British Complicity in the Triumph of Zionism
Robert Wilkinson
The prevailing analysis of much of the left regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict is that of a Zionist settler-colonialist enterprise displacing the indigenous Arab inhabitants in order to establish a racially exclusive Jewish state. The danger is that some of the arguments being brought forth are liable to slip into antisemitism or conversely that the fear of being labelled as such constrains our understanding of the issues involved. This article hopefully navigates between the Scylla and Charybdis of either danger. For many decades in the National Union of Teachers, I worked with comrades including Bernard Regan in raising the issue of Palestine and securing the union’s support for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
There is broad agreement on the insidious role that British imperialism played in the creation and aggravation of the ethnic tensions in Palestine. Bernard Regan’s book The Balfour Declaration gives a really useful account of the discussions in the UK Cabinet and their responses to the Arab representatives who were almost universally ignored.
In the conclusion to his important article in Communist Review, Phil Katz wrote about a Resolution of the CPB 56th Congress advocating that “Left forces are encouraged to reject lazy shorthand analysis in place of one that is rooted in facts, in material conditions and in class struggle”. I hope that this article will go some way to fulfil that expectation by showing how much British imperialism was responsible for the eventual triumph of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, despite its interests in maintaining control over the feudal Arab regimes in the Middle East and their mineral resources.
The imperialist carve-up
The Ottoman Empire had already lost control of much of north Africa and the Balkans before the outbreak of war in 1914. The decision to throw its weight on the side of the Central Powers of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Bulgaria by declaring jihad against Britain, France and tsarist Russia in November 1914 met with initial successes in repelling Allied incursions in the Bosporus at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Britain was so concerned that it encouraged an Arab revolt against the Turks with promises of autonomy for the feudal rulers of Arabia and the Fertile Crescent from Kuwait to Aqaba. Meanwhile British and French diplomats Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot were coming to a secret agreement to carve up the Fertile Crescent. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia published such secret treaties and exposed their imperialist duplicity.
To make matters even more complicated, was the attempt by British imperialism to secure the support of the Jewish communities in Britain, the United States and Kerensky’s Russia by the issue of the Balfour Declaration on 2 November 1917. It was made in a letter from Arthur James Balfour, then British foreign secretary, to Lord Lionel Walter de Rothschild, a leader of the Anglo-Jewish community. The wording of the Declaration is significant for its deliberate ambiguity:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
Members of the War Cabinet including the Ulster Unionist Edward Carson and the South African leader Jan Smuts were fully in support. Winston Churchill expressed his approval in forthright terms:
“If, as it may well happen, there should be created in our lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish state under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four million of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.”
Despite the publication of US President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ including the principle of ‘self-determination’, there was an over-riding determination on the part of the European imperialist powers not to apply the principle to non-European peoples in the countries formerly part of the German and Ottoman Empires. In order to appease Wilson and public opinion at home, the Paris Peace Conference established the principle of Mandates. Mandates were held on behalf of the League of Nations by “advanced nations” as a “sacred trust of civilisation” in order to give “practical effect” to the “development of such peoples” who “are not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world”. Regan writes that “the British were determined to be in sole control of the destiny of Palestine and take little heed of the views of indigenous peoples.”
President Wilson established a commission to investigate the situation in the Arab countries of the former Ottoman Empire, but Britain, France and Italy refused to take part. The King-Crane Commission, after taking evidence from the then inhabitants, came to the far-sighted conclusion in August 1919 that
“[A] national home for the Jewish people is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
In this article, much of the evidence for the development of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine is taken from Nathan Weinstock’s book, Zionism: False Messiah, that – despite its Trotskyist fantasies – views the Jewish experience of immigration into Palestine as a consequence of desperation and lack of possible alternatives.
The growth of the Yishuv (Jewish settlement in Palestine)
Prior to the Balfour Declaration, there were already in existence a relatively small number of Jewish inhabitants in the ‘Holy Land’. “Periods of great stress or epochal transformations” simply gave new impetus to “pilgrimages and permanent settlements there, by pious and learned Jews”. Towards the middle of the 18th century, numerous rabbinical seminaries were established in Palestine. Their numbers increased and several tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews settled in this way in the Holy Land in the course of the following century. Weinstock argues that:
“Jewish nationalism, in particular its Zionist variant, was an absolutely new conception born of the socio-political context of Eastern Europe in the 19th century … political Zionism advocated massive emigration to an undeveloped country with the aim of establishing a Jewish State.”
The reality however was that most Jews suffering under antisemitic pogroms in tsarist Russia, Ukraine and Poland were more likely to emigrate to the United States (73%), Britain (5%), Argentina (4.5%) and Canada (3.1%), than the relatively few (3%) that chose Palestine as their destination.
Those Jewish workers who remained in tsarist Russia were increasingly drawn to the socialist movement. The establishment of the Allgemeiner Yiddisher Arbeiterbund in 1897 (the Bund) attracted considerable numbers in Lithuania, Poland and Russia. Whilst being fiercely opposed to Zionism, it developed increasingly nationalist positions. It adopted effective strategies in organising Jewish workers with a mass line instead of small study circles, following the arguments of the influential pamphlet On Agitation by Arkadi Kremer and Julius Martov, later Menshevik leader. However, Weinstock argues that:
“The Jewish workers’ party was essentially composed of Jewish artisans and workers working for small Jewish employers in small-scale industry. This particular social composition of its base made the Bund especially vulnerable to petty-bourgeois ideology.”
Although impressed by the effectiveness of the Bund in organising large numbers of Jewish workers, Lenin criticised it for its separatism and argued
“The more the predatory tsarist autocracy strives to sow the seeds of discord, distrust and enmity among the nationalities it oppresses, the more abominable its policy of inciting the ignorant masses to savage pogroms becomes, the more does the duty devolve upon us, the Social-Democrats, to rally the isolated Social-Democratic parties of the different nationalities into a single Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party”.
Very few workers in the tsarist Russian Empire were attracted by promises of settlement in Palestine. Although the Jewish population grew from 20,000 in 1880 to 50,000 in 1895 the immigrants from eastern Europe (Ashkenazim) had little in common with the long-established Jewish communities (Sephardim). The Ottoman province of Palestine was also subjected to the incursions of rival Christian Churches setting up religious institutions that made significant real estate purchases and invested considerable capital.
“The introduction of a money economy and incorporation into the world capitalist market involved the breaking up of collective ownership of village lands and the subjection of the fellahin to ruinous taxation … [was] an extremely favourable situation for the effendis who grew fat at the expense of the fellahin … who were gradually dispossessed”.
Jewish settlement in Palestine was at first almost entirely dependent upon external finance, largely from Baron Edmond de Rothschild, starting in 1882. This investment soon degenerated into a ‘normal’ colonialist structure of European planters exploiting cheap local labour, as in Algeria or Rhodesia. Jewish journalist and founder of cultural Zionism Ahad Ha’am reported in 1891 that:
“They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause and even boast of these deeds”.
In 1900, Rothschild transferred the settlements that he had sponsored to the Jewish Colonisation Association led by Baron de Hirsch. As Weinstock concluded, without their substantial investment “Zionist colonisation would have been doomed to failure”.
A second wave of Jewish immigration intensified after the defeat of the Russian revolution in 1904-5. Profoundly influenced by populism and Tolstoy, they were committed to ‘the return to the soil’. It meant a Jewish economy excluding the Arabs, so as to protect the immigrants’ jobs. The Zionist worker drove the fellahin out of the Jewish agricultural settlements. The Jewish pioneers (chalutzim) made it a principle of establishing a separate economy. Apartheid (separate development) was built into the foundations of Zionist labour colonisation. Until the development of citrus production, the Jewish settlements were only economically viable thanks to considerable funding from abroad.
The 5th Zionist Congress in 1901 established the Jewish National Fund (JNF) to acquire land as the inalienable property of the Jewish people, conditional on the employment of Jewish labour alone. The Poale Zion party, affiliated to the Socialist International in 1907, was comprised exclusively of Jewish workers and had the boycott of Arab workers as a fundamental policy from the very beginning. A ‘self-defence’ organisation, the Hashomer (Guardians) was established on the principle that ‘Jewish property must be protected by Jews’. The Zionist Congress also decided in favour of the use of Hebrew in Palestine, further reinforcing the separate existence of Jew and Arab in the country. It was to be the sole language of instruction in Jewish schools.
The Arab response to ‘separate development’
In 1908 the first cooperative villages (moshavim) were established, with the first collective (kibbutz) two years later. Their numbers were considerably expanded following the First World War with 12,000 ‘settlers’ out of a total Jewish population of 85,000. The Second International in 1919 recognised “the right of the Jewish people to set up and build a National Home in Palestine”, leaving it to the League of Nations to “see to it that the rights of the other inhabitants of the country are respected”. However, the 2nd Congress of the Communist International in 1920 denounced “Zionism as a whole, which under the pretence of creating a Jewish State in Palestine in fact surrenders the Arab working people of Palestine, where the Jewish workers form only a small minority, to exploitation by England.”
The Administrator of Palestine, General Bols, reported that the Zionist Commission “adopted an hostile, critical and abusive attitude” to the British Administration:
“[I]t is manifestly impossible to please partisans who officially claim nothing more than a National Home but in reality will be satisfied with nothing less than a Jewish State and all that it politically implies.”
In 1920 anti-Jewish riots broke out in Jerusalem and in the north, where a number of settlements had been established. Further demonstrations occurred in Haifa during the visit of Winston Churchill in March 1921, when an Arab delegation of Christians and Moslems was met with a “curt refusal” to amend the Mandate policy on Jewish immigration, despite the copious evidence in the report on the riots by Major-General Palin.
More serious rioting occurred in Jaffa on 1 May 1921, leaving 47 dead and 146 injured, when, according to Norman and Helen Bentwich, “an Arab mob … burst into the Jewish Immigrants’ House at Jaffa and murdered many of the inmates”. Those authors are of the opinion that the emerging fierce Arab resistance was motivated to a large degree by the fear of being dispossessed of their lands. Weinstock says that the policy of “economic apartheid” practised by the Histadrut (the Zionist trade union centre) aroused strong Arab resentment as early as 1920.
The report on the disturbances by the Haycraft Commission led to some concessions to Arab opinion. It rejected the argument that Palestine should become “as Jewish as England is English”. Weinstock comments:
“It was not contemplated that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded in Palestine. Jewish immigration was to be bound by the criterion of the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals.”
The rigged election in 1921 of a new Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a candidate recently pardoned for his role in the 1920 Jerusalem disturbances, showed how the British High Commissioner was desirous to counterbalance Zionism by the choice of an “arch-reactionary big landowner, whose religious fanaticism and extreme right-wing nationalism were well-known.”
In August 1929 violence broke out again as Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem, Hebron and Safed were attacked, with 133 killed and 355 injured. 116 rioters died as British forces restored order. Weinstock argues that
“Lacking any political leadership other than that of the big landowners, the masses protested in a savage pre-political and fanatical form, superficially similar to a pogrom.”
In response the Passfield White Paper announced restrictions on Zionist land purchases in line with the report of the expert Sir John Hope-Simpson “who had been shocked at the extent to which the Arabs had been evicted”.40 However, the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald wrote a letter to the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in February 1931 that rendered the White Paper null and void. Weinstock writes that
“MacDonald recognised and accepted Zionist separatism, which was based on the principle of excluding Arab labour from Jewish enterprises.”
General strikes by Arab workers and businesses were increasingly directed against British colonial domination, accompanied by demonstrations and extremely violent clashes with the police. Rioters were encouraged by similar events in Egypt and Syria but were betrayed by their traditional ‘feudal’ leaders of the Higher Arab Committee and diverted into “anti-Jewish excesses”.
Partition or a single state?
The Arab Revolt of 1936-39 was ruthlessly repressed by Britain, with more than 2,000 Arabs killed, and some hundred convicted by military courts and hanged under the 1937 Emergency Regulations. This defeat left the population exhausted. Excluded from the Jewish consumer markets for their agricultural produce and from employment in Jewish owned businesses, the Arab farmers and workers “‘inevitably fell back under the hegemony of the fanatical effendis”, the Husseini and the Nashashibi cliques.
In response to the uprising the British Government established another Commission of Inquiry led by Lord Peel that suggested the partition of the country between the two ethnic communities, with the British retaining control of Jerusalem. In the Jewish ‘statelet’, the Jews would have a slender majority of 53.4%. However the Woodhead Commission, established to consider the implementation of partition, concluded that partition would require the significant transfer of the resident population.
The Arab representatives opposed any idea of partitioning the country and developed contacts with Britain’s imperialist rivals, Italy and Germany. The Mufti grew closer and closer to the Nazis and later, during the Second World War, “recruited Moslem regiments for the Axis in Yugoslavia”.
In May 1939 the MacDonald White Paper (named after the Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald) advocated a Jewish national home within an independent Palestinian state within ten years. “The independent State should be one in which Arabs and Jews share government in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safeguarded.” Jewish immigration was to be limited to 75,000 over the next five years and the sale of land to Jews restricted. In response the first acts of Jewish terrorism against the British administration occurred.
During the Arab Revolt, the British had enlisted 21,000 in the Jewish Settlement Police, enabling the underground militia of the Haganah (The Defence) to be armed and trained by Captain Orde Wingate at Britain’s expense. The White Paper of 1939 however broke up the alliance between the British administration and the Zionist movement.
Jewish immigration had previously peaked at 33,800 in 1925 but rose to a high of nearly 62,000 in 1935. Restrictions imposed by the British saw official numbers fall to around 10,500 by 1937 but ‘unofficial’ numbers were increasing as Zionist smuggling became better organised (and many were desperate to escape fascist governments in Europe). It became increasingly difficult for Jewish emigrants from Germany, Poland and Hungary to enter the United States. Vessels transporting refugees to the Americas were turned back, and even relatives of US citizens were refused entry. It was notable that the US Zionist leadership refused to help the resettlement of refugees outside Palestine.
Out of a total of around 2.5m who sought refuge abroad between 1935 and 1943 only about 8.5% settled in Palestine. Around 7% were admitted by the USA and 2-2.5% by Britain. Weinstock argues that “The vast majority of European Jews who managed to escape the slaughter found refuge in the Soviet Union”, although their safety might well have been only temporary in the Baltic States and western Ukraine and Belarus, incorporated in the USSR in 1939.
Weinstock concludes that these figures “underline the heavy responsibility borne by the Western governments for the genocide of the Jewish people by confining their intervention to the admission of a symbolic quota of refugees”.57
The Jewish response to antisemitism
The rise of antisemitism in Europe revealed the profound divergence between the mainstream Zionists led by Ben Gurion and the Revisionists who followed the ideology of Ze’ev Jabotinsky. The admiration shown by Jabotinsky to the Italian Fascist movement since the 1920s was reciprocated by Il Duce Mussolini who said in 1934 that
“You must create a Jewish state. I am myself a Zionist …. You must have a true state, not the ridiculous national hearth that the English have offered you.”
The Revisionists had attacked the Jewish working-class movement by organising scabs during strikes and even stooped to assassination of a leader of the Labour movement. Their armed militia, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, practised systematic terror towards the Palestinians with bombs in Arab markets and attacks on buses carrying Arab workers.
The growing threat of war in Europe also gave an urgency to the situation of the Jews in Poland, as 40% of the post-1918 immigrants in Palestine had family roots in that country. As racial persecution intensified in Germany and its occupied territories, neighbouring countries reinforced legislation against refugees. After the Kristallnacht atrocities in Germany in 1938, Romania and Hungary also enacted discriminatory regulations against their Jews. Weinstock observes that
“Only the Jewish community in Palestine publicly declared its willingness to welcome the tens of thousands of refugees from the Nazi inferno and Britain stood opposed to it.”
Thousands were assisted by the Haganah in entering Palestine illegally although the British authorities intercepted and deported many hundreds back to their ports of embarkation.
Even though Chaim Weizmann and the Zionist Executive assured the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Jewish support in the war effort, the Irgun organised a series of terrorist attacks against Government buildings in Palestine. However the Irgun split and several of its leading fighters assisted the British against the Vichy regime in Syria and the pro-Nazi coup of Rashid Ali in Iraq. Nevertheless, a minority led by Abraham Stern was determined to carry on the struggle against Britain. The Stern Gang resorted to armed robbery and assassinations but many of its leaders were killed or arrested in the process.62 Meanwhile more than 43,000 of the Haganah forces were receiving military training by the British.
The revelations of the extermination camps by the Allied armies at the end of the war did not however result in any relaxation of the immigration prohibitions on the entry of Jewish refugees into the Western countries. Out of a total of 450,000 only 25,000 were allowed to immigrate into the United States. Many of those who had failed to enter Palestine were held by the British authorities in concentration camps on Cyprus. Even after the liberation by the Soviet forces, antisemitic violence continued in Poland by opponents of the new government. Weinstock concludes that
“The scandalous indifference of the Western Governments to the fate of the survivors of National Socialism accounts for their mass support for Zionism”.
The 1945 world Zionist conference demanded that “‘An immediate decision be announced to establish Palestine as a Jewish State.” Earlier in December 1944 the British Labour Party Executive had recommended that “the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in”. However once they formed a government after the 1945 election the Labour leaders appreciated that the British strategy towards the Arab League was in danger of collapse as a result of “ill-considered pledges to the Zionists.”67
US President Truman suggested to British Prime Minister Attlee that he should open up Palestine to all those stateless Jews who wished to settle there. British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin cynically responded that American agitation in favour of the admission of the Jews to Palestine mainly arose from the fact that “they did not want too many of them in New York”. Meanwhile in Palestine in addition to increasingly effective people-smuggling, attacks on British facilities by Jewish militias (Haganah, Palmach and Irgun) became more frequent and were met by Emergency legislation in January 1946. Bevin established an Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry that recommended the immediate admission of 100,000 refugees, the conversion of the Mandate into a United Nations trusteeship and a bi-national Palestine.
Weinstock argues that
“[T]he Jewish resistance went on unrelentingly and the British sustained severe losses. After seven soldiers were killed in April 1946, the military staged ‘unauthorised reprisals’ raiding Jewish settlements and attacking innocent passers-by, a treatment quite frequently meted out to the Palestinians during the Arab revolt of 1936-1939.”
The attitude of the British administration became increasingly antisemitic as the situation became far too costly in expenditure on security and the loss of British lives.
In July 1946 the Irgun carried out its most sensational attack yet, the destruction of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that was being used by the British intelligence units, resulting in 91 dead and 46 injured. Within a few minutes of the bombing, the GOC of the British forces Sir Evelyn Barker ordered that “all Jewish places of entertainment, cafes, restaurants, shops and private dwellings” be out of bounds to all ranks. He concluded:
“I appreciate that these measures will inflict some hardship on the troops, but I am certain that if my reasons are fully explained to them, they will understand their propriety and they will be punishing the Jews in a way the race dislikes as much as any, by striking at their pockets and showing our contempt of them.”
The British Mandate in crisis
In the deteriorating situation the British government brought forward the Morrison-Grady Plan that proposed the partition of the country into Arab and Jewish provinces with limited autonomy beneath a British High Commissioner who had direct authority over the Jerusalem-Bethlehem area. Negotiations were resumed with both the followers of the Mufti and the Zionist leadership, the British playing off one side against the other in typical colonialist manner. Yet Jewish terrorism continued even more intensely than before and retaliatory actions were more savage. The Irgun hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their bodies. Britain expelled thousands of Jews without trial to Cyprus and Kenya. A teenage member of the Stern Gang died whilst under ‘interrogation’, with the officer responsible being acquitted.72 There were even outbreaks of antisemitic violence in British cities.
In such circumstances, and with tens of thousands of Jewish would-be illegal immigrants held in British camps in Cyprus and Palestine, the British government admitted in February 1947 that it could not manage these problems on its own and referred the issue to the United Nations, seeking its advice on how Palestine could be better administered. On 15 May the General Assembly created the UN Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) to investigate the cause of the conflict, and, if possible, devise a solution. In this debate the Soviet delegate, Andrei Gromyko, supported partition.
The British government’s reputation was further worsened in the summer of 1947 by the episode of the Exodus 1947 refugee ship. This vessel, having left Marseilles on 11 July with 4,500 Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide on board, was intercepted by the British navy and brought into Haifa port, where the authorities attempted to remove passengers forcibly. Two refugees were killed in the struggle, and dozens more were injured. British forces then transferred the remaining passengers back to France; and when the survivors refused to disembark there, and declared a hunger strike, the government decided to send the ship to the British-controlled zone of Germany, where the survivors would be placed in camps for screening.
The whole episode produced an international outcry, bolstering Jewish claims for the need for sovereignty. At the end of August, the majority of the UNSCOP recommended the partition of the Mandate into two states linked by an economic union with Jerusalem given international status, and this was formally agreed by the General Assembly in Resolution 181 on 29 November. The plan was rejected by all sections of Arab opinion whilst the Zionist General Council expressed its approval.
A special case
What makes Israel unique as distinct from other colonial endeavours established by force against the wishes of the indigenous inhabitants, such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is the fact that the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine was the decision of a two-thirds majority in the United Nations General Assembly.
What is often passed over by many left-wing commentators is the fact that the ‘socialist camp’, USSR, Belorussian SSR, Ukrainian SSR, Poland and Czechoslovakia, voted in favour of partition, although Yugoslavia abstained.
The Soviet position on partition has often been characterised as an attempt to oust, or at least weaken, British influence in the Middle East. Galia Golan, in her book Soviet Policies in the Middle East, argued that
“There was a Soviet interest in the internationalisation of the issue of Palestine in the 1940s, so as to obtain some role for Moscow in the necessary decisions. Thus the Soviets supported the idea of an international trusteeship or, if Britain rejected this idea, the submission of the issue to the United Nations for settlement. … The Soviets, indeed, had little to gain at this time from favouring the Arab position, against the Jews, in view of the pro-British orientation of the Arab regimes”.
The United Nations General Assembly debate on Resolution 181 (II)
It is instructive to consider the arguments of the representatives of Poland and the USSR to the UN debate in November 1947. ,
Oscar Lange, the Polish delegate, said that
“We have followed with pride the great constructive work of the Jewish community in Palestine, for we know that a major part of this community consists of Jews who came from Poland and once were citizens of the Polish Republic …. [T]he mass extermination of millions of Jews in our country established a community of suffering between the Jews and the Polish nation. This community of suffering also turned into a community of resistance and struggle against the forces of German occupation, a struggle which is known throughout the world through the dramatic and heroic uprising of the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto …. We know that a large proportion of the Jewish people consider Palestine as their national home, where they wish to establish their own national life.”
Lange went on to point out that Poland also had sympathies with the Arab struggle for national independence:
“Having been deprived of our own national independence for over a century, we understand, and sympathise with the aspirations of all Arab nations for full national independence …. For this reason, we also wish the Arab people of Palestine to achieve their independence and national statehood as quickly as possible.”
As in Gromyko’s speech in May 1947, Lange also put the blame for the situation in Palestine on the British administration:
“British statesmanship has not succeeded in settling the problem. Palestine is torn by strife and terror which impair the normal development of both Arab and Jewish communities in that country…. [I]t is vital that the settlement of the Palestine problem should be adopted now with the necessary two-thirds majority …. The Arab people of Palestine, as well as the Jewish people of Palestine, want national independence.
My delegation and my government believed for a time, and hoped, that those national aspirations might find their expression in one Palestinian State in which both Arabs and Jews would be equal partners, free to develop their national life. The situation, however, is such that this cannot be achieved …. We therefore have to establish two states, an Arab and a Jewish State…. There is no other way out.”
Lange accepted that
“Great attention has been given to the establishment of a Jewish State …. But there is sometimes overlooked … that the proposal contained in the resolution … establishes an Arab state in Palestine, a state which gives to the Arab people of Palestine their national political independence.”
Gromyko reiterated the comments he had made in the May session:
“When the question of the future of Palestine was under discussion at the special session of the General Assembly, the Government of the USSR pointed to the two most acceptable solutions of this question. The first was the creation of a single democratic Arab-Jewish State in which Arabs and Jews would enjoy equal rights. In case that solution were to prove unworkable because of Arab and Jewish insistence that, in view of the deterioration in Arab-Jewish relations, they would be unable to live together, the Government of the USSR through its delegation at the Assembly, pointed to the second solution, which was to partition Palestine into two free, independent and democratic States – an Arab and a Jewish one.”
He welcomed UNSCOP’s agreement with the conclusion of his speech in May, ie partition. He argued that:
“[A]ll the alternative solutions of the Palestinian problem were found to be unworkable and impractical …. The experience gained from the study of the Palestinian question has shown that Jews and Arabs in Palestine do not wish or are unable to live together …. [I]f these two peoples that inhabit Palestine, both of which have deeply rooted historical ties to the land, cannot live together within the boundaries of a single state, there is no alternative but to create, in place of one country, two states – an Arab and a Jewish one.”
He went on to acknowledge that:
“The representatives of the Arab states claim that the partition of Palestine would be an historic injustice. But this view of the case is unacceptable, if only because, after all, the Jewish people has been closely linked with Palestine for a considerable period in history. Apart from that, we must not overlook the position in which the Jewish people found themselves as a result of the recent world war …. The proposal to divide Palestine into two separate independent states … is in keeping with the basic national interest not only of the Jews but also of the Arabs …. It is keeping with the principle of the national self-determination of peoples …. This decision will meet the legitimate demands of the Jewish people, hundreds of thousands of whom, as you know, [are] still without a country, without homes, having found temporary shelter only in special camps.”
Gromyko laid the blame for the situation in Palestine on the British and the League of Nations mandate system:
“[T]he mandate system has been found wanting. I shall say more: the mandate system has failed .… It was just because the system of governing Palestine by mandate had failed, had proved inadequate, that the United Kingdom Government turned to the United Nations for help.”
However, the British representative at the UN continued to voice reservations, making a settlement conditional on agreement between the two sides. Gromyko dismissed such prevarication, arguing that
“[W]e all know that the Arabs and the Jews have failed to reach an agreement. The discussion of this problem at the present session shows that an agreement between them is impossible. There seems to be no prospect of any such agreement being reached between Arabs and Jews.”
Denouncing the British attitude, Gromyko accused them by pointing out that
“[T]he present regime in Palestine is hated equally by both Arab and Jew. You all know what the attitude towards that regime is, especially on the part of the Jews.”
The United Nations Plan of Partition was the outcome of Resolution 181 (II). A full account of the historical background to the decision of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) is available on their website. In its final form the Jewish State would cover just over half of the area of the Mandate although the current Jewish population of 608,000 made up about one-third of the population. It was expected that the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees in ‘displaced persons’ camps in Europe would move into the new Jewish State and by doing so form a majority.
Defeat of the Arab invasion meant disaster for the Palestinians
The British delegation at the UN had made it clear that Britain was
“not prepared to undertake the task of imposing a policy in Palestine by force of arms … and the extent to which force would be required to ensure its implementation”83
The British government in washing its hands of the responsibility for an orderly transfer of power was in effect condemning the population to inter-communal violence on a scale only dwarfed by the contemporaneous withdrawal from India that may have resulted in around a million deaths.
In September 1947 the British dominated Arab League had decided to resist territorial partition ‘by all means’. By the end of November an anti-Zionist rural guerrilla campaign was started by the Arab militias supported by the League. The Haganah staged ‘counter-attacks’ on Arab villages “as a warning against helping Arab terrorists”. A general strike and anti-Jewish riots in Jerusalem led to reprisals by the Irgun who had by then abandoned its attacks on the British. Sectarian attacks upon workers in the Haifa refinery led to 19 deaths and the murder of a trade union leader by agents of the Mufti.
In January 1948 over 6,000 fighters of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) under the command of the Arab League entered Palestine with no opposition from the British. The Arab militia succeeded in blocking the road to Jerusalem and laying siege to the Jewish quarter in the city. By the beginning of March, 1,378 had been killed and more than 6,000 wounded in the inter-communal fighting. The Haganah managed to take control of most of the towns allocated to the Jewish state but their initial attempt to relieve the Jewish enclave in Jerusalem failed. At the start of April, a co-ordinated assault under the name of Operation Nachshon attempted to break the Arab blockade and take control of a corridor linking Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It was during this offensive that units from Irgun and Lehi (the Stern Gang) attacked the village of Deir Yassin in which over 100 civilians were massacred. This was used by Zionist propaganda as a warning to other Arab villages of what could happen if they failed to obey orders to leave. Arab leaders also publicised the atrocity, leading to even more villagers fleeing their homes. More than 400 Arab villages were wiped off the map as their inhabitants fled. Shlomo Sand provides an account of the dispossession of one Arab village that took place before Deir Yassin:
“All told, in the course of the Nakba, some seven hundred thousand people were displaced. Their lands and homes were appropriated without compensation. Many of them and their descendants still live in refugee camps throughout the Middle East.”
Weinstock writes:
“On the eve of the expiry of the Mandate, David Ben Gurion proclaimed the birth of the State of Israel in Tel Aviv on May 14. The following day, in accordance with the decisions of the Arab League, units of the Transjordanian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Egyptian regular armies and a Saudi Arabian contingent crossed the border of Palestine. … Bevin gave Glubb Pasha a friendly warning: But do not go and invade the area allotted to the Jews.”
Even before the ending of the Mandate on 14 May, units of the Arab Legion, led by British officers, had intervened in the war and destroyed the Jewish settlement of Gush Etzion south of Jerusalem. General Glubb was ordered by King Abdullah of Transjordan to enter Jerusalem, and he succeeded in taking control of the eastern areas of the city. UN mediator Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte negotiated a ceasefire in June, yet Lehi regarded this as a betrayal, and Bernadotte was assassinated in September as a result.
Galia Golan points out that
“During the 1948 war, following the attack by the Arab states on the newly declared State of Israel, Soviet propaganda attributed Arab hostility to British provocation designed to thwart partition and provide a pretext for the British to remain. The British were said to be aiding Arab reactionaries against the creation of an independent Arab state despite the fact, according to Soviet propaganda, that such a state would be in the interests of the Arab peoples and the Arabs of Palestine. Partition, as portrayed by the Soviet Union, was to mean the end of British imperialist exploitation of the Arabs. …
Despite this effort not to alienate the Arabs, the Soviet Union significantly assisted the defence of the new Jewish state …. [Weapons] were provided mainly by Czechoslovakia, with Soviet permission, about the same time as the British arming of Iraq, Egypt and Trans-Jordan on the grounds that Britain had defence pacts with these countries.”
Even though the support given to the Arab forces by the British was considerable, they failed, as Maxime Rodinson says, to “prevent a Jewish take-over of points inside the zone allocated by the UN to the Arabs”. Weinstock argues that
“The invasion of Palestine by the Transjordanian troops was negotiated by King Abdullah with Bevin …. In reality Britain urged its Transjordanian protégé to annex the Arab areas of Palestine.”
In his history of Jordan, Benjamin Schwadran writes that
“In this way the future Arab state of Palestine was liquidated by an agreement between the abdicating Mandatory Power and the recently founded sovereign state of Transjordan.”
Weinstock adds that
“Ben Gurion and Abdullah carved up between them the area which was to have been the Palestinian Arab state.”
The Israeli Army, with its hands free in the centre of the country and assured of the almost total passivity of the Arab Legion, pursued its victorious offensive in the south against the Egyptians. The armistice concluded between Israel and Egypt sanctioned the occupation of the Negev by the Israeli army with the exception of the coastal strip of Gaza where “about 130,000 refugees were concentrated, many of whom were farmers whose lands were on the other side of the border.”
The USSR continued its denunciations of the feudal Arab regimes, and Jordan especially came in for criticism for its occupation of the West Bank and east Jerusalem. King Abdullah’s close association with the British was regarded as preventing the creation of an independent Arab state in accordance with the partition plan. Moscow also continued to support the internationalisation of the city of Jerusalem as the resolutions of the UN had demanded. It accused the British administration of creating the refugee crisis by urging the Arabs to flee their homes even before the British troops were withdrawn at the end of the Mandate.99
By the end of 1948, however, Soviet support for Israel began to cool as the defence of the country from the invasion by the feudal Arab regimes, with British support, had turned around into Israeli expansionism beyond the partition lines into the designated Arab territories. As early as September 1948, attacks on Zionism reappeared in the Soviet media as the Cold War with the West intensified.
Israeli territory now extended to more than four-fifths of the area of former Palestine, but only about 133,000 of the Arab population remained. Hundreds of thousands of refugees had sought sanctuary in Arab Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank) or in neighbouring Arab countries. The Jewish State was now a reality but at the price paid by the Palestinian people who were the victims of deals made behind their backs by feudal Arab leaders. As Weinstock comments:
“Either as refugees ‘vegetating in the dire poverty of camps maintained by the UN’… or as ‘second-class citizens in Israel, alienated in their own country: a terrible degradation of an entire people …. The Zionist ideal came true.”
Results and prospects
Without the consistent support of Balfour, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill it is doubtful that the Jewish State in Palestine would have come into existence. The tragedy for the Palestinians was that they were so badly served by leaders such as the Grand Mufti and Ahmad Shukairy, whose policies of threatening extermination only reinforced the ideological stranglehold of the Zionists over the Jewish population of Israel.
The danger now is that a demand for a ‘single-state solution’ cannot provide a realistic way forward. It either presupposes an Arab domination (assuming a demographic majority of Arabs after implementing the return of refugees) or a Jewish domination over the entire ‘Eretz Israel’ with the Arab population as second-class inhabitants. Neither of these two perspectives recognises the right to self-determination of either of the two nationalities existing in the former Mandate.
The promise of sovereignty for the Palestinian Arabs held out by Oskar Lange in November 1947 is still unfulfilled and deserves our continued support. Peace resulting from a just solution is still in the best interests of both peoples. The BDS campaign will need to keep up the pressure despite government attempts to silence such protests, and all supporters of peace must become more fully involved with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
The more recent attack by Hamas from the Gaza Strip temporarily reinforced the hold of Netanyahu’s government on the Jewish population of Israel and led to the formation of a ‘National Unity’ coalition. Yet the Jewish communities elsewhere have raised doubts about the military response to the Hamas attack and kidnappings and the evident unpreparedness of the much-vaunted security services. Carpet-bombing and starvation blockade of civilians is unpopular even with the pro-Israel US President, and the exercise of the US veto in the UN Security Council makes its isolation damaging. The crisis makes it even more necessary to advocate a peace agreement along the lines proposed by China and the Arab states. The writing is on the wall for Netanyahu and Palestinian sovereignty is back on the agenda.
Notes and References
1 An example of such an analysis is in the RS21 pamphlet by N Rogall, Israel: The Making of a Racist State, London, 2018.
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Scylla_and_Charybdis.
3 B Regan, The Balfour Declaration, Verso, London, 2017, p 14. J Schneer, The Balfour Declaration, Bloomsbury Books, London, 2011, gives a thorough account of the background to the Declaration. P Shambrook, Policy of Deceit, Oneworld Academic, London, 2023, is the most up to date account of Britain’s betrayal of its promises to the feudal Arab leaders. G Thompson, Legacy of Empire, Saqi Books, London, 2021, is a shorter but still comprehensive review of British duplicity.
4 P Katz, ‘Historical Revisionism, Holocaust Denial and Conspiracy Theory’, in CR102, Winter 2021/2022, pp 2-8.
5 TE Lawrence gives a first-hand account in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926. The Hussein-McMahon correspondence reveals the diplomatic manoeuvrings between His Majesty’s Government and the Hashemite dynasty.
6 J Barr, A Line in the Sand, Simon & Shuster, London, 2011. See also http://passia.org/maps/view/4; the PASSIA website is of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs.
7 Regan, op cit, p 49.
8 Quoted by Regan, op cit, p 62. The original document is available in the British Library.
9 M Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, Simon & Schuster, London, 2008, quoted in Regan, op cit, p 64.
10 Regan, op cit, pp 73-7.
11 N Weinstock, Zionism: False Messiah, Pluto Press, London, 1989, p 107.
12 Regan, op cit, p 74.
13 SW Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, Vol V p 165, Philadelphia, 1957. Regan, op cit, p 97.
14 Weinstock, op cit, pp 30-32.
15 Ibid, p 12. Data extracted from A Ruppin, Soziologie der Juden, Berlin, 1930, p 157.
16 A Kremer, On Agitation, 1893, in N Harding, ed, Marxism in Russia: Key Documents, 1879–1906, Cambridge University Press, 1983. See also L Shapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Methuen, London, 1963, pp 24-29.
17 Weinstock, op cit, p 33.
18 Lenin, Critical Remarks on the National Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964, p 12.
19 Lenin, To the Jewish Workers, in Collected Works, Vol 8, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1962, pp 495-6.
20 I Cohen, The Zionist Movement, University of California, 1912, p 66. Regan, op cit, p 78.
21 B Halpern, The Idea of the Jewish State, Cambridge Mass., 1961, pp 109-121.
22 Peasant or agricultural labourer.
23 Lords (effectively the landowners) who were increasing absentee urban dwellers known as A’yan.
24 Weinstock, op cit, pp 55-6; Regan, op cit, p 78.
25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family.
26 Quoted by by H Kohn in Zionism Reconsidered: The rejection of Jewish normalcy, M Selzer, ed, Macmillan, New York, 1970.
27 Weinstock, op cit, p 67.
28 Ibid, pp 67-9.
29 Ibid, pp 140-1.
30 Ibid, pp 73-4.
31 Ibid, p 106.
32 H Carrère d’Encausse and SR Schram. Marxism and Asia: An introduction with readings, Allan Lane, London, 1969, p 154.
33 D Ingrams, Palestine Papers 1917-1922, George Braziller, New York, 1973, pp 85-86; Weinstock, op cit, p 112.
34 Regan, op cit, p 103.
35 N and H Bentwich, Mandate Memories 1918-1946, Hogarth Press, London, 1965, p 75. See also Note 34 above.
36 Weinstock, op cit, pp 115-121.
37 H Samuel, Grooves of Change, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis-New York, 1946, p 205. The aspirational claim to ethnic exclusivity appears to have originated from Chaim Weizmann.
38 Weinstock, op cit, p 116.
39 Ibid, p 117.
40 Ibid, p 119.
41 Ibid, p 120.
42 Ibid, p 121.
43 Ibid, p 122. Other sources give a much higher figure of Arab deaths, see pp 177-8.
44 Ibid, p 185.
45 Ibid. See also http://passia.org/maps/view/8.
46 http://passia.org/maps/view/9
47 Weinstock, op cit, p 123.
48 Ibid, pp 179-185.
49 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Paper_of_1939.
50 Weinstock, op cit, p 130. Wingate’s Jewish deputy was future Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan.
51 J Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilised Europe, Pan Macmillan, London, 2021, describes antisemitism in Ukraine and Poland during and after the First World War.
52 Data extracted from Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2020/6/26/palestine-and-israel-mapping-an-annexation#jewishimmigration. These figures are from British records, ‘A Survey of Palestine’ (1946), and differ from the data in the Jewish Virtual Library, which are over 14% higher for 1920 to 1941 with significant British underestimations in 1922, 1923 and 1927 (over 10%) and for 1932 and 1933 (over 20%) and over 60% for the period 1938 to 1941. Most likely this reflects the extent of ‘illegal’ immigration organised by the Haganah.
53 Weinstock, op cit, p 138, cites 11,000 clandestine entries in 1939 alone.
54 https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/immigration-to-the-united-states-1933-41.
55 W Laqueur, A History of Zionism, Schocken, London, 1972, pp 505-8. See also The Voyage of the Damned, film (1976).
56 Weinstock, op cit, p 204.
57 Ibid, p 138.
58 Ibid, p 151.
59 The worst atrocity was the deaths of 74 Arabs killed and 129 wounded in the Haifa fruit market in July 1938, see Weinstock, op cit, p 177.
60 Ibid, pp 202-4.
61 Ibid, p 203.
62 Ibid, pp 205-7.
63 Ibid, p 219.
64 The Kielce pogrom with 41 deaths was the most notorious, see https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/timeline-event/holocaust/after-1945/kielce-pogrom.
65 Weinstock, op cit, p 220.
66 Ibid, p 221.
67 Ibid, p 225.
68 Ibid, p 226.
69 JC Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine, Schocken, New York, 1950, and RHS Crossman, Palestine Mission, Harper Brothers, New York and London, 1947.
70 Weinstock, op cit, p 228; Hurewitz, op cit, p 243.
71 B Hoffman, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917–1947, Knopf, 2015; Weinstock, op cit, p 228.
72 Weinstock, op cit, pp 229-230.
73 https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/this-week-in-jewish-history–exodus-1947-the-ship-that-launched-a-nation-7-4-2020.
74 Weinstock, op cit, p 231.
75 33 countries voted in favour (72%) with 13, mainly Arab, countries against.
76 The United States delegation headed by the former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt also supported the establishment of a Jewish State. Her position of sympathy with Zionist aspirations has been criticised in G Kidd, Eleanor Roosevelt: Palestine, Israel and Human Rights, Routledge, London, 2017, as being contrary to the recently agreed United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
77 G Golan, Soviet Policies in the Middle East, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp 34-7.
78 https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-185393/.
79 The November UNGA debates are accessible at the website of the Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/united-nations-debate-on-partition-november-1947.
80 The most thorough account of the Soviet decision is contained in G Gorodetsky, The Soviet Union and the Creation of the State of Israel, at https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/36219/ssoar-2001-gorodetsky-The_Soviet_Union_and_the.pdf?sequence=1.
81 https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/1947/11/m0103_1b.gif.
83 Weinstock, op cit, p 232.
84 T Dyson, A Population History of India, Oxford UP, 2018, p 189.
85 Weinstock, op cit, p 233.
86 Laqueur, op cit, p 267.
87 Sir JB Glubb (Glubb Pasha), A Soldier with the Arabs, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1957.
88 This was Al-Shaykh Muwannis, now the site of Tel Aviv University.
89 Nakba: Arabic for catastrophe.
90 S Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel, Verso, London, 2014, pp 259-281.
91 https://mondediplo.com/maps/middleeast1948.
92 Weinstock, op cit, p 237.
93 B Morris, 1948 – The First Arab-Israeli War, Yale UP, New York, 2008.
94 Golan, op cit, p 37.
95 M Rodinson, Israel – A Colonial-Settler State?, Monad Press, New York, 1973, p 72. See also http://passia.org/maps/view/15.
96 Weinstock, op cit, p 236.
97 B Schwadran, Jordan, State of Tension, Middle Eastern Affairs Press, New York, 1959, p 246.
98 Weinstock, op cit, pp 238.
99 Ibid, p 240.
100 Golan, op cit, p 38.
101 G Kirk, The Middle East 1945-1950, Oxford UP, RIIA, London, 1954. See also http://passia.org/maps/view/16.
102 http://passia.org/maps/view/19.
103 Weinstock, op cit, p 243.
104 Shukairy was credited with uttering the call to ‘throw the Jews into the sea’, see W Laqueur, The Struggle for the Middle East, Penguin Books, 1972, p 9.
105 https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745343396/decolonizing-israel-liberating-palestine/.
106 See Peter Leary’s article https://mondoweiss.net/2023/07/campaigners-must-keep-up-the-pressure-following-parliamentary-votes-on-britains-anti-boycott-bill/.
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