A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  With such strong currents in favor of Jewish settlement east of the Jordan, it was clear that Churchill, if left to his own devices, might well act out his idea of “a Jewish State by the banks of the Jordan”—and the functionaries of the new Middle East Department moved quickly to ensure that he did not. It was Shuckburgh, Lawrence, and their associates who led Churchill to believe that Transjordan had been promised to Feisal and the Hashemites of Mecca during the war. They thereby triggered the installation of Feisal’s brother Abdullah and his army of two hundred Bedouins as rulers of Jordan—despite the objection by High Commissioner for Palestine Sir Herbert Samuel and others that Jordan was part of Palestine. Lloyd George, too, insisted that even if there were no choice but to make Transjordan Arab, it had to be considered an ‘Arab province [of] or adjunct to Palestine.” 42

  But Churchill’s subordinates were convinced that by throwing such favors to the Arabs, they would earn the Arabs’ loyalty. They told Churchill that making such a gift would really not harm the Jews—a line which Churchill, like so many other Western leaders after him, did not know enough to refute. Meinertzhagen, who had been assigned to the Middle East Department in London, once again found himself alone in attempting to maintain the commitment that Britain had made to the Jews:

  The atmosphere in the Colonial Office is definitely hebraphobe [i.e., anti-Semitic], the worst offender being Shuckburgh who is head of the Middle East Department….

  I exploded on hearing that Churchill had severed Transjordan from Palestine…. Abdullah was placated at the expense of the Jewish National Home which embraces the whole of Biblical Palestine. Lawrence was of course with Churchill and influenced him…. This reduces the Jewish National Home to one-third of Biblical Palestine. The Colonial Office and the Palestine Administration have now declared that the articles for the mandate relating to the Jewish Home are not applicable to Transjordan…. This discovery was not made until it became necessary to appease an Arab Emir.

  Outraged, Meinertzhagen insisted on seeing Churchill:

  … I went foaming at the mouth with anger and indignation[.] Churchill heard me out; I told him it was grossly unfair to the Jews, that it was yet another promise broken and that it was a most dishonest act, that the Balfour Declaration was being torn up by degrees and that the official policy of His Majesty’s Government to establish a Home for the Jews in Biblical Palestine was being sabotaged; that I found the Middle East Department whose business was to implement the Mandate, almost one hundred percent hebraphobe…. Churchill listened and said he saw the force of my argument and would consider the question. He thought it was too late to alter[,] but a time limit to Abdullah’s Emirate in Transjordan might work.

  I’m thoroughly disgusted. 43

  To Churchill’s credit, he rejected effort after effort to persuade him not to implement the Balfour Declaration west of the Jordan River. But his rejections were not enough to discourage the Arabs, who correctly recognized that Britain was caving in under the pressure of their violence. Less than two months after Churchill’s decision, in March 1921, to establish Abdullah in Transjordan, Arab mobs, somehow not appeased, again went on the rampage. A British judge in the Mandatory government named Horace Samuel (no relation to Lord Herbert Samuel), who was involved in the subsequent trials, recorded the events in Jaffa:

  The Arabs of Jaffa… started to murder, wound, and loot the Jews under the official protection and assistance of a substantial number of Jaffa police.… A mob of Arabs… began to attack [the Zionist Commission immigration depot] with stones and sticks, but were at first successfully kept at bay by the immigrants. Finally, reinforcements for the attackers were supplied by certain Arab policemen, well equipped with rifles, bombs, and ammunition. The door was forced by the police, and under their leadership and escort the mob burst into the building. Thirteen of the immigrants were murdered.

  Faced with the murder of Jews, the British instantly knew what to do. As Judge Samuel explained:

  The riots of the 1st of May and the massacre of the Jews at the Immigration Hostel were a pretty broad hint that the Jaffa Arabs resented any further Jewish immigration into the country. Under these circumstances the High Commissioner [Lord Samuel], preferring a policy of tact to one of drastic repression, within forty-eight hours of the massacre telephoned Mr. Miller, the Assistant Governor of Jaffa, instructing him to announce to the Arabs that in accordance with their request, immigration had been suspended. 44

  Still unappeased, Arab mobs spent the following week attacking Jewish communities all over the country. British soldiers were under orders not to shoot. 45 In the end, thirty-five Jews were left dead and hundreds more wounded. According to Judge Samuel, Storrs argued for a policy of “throwing the Arabs as many sops as they could swallow, in the hope of thereby getting them to desist from open revolt.” 46 His view prevailed, and a general freeze on Jewish immigration was imposed for the first time. And while the freeze lasted only two months, it set a precedent of sacrificing Jewish rights to Arab blackmail, which was soon to replace the Balfour Declaration as London’s policy.

  But by this time, many of the Arabists did not see the Arab threats as blackmail at all. On the contrary, the Arabists found themselves in sympathy with Arab revulsion against this “nowhere very popular people,” as Storrs called them. 47 With astonishing hypocrisy, these avowed imperialists and colonialists began to argue that “foreign” Jewish control of Palestine was an injustice to the indigenous Arabs. Thus in 1920 the new foreign minister, Lord Curzon, a staunch colonialist, argued that the Mandate, which “reeks of Judaism in every paragraph,” was inherently unfair to the local Arabs. 48 He was joined in his opinion in 1921 by the new commander of the British Army in Palestine, General W N. Congreve, who circulated a memorandum to his troops decreeing that while the army of course was not supposed to have political opinions, it could not ignore the injustice being done to the Arabs by allowing the Jews to settle in Palestine. 49 The effect of this new moralizing on the part of the British imperial establishment had an almost immediate effect on the execution of British policy It propelled Lord Samuel’s adviser on the Arabs, Ernest Richmond, to conclude that the Zionist policy was “inspired by a spirit which I can only regard as evil” 50 —and to engineer the appointment of Haj Amin al-Husseini to the post of Grand Mufti as a curative.

  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 a
nd 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 Ger
man 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.