arab terrorists assassinated the new British district commissioner for Galilee, whom they believed
to be working to implement partition. The uprising resumed with the same demands: a complete end to all Jewish immigration
and a complete renunciation of the Jewish National Home.

In the end the British complied. Early in 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain concocted the formula that was to bring
“peace in our time” to the Middle East. His solution to the Arabs’ unhappiness with the Balfour Declaration was to abrogate
the declaration once and for all. The Chamberlain White Paper of May 1939 was issued four months before the outbreak of World
War II and the final countdown to the Holocaust. It decreed that Jewish
immigration was to be finally terminated after the entry of another seventy-five thousand Jews, and that Britain would now
work to create a “bi-national” Arab-Jewish state. Anyone who could read and count understood that this meant that Chamberlain
had finally dealt a death blow to the idea of a Jewish state. A mere six months after he betrayed the Czechs at Munich, Chamberlain
went on to betray the Jews. The League of Nations Mandates Commission rejected the British action as not in accord with the
Mandate, but the League’s opinion was no longer of interest to anyone.
⁵⁹

The extent of the British betrayal of the Jews can be understood only in the context of what was happening in Europe in the
1930s and thereafter. Responding to pressure from the Arabs, the British restriction of Jewish immigration (there was no analogous
restriction on
Arab
immigration) cut off the routes of escape for Jews trying to flee a burning Europe. Thus, while the Gestapo was conniving
to send boatloads of German Jews out onto the high seas to prove that no country wanted them any more than Germany did, the
British dutifully turned back every leaking barge that reached Palestine, even firing on several.
⁶⁰
To some, such as Meinertzhagen, the meaning of these events was all too clear:

The Nazis mean to eradicate Judaism from Germany and they will succeed. Nobody loves the Jews, nobody wants them and yet we
are pledged to give them a home in Palestine. Instead we slam the door in their faces just at the moment when it should be
wide open. We even whittle down their home at a moment when we should enlarge it. The action of His Majesty’s Government in
Palestine is very near to that of Hitler in Germany. They may be more subtle, they are certainly more hypocritical, but the
result [for the Jews] is similar—insecurity, misery, exasperation and murder.
⁶¹

For over ten years the British shut the doors of the Jewish National Home to Jews fleeing their deaths. In so doing they not
only worked to destroy the Jewish National Home, which no one believed could survive without immigrants, but made themselves
accomplices in the destruction of European Jewry.

Of the ideals that had led Britain to promise the Jews a national home, Foreign Minister Lord Halifax (who imposed the restrictions)
averred: “There are times when considerations of abstract justice must give way to those of administrative expediency.”
⁶²
When news of the destruction of Europe’s Jews reached the Colonial Office during the war, pleas to open the gates and allow
some to be saved were dismissed by John Shuckburgh as “unscrupulous Zionist sobstuff.”
⁶³
He explained: “There are days in which we are brought up against realities, and we cannot be deterred [from our policies]
by the kind of perverse, pre-war humanitarianism that prevailed in 1939.”
⁶⁴

Indeed, the British adhered to their policy of opposing “perverse humanitarianism” with a vengeance. During all the years
of World War II, as European Jewry was being fed into Hitler’s ovens, Britain regularly turned away Jewish refugees seeking
to reach the safe shores of Palestine. Some managed to “illegally” run the blockade, and they and their children now live
in Israel. Most were unsuccessful and were forced to return to Europe, sent by the British to their deaths. No other country
would have them, and the only place that would was cruelly blocked.

By war’s end in 1945, the pro-British Chaim Weizmann was forced to give up the leadership of the Zionist movement (although
he was later to receive the ceremonial post of first President of the State of Israel). In his last address as chairman of
the Zionist Organization, he bitterly surveyed the end result of a quarter of a century of unflagging faith in British goodwill:

Sometimes we were told that our exclusion from Palestine was necessary in order to do justice to a[n Arab] nation already
endowed with seven independent territories covering a million
square miles; at other times we were told that the admission of our refugees might endanger military security through the
war…. It was easier to doom the Jews of Europe to a certain death than to evolve a technique for overcoming such difficulties.
⁶⁵

Astonishingly, not even the confirmation of the destruction of most of Europe’s Jews and the photographs from the death camps
could melt the stone hearts of British policymakers, who had determined that no Jewish state would be allowed to come into
existence at any price, and who were prepared to make sure that every last survivor of the Holocaust stayed in Europe.
⁶⁶
Britain continued to fight tooth and nail after 1945 to prevent the entry of the survivors into Palestine, resorting to deportations
to Cyprus, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. Earlier, in the middle of World War II in 1942, they refused passage to Palestine
to the ship
Stuma,
which subsequently sank taking down with it 768 refugees from the Holocaust. There was only one survivor. The pathetic number
of Jews permitted to enter Palestine fell even lower than it had been during the war.
⁶⁷
As if this were not enough, the British equipped the Arab armies preparing to wipe out the Jewish communities in Palestine.
In April 1948, with Arab irregulars already pouring over the borders, the dying British administration used its last breath
to keep out the Jews.
⁶⁸