A History of Zionism (105 page)

The members of the committee went first to the German camps, then to the Middle East. They listened to many witnesses, the most impressive of whom was, as usual, Weizmann, both for his eloquence and his candour. There is no absolute justice, he said, only rough human justice. Injustice there was bound to be. But the Arabs had already two kingdoms and four republics. What was the number of their casualties in the Second World War? They had, moreover, a foolproof guarantee with regard to the fate of their fellow Palestinians in the Jewish state, for Israel was bound to remain an island in the Arab sea.
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The committee’s report was published on 1 May 1946: it made ten recommendations, and gave a brief survey of the situation of the Jews in Europe and a note on the state of affairs in Palestine. It suggested that since the attempt to establish either one Palestinian state, or Arab and Jewish states in Palestine, would result in civil strife which might threaten the peace of the world, the only practical solution was the continuation of the mandate, for the time being by the British and ultimately under the United Nations. The Jews were to get their hundred thousand certificates, and the White Paper and land transfer regulations were to be rescinded.
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The Arabs flatly rejected the report and declared a general strike. The Jews were happy with some of its provisions, bitterly opposed to others. Ben Gurion regarded it as a thinly disguised, more cleverly compiled edition of the White Paper, and the American Zionist leaders rejected it for its denial of Jewish rights and aspirations.
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Other Zionist leaders took a more conciliatory line, believing that with all its weaknesses the report could serve as a basis for discussion and negotiations. Truman said,
inter alia
, that he was happy that the request for the hundred thousand certificates had been endorsed and the abrogation of the White Paper suggested.

The British government, however, was most unhappy about the outcome. Crossman was told by the leaders of his party that he had let them down. In a statement on 1 May 1946 Attlee said that ‘the report must be considered as a whole in all its implications’, which meant in less diplomatic language that he did not like any part of it. Its execution would entail very heavy immediate and long-term commitments. When pressed for details Bevin said, a few weeks later, that it would involve the dispatch of another division and £200 million to implement the admission of the hundred thousand. And he returned to his favoured theme: the Americans were putting so much pressure on London because they did not want too many Jews in New York. If Truman was annoyed by Zionist pressure, Bevin’s constant innuendoes did not improve his mood, especially since he was working at this very time for a liberalisation of American immigration laws. The president continued to ask the British for action on the hundred thousand certificates, and the Labour government continued to stall.

In Jerusalem, counsels were divided. Weizmann said at a meeting of the Inner Zionist Council that it had perhaps been a mistake to ask for a Jewish state: ‘We are always trying to push too hard.’
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But the activists had the upper hand; on 16 June 1946 there was another large-scale Hagana action in which nine bridges (including the Allenby bridge across the Jordan) were blown up and the Haifa railway workshops damaged. The British retaliated on 29 June by ordering the arrest of the members of the Zionist executive in Palestine as well as many other public figures. The Jewish Agency offices were sealed off and public buildings and settlements were searched.

British-Zionist relations were reaching their lowest ebb when the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, with the loss of almost one hundred lives, British, Jews and Arabs. The British imposed a three-day curfew on Tel Aviv, during which 787 men and women were arrested. The terrorist leaders were not among them. General Barker, commanding the British forces, issued an order to his officers which said that he would punish the Jews in a way this race disliked most of all, ‘by striking at their pocket and showing our contempt for them’. This declaration in its turn provoked a great outcry and there were further acts of violence.

The British were charged by the Zionists with using Nazi methods and trying to destroy the Jewish national home. There were acts of torture and even murder, but on the whole the British troops behaved with considerable restraint in the face of frequent physical attacks and much abuse. It is not difficult to imagine how American or Russian or most other troops would have reacted in a similar situation. It was not the fault of the individual British officer or private if he had to carry out the conflicting orders of a government which, facing an impossible task, no longer had a policy. There was only a vague hope that by procrastinating, hanging on to Palestine, the problem might become more tractable. While a campaign for non-cooperation got under way in Palestine, Weizmann appealed to London on 9 July to act quickly. Shortly after, the Jewish Agency building was handed back, and several hundred detainees, including the aged Rabbi Fishman of the Jewish Agency executive, were released. But Shertok and the other members of the executive remained in detention for several more months.

Ben Gurion and Sneh, who had evaded arrest, convened an executive meeting in Paris on 1 August 1946. Weizmann was ill at the time and could not be present; nor did Rabbi Silver attend. The mood was one of almost unmitigated gloom. Rabbis Wise and Fishman had second thoughts about Biltmore and partition. Perhaps they should have accepted the Peel Report at the time after all? Even the irrepressible Rabbi Silver wrote that it was a terrible situation, with the Americans inactive and ‘all the cards stacked against us’.
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In a vote taken on 5 August, with Ben Gurion and Sneh abstaining, a resolution was adopted which marked a clear retreat from Biltmore: the Jewish Agency was willing to negotiate on the basis of a viable Jewish state in an adequate area of Palestine, rather than in the whole of western Palestine. Goldmann immediately returned to Washington and began to negotiate with the administration on the basis of this resolution.

Meanwhile a new project had appeared on the scene; it was discussed and rejected in record time. Details of the Morrison-Grady scheme were revealed in a debate in the House of Commons on 31 July and 1 August 1946. Less than two weeks later Attlee had word from Truman that the plan was unacceptable. It was essentially a Foreign Office document to which Herbert Morrison, one of the central figures in the Labour cabinet, had given his name. It had been discussed in London with a small American working party headed by Ambassador Grady. The scheme envisaged a division of Palestine into four areas (Arab and Jewish provinces, a district of Jerusalem, and a district of the Negev), with the central government (British) having exclusive authority on defence and foreign affairs, and with the high commissioner as the supreme arbiter of,
inter alia
, the extent of immigration. The scheme was not new; it had been submitted to the members of the Anglo-American committee who had been to Palestine earlier that year and had been rejected by most of them.

The concept of partition as defined by the Zionists at their Paris meeting seems to have appealed to the American administration, but there was no marked advance in Goldmann’s talks in Washington. Nor did Weizmann make much headway when he resumed his contacts with Bevin in Paris. On the eve of the Day of Atonement (shortly before the New York elections) President Truman in a public statement reiterated his request for the hundred thousand certificates, for the liberalisation of America’s immigration laws, and, for the first time, mentioned the idea of a ‘viable Jewish state in an adequate area of Palestine’ (the Paris formula) as something to which the American government could give its support.

This announcement was generally interpreted as the most pro-Zionist ever made by an American president. It angered Bevin, who found his pet theory about the influence of the New York Jews confirmed, outraged the Arabs, and provoked anger among the anti-Zionists in the American administration. Nor did the Zionists display much enthusiasm either, since the statement was open to conflicting interpretations. The president did not define ‘viable’, but he probably meant a very small Jewish state, which would be unacceptable to the Zionists. Rabbi Silver probably had this danger in mind when, at the zoa convention of 26 October, he attacked his old political enemies, Weizmann and Goldmann. He argued that the executive had no right to negotiate on partition without the approval of the Zionist congress.
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A resolution was passed, stressing again the claim to the whole of mandatory Palestine.

These declarations had no practical results, and the next stage in this struggle for the future of Palestine opened at the twenty-second Zionist congress in Basle on 9 December 1946. The number of voters who had participated in the elections - 2,159,850 - was far larger than ever before.
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It differed radically in its constitution from its predecessors; it was, as Tabenkin sadly noted, an ‘English’ not a ‘Jewish’ congress. More than 40 per cent of the votes had come from the United States, and the Americans had by far the largest delegation. The three left-wing parties - not united at the time - had 125 mandates; the General Zionists, equally torn by internal strife, 106; the Mizrahi 48; and the revisionists 36. The congress should have met in Palestine; Weizmann had been one of the few to express doubts whether this was feasible in the given political circumstances. Events, as so often, proved him right, but this did not make him any more popular. He was under fire from the very start in view of the failure of his ‘pro-British orientation’, but was determined to fight back. In his opening address he said that Zionism was a modern expression of the liberal ideal. Divorced from it, it lost all purpose and hope. He, too, was in favour of the immediate establishment of a Jewish state. But the acts of terrorism were abhorrent and barren of all advantage. Against the heroics of suicidal violence he urged the ‘courage of endurance and the heroism of superhuman restraint’.
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Massada, for all its heroism, had been a great disaster in Jewish history.

The counter-attack was led by Emanuel Neumann, a ZOA vice-president, who said that the conciliatory line was a costly experiment that had already failed. He opposed Zionist participation in the new London conference which the British government was about to initiate. (It should be noted in parenthesis that some of the bitterest conflicts in Zionist history concerned conferences or schemes which either never went beyond the planning stage or were doomed to fail soon after.) Neumann called for a more active struggle against the mandatory power. Diplomacy, he said, could succeed only if backed by force, by a resistance movement.
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Goldmann, defending the policy of which he had been one of the main architects, said that if the deadlock had not been broken by the Paris initiative, America would have washed her hands of the whole affair and things would have further deteriorated: ‘What we attained with our proposals was to bring America back into the picture.’
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The confrontation between ‘activists’ and ‘moderates’ reached its climax with Weizmann’s answer to his critics. Speaking in Yiddish at the seventeenth session, he again condemned in the sharpest terms the terror, that ‘cancer in the body politic of the yishuv’, which would destroy it if it was not stamped out. He criticised Dr Sneh, who had advocated both armed struggle and a political reorientation. ‘Sneh’s arguments frighten me’, Weizmann cried, and, pointing to Herzl’s picture on the wall, he quoted Ahad Ha’am’s old slogan: ‘This is not the road’.
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The American Zionists were the main target of Weizmann’s speech: the eleven new settlements recently established in the Negev had a far greater weight than a hundred speeches about resistance, especially if these speeches were made in Washington and New York, whereas the resistance would be put up in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Neumann interrupted him and shouted ‘Demagogue!’, whereupon Weizmann, deeply offended, gave free rein to his fury:

I – a demagogue! I who have borne all the ills and travails of this movement. The person who flung this word in my face should know that in every house and every stable in Nahalal, in every workshop in Tel Aviv or Haifa, there is a drop of my blood. [Most delegates rose to their feet.] You know that I am telling you the truth. Some people don’t like to hear it - but you will hear me. I warn you against bogus palliatives, against short-cuts, against false prophets, against facile generalisations, against distortion of historic facts. … If you think of bringing the redemption nearer by un-Jewish methods, if you lose faith in hard work and better days, then you commit idolatry and endanger what we have built. Would I had a tongue of flame, the strength of prophets, to warn you against the paths of Babylon and Egypt. Zion shall be redeemed in Judgment - and not by any other means.
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It was one of the most dramatic scenes at a Zionist congress, but in political terms Weizmann’s moving appeal was ineffectual. He received great applause, but the vote went against him. By a small majority (171–154) the congress rejected the proposal to attend the London talks, which was tantamount to a vote of no-confidence. Weizmann was not re-elected as president, and though out of respect to him the post was left vacant, this was the end of his career in the Zionist movement which he had served for more than fifty years. In his autobiography Weizmann bitterly notes that, as in the past, he had become the scapegoat for the sins of the British government, and since his critics knew that their assault on Westminster was bound to be ineffective, they turned their shafts against him.

It is easy to take issue with his critics for inconsistency and indeed demagogy. The crowning irony was that four weeks later the Zionist leaders went to the London talks after all, and that nothing of any consequence came of these negotiations. But Weizmann’s position had become untenable irrespective of the vote of no-confidence. More and more Zionists had reached the conclusion that their cause could be advanced only against, not with Britain, and that Weizmann was no longer the right man to lead the movement in this new phase. The recourse to armed resistance was dangerous in both its foreign political and domestic implications, but in retrospect it may be seen as an essential element in the struggle for independence. The powers dealt with the Palestine problem as a matter of urgency not because of speeches made or resolutions adopted, but because it constituted a danger to peace. Armed resistance and illegal immigration helped to dramatise the state of emergency much more effectively than the patient, constructive work (‘another settlement, another shed, another cow in Hadera’) which for so many years under Weizmann’s leadership had been Zionist policy.