Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (38 page)

We therefore recommend that until this hostility disappears, the government of Palestine is continued as at present under Mandate pending the execution of a trusteeship agreement under the United Nations.

The idea was that Britain, unless another nation was mad enough to want the job, would remain the administering power as the UN’s Trustee. The Committee acknowledged this would mean a very heavy burden for the British, but the burden, it said, would be lightened if the difficulties were appreciated and the Trustee had the support of other members of the United Nations.

The most obvious implication for the longer term of the Committee’s report was that if and when hostility “disappeared”, an independent Palestine would have a single power-sharing government to serve the well-being of the inhabitants “as a whole”, with the rights of the minority Jews guaranteed by the UN. Another possible implication was that a single state of Palestine might have a federal government, with members elected by separate Arab and Jewish regions or cantons. The only things ruled out were Palestine as a Jewish or Arab state.
On any reading of the report as a whole, it was “No” to the Zionist enterprise.

My own view is that the Committee, no doubt in the name of political expediency, was misrepresenting the situation when it spoke of the “determination of each to achieve domination, if necessary by violence...”
The Zionists in Palestine were seeking to dominate the Arabs. The Arabs were merely trying to avoid being dominated.

It was in the section of the report concerned with “Future Immigration Policy” (presenting and explaining its sixth recommendation) that the Committee made clear what its own stance was—one of pure pragmatism. The Committee was not concerned with what might be right or wrong when judged in the light of past events and even international law; it was concerned only with what was possible given the situation as it was. The Committee’s pragmatism (and, I think, its wisdom) was indicated in this passage:

In Palestine there is a Jewish National Home created by the consequences of the Balfour Declaration. Some may think the Declaration was wrong and should not have been made; some that it was a conception on a grand scale and that effect can be given to one of the most daring and significant colonization plans in history. Controversy as to which view is right is fruitless. The National Home is there. Its roots are deep in the soil of Palestine. It cannot be argued out of existence; neither can the achievements of the Jewish pioneers.

Pragmatism was insisting that even if wrong had been done to the Arabs of Palestine by Britain’s issuing of the Balfour Declaration and the consequences of it—too bad. It was a wrong that could not be righted. It was too late.

On the subject of future Jewish immigration into Palestine the Committee’s sixth recommendation was this:

We recommend that, pending the early reference to the United Nations and the execution of a trusteeship agreement, the Mandatory [Britain] should administer Palestine according to the Mandate which declares with regard to immigration that the Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and positions of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions.

In its statements about how further Jewish immigration into Palestine should be facilitated if the rights of the Arabs were not to be further prejudiced, the Committee delivered a few words the Arabs did not want to hear and many words the Zionists did not want to hear.

The following three paragraphs from the Committee’s report take us to the very heart of the matter, and they help to explain why the Arabs had good cause to be aggrieved by what happened next and throughout the years to come; and is still happening.

The well-being of all the people of Palestine, be they Jews, Arabs or neither, must be the governing consideration. We reject the view that there shall be no further Jewish immigration into Palestine without Arab acquiescence, a view which would result in the Arab dominating the Jew. We also reject the insistent Jewish [actually Zionist] demand that forced Jewish immigration must proceed apace in order to produce as quickly as possible a Jewish majority and a Jewish state. The wellbeing of the Jews must not be subordinated to that of the Arabs; nor that of the Arabs to the Jews. The well-being of both, the economic situation of Palestine as a whole, the degree of execution for further development, all have to be carefully considered in deciding the number of immigrants for any particular period.

Palestine is a land sacred to three Faiths and must not become the land of any one of them to the exclusion of the others, and Jewish immigration for the development of the National Home must not become a policy of discrimination against other immigrants. Any person, therefore, who desires and is qualified under applicable laws to enter Palestine must not be refused admission or subjected to discrimination on the ground that he is not a Jew. All provisions respecting immigration must be drawn, executed and applied with that principle always firmly in mind.

Further, while we recognise that
any Jew who entered Palestine in accordance with the law
[Committee’s own emphasis] is there of right, we expressly disapprove of the policy taken in some Jewish quarters that Palestine has in some way been ceded or granted as their state to the Jews of the world, that every Jew everywhere is, merely because he is a Jew, a citizen of Palestine, and therefore can enter Palestine as of right without regard to conditions imposed by the Government upon entry, and that therefore there cannot be illegal immigration of Jews into Palestine. We declare and affirm that any immigrant Jew who enters Palestine contrary to its laws [at the time British law administered by Britain] is an illegal immigrant.

There could not have been a more explicit condemnation of the strategy Zionism was pursuing in the shadow of the Nazi holocaust to achieve its ends. And it was the strategy that was to become Israel’s policy.
In the years to come the Arabs driven out of their homeland would have no right of return, while citizens of any country in the world had [and still have] an absolute and unquestionable right to go and live in Israel provided they were Jewish.

On the subject of “The Need for Peace” the Committee, in its 10th and last recommendation, said this:

We recommend that if this report is adopted, it should be made clear beyond all doubt to both Jews and Arabs, that any attempt from either side by threats of violence, by terrorism, or by the organisation or use of illegal armies to prevent its execution, will be resolutely suppressed.

Furthermore, we express the view that the Jewish Agency should at once resume active co-operation with the Mandatory in the suppression of terrorism and of illegal immigration, and in the maintenance of law and order throughout Palestine, which is essential for the good of all, including the new immigrants.

An objective reading of the Committee’s entire report invited two conclusions.

The first was that the fairness principle had been stretched to favour Jews because of the exceptional and emotionally charged circumstances of the time. On the subject of the “hostility between Jews and Arabs” in Palestine, the Committee could have noted (and in my view should have noted) that in pre-Zionist times, and as even Ben-Gurion had admitted to the State Department, the minority of Jews in Palestine had lived “in amity” with the majority Arabs; and that it was only political Zionism that turned Jews in Palestine into enemies so far as the Arabs were concerned.

The second was that the Committee was right, in the name of pragmatism, to say that the consequences to this point of Britain’s implementation of the Balfour Declaration could not be undone. And that being so, the solution had to be one that was less than fair to the Arabs. But it was a solution that could prevent a massive and cruel injustice being done to the Arabs of Palestine.

Unfortunately the Anglo-American Committee’s report on the way forward in the best interests of all concerned—Arabs, Jews everywhere, Britain, the U.S., the whole world—was, in American terminology, D.O.A.
Dead On Arrival.

Zionism’s reaction to it was predictable. While it was willing in principle to endorse just one of the report’s ten recommendations—the one calling for the immediate issuance of 100,000 entrance certificates—it said “No” to the rest. American Zionists in New York, British Zionists in London and Ben-Gurion’s Jewish Agency in Tel Aviv insisted that nothing less than a Jewish state in accordance with the Biltmore Program would do.

As a consequence President Truman was too frightened to say that a Zionist state was out of the question. There simply was not the political will to implement the recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee to solve the Palestine problem in a way that required the man in the White House to say “No” to Zionism. It might have happened on President Roosevelt’s watch if he had lived; but it was not going to happen on President Harry Truman’s watch.

In panic, laced no doubt with despair and fear of the future, British and American diplomacy went through the motions of cobbling together another scheme, which was to surface as the Morrison-Grady Plan. (Herbert Morrison was a leader of the British Labour Party and a future foreign minister, and the man some in his party thought should have been prime minister in Attlee’s place. Henry F. Grady had been appointed by Truman to serve on his special Cabinet Committee on Palestine. Grady was Dean of the College of Commerce of California, a very successful businessman and, because of his knowledge and abilities, was called upon from time to time to undertake special assignments for the State Department).

The Morrison-Grady plan was, in fact, drawn up with the assistance of the U.S. Secretaries of State, Treasury and War and their British counterparts. It recommended a federal state of Palestine with separate Arab and Jewish cantons and, if the Arabs could not be persuaded to accept that, an Arab state. It rejected the idea of a Jewish state. And the question of immediate Jewish immigration was made conditional upon Arab acceptance. It was Grady who conducted the discussions with the British.

President Truman’s initial behind-closed-doors response to the Morrison-Grady Plan was that it was “fair.”
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But he backed away from it under Zionist pressure. The pressure was of two kinds.

One was a flood of general messages denouncing the Morrison– Grady Plan as a “sell-out” of the Zionist cause.

The other was a particular message from Paul Fitzpatrick, New York State Democratic Committee Chairman. In a cable to the President on 2 August 1946 he warned (emphasis added): “I
f this plan goes into effect, it would be useless for the Democrats to nominate a state ticket for the election this Fall. I say this without reservation and am certain that my statements can be substantiated.
”
⁷²
As Truman would have known, Fitzpatrick’s warning had a nationwide as well as New York State implication. With the mid-term elections for Congress approaching, Democratic candidates, if the Morrison- Grady Plan was supported by the President, could forget about Jewish campaign funds and votes (as organised by the Zionist lobby).

Secretary of State Byrnes would subsequently tell his successor, George Marshall, that he had “disassociated” himself from President Truman’s decision to turn down the Morrison-Grady Plan.

In his diary on 4 September 1947, Forrestal noted that the President’s decision amounted to “a denunciation of the work of his own appointee.” It also resulted, the diary entry continued, “in Secretary of State Byrnes washing his hands of the whole Palestine matter, which meant that it was allowed to drift without action and practically without any American policy.”
⁷³

But there was a hidden hand on the tiller. In the months of drift before Marshall was appointed to succeed Byrnes, the official who was effectively directing what passed for American policy with regard to Palestine was Zionism’s own top man in the Truman White House, Niles. And thereafter, as we shall see, he never really lost his grip.

There are a number of indications that President Truman was actually more than exasperated by the Zionists and the pressures to which they were subjecting him. And there were times when he failed to contain his extreme irritation.

As part of its strategy to oblige Truman to kill the Morrison-Grady Plan, Zionism had New York Senators Robert Wagner and James Mead call on the President to present him with a memorandum attacking it. After they had gone, and according to Vice President Wallace, Truman snapped: “I am not a New Yorker. All these people are pleading for a special interest. I am an American.”
⁷⁴
At a subsequent Cabinet meeting during which Wallace warned Truman that the Morrison-Grady Plan was “loaded with political dynamite”, the President was said by the Vice President to have blurted out, “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was here, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck.”
⁷⁵

The same President could and did say the following to American diplomats summoned home from Arab capitals in 1946 to report on growing anti-American sentiments and the deteriorating U.S. position in the Arab world: “
I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents
.”
⁷⁶
(Emphasis added)