The Harrison Report’s impact on American public opinion was of great concern to Attlee and Bevin. Pressure from the United States, the country from which they were seeking a hefty loan to rebuild their economy, meant that Britain could not simply reject or ignore the report’s main proposal—the immediate admission of 100,000 more Jews into Palestine. However, diplomatic experts in its Foreign Office thought that in order to shore up Britain’s weakening position in the Middle East, it was essential to keep Arab goodwill. This meant maintaining the White Paper with its restrictions on Jewish immigration. Bevin, in particular, was wary of Stalin’s expansionist aims in the Middle East and was afraid that the Arabs might turn to the Soviets.
Attlee and Bevin were also quite aware of the long record of Labour’s pro-Zionist statements, since they had made some of them. The best defense being an offense, the British government now proposed a new Anglo-American effort to study the refugee problem and to come up with a joint solution. Convening yet another committee to study policy options would buy the British more time before they had to make tough decisions concerning the Arabs and the Jews. If all went well, such a joint committee might lead the United States closer to the British position, to share some of the responsibility and perhaps even to enter a partnership with Britain in the administration of Palestine.1
On October 19, Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Lord Halifax, formally proposed to Secretary of State Byrnes the creation of a joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. As for specifics, he submitted suggestions for the committee’s terms of reference. The committee would be given the task of visiting British-and American-occupied Europe and assessing the refugee crisis.
Challenging the Harrison Report’s conclusions, Halifax told Byrnes that the British government refused to accept the view that the present living conditions of the Jews were any worse than those of the other victims of Nazi persecution. Rather than allow them to leave Europe, it was their hope and policy to enable the Jews in Europe “to play an active part in building up the life of the countries from which they came.”2 Hence, the British proposed that the new committee would investigate the position of the Jews in Europe and the possibility of their emigration into other countries outside Europe, including the United States.3
Halifax then explained the logic of London’s position against admitting 100,000 Jews to Palestine. First and foremost, he made it clear, Britain did not want to “fly in the face of the Arabs.” Of lesser concern—but nevertheless most important—was that the United States’ stance was both embarrassing to Britain and hurting the two countries’ relations. Britain could not accept the view that most of the Jews should leave Germany and the rest of Europe, because to have them leave “would be to accept Hitler’s thesis.” Moreover, the British claimed that the Zionists were using intimidation to stop Jews in Palestine from moving back to Europe.4
While Byrnes was negotiating with Halifax over the terms of reference, the president again sought Sam Rosenman’s advice. “I think it is a complete run-out on the mandate,” Rosenman told Truman. “I certainly do not think that you ought to agree to it.” The terms of reference made no connection between the refugees and Palestine (this, of course, was what the British wanted to avoid). As he saw the British position, it was one of “temporizing, appeasing and seeking to delay the settlement of the issue.” Most of the proposed committee members would carry out unnecessary work and be charged with obtaining data that could be found out in a few short days. The only valid purpose for such an investigation, he believed, would be to “determine just how many people could be absorbed into Palestine per month.”
Taking Rosenman’s advice into account, Byrnes told Halifax that from America’s viewpoint, the terms of reference proposed by the British government needed to mention Palestine as one possible destination for the refugees, which they did not. Indeed, Byrnes complained, it seemed meant to “divert the mind of the committee from Palestine” to that of finding other countries that might take the European Jewish remnant. If it did not discuss Palestine as part of the solution to the homeless refugees, he predicted, “the Jews are going to say this is just another trick and nothing will be done.” Therefore, Byrnes demanded the committee address how many Jews would actually be able to be absorbed into Palestine.5
The British were anxious to announce the new committee, but Rosenman raised the political issue, telling Truman he did not understand why there had to be any statement issued right before the New York mayoral elections that might hurt the chances of the Democratic candidate confronted by voters who might very well not view the new committee as favorably as he did.6
The president decided to give Byrnes the go-ahead to accept U.S. participation in the new committee but took some of Rosenman’s advice. Rosenman had suggested a time limit of thirty days, “which would take the sting out of the charge of stalling and delay,” but Truman decided to give the committee 120 days to complete its work.7 The terms of reference included an important qualifying caveat: the committee would first look at “conditions in Palestine as they bear upon the problem of Jewish immigration,” as well as carrying out estimates “of those [Jews] who wish, or who will be impelled by their conditions, to migrate to Palestine.”* The announcement of the committee would take place after the November 6 election, which would prevent it from becoming a political football. Finally, Byrnes stressed that the president’s agreement did not mean he had changed his mind on the immediate immigration to Palestine of 100,000 Jewish refugees.8
Bevin, whose outsized ego was legendary, was willing to bend to Truman’s demands, as he assumed that eventually the committee would reach the conclusions he favored: that Palestine would not be the answer for the European Jewish refugees because of Arab opposition and because it was too small a land area to absorb tens of thousands of new refugees.
As Rosenman predicted, in New York there was an immediate negative reaction when Truman announced the creation of the committee on November 13. Representative Emanuel Celler called the committee “just another British dodge and stall.” British policies, he threatened, might call for reevaluation of any U.S. economic aid and sharing of atomic energy information with Britain that Attlee sought. “I am surprised,” Celler said, “that President Truman has fallen into the British trap.”9 Rabbi Baruch Korff of New York, who had led a parade of 1,000 rabbis to the capital a day earlier to demand the immediate admission of the 100,000 to Palestine, told the press that the president’s acceptance of the committee was nothing less than “a death sentence to European Jewry.” Ironically, Korff said, the idea of the demonstration had come from “a member of the White House staff,” a man who had suggested it take place “before it is too late.”10 Although the march had been “spontaneous” and no organization had orchestrated it, he affirmed that it had been “inspired” by this White House staff member on a train ride from Washington to Boston.11
On November 18, Israel Goldstein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, spoke at the group’s convention, held in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Goldstein denounced Truman in the harshest of terms and demanded that the United States have nothing to do with the proposed British committee. “No committee is needed,” he told the assembled delegates, “to study whether Palestine has room for the 100,000 immediately.” In fact, Palestine needed Jewish laborers and farmers. Why was President Truman so willing to defer his first request for the 100,000? Goldstein warned Truman that “the Zionists are done with illusions” and were “impatient with delay, and were determined to do all that the situation demands.”12
The highlight of the convention was Chaim Weizmann’s speech. “A tired old man in a wrinkled gray suit,” one news article reported, “stood on the auditorium’s platform, and as he has done for scores of years, pleaded the case of his people before the world.” His presentation was, as usual, eloquent and powerful. “He spoke slowly without oratorical gesture, without raising his voice, seemingly without bitterness against Britain, as he explained why the Jewish people must be granted a state of their own in Palestine.”13
Weizmann expressed his profound disagreement with the new Anglo-American Committee. By now he had expected the White Paper to be history, he told his audience. Instead, he sadly noted, “another document [has been] added to those which seek to repudiate the solemn covenant of 1917 between Great Britain and the Jewish people.”14 When Bevin announced the formation of the Anglo-American Committee to Parliament on November 13, he warned that the Jews shouldn’t ask for any special treatment. He said, “If the Jews want to get too much at the head of the queue they face the danger of another anti-Semitic reaction.” At the convention, Weizmann reminded Bevin that not too long ago the “Jews had the highest priority in the queues which led to the crematoria of Auschwitz and Treblinka.”15 What Bevin called a queue, Weizmann answered, was in fact a “simple request for survival.” Was it, Weizmann asked, “getting too much at the head of the queue if after the slaughter of six million Jews, the remnant of a million and a half implore the shelter of the Jewish homeland?”
Challenging Bevin’s assertion that Jews should remain in Europe, Weizmann asked that no Jews be forced to live in nations “where they saw their wives mutilated and burned, their sons and daughters buried alive, their parents turned into white ash.” The return to the countries of their birth was, for many, not an option. Moreover, Weizmann saw the Anglo-American Committee as an insult. During the war, the democracies had said there was no way to save the suffering Jews of Europe. “Now we are told that the survivors must wait until another inquiry will establish the exact measure of help they will require.”
If Weizmann was respectful of Truman, Rabbi Silver was his usual militant self. Originally, Silver admitted, he had been “heartened by President Truman’s request of Prime Minister Attlee that 100,000 Jews, principally from the concentration camps in Europe, be permitted immediately to go to Palestine.” Sadly, he now had to say, “we had overestimated the determination of the President.” Instead of getting action, the president had accepted “the shabby substitute of an investigating committee, that…transparent device for delay and circumvention, against his own better judgment.” Once again, America had given in to Arab chieftains and British policy makers at the expense of the Jews. Chastising Truman for not demanding admission of the 100,000 “with all the prestige and authority of his office,” he suggested that the president withold economic help desired by Britain in return for their granting free immigration into Palestine.16
The entire Zionist movement, from moderate to militant, appeared to be united in its condemnation of the new committee and of Harry Truman’s decision to have the United States participate. These objections were seconded by the former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, whose advice Truman valued. She had supported Truman’s call for admission of the 100,000 Jews to Palestine, even though at this time she opposed the creation of a Jewish state. “I am very much distressed,” she now wrote Truman, “that Great Britain has made us take a share in another investigation of the few Jews remaining in Europe…. Great Britain is always anxious to have someone else pull her chestnuts out of the fire.”17 “I’m very hopeful,” Truman responded, “that we really shall be able to work out something in Palestine which will be of lasting benefit. At the same time we expect to continue to do what we can to get as many Jews as possible into Palestine as quickly as possible, pending any final settlement”18 (our emphasis).
Though Truman was committed to helping the refugees rebuild their lives in Palestine, he was adamant that he was not about to let Zionist pressure force him to commit to send American troops to Palestine to enforce a Jewish state. “I told the Jews,” he wrote an old colleague, Senator Joseph H. Ball, “that if they were willing to furnish me with five hundred thousand men to carry on a war with the Arabs, we could do what they are suggesting…otherwise we will have to negotiate awhile.” Agreeing that it was an “explosive situation,” he did not think “that you, or any of the other Senators, would be inclined to send a half dozen Divisions to Palestine to maintain a Jewish State.” He told Ball that he was trying to “make the whole world safe for the Jews,” but, he explained, “I don’t feel like going to war for Palestine.” On second thought, he wrote “Do not send” across the letter.19
In fact, Truman was not convinced of either the need or the wisdom of creating a Jewish state. He told the publisher J. David Stern, who owned The Philadelphia Record, that although he favored the creation of a democratic state in Palestine, he did not favor one based on religion, race, or creed. Palestine, he thought, had to be “thrown open” to Jews, Arabs, and Christians alike. It should aspire to be a pluralistic society like that of the United States.20 Truman had clearly been influenced by the arguments of non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish groups, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Council for Judaism (ACJ). The president had just received a visit from Lessing J. Rosenwald, the head of the ACJ, who had presented him with a seven-point program. Rosenwald’s proposal would ensure that Palestine would not be a Jewish state but a country open equally to people of all faiths. Therefore, Rosenwald argued, the issue of the European Jewish DPs should be treated separately from that of Palestine. The refugees would be settled abroad according to their preferences, as administered by the United Nations.21
The same day Truman saw Rosenwald, Ambassador Halifax brought Chaim Weizmann, who was a British citizen, to the White House. Thanking Truman for his position on the 100,000 European Jews, Weizmann gave him his candid views on the Anglo-American Committee. “The whole ground,” Weizmann argued, “had been repeatedly worked over during the last twenty years.” Interrupting Weizmann, Truman said he thought the Jewish problem should not be viewed simply through the prism of Palestine, and he then deprecated use of the term “Jewish state,” telling the Zionist leader he favored the term “Palestine state.” Truman argued that “there were many Jews in America, representatives of whom he had been receiving before he had seen Weizmann, who were not at all keen on the Palestine [i.e., Zionist] solution.” Weizmann was obviously disappointed. Truman closed the meeting by telling him, “The United States wants a solution and we shall have to see whether we cannot work it out.”22
Weizmann was so disturbed by his discussion with Truman that he wrote him a nine-page single-spaced typed letter.23 It was perhaps the most thorough attack on the positions of the anti-Zionist Jewish groups that the president would ever receive. Unlike the American Zionist leaders, who often appealed to their constituencies first and the administration second, Weizmann knew how to address an American president.
Weizmann began by thanking Truman for his insistence on the 100,000. He was only seeking with this letter to “place on record” his views of everything the president had touched upon during the brief meeting. The new Anglo-American Committee, Weizmann wrote the president, “cannot bring to light any new facts, as there have been a whole procession of committees on Palestine and every aspect of the problem has been investigated” since 1937.
Next Weizmann took up the issue of the absorptive capacity of Palestine. The one useful question the committee could look at was how to develop Palestine through irrigation, since studies had proved that large stretches of land that had never been touched could indeed be cultivated, which would provide room for hundreds of thousands of families who would be employed in agriculture and industry. If this were accomplished, he informed Truman, Palestine would be able to absorb three to four million additional people. The truth, however, was that “only Jews are capable of initiating and of executing such development schemes.” The Arabs and the British would not, since for them it was not a matter of sheer existence. The Jews would have to do it if they were to be able to bring in hundreds of thousands who would become citizens of the Jewish homeland. They would also have to make room for the oppressed Jews from the Orient and Arab states. “We are convinced,” he told Truman, that the Jews could be settled in Palestine provided the land had been properly developed.
Challenging Ernest Bevin’s claim that the Balfour Declaration did not promise a Jewish state in Palestine, Weizmann noted that its intent had been to create a home not for individual Jews “but a home for the Jewish People.” As for Jews who argued that they were only a religious community—a clear reference to Lessing Rosenwald’s position—Weizmann countered that the Zionists had never intended for the new national home to “become a ‘religious’ or theocratic state.” Palestine would be a “modern and progressive” nation, with “no stress on the religion of the individuals who would form the majority of its inhabitants.” He assured Truman that it would be “a secular state based on sound democratic foundations,” with a system similar to those of the United States and Western Europe.
Already, he emphasized, the Jews living in Palestine had in essence set up a government with state functions, but without recognition and without executive powers to enforce its decisions. All the work of generations had not been undertaken to establish another Jewish minority society—a ghetto, as Weizmann called it. As for the Arabs, Weizmann reassured Truman, the Jews and the Zionists “desire nothing better than to live on the most peaceful terms with the Arabs” and that the latter’s rights in a Jewish homeland would be scrupulously safeguarded, with equal opportunity and without regard to race or creed. Like many other Zionists of the day, Weizmann wanted to believe that the Arabs, despite their protests, would accept a Jewish state and their opposition would not “turn into active armed conflict.”
Finally, Weizmann proposed that the president consider giving a speech in which he would tell the Arabs that the Allied armies had saved them from Fascist enslavement, and that the Allies had the right to ask them not to hinder the settlement of the homeless Jewish people in Palestine, which was but “a small notch in the vast under populated Arab peninsula.” The Jews, he assured them, knew how to treat minorities with dignity, and they would also be assured guarantees of civil and religious rights by the United Nations.
Senators Robert F. Wagner and Robert A. Taft were also concerned about rumors circulating on Capitol Hill that the Jewish homeland would be a theocratic state. They were also angry and confused about Truman’s seeming about-face on their latest resolution (introduced on October 26, 1945) supporting the refugees’ immigration to Palestine and supporting a homeland for the Jewish people. Just a short while before, Secretary Byrnes had encouraged them to reintroduce their failed 1944 resolution in the Senate. He had told them that the administration did not object and that they should “go ahead.”24 The 1944 resolution had spoken of creating a “Jewish commonwealth” in Palestine; the new version promised that the doors of Palestine would be open to all Jews, so that they could create a “free and democratic Commonwealth.” The word “Jewish” before “Commonwealth” was eliminated, thereby possibly obtaining a few more votes from Senate and House members who otherwise might have been reluctant to sign on.25
The senators wrote to Truman that since the resolution had been introduced, a campaign had taken place against its basic preposition, “that the Jews shall have the right of free entry into Palestine so that they may reconstitute it as a democratic commonwealth.” Particularly objectionable was the charge that they favored a theocratic state in Palestine based on religious and racial discrimination. Calling it an “insidious campaign,” the senators set out to explain their position to Truman in order to dispel such misconceptions.
Tracing the long history of the concept of a Jewish commonwealth from the days of the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I to the present Democratic Party platform, they assured Truman that what was meant was that in their ancestral land of Palestine, “the Jews should be free to grow into a majority and not be kept down artificially to the position of a minority in which they find themselves in every other country in the world.” The senators’ own resolution was only giving renewed expression to a long-standing U.S. and Allied policy. Noting the agreement with its emphasis on a democratic state open to citizenship by all citizens of Palestine, whose rights would be protected, they explained to Truman that anyone who was well informed could not be claiming that the Zionists wanted a theocratic state in Palestine.
Jews were not only a religion but a people with distinct cultural features, like Czechs, Greeks, or Irish, argued the senators. Like those peoples, Jews were entitled to their own homeland. Thus the Mandate created at Versailles in 1919 spoke of the historical connection of the Jews to Palestine and their need to reconstitute a national home there. The present campaign was meant by opponents of a Jewish homeland to “confuse the public, to deprive the Jewish people of their established rights, and to assist the British government in evading its obligations.”26
At the end of the first week of December, the White House announced the composition of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. The American group was to be chaired by the conservative Judge Joseph Hutcheson, whom Acheson had described as a “fiery Texan and friend of the President.”27 The rest of the group was composed of Frank W. Buxton, the editor of The Boston Herald and a friend of Felix Frankfurter; James G. McDonald, the former League of Nations high commissioner for refugees; Bartley C. Crum, a left-leaning San Francisco lawyer; William Phillips, a former ambassador to both India and Italy; and Frank Aydelotte, the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University. The British members were led by its chairman, Sir John Singleton, a High Court justice. The British members were Wilfrid P. Crick, an economic adviser to the Midland Bank; Richard H. S. Crossman, a Labour MP; Lord Morrison (Robert Craigmyle, Baron Morrison), a Labour MP; Sir Frederick Leggett, a deputy in the Labour cabinet; and Major Reginald E. Manningham-Buller, a Conservative MP.28
The premise of the British members, Crossman later wrote, started with the assumption that “the whole idea of a Jewish national home is a dead end out of which Britain must be extricated” and that the legitimate demands of the Arabs had to be satisfied. The British members worked under the assumption that they had to explore how to find homes for the dispossessed Jews in Europe and that they had to destroy the Zionist case for immigration into Palestine.29
The American group had quite a different perspective. James McDonald, in his previous posts, had been an ardent supporter of Europe’s Jewry and, as high commissioner for refugees, offered them his support and tried to get as many of them as possible out of Nazi Germany. Having met Hitler in 1933, he was an early witness to the Führer’s intentions. As he told audiences upon his return to America, Hitler had told him, “I will do the thing that the rest of the world would like to do. The world does not know how to get rid of the Jews. I shall show them.”30 McDonald had thought he should be taken at his word.
The British, rightfully, suspected that McDonald was privately pro-Zionist. Joining them in this suspicion was Loy Henderson. Henderson claimed he had not been aware of it at the time. Niles had put McDonald’s name on the list of potential committee members. Henderson later concluded that “McDonald had been campaigning actively for the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine” and while high commissioner for refugees “had been supporting Zionist propaganda being carried on in the refugee camps.”31 In fact, as stated earlier, by 1944 McDonald had publicly recognized what he called a “transcendent role for Palestine” and had concluded that the remnant of Jewry still alive in Europe could not return to their old homes in the countries in which they had lived. “Only in Palestine,” he said, “will most of them feel that they have returned home.” Since his views were well-known to all, we must assume that Truman and his staff knew it when his name was added.
Bartley Crum, who was registered as a Republican, was nonetheless a civil libertarian and a man friendly to and supportive of left-wing causes, most especially the militant CIO. Yet his own firm had many big business clients, as well as Jews known to be anti-Zionist. He had started out supporting the candidacy for president of Wendell Willkie but had swung over to become a major supporter of FDR. Crum was first suggested as a member by Truman’s adviser David Niles, who had gotten to know Crum in 1944, when he had chaired the Republicans for Roosevelt group.32 Later, Crum asserted that Truman had told him that on three different occasions, the State Department had rejected his name when it was sent to them for approval. Crum believed State was wary of him because of his endorsement of left/liberal causes such as support for refugees after Francisco Franco had won the Spanish Civil War. It was only because of Truman’s insistence that he serve that State relented.33 Crum’s suspicions were correct. The State Department security officer concluded that Crum should not receive clearance since he was a member of several “united front” (i.e., pro-Communist) groups and was noted “for his demagogic speeches.” Henderson himself had initialed a memo opposing the issue of a security clearance for Crum.34
Before leaving with the committee, Crum met with Leo Rabinowitz, an American Zionist, to discuss how the committee would handle its work. “He confirmed my impression,” Rabinowitz reported to Epstein, “that he is most sympathetic to our point of view, or at least receptive, and certainly devoid of prejudices.” Because of Crum’s background, Rabinowitz thought that he was “in a position to ask much from the present administration.”35 McDonald was impressed with Crum. He was “an amazingly energetic and keen student,” McDonald wrote in his daily diary. “With his political connections closer than any of the rest of us, he should prove invaluable.”36
Judge Hutcheson provided balance. He was shrewd, honest, and determined to find a “just solution,” McDonald thought. But the judge was strongly opposed to Zionism and most likely sympathetic to the State Department and British arguments. “He has very strong feelings against any form of Jewish state,” McDonald confided to his diary, “and is quite unsympathetic to anything which smacks of Jewish nationalism.”37
From the beginning, there was a British-American split in the committee that would increasingly grow wider. The Zionists expected that the British members would be unsympathetic to their cause. A possible exception was Richard Crossman. He was at age thirty-nine a Labour member of Parliament. Previous to that, he had been a Foreign Office intelligence officer, an Oxford don, and an assistant editor of the liberal New Statesman and Nation, the flagship pro-Labour/Left magazine. Epstein viewed him as a moderate supporter of Labour’s traditional pro-Jewish position. “Dick,” Eliahu Epstein reported, would be “a practical but difficult member…. He is impatient, obstinate, dogmatic, but has a good brain.”38
Epstein did not know, however, that even Crossman started out with his countrymen’s assumptions. Crossman believed that the White Paper had to be maintained and that the Zionist position was wrong. He agreed with Ernest Bevin that to view Jews as a nation was an anti-Semitic reflex. The survivors had to be liberated from the separateness Hitler had forced them into and become assimilated Europeans with full rights and duties wherever they settled. That meant rejecting Zionism, which he thought only strengthened the walls of a spiritual concentration camp. To advocate their cause would mean that one would be joining the anti-Semites who wanted to take Jews from Europe and put them all in Palestine. And no single place was worse, thought Crossman, “for a persecuted people than this strategic key point in which the whole Arab world is against them.”39
Before the hearings began in Washington on January 7, 1946, the American delegation was summoned to the White House, where Harry S. Truman met with them. No problem concerned him more deeply than the fate of the DPs, he told the assembled members. It was the obligation of the “democratic world to give these people who had wronged no one a chance to rebuild their lives,” and he pledged that he and the American government would do all in its power to find a solution.40
The committee’s schedule was intense. It would begin with hearings in Washington and London and then split up, its members going to DP camps in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. At the end of February, they would proceed to Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, Riyadh, and Amman. Much of what the members would hear would be repetitive, since they had been given basic background reading and already knew the essence of the Zionist and Arab cases. By the end of the Washington hearings, Crossman wrote, “we generally knew what a witness was going to say before he said it.”41
When Crossman arrived in Washington, he tried to analyze why the American and British perceptions of the situation were so different. He had thought that support for Zionism in the United States was limited to American Jews but was surprised to find that it had widespread support. America was still a pioneering nation, he observed, with a frontier mentality, and the idea that Jews who had been oppressed and confined to ghettos in Europe for decades could improve their lot by setting sail for a new country was part of the American grain. Palestine as a refuge, therefore, “comes naturally to an American.”
To the Americans, Europe’s Jews who sought to rebuild their lives in Palestine were the equivalent of the American settlers who had developed the West. The analogy carried to the Arabs, who were the equivalent of America’s Native Americans. They were “the aboriginal who must go down before the march of progress,” wrote Crossman. America had gained its independence by fighting a war with King George III; the Jews of Palestine, he thought, might conflict with his successors in the British Mandate. If that occurred, Crossman predicted, the Jews were “bound to win an instinctive American sympathy.” That was not necessarily beneficial. He summed up what he saw as the American view in these words:
The American knows that if an imperial power had espoused the cause of the Red Indians, maintaining that no settlement could be allowed which was damaging to their rights, and that development of the west could only be permitted according to the absorptive capacity of the country, half of the U.S.A. would still be virgin forest to-day. Because a nation’s history conditions its political thinking, Americans…will always give their sympathy to the pioneer and suspect an empire which thwarts the white settler in the name of native rights.
The British, on the other hand, in Crossman’s view, were made up of people who had never left and went back for generations. What they feared most was an invasion by a foreign conqueror. They also resented the idea that Europe was foundering “and that a million Jews must be rescued from the sinking ship.” To them, Zionism was unnatural and was nothing but “the product of high-powered American propaganda.” Thus the average Englishman sided with the Arab, whom he saw as “defending his thousand-year tenure of his country against the alien invaders.”
When the hearings began in Washington and the witnesses appeared, Crossman experienced their testimony as “a monumental indictment of Great Britain.” At times, he confided, he felt more like “a prisoner in the dock than a member of a committee of enquiry.” The committee heard from the usual suspects: Rabbi Stephen Wise and the Zionist leader Emanuel Neumann, whom Crossman called “the organizing brain behind the indictment.” Moving about continually in the back of the hearing room was Peter Bergson, a man who “looked more like a Russian university student than a terrorist,” who was there as the Irgun’s sole spokesman, as well as being the “skeleton which the orthodox Zionists obviously thought should have remained in the cupboard.” All of them collectively made the British members feel that they “were personally responsible for the death of six million Jews.”42
Crossman was irritated that in Washington there was almost a “complete disregard of the Arab case.” He thought, “Why should these people from a safe position across the Atlantic lambaste my country for its failure to go to war with the Arabs on behalf of the Jews?” His mood improved when he met David Horowitz, who was with a friend of his from Tel Aviv. The three talked for more than three hours. Crossman was impressed with the case they made for the Jewish community in Palestine. The Palestinian Jews “belonged to a different world from that of the American Zionists. Palestine for them was not a cause which they had taken up, a gigantic piece of organized philanthropy, or a stick with which to beat the British. Palestine was their native country.” “Perhaps,” thought Crossman, “while the rest of the world was arguing, the Jewish nation had been born.”43
The hearings had begun with a presentation by Earl Harrison, who restated the conclusions he had come to in his report on the status of Jewish refugees. Following him was Dr. Joseph Schwartz, the European director of the Joint Distribution Committee, who had accompanied Harrison in Europe and shared his views. The legal case for Zionism was presented by Emanuel Neumann, who argued the illegality of the White Paper and urged that the DP camps be closed down and the Jews living in them be sent to Palestine. The Arab case was presented by Dr. Philip Hitti, a professor of Semitic literature at Princeton University. A Christian Arab, Hitti argued that Palestine was part of Syria and had been home to the Arabs since time immemorial. A Zionist state would be an imposition on the Arabs and could be created only by force.
The biggest stir was the testimony on Friday the eleventh of Albert Einstein. His appearance was regarded by the Zionist leadership as their pièce de résistance, but they had to pull out all the stops to get him to testify. Meyer Weisgal, Chaim Weizmann’s man in America, traveled to Princeton to convince him to participate. Weisgal walked up and down the streets with him for hours, imploring him to come. Finally agreeing, Einstein made the kind of demands associated with prima donnas. “I had to go with him on the train,” Weisgal wrote. “I had to be with him at the sessions, I had to take care of him all the time.”44
With his “great mane of flowing white hair reaching almost to his shoulders,” Crum would write, “he looked like a patriarch stepping out of a Biblical tale.”45 He approached the witness stand “with adoring women gazing up at him like Gandhi—flashlights, movie cameras and so on.”46 Bearing what McDonald called “a sweet smile and a very gentle manner,” the eminent scientist “proceeded to throw bombs in three distinct directions, blasting, as it were…the British, the extreme Zionists, and the Committee.” The British were following a policy of divide and rule, he said, keeping Arabs and Jews apart the better to serve imperialism. He continued to make it clear that he also repudiated Zionism. And as for the committee itself, Einstein said in a “beatific tone” that it was “futile and a smoke-screen for the two governments.”47 Crum put it another way. Einstein, he said, argued that the British were responsible for all the turmoil. Its Colonial Office sponsored Arab-Jewish clashes to prevent the two peoples uniting and finding they did not need British rule. His own answer was an independent Palestine under the United Nations.48 If the Zionists had high hopes for his testimony, they were sorely disappointed. A Jewish majority in Palestine was “unimportant,” Einstein concluded, and he thoroughly disapproved of any nationalism. Hearing this, the “audience nearly jumped out of their seats.”49
Next was London. The group traveled on the Queen Elizabeth, finding time to further study the reading material they had been given and to compare notes. Evan Wilson, the American secretary for the committee from State’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, accompanied them on the journey. Expressing the State Department’s point of view, Wilson counseled the American members that if they reached a decision that could be conceived as too favorable to the Jews, “an aroused Arab world might turn to the Soviet Union for support.”50
Tall and rangy, Harold Beeley, the secretary for the British and an expert on the political history of the Middle East, held views similar to Wilson’s. In the ship’s lounge he told Crum and Buxton that one could understand Palestine only in the context of the new Cold War with the Soviets. Since Stalin sought to move into the Middle East, he argued, the United States had to join with Britain “in establishing a cordon sanitaire of Arab states,” which would become a strong link in the anti-Soviet chain if Palestine were made an Arab state.51
The American delegates were shocked when, on the third day aboard ship, they were given the State Department’s confidential communications on Palestine, probably meant to sway them to the department’s views. They had the opposite effect. After reading the outline of State’s handling of Palestine, the Americans concluded that “each time a promise was made to American Jewry regarding Palestine,” State immediately sent messages to the Arab leaders that those promises could be ignored, and that policy would not change. Crum saw this as “double-dealing,” as well as sabotage of Truman’s Palestine policy. He felt betrayed, thought the committee would do no good, and wanted to return home. Informing the British members of what the Americans had learned, Sir John Singleton responded, “It appears that Great Britain is not the only power who promises the same thing to two different groups.”52
The British hearings took place from January 25 until February 1. According to Crossman, at a farewell luncheon for the committee in Dorchester, Bevin thanked them “for removing the responsibility from his shoulders for at least 120 days.” He then slowly and deliberately announced that if they achieved a unanimous report, he would do everything in his power to see that it was implemented. The speech made a big impact on the committee members, especially the Americans. Maybe the committee wasn’t a stalling device after all.53 But in reality, Bevin believed that when the committee members saw the situation face-to-face, they would dismiss Truman’s call to send 100,000 immigrants to Palestine and adopt his own view.54
In London, the committee heard more of the Arab case, including that of Prince Faisal, the second of the forty sons of Ibn Saud. As expected, Faisal was firm in his insistence that not one more Jew be allowed into Palestine. The Syrian delegate, Faris al-Khouri, argued that a Jewish state in Palestine would become a “vast imperialist power threatening the security of the entire Arab world.” Turning to Judge Hutcheson, he bellowed, “Why don’t you give the Jews part of Texas?”55 “The Arabs,” McDonald confided to his diary, “made an impression of such unyieldiness that it would be impossible to win them by any sort of compromise.”56
While in London, James McDonald took time out to have a three-hour working dinner with an individual he described only as “an important American personality” and later as “one of the most important Americans in London.” The individual, judging from what he said, was representing the White House, rather than the State Department. The committee, he told McDonald, had to “create the opportunities for enlarged immigration of Jews.” It had to reach a conclusion that appealed to the conscience of the world but also had to be one that made it clear the United States would provide no military support for Palestine. Most significant, his dinner partner took a decided swipe at the State Department. “The men in the Near East division would be,” he stressed, “…inclined to take the view of the Arab states.” Therefore, when the American members had to communicate with the U.S. government later on, he gave McDonald the impression that it would be preferable to move directly through the president or the secretary of state.57
The British round of hearings having concluded, the committee split up and toured the DP camps, assessing the status and desires of the Jewish refugees. Sir Frederick Legget, Crossman, and Crum went to the American zone of Germany. There they found the DPs living in similar conditions to those that Harrison had seen, now only slightly better due to Truman’s and Eisenhower’s efforts. Abstract arguments now felt remote. Referring to Attlee’s comment, which Bevin later repeated, that Jews should not push to the head of the queue, Crossman wrote, “That might go down in Britain; in Belsen it sounded like the mouthing of a sadistic anti-Semite.”58
Speaking to refugees, they heard unimaginable horror stories. “What are you to say,” wrote Crum, “when a man like yourself carefully extracts a snapshot…showing a pleasant-faced young woman with an infant in her arms and a little boy playing nearby with a pail in the sand? ‘This is my wife and children,’ he says. And he adds: ‘They killed the baby with a bayonet and she and the child were burned in the crematorium.’”59
Near Frankfurt, the group was given a result of a poll taken of the 18,311 Jewish DPs there. Only thirteen wanted to stay in Europe. The rest all opted to go to Palestine. As they were reading the results, they heard the faint sound of marching feet outside the window. The DPs were marching three and four abreast, carrying a flag with the Star of David and a banner reading “Open the Gates of Palestine,” some wearing the same concentration camp uniforms given them by the Nazis. They stood for an hour in the rain looking into the window at the commissioners, delivering their powerful message.60
Many of the DPs came from Poland and were the sole survivors of what once had been large families. Some had walked hundreds of miles to their old towns, only to have to turn around and trudge back to the camps. There was nothing left for them there. Some who returned never made it back, having been murdered by non-Jewish residents. The British Embassy in Warsaw reported that three hundred Jews had been killed in Poland alone between the end of the war and the end of 1945.61
In Munich they met some Jews who had recently arrived from Poland, through the illegal smuggling route established by B’riha, an organization originating in Palestine before the war. Resistance fighters during the war had kept up both spy networks and escape routes and were now using them again to smuggle Jews out of Eastern Europe. Supported by both the Jewish Agency and the Joint, they led parties of Polish Jews into the American zone and camps or to Palestine itself. By 1946, some 40,000 Jewish “infiltrees,” as the Americans called them, had greatly enlarged the population in the American zone. Between 1945 and 1948, B’riha is estimated to have successfully moved 250,000 Jews into Palestine.62
Later, the committee met with General Clark, who told them that U.S. policy, unlike that of the British, was to keep the borders open: “We want to give the Jews trying to get out of Poland a chance to save their lives.” They were told that the policy had been originated by General Eisenhower and was backed by Truman. But this was very difficult because of “transportation troubles, absence of adequate food supplies, and opposition from British sources.” The British in Austria wanted to “compel the Jews to rehabilitate themselves in Poland” and was based on Bevin’s assumption that if the Jews left Europe, it would mean Hitler had won the war.63
The committee found that the DPs’ morale was highest where the people had some vision for the future. For the majority, it seemed, that vision was Palestine. Crum observed that amid all the despair, the young people who were preparing for life on communes in Palestine seemed hopeful and happy. But other members of the committee were not convinced of the refugees’ desire to go to Palestine. Judge Hutcheson for one thought the demand for Palestine was only the result of “artful indoctrination by Zionist agents.” Buxton, who had gone with him to Poland and Austria, disagreed. “The feeling we found,” he responded, “was too deep, too passionate, too widespread to be accounted for in that manner.” In a report he wrote for the other committee members, Buxton spoke about the underground railway established to smuggle Jews out of Europe. The passion they held could “not be checked by official steps of any kind, whether by “disappearance of Zionist propaganda, the elimination of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, or any other measure.”64
During this same period, James McDonald and other committee members went to Paris, Bierbach, Constance, Austria, Bern, Zurich, and Lugano and then headed back to meet the rest of the group to continue their journey to the Middle East. Like those who had gone to Germany and Poland, McDonald met with a unanimous desire on the part of Jewish refugees to gain entry to Palestine. In a boys’ camp in Lugano, McDonald wrote, “nearly everyone of them had lost all his relatives in concentration camps and had known little but terror and death. They had built a new world for themselves of dreams and hopes and would tolerate no questioning of their realization,” which was to reach Palestine. “Their earnestness,” McDonald confided, “tempted one to weep.” A day later, visiting both boys and girls at a villa where they cleaned and worked in the gardens, McDonald observed, “To them,…the world and the whole future centers in Palestine…. They, as the others I had seen…were absolutely confident that there was no future for Jews anywhere in Central or Eastern Europe.”65
Crum and Sir Frederick went on to Nuremberg, where they attended some of the war trials. The Army allowed them to view secret documents about Nazi policy and showed them unexpurgated films taken by the Nazis of their murder of Jews (which made Crum so ill he had to walk out). Crum also read extensive evidence implicating the grand mufti in the crimes against the Jews.66 Crum convened a press conference. If the settlements were not cleaned out, he told the American newsmen, “sooner or later we will have a wave of mass suicides or they will fight their way to Palestine.”67
All this made Crum become an advocate for the Jews and no longer a mere observer. Either he would get the committee to write an interim report (which it had been instructed it could write but didn’t have to) calling for a clearing out of all the camps, or, he pledged, he would present what he found to the American people via the media. “The facts,” he said, had to be revealed.”68 The other Americans also wanted an interim report written addressing the plight of the refugees but were opposed by the British members.
Finally, Judge Hutcheson asked Crum to stop his campaign. The judge had been informed by the president and the State Department that an interim report might call the committee’s impartiality into question. Instead, when it filed its final report, it should make short-term and long-term recommendations.69 Crum became even more agitated by this intervention, suspecting an anti-Zionist conspiracy. He threatened to resign, which would have been disastrous for the committee. Niles tried to calm him down, writing Crum that he had talked to Truman and the president wanted to assure Crum “that he has every confidence in you and that he hopes you will do nothing rash.” Calling Crum a “good sport,” Niles added that no one was suggesting how the committee should conduct itself. Crum calmed down, and the break was averted.70
In March, the group moved on to the Middle East, where they heard directly from Arab spokesmen of their opposition to both Jewish immigration and a Jewish state. The Jews, and all of Western civilization, they argued, had “no right to impose the solution of the Jewish problem…on the Arab world.” Jewish colonial settlements in Palestine were simply a new variant of Western imperialism.71
In Egypt, Azzam Bey, the secretary-general of the Arab League, made an elegant twenty-minute speech about his cousins the Jews, who had left the region and come back as Europeans and as imperialists. “We are not going to allow ourselves to be controlled either by great nations or small nations or dispersed nations,” he told the committee. They also heard from Syria’s spokesman, Jamil Mardam Bey, as well as others. In public, all of them had the same opinion, McDonald noted: “not one more Jewish immigrant, not one more dunem of Jewish land.” They called only for “united and unlimited effort to block Zionism,” and considered themselves to be in a state of war.72
Then the group moved on to Jerusalem, where they stayed at the King David Hotel and held hearings at the YMCA across the street. Weizmann was the first to give his testimony. He told the committee, “Here is a people who have lost all the attributes of a nation, but still have maintained their existence as a ghost nation, stalking the arena of history, maintained it for thousands of years. It is our belief in a mystical force, our conviction of a return to the land of Israel, which has kept us alive…. We are an ancient people. We have contributed to the world. We have suffered. We have a right to live—a right to survive under normal conditions. We are as good as anyone else, and as bad as anyone else…. I stand before young Jews today as a leader who failed to achieve anything by peaceful means.” Despite all the promises of British and American statesmen, he continued, “Jews are able to enter Palestine only as illegal immigrants and have no freedom of movement in the land.” McDonald thought it was “one of the most impressive and moving statements” he had ever heard.73
To Richard Crossman, Weizmann looked like a “weary and more human version of Lenin.” He seemed moderate and reasonable, but Crossman thought that he was too old, ill, and pro-British “to control the extremists” among the Zionists. But Crossman was impressed by Weizmann’s candor, as were other committee members, when he admitted that “the issue is not between right and wrong but between the greater and less injustice.” Since it was unavoidable, he candidly told them, they would have to decide “whether it is better to be unjust to the Arabs of Palestine or the Jews.”74
Two days later, Crossman and Crum drove out to Weizmann’s home in Rehovot. The modernist building of white stone designed by Erich Mendelsohn, a noted German architect, was an anomaly in Mandate Palestine. Political leaders called it the White House, while children saw it as a fairy-tale castle. “The interior,” Crossman commented, “is a show piece, polished stone floors, thick carpets, and a number of beautiful works of art, including the two Utrillos and the most beautiful T’ang horse which I have ever seen.” Crossman felt that all of this was really his wife, Vera’s, doing, since Weizmann himself “scarcely notices it.” Taking them into a smaller room to talk privately, Weizmann told them that he thought the British would not accept any extremist solution, either Arab or Jewish, which was why he favored partition. He had been in favor of it in 1937 when a British commission had recommended it, and was still in favor of it because it would give the Jews national sovereignty. “I regard it as a practical solution,” he told them. Moshe Shertok (Sharett) entered the room and told them that he could get his people to go along if Bevin said a Jewish state could be created in a divided Palestine. It would be seen as a “practical possibility,” provided that the area for the Jews included Galilee and the Negev, as well as a separate Jewish flag, army, and representation in the United Nations.75
Traveling around Palestine, the group could not help but be impressed with the achievements of the Jewish community, especially its efforts at reclaiming Palestine’s barren wastelands. Crossman visited Mishmar Ha’emek, a large Jewish collective run by Marxist Zionists (Hashomer Hatzair), which believed in cooperation with the Arabs and a binational state. He found it a lovely place “with turfed gardens, fountains, beautifully kept flower beds and 700 acres of plain land and vineyards, and forests on the hills.” He felt that he had never met a nicer community anywhere. Yet he was disturbed by the inhabitants’ naiveté. It was impossible to make them realize, he thought, that the beautiful place they had created “with the green turf and the fountain and the gold-fish and the magnificent memorial to the dead children of Europe, and the cooperative spirit, are all set inside a huge barbed-wire stockade in a hostile territory.”76
Crum and Crossman were not alone in their admiration for what the Jews had accomplished. When they met Frank Buxton in the café at the King David Hotel, where he was relaxing after visiting a nearby kibbutz, they saw that “his eyes [were] welling up with tears.” “I feel like getting down on my knees before these people,” Buxton told him, “I’ve always been proud of my own ancestors who made farms out of the virgin forest. But these people are raising crops out of rock!”77
The poverty and lack of educational opportunities among the Arabs of Palestine, on the other hand, disturbed Crossman and the other members of the committee. Though the majority of Arabs in Palestine appeared to be better off than their counterparts in most of the other Arab countries (their population was growing due to immigration, a higher birthrate, and a lower death rate), the discrepancies in living standards between the two communities could only cause continued friction. Crossman believed that “all the Arab hatred for the Jew is based on a resentment at the arrogance, wealth and superiority of the invaders.” Only two hundred yards away from the lovely collective, he wrote, was “the stenchiest Arab village I have ever seen,” where he was entertained by a sheikh and “seated on the floor of a filthy hovel drinking tea.”78
Later in March, David Ben-Gurion gave his formal testimony. Crossman’s description of Ben-Gurion was more playful; “a tiny, thick-set little man with white hair—a Pickwickian cherub.”79 The militant Labor Zionist did not seem disturbed by the thought that the Jews would not get the whole of Palestine, observed Crossman. He and the other Eastern European Zionist leaders envisioned creating Israel as the first successful democratic socialist society. “I am a Socialist,” Ben-Gurion explained, and the socialist commonwealth would stimulate “similar movements throughout the Arab world.” He talked of inviting young Egyptians to come and train in the kibbutzim, with the result that the Zionist project would “capture the Middle East,” as well as becoming the West’s and Britain’s bulwark against the Soviet Union.80
The second day, the entire committee heard David Ben-Gurion for the whole morning. Starting with a two-hour speech in which he explained the tenets of Zionism, he gave “no apology and no indication of the least doubt about ultimate success.” McDonald concluded that there was no doubt that, if necessary, there would be “resistance to any move to liquidate or seriously weaken the Jewish position in this country.”81
After Ben-Gurion, they heard a presentation from David Horowitz, the Jewish Agency’s economist, who came ready with charts, statistics, and graphs. McDonald noted that he made “a stunningly clear and, to my mind, convincing presentation of the Zionist case, to the effect that Jewish development in Palestine had substantially benefited the Arabs.”
Both McDonald and Crossman were impressed by Ben-Gurion’s commitment and passion. Driving to his home on the March 26, they wanted to make their formal good-byes before leaving Palestine. Crossman felt an affinity for Ben-Gurion and others he had met during the trip, including Golda Meyerson (Meir), the chairwoman of the Histadrut Jewish Confederation of Labor, whom he regarded as socialist comrades. To his eyes, meeting with them was as if he were at a meeting of the Socialist International with Western members. They all acted as if they were “fanatically building what they believe will be the only free socialist society in the world,” he recorded in his diary. Moreover, they acted as if their fate rested in the hands of the Anglo-American Committee. To his mind, he could not help but think of how Vienna’s Socialists had been betrayed by the West when they thought they would be rescued and Hitler prevented from taking Austria in the 1930s.
They found Ben-Gurion very concerned that the committee would recommend disarming the Haganah and abolishing the Jewish Agency. He gave them a final warning: “Don’t make the mistake of thinking of us as Jews like the Jews you have in London,” he admonished them. “Imagine that we’re Englishmen fighting for our national existence.” Calling out as they left, he added, “Don’t underrate our intelligence.” The committee’s bodyguard was concerned about their safety as they drove back to their hotel at night. “It’s O.K.,” Ben-Gurion joked. “I’ve telephoned the terrorists all along the route.”82
The committee members listened to the representatives of the Arab Palestinians. In Jerusalem, Jamal Husseini, a representative of the Arab Higher Committee, presented the Arab case. Husseini was a relative of the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the titular leader of the Palestinian Arabs and a well-known collaborator and partisan of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during the war. The American members wanted to know what would happen if, as they wished, Palestine became an entirely Arab state. Would the Grand Mufti be proclaimed head of a new Arab Palestine government? If they succeeded, Jamal Husseini argued, at least 30 percent of Jews who had come to Palestine would leave, and the rest would accept living in Palestine under Arab rule.
As for the Mufti, he might well become head of the new Palestinian Arab state. He only had the interests of the Arabs at heart. As for his collaboration with Hitler, Jamal Husseini argued, the Mufti had only sought to “get something out of them in case they were victorious.” Listening to his testimony, Bartley Crum thought to himself that al-Husseini was “Gerald L. K. Smith in a fez,” referring to the notorious American anti-Semite.83 “He was brilliant and fluent,” McDonald commented, “but, from the point of view of the Americans…his open defense of the Mufti was a major strategic mistake.”84
The final Arab statement was delivered in writing to the committee and later published in America by the Arab office as The Problem of Palestine. Its opening statement set its tone: “The whole Arab people is unalterably opposed to the attempt to impose Jewish immigration and settlement upon it, and ultimately to establish a Jewish State in Palestine.”85
For many of the delegates, the most memorable session was that of Martin Buber and Dr. Judah Magnes, the two most prominent intellectuals in Jewish Palestine. Here the committee members heard their eloquent but perhaps irrelevant pleas to create a new binational (Arab-Jewish) state in the former British Mandate. Magnes, then the president of Hebrew University, gave what McDonald called an “eloquent” and “deeply moving” speech reflecting “a moral courage of the very highest kind.” His solution, however, McDonald thought, reflected a poor sense of statesmanship as well as being completely impractical.86 Crossman reached much the same conclusion. Acknowledging that the British viewed Magnes as a moderate who wanted conciliation with the Arabs, Crossman felt that his concept of a binational state “represented nothing real in Palestine politics” and that once it might have been possible but was now too late.87
Then the committee received a memorandum from the Jewish Resistance Movement, the armed unit that, after the war, had combined the fighters of the Haganah with those of the Irgun. As it functioned underground, its leaders could not testify, and the press was not given the memo. “We consider it our duty to warn you, against any attempt to impose an anti-Zionist political solution and mask it with a token increase of immigration permits.” No minority status for Jews in Palestine would be acceptable, they informed the committee, nor would any “symbolic independence in a Lilliputian State.” The committee, they admonished, had to be courageous and, most important, “decisive.”88
Finally, the weary group went to Lausanne, Switzerland, in early April to hammer out their findings and, they hoped, to develop a consensus document. Switzerland, neutral during the war, was nevertheless a tense site for the members. Security was very tight, and the American members feared that they were under secret British surveillance and that their phone calls were bugged. McDonald thought his mail was being opened and complained that he was not allowed to go anywhere without telling the hotel concierge precisely where he was headed. When President Truman cabled the U.S. delegates’ chairman, Judge Joseph Hutcheson, to let him know that he hoped they would arrive at a unanimous conclusion, the cable was first delivered to the British consul in Geneva. A second cable from Truman was also opened by the British before it was given to Hutcheson.89
Truman’s request was hard to fulfill. Differences, particularly between the American members and the British group, threatened to tear them apart and make a satisfactory end next to impossible. Back home, the congressman from Brooklyn, Representative Emanuel Celler, wrote the president expressing his fears: “It is clearly evident from the rift that has arisen between the American and British members…that the British are determined to control completely this inquiry.” He had heard rumors that the British had actually written a final report in London, without waiting for the delegates even to write their own. The British report, he was certain, would be one “pre-formed by the foreign policy of Great Britain.”90
All of the committee members had been extremely moved by their experiences in Europe. The majority had concluded that anti-Semitism was still very strong; that little less than death would destroy the wish of the Jewish displaced persons to go to Palestine; and that the military wanted to close down the camps not only for the sake of the refugees but to help normalize life in Europe. Sir Frederick Leggett, who had been hostile to the Jewish position when the committee started, “became emotionally exhausted by the trip and resolved to do something to help those who had survived. He even started greeting everyone with ‘Shalom.’” He told his colleagues, “Unless we can do something and do it soon, we shall be guilty of having finished the job Hitler started; the spiritual and moral destruction of the tiny remnant of European Jewry.”91
But what was to be done? Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller argued that the Balfour Declaration had already been fulfilled in creating a homeland for the Jews and that Britain should be formally released from its promise to support an actual Jewish state in Palestine. The other British members, save Crossman, agreed with his perspective. Moreover, he favored disbanding the Haganah and altering the power of the Jewish Agency. The Americans answered back. Frank Buxton argued that the principle of “eminent domain,” used to explain the American conquest of Mexico and the movement of American Indians into a modern society, applied to the situation in Palestine. Crossman emphasized the different culture of the Arabs and Jews and recommended partition as the best solution, as did Crick. They could not, McDonald summed up, avoid dealing with “the very wide and fundamental differences disclosed” during their meeting.92
The committee was still split on the issue of a binational state, the number of immigrants to be allowed in, the role of the Haganah and the Jewish Agency, and the issue of partition. The animosity was fierce. McDonald, Buxton, Crossman, and Crum favored immediate admission of 100,000 Jews: Phillips and Aydelotte leaned to the British view. It all depended on Hutcheson, who alone could persuade the other Americans. The discussions continued, and eventually Harry Truman’s request for admission of the 100,000 seemed reasonable. “The primary way to resolve the whole unsettled condition,” Crum put it, “…was by doing precisely what the President of the United States had suggested.” The committee called in military officers who ran the DP camps in Austria and Germany, and they agreed that all of those living there could be shipped to Palestine within the year.93
The final recommendations were meant to be tentative. Crossman explained that the members of the committee were not experts; they disagreed about much, and all they could really contribute was a set of guiding principles for Anglo-American policy. It was foolish, he thought, for them to work out a concrete plan that would probably eventually end up at the United Nations. They should make interim proposals “which could ward off the danger of war and give to the British government at least six months’ breathing space in which to formulate its policy.” As for settling the Jewish DPs in other countries, “The fact had to be admitted,” he put it, “—shameful as it was—that Palestine was the only country where 100,000 Jews could be absorbed in the immediate future.”94
Crossman was particularly astute in framing issues in a way that could gain support from the British members. In a long memo, he argued that they had to take a position that would isolate Zionist extremists and reinforce moderate leaders such as Weizmann, who were losing ground as the British continued to stand by the White Paper. Allowing Jewish immigrants into Palestine would satisfy Jewish demands and at the same time allow Britain to deal ruthlessly with uncompromising Jewish terrorists. Anything else would only turn all the Palestinian Jews “into a fanatical support of the extremists,” as well as possibly leading to a war against British troops by the entire Jewish population. They had to accept, he told his colleagues, “a more humane and juster course.”95
“In the end,” Crum wrote, “it was the leadership of Judge Hutcheson which kept us all together.” The judge worked around the clock, putting in twelve-to sixteen-hour days, shuttling between the two groups as he tried to achieve reconciliation.96 On April 1, he convened a meeting in which he shared his recommendations with the committee. He thought that Palestine should be neither an Arab nor a Jewish state. Yet he insisted the Jews’ achievements there had to be accepted, and nothing should occur that would disrupt the development of the Jewish homeland. Like Judah Magnes, Hutcheson suggested the creation of a binational state. As for partition, which some Zionist leaders had said they would accept, Hutcheson saw it as “a solution of despair” that would “satisfy neither the genius of the Jews nor that of the Arabs.” In the short term, he argued, the committee should ask for the immediate “largest possible immigration” of Jewish DPs up to the 100,000, if necessary. The bottom line: there should be “substantial continuing immigration under the Jewish Agency” but not the creation of a Jewish state.97
The committee finally came to a unanimous decision along the lines suggested by Hutcheson: it recommended the immediate issuance of 100,000 certificates by Britain to allow Europe’s Jewish DPs to go to Palestine and the revocation of the land and immigration regulations of the White Paper. For the long run, they rejected both an Arab state and a Jewish state in Palestine and called for a “country in which the legitimate national aspirations of both Jews and Arabs can be reconciled, without either side fearing the ascendancy of the other.” The details would be worked out by the United Nations.98
The members signed it, feeling exhausted but relieved and proud of their achievement. Agreement had for days seemed impossible, yet they had put aside their differences and established a precedent for Anglo-American cooperation on this issue. Palestine was on the verge of war, they thought, and they hoped that their deliberations and recommendations might prevent it from occurring. Dissatisfied as they might have been, observed Crossman, each one of them felt the conclusions they had reached were better than what they could have achieved on their own.99
The committee had done its job. Its members had traveled and lived together under harsh and often difficult conditions. They had quarreled over differences, yet, at the end, they had come to a consensus. The committee knew that both sides would find many of their recommendations offensive, as well as wrongheaded. In a sense, they left it to others to decide on a final outcome and to reconcile the differences before making a new policy. But on one point they stood together: the 100,000 Jewish DPs had to receive immigration visas for Palestine immediately. Whether or not the British government would go along remained to be seen.