A History of Zionism (101 page)

The conference declares that the new world order that will follow victory cannot be established on foundations of peace, justice and equality, unless the problem of Jewish homelessness is fully solved. The conference urges that the gates of Palestine be opened; that the Jewish Agency be vested with control of immigration into Palestine and with the necessary authority for upbuilding the country, including the development of its unoccupied and uncultivated lands; and that Palestine be established as a Jewish commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.
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Such outspoken language appealed not only to American Zionists; it fired the imagination of American Jewry in general. The majority of American Zionists had favoured the idea of a Jewish state since 1937; the three leading Yiddish-language papers had advocated it before the outbreak of war. It has been argued that Biltmore was a major defeat for Weizmann, who regarded the sudden conversion of American Zionists to revisionism as a setback to his policy. In the words of one historian, his seemed to the delegates a voice out of the past, ‘uttering unacceptable homilies more appropriate to a State Department man than to the president of the World Zionist Organisation’. Weizmann is said to have thought that nothing should be done to antagonise the Arabs any further and thus to damage the British war effort.
†
That the Biltmore formula was almost identical with the sovereignty long demanded by the revisionists did not escape the attention of the British Embassy in Washington, which in an
aide mémoire
to the State Department noted with some concern that Zionist policy had become maximalist and that a
rapprochement
with the revisionists was taking place.
‡

In fact, the background of Biltmore was far more complex. The record shows that the Biltmore formula was prepared by Meyer Weisgal, one of Weizmann’s closest political aides, and that Weizmann was by no means unduly worried by either British or Arab reactions. In a speech in December 1942 he reaffirmed his full agreement with the programme, calling for a ‘reinvigoration of Zionist purpose’ in support of its demands. The resolution was sufficiently vague to allow for many different interpretations. For Weizmann it was not a matter of immediate practical politics, since it left wide open the question of implementation. It was no more than the statement of a maximum demand. Ben Gurion, on the other hand, regarded the formula as the new platform of the Zionist movement. Biltmore was not a defeat for Weizmann: when Ben Gurion wanted to overthrow the president of the World Zionist Organisation soon after this meeting, charging him with being excessively pro-British, weak and unreliable, the American Zionist leaders rejected these accusations as baseless.
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In Jerusalem Ben Gurion was more successful in the struggle for his interpretation of the new programme; there his colleagues proved more receptive. The programme was not just an emotional response to the need for Jewish liberation and independence, as Yehuda Bauer has noted. It also seemed to point the way out of the confusion that had reigned in Zionist ranks since the beginning of the war. Several members of the Jerusalem executive had their doubts about its feasibility. Kaplan regarded it as no more than a slogan, and Shertok also thought it utopian. But all agreed that the Jewish people should not be silent while other nations were putting forward their claims. In these circumstances it was no doubt better to ask for too much than for too little. If the whole of western Palestine could become a Jewish state, well and good; if not, they would have to think again. They agreed with Ben Gurion that the Zionist maximum had now become the Zionist minimum, and that even if Biltmore was only a political slogan, it was certainly a topical and powerful one.

The Zionist Action Committee adopted the Biltmore programme, at its meeting on 19 November 1942, by twenty-one votes against three, with three abstentions. The opposition came mainly from Hashomer Hatzair, on the ground that the new policy was likely to be interpreted by the powers as releasing them from their responsibility, and that in any case the mandatory government would not give real independence to the yishuv. This was a valid argument, for if Britain had been unwilling to carry out the mandate it seemed altogether unthinkable that it would help to establish a Jewish state. Hashomer Hatzair also argued that Biltmore was based on the assumption that no satisfactory solution was possible to the Arab question, a view with which it emphatically disagreed, suggesting a bi-national state as an alternative. But since it insisted at the same time that control over Jewish immigration should not depend on Arab goodwill, and since such goodwill was nonexistent, the Hashomer Hatzair proposal, however attractive in theory, was yet another exercise in political futility.

The debate continued well after 1942, but became more and more unreal in view of the destruction of European Jewry. At Biltmore Weizmann had estimated that 25 per cent of central European Jewry would be physically destroyed under German rule.
*
In November 1942 news reached Palestine that sporadic pogroms and expulsions had given way to the systematic physical extermination of European Jewry. In December of that year the State Department confirmed that two million had already perished and that another five million were in danger of extermination. The Biltmore programme was based on the assumption that there would be millions of refugees at the end of the war. After November 1942 it became clear that millions of refugees would not be left at the end of the war. ‘But at the same time the emotional underpinning to the plan grew all the stronger. It was out of the question that justice should not be done to the Jewish people, that it should lack a home, a state. … Just at the moment when the politico-diplomatic value of the Biltmore programme crumbled, the heart-touching summons, on which the programme rested, grew stronger.’
†

Both adherents and opponents of the Biltmore programme were mistaken in believing that it was a decisive turning point in the history of Zionism. It failed to materialise because it was based on premises that were not realistic. Nor did it do much harm, as its critics at the time believed. Churchill, for instance, seems not to have been deterred by it. In April 1943 he wrote to the colonial secretary that he had always regarded the White Paper as a gross breach of faith and that the majority of the war cabinet would never agree to any positive endorsement of this policy. The Arabs in any case believed the worst as far as Zionist intentions were concerned, and did not need the Biltmore programme to confirm their suspicions. In the last resort Biltmore was not a policy but a symbol, a slogan, reflecting the radicalisation of the Zionist movement as the result of the war and of the losses suffered by the Jewish people. It foreshadowed the bitter postwar conflict with the British government.

The progress of American Zionism

Shortly after Biltmore Ben Gurion noted in one of his speeches in Jerusalem that whereas until recently the American Zionist movement had concentrated on providing financial assistance to Israel, the situation had been radically transformed by the war. A review of Zionist policy during the war that was limited to London and Jerusalem would be quite incomplete, for with the destruction of European Jewry American Zionism had become the single most important factor in the world movement. With the steady growth of American influence in international affairs, Washington had become the most important centre in world politics, and consequently in Jewish politics.

American Zionism, it will be recalled, had undergone a severe crisis in the late 1920s, and it was not until 1932 that its fortunes picked up again. Membership of the Zionist organisation of America (
ZOA
) rose from 8,400 in 1932 to 43,000 in 1939. By the end of the war it had topped the 200,000 mark. Funds remitted to Palestine by the United Palestine appeal increased almost sevenfold between 1932 and 1939.
*
The income of the United Jewish Appeal rose from $3.5 million in 1940 to about $50 million in 1947. Critics of Zionism have always attributed enormous strength and unlimited financial resources to American Zionism through its alleged connections with Wall Street. Its task would have been much easier had this been true. In fact the multi-millionaires cared little, if at all, about Palestine. Nor was public response encouraging: when
ZOA
tried in 1935 to carry out a national roll call to get the signatures and one dollar from each of its 250,000 registered sympathisers, the results were deplorable; less than one-tenth, about twenty thousand, responded.

The real upsurge in American Zionism came only after 1936, when prominent Jewish organisations such as the Bnai Brith and some of the leading Reform synagogues began to show an interest in Palestine. There was a marked shift towards Zionism as a result of the Nazi persecution of German Jews. The events in Europe after the outbreak of war and American reluctance to admit Jewish immigrants to the United States gave further momentum to this process. Sympathies for Zionism and Palestine increased even more quickly and more extensively than is reflected in the growth of
ZOA
membership. American Jewry became overwhelmingly pro-Zionist, whereas in the past the majority had been indifferent or even actively hostile.

During the first years of the war this goodwill did not amount to a political force. Eliyahu Golomb, the chief of Hagana, wrote to Ben Gurion: ‘When I tell you all I saw in Jewish and Zionist circles in America I would paint a rather dismal picture. … A force can be crystallised from among American Jews for political action and practical aid for our cause. But so far it does not actually exist — it is only a potential force.’
*

At the time of the Geneva congress, shortly before the outbreak of war, a Zionist emergency council had been set up to fight the White Paper, with Rabbis Stephen Wise and Abba Hillel Silver as cochairmen. But during the first eighteen months of its existence it did little. In fact, until late 1940 it did not even have a full time secretary or a New York office of its own.
†
The circumstances were not favourable; the United States was not yet at war and there was a strong isolationist current in American public opinion. The country was, as Weizmann put it after a visit in 1940, ‘violently neutral’ and making an extraordinary effort to live as though nothing unusual was happening. Mention of the Jewish tragedy was associated with war-mongering: ‘It was like a nightmare which was all the more oppressive because one had to maintain silence; to speak of such things [the danger to European Jewry] in public was “propaganda”.’
‡

The turning point came in early 1941. More Americans became reconciled to the idea that their country would not be able to remain neutral indefinitely. Rabbi Silver, the stormy petrel of American Zionism, decided to speak out at a fund-raising dinner in New York in January 1941: only by the large-scale settlement of displaced Jews in Palestine, with the aim of its reconstruction as a Jewish commonwealth, could the Jewish problem be permanently solved. He ended his fiery speech by quoting Daniel O’Connell, the hero of the Irish struggle for national liberation: ‘Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!’, and Danton’s ‘L’audace, encore l’audace, toujours l’audace!’

The same month Emanuel Neumann took over the department of public relations and political action of the emergency committee and gave fresh impetus to its work. It revived the American Palestine committee, a group of pro-Zionist Christian public figures which was instrumental in gaining support for the Zionist cause. A statement published on 2 November 1942, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, calling for the establishment of a Jewish national home, received the signature of 68 senators and 194 congressmen as well as hundreds of other communal leaders and public figures.
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These and other initiatives were a cause of much concern to the State Department, and even more to British diplomats: if before Pearl Harbour the Zionists had been under attack for trying to draw America into the war against Hitler, after December 1941 they were accused of harming the allied war effort by their partisan activities.

As news was received through unofficial channels of the fate of European Jewry, and as both government and the mass media seemed to draw a curtain of silence over the subject, a mood of impatience and bitterness prevailed among American Jewry. Weizmann, not given to overstatement or excessive emotionalism, said in a speech at Madison Square Garden on 1 March 1943:

When the historian of the future assembles the bleak record of our days, he will find two things unbelievable; first the crime itself, second the reaction of the world to that crime. … He will be puzzled by the apathy of the civilised world in the face of this immense, systematic carnage of human beings. … He will not be able to understand why the conscience of the world had to be stirred. Above all, he will not be able to understand why the free nations, in arms against a resurgent, organised barbarism, required appeals to give sanctuary to the first and chief victim of that barbarism. Two million Jews have already been exterminated. The world can no longer plead that the ghastly facts are unknown or unconfirmed.

There was in Jewish circles much resentment against an indifferent world which ignored the holocaust. There was also mounting anger against Jewish leaders who refused to speak out, apparently in fear of having their American patriotism questioned. These moods were exploited by a young Palestinian revisionist leader named Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), who found a valuable ally in Ben Hecht, a successful playwright and Hollywood figure, with connections on Broadway and in Hollywood, as well as Madison Avenue. With the help of several devoted colleagues these two, initially operating on a small budget, organised a public relations campaign for the immediate establishment of a Jewish army which all but overshadowed the activities of the official Zionist movement. Bergson and Hecht received the support of the secretaries of the army and the navy, the chief justice, many congressmen. They put on mammoth pageants (‘We will never die - A memorial to the two million Jewish dead of Europe’), and in general created a great deal of commotion. The direct political results of these activities were nil, but, for all its self-dramatisation, shrill language, and distortions, the Palestine Liberation Committee (which at various times also called itself ‘Committee for a Jewish Army’ and ‘Emergency Committee to save the Jewish people of Europe’) helped at this stage to stir up American-Jewish awareness of the extent of the catastrophe.