Paul Kelemen
Towards the end of 1949, most of the Palestinians who had fled, or were expelled, during the previous year's war between the Israeli and Arab forces, faced their second winter in the camps of neighbouring countries and in the Gaza strip. The Red Cross had reported a general improvement in the health of the refugees over the previous 12 months but the camps were overcrowded, medical provision was rudimentary and the food ration per head had had to be reduced because of supplies running low.1 In the Egyptian controlled Gaza strip, the per capita ration of the 245,000 refugees was 1,500 calories per day. The camps were heaving with a traumatised, destitute people:
Simple village folk who fled in their summer garment, unable to carry anything with them but their children, in some cases robbed of their jewelry and small sums of money as they fled. They fled in the heat of the summer, hoping to return to their home within a few weeks.2
Uncertainty about the future and the daily humiliation of living from handouts were taking their toll. 'With few exceptions', the American Friends Service Committee reported, 'the slowly declining morale of the refugees is upheld by one dominating idea, namely, that they shall be allowed soon to return to their former homes.' But it suggested that there was little prospect of that or, even, of significantly improving the refugees' material conditions:
In spite of large contributions of tents from various nations it is still true to say that many thousands of refugees are living in dugouts or under pieces of threadbare sacking, or other conditions of over-crowding and squalor to which no human being should be subjected ... If the refugees were to spend another winter in their present circumstances their suffering would be terrible.3
A letter from the London-based Refugees' Defence Committee gave a stark summary of the situation:
After more than a year's cessation of hostilities there are still 710,000 Palestinian Arab Muslim and Christian refugees - 430,000 under canvas (three families to a tent), 30,000 actually in caves reminders of our prehistoric ancestors.4
In November 1949, with Foreign Office encouragement, a handful of prominent individuals, headed by Ernest Bevin, and representatives of the British Council of Churches, launched a public appeal to support the refugees in the name of a committee called 'Christian Relief to the Holy Land'.5
While the refugee crisis was still unfolding, the Labour Party sent a delegation to Israel led by Alice Bacon, the vice-chairperson of the Labour Party and the Durham miners' leader, Sam Watson, in his role as chairperson of the NEC. The visit, as the party secretary Morgan Phillips indicated, was intended as a signal to Israeli leaders that the Labour government desired to begin a new chapter and establish friendly relations with Israel.6 The three thousand word report that Bacon and Watson submitted on their visit reflected this intention. It recommended that Britain 'give full recognition to Israel' and 'should assist in its economic recovery'.7 It made no mention of the Palestinians. Until 1973, the Labour Party did not address itself either to the plight of the refugees or to the question of how Palestinian national aspiration might be satisfied.
Through what ideological prism did the party view the Arab—Jewish conflict, that the Palestinians' fate held such little significance? Was this an unfortunate effect of the Labour Party's 'socialist humanistic tradition' which, according to Yosef Gorny's The British Labour Movement and Zionism, underpinned the party's endorsement of the Zionist as against the Arab case? The view that Zionism had, by the criteria of socialist humanism, a stronger case than the Palestinian Arabs is essentially a political judgement. In any case, Gorny's claim that socialist humanism was the ideological basis of Labour's policy on Palestine does not stand up to historical examination. His view, nevertheless, may be considered a plausible explanation for the Labour party's pro-Zionist tilt towards the end of the war, when the scale of the Nazi extermination of Jews became fixed in the party's consciousness. The party's strong emotional support for Zionism, in this period, manifested, claims Gorny, 'the more human and attractive aspects of the Party's image'.8 His argument implies that, whatever injustice and suffering the establishment of Israel entailed for Palestinians, in Labour's humanist perspective, this would have been outweighed by the need to recompense European Jewry for the six million exterminated by the Nazis. However, the view that the Palestinians should bear the cost of making some amends for the Holocaust was predicated, as had been the Balfour Declaration, on Britain's imperial relation to Palestine: on the power to decide over the land and future of a colonial people. In part, the Attlee government's role in the final phase of the Mandate which, in upholding British imperial interests in the Middle East, collided with the Zionist objectives has helped to eclipse the imperial inspiration of the Labour Party's traditional support for Zionism. But the historical connection between Labour's pro-Zionism and British imperial politics and ideology is, none the less, close and it is a connection that Gorny's work elides. The Holocaust made a deep impression on the Labour Party but that, in itself, does not explain why the leadership, in its 1944 postwar settlement proposal, saw the appropriate response to be the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
The linking of the Holocaust to the setting up of Jewish state was neither as self-evident nor as uncontested in the immediate post-war period as has been subsequently represented.9 A Mass Observation survey on public attitudes to the Palestine conflict, in 1947, while finding general indifference to the issue noted: 'Jewish sufferings during the war are not often mentioned as a reason for sympathising with Zionist aims'. 10 Among political élites, too, in this period, the Holocaust was not the main consideration in discussions on the future of Palestine. 'With regard to the deliberations in the United Nations and its commissions in 1947-48,' Friesel notes, 'it is difficult to find evidence that the Holocaust played a decisive or even significant role'.11 The Labour Party's commitment to a Jewish state in Palestine, as a recompense to Jews for the Holocaust, emerged out of a perspective on the Palestine conflict that was formed in the inter-war years.
The Bacon-Watson report extends, seamlessly, the dominant theme in the party's inter-war discourse on Palestine. It portrays Zionism as a social democratic force bringing enlightenment to the Arab world.
A new Social Dynamic based on progressive democracy and Socialism is being created in a manner akin to that of Britain and the Scandinavian countries. This social force is something new in the Middle East, and is the most outstanding development in that part of the world for centuries.12
Nearly 30 years before, Ramsay MacDonald had written about Zionist activity in Palestine in similar terms. Like the Bacon-led delegation he had visited the country as guest of the Histadruth and had been similarly unconcerned about the views of the Arab inhabitants. They appear in his desert scenes, in which the narrative switches between the viewpoint of the pilgrim and of the intrepid explorer. At the end of his journey he recounts:
Our mud-caked Ford cars are being scraped and repaired after their heroic journeys; our ruts are being trodden down by donkeys and camels; no more will the Bedouin scurry at our hoots, and shoulder his ass to the side of the road.13
The sleepy, stagnant Orient is the foil to the dynamism of the Zionist settler.
The Jewish town spreads on the sand. The foundations of a new garden city have been laid; in the middle of the sand dunes a big factory is at work turning out stones everyday sufficient to build a house.14
MacDonald perceived the Jews of Europe extending progress into a hithertoneglected corner of the world: 'the Arab population do not and cannot use or develop the resources of Palestine'.15 Its rulers, argued MacDonald, unable to deliver development feared the progressive political influence of Zionism on the masses.
Socialism and trade unionism came with the immigrants, and the Jewish workmen demanded a higher standard of life than the Arab. The old Arab leaders saw their position threatened.
By consequence, he saw the Arab hostility to Zionism as an aspect of 'the conflict between the Middle Ages and the Twentieth Century'.16 The 1936 Arab rebellion provided the opportunity for these arguments to be rehearsed and to entrench them in Labour Party thinking on Palestine.
The rebellion began with a general strike that lasted for six months and involved most of the urban population. From the Arab motor transport and the Jaffa port workers the strike spread to the railways, petrol companies and public sector. As Lockman has documented, the British authorities and the Zionist trade union movement collaborated closely to try to break the strike. For Zionist leaders, the strike offered an opportunity to advance their 'conquest of labour' strategy which aimed at replacing Arab with Jewish labour. This had been partially effective in the Jewish-owned private sector but the British authorities had until then largely resisted the displacements of Arabs in the state run sector in order to avoid increasing labour costs.
Now, however, the Arab revolt created circumstances in which the government had a strong political and security interest in backing the Histadruth's drive for Hebrew labour, in order to keep vital enterprises functioning and weaken the nationalist revolt.17
In the House of Commons, the Labour Party leadership denied the legitimacy of the strike and called for the government to resist its demands, which were aimed at halting further Zionist settlement activity. From the front bench Tom Wlliams explained: 'these disorders in Palestine can scarcely be characterised as the result of a strike in the sense in which that term is generally understood in this country'.18 The Daily Herald commented:
In Palestine the strike has been purely political, having its roots and its purpose in the same supercharged nationalism which is rapidly setting Europe by the ears: its methods have been those of the gunmen of Mussolini and Hitler.19
The Arab Higher Committee, formed by the political leaders of the various parties, had put itself at the head of the strike movement which had been initiated from below. But the Labour Party echoed the Zionist movement's claim that the strike, and the armed struggle it had triggered had no popular base or progressive content. Labour politicians insisted that there was no contradiction between the interest of Jewish workers and the Arab labouring classes, on the basis that Zionism, and particularly Labour Zionism was introducing not only economic development but also new forms of working-class social and political organisation. 'The policy of the Zionist movement', claimed Creech Jones:
has not been to create ail army of landless Arabs but, rather, to build up the Arab people by safeguarding to them the use of land. By Jewish immigration new markets have been created, new land has been reclaimed and the Arab peasant has gained by being released from the money lender because of the capital which has become available.20
The Arab industrial worker also gained from Zionist settlement, according to Morrison: Jewish trade unions were 'assisting in the formation of Arab trade unions under Arab leadership'.21 The Labour leadership's generally uncritical endorsement of the Zionist interpretation of the Palestine conflict was challenged, on a few occasions, from within the party. At the 1936 Labour Party conference, Alex Gossip, a leader of the National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades' Association, moved a motion ostensibly critical of the Mandate and the British government but, in reality, targeting the party's position. He told the conference:
The Arabs have been in Palestine for over 1000 years. Their consent has not been asked. What right has Great Britain to go there, or any number of countries to say to Great Britain: You go into Palestine?' It is not the land of the British people at all. What would you or I say, what would we all say, if the Arabs or any other nationality came into this country and started to dominate and deal with us as the British Government is dealing with those who are under their control at the present time?
Gossip's resolution was defeated, while that put by Poale Zion was 'carried by an overwhelming majority'.22 A discussion paper drafted by Tom Reid, in January 1942, for the party's Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions also diverged from the leadership's position on Palestine. Reid had been a member of the Woodhead Commission which investigated the feasibility of implementing the Peel Commission's partition proposal and in that task, he explained, 'spent six months on end at this subject alone with all documents and persons concerned (except Arabs)'.23 Reid's paper challenged the frequently affirmed Labour Party view that Zionist settlement was congruent with Arab interests. Land bought by the Jewish authorities, he pointed out, could not be sold to the Arabs and where possible Arab labour was excluded from Jewish enterprises. Jewish immigrants he argued 'who come to stay in Palestine must throw in their lot with Palestinians instead of trying to set up an exclusive racial or communal economic system for themselves alone'. He recommended that both land sales and Jewish immigration be restricted since they were intended by the Zionists to give Jews a majority and political domination over the Arabs.
The transference of political power from the people of Palestine to Jews, mostly recent immigrants, against the wishes of the majority of the people of Palestine cannot be justified by the promises made, nor by any fair principle of politics.24
Reid's paper ran into objections in the committee from Bentwich, a member of Brit Shalom and from Creech Jones. The exercise was, in any case, largely academic since the committee wielded little influence on the party's executive, where the Zionist case had several determined advocates.
Although a Poale Zion leader judged, in 1942, that Zionist lobbying 'had not penetrated very far beyond the top layer of the Labour leadership',25 by this time few party activists could have been unaware where their sympathy was expected to lie on this issue. Most articles on Palestine in the Labour press - and particularly in the Daily Herald, the New Statesman and Tribune - and party conference statements and resolutions on seven occasions between 1921 and 1945, were favourable to Zionism. Morrison, the deputy leader from 1935, Gillies, the party secretary, Creech Jones, Noel Baker, Wedgwood and Laski frequently intervened in favour of Zionism, while the Arab case did not have a single prominent Labour Party advocate in the 1930s.
Poale Zion, the socialist Zionist party which acted as the propaganda arm of the Zionist Labour movement, was highly effective in lobbying British labour leaders. At various stages such prominent figures as Ben-Gurion, Dov Hoz and Berl Locker assisted its work in London. On at least one occasion, this involved drafting the contributions for a Commons debate on Palestine of sympathetic MPs. Ben-Gurion wrote to his wife from London: 'The speeches by Lloyd George, Leopold Amery, Tom Williams, Creech Jones, Herbert Morrison, James de Rothschild and Victor Cazalet were wholly or partly prepared by us.'26 British Labour Party figures who visited Palestine as guests of the Histadruth also helped its work by addressing meetings, writing articles and providing contacts. Nevertheless, British membership of Poale Zion was limited to around 450 until 1939. It grew during the war to 1,500. Its work focused on lobbying the parliamentary party to which it was affiliated. On developments in Palestine it was one of the Labour Party's main source of information. It was frequently consulted by the Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions and briefed MPs. No similar access was available to George Mansur, the former Secretary of the Arab Workers' Society in Jaffa, who from 1936 ran the Arab Centre in London. It took nine months for him to obtain a meeting with the Advisory Committee. Poale Zion was able to acquire influence because the party was favourably predisposed to Labour Zionism. There are four main factors that account for this.
First, the Labour Zionist project appeared to represent a benign, social democratic form of colonisation. Instead of instituting a capitalist system involving the exploitation of the indigenous people it aspired to introduce cooperative forms of economic organisation and trade unionism. It was seen by Labour as embodying the ideals of 'trusteeship', which required reform rather than the dismantling of the Empire. The Labour Party was committed to the 'humane' management of the colonies, to the notion that it was the duty of the imperial power and, by extension, of Western civilisation to develop the resources of the colonial world, while attending to the interests of 'the natives'. 'The Jews have proved to be first-class colonisers', enthused Morrison, 'to have the real, good, old, Empire qualities, to be really first-class Colonial pioneers, and 1 do not object in any way, on the contrary, I welcome it'.27 The Jew as coloniser, as the bridge between the West and the East, is redeemed not by discarding the categories of anti-Semitism but by reascribing them to the urban Jew - whom Morrison still disdained - and to the Arab. 'The Jews I saw in Palestine', commented the Labour MP, Commander Fletcher, 'were young, virile, vigorous, full of health, whereas many of the young Arabs seemed to me to be sickly, stunted and diseased.
Second, as the above indicates, an integral part of Labour's 'humane' imperialism, was a racist view of the Arab world which could not sustain the notion that development could come in any other way than through outsiders. Accordingly, Arab opposition to Zionism was castigated as hostility to progress. 'No people', opined Brailsford, 'enjoys the process of being shaken out of its medieval slumbers: the camel hates the bustling motor car.'29 Wedgwood, the most vocal advocate of Zionism in the Labour Party, also believed that the Palestinian Arabs were merely paying the price of progress: 'every change in cultivation or in civilisation does injure some people, and these wondering Bedouin have suffered and must suffer as civilisation advances',3" Building on the image of a world trapped in biblical times in which Bedouins wandered over a limitless desert, Labour helped to insert into public consciousness the figure of the effendi. The latter was depicted not merely as a rapacious landlord and religious fanatic but also as the sole figure of Arab politics. This vision of the Middle East in which the wandering Bedouin could always move on (and the effendi needed moving on), contributed to the party's proposal on Palestine, in 1944. The National Executive Committee's report, after noting the Nazi atrocities against the Jews, stated:
Here too in Palestine surely is a case, on human grounds and to promote stable settlement, for transfer of population. Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews move in. The Arabs have many wide territories of their own; they must not claim to exclude the Jews from this small area of Palestine, less than the size of Wales.31
Third, from the mid-1930s the Zionist goal of gathering Jews in Palestine was seen increasingly, by at least some Labour leaders, as a solution to the growing number of refugees from fascist persecution in Germany and Eastern Europe. In this, perceptions of self-interest, humanitarian concern and anti-Semitic prejudices were intermingled. Between 1933 and 1939 about 50,000 Jews sought refuge in Britain. Although Labour politicians interceded on behalf of individual Jews seeking refuge in Britain, the Labour Party did not advocate a mass entry of Jews. Following the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, Noel-Baker called on the government to 'consider the principle of large-scale settlement in Palestine, where there is work ready to be done'.32 Zionism enabled Labour to reconcile its humanitarian concern for the Jewish victims of fascism and anti-Semitism with its own unease over immigration in to Britain. Morrison, as Home Secretary in the coalition government, apparently believed that anti-Semitism inevitably accompanied the presence of Jews and the greater their number, the more intense the anti-Semitism. He warned his Cabinet colleagues in 1940: 'If there were [sic] any substantial increase in the number of Jewish refugees or if these refugees did not leave this country after the war we should be in for serious trouble.'33
Fourth, the right wing of the Labour Party saw in Labour Zionism a counter-model to Soviet communism, useful in its political struggle against Communist influence in working-class politics. Labour Zionism proclaimed the priority of the national interest and it played down the role of class struggle, claiming to build socialism in collaboration with rather than through the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie. In 1922, MacDonald contrasted the 'constructive work' of the cooperatives in Palestine with Lenin's approach and concluded: 'we cannot begin with the creation of an agricultural settlement, but if England were in a similar position to Palestine, we should also have to follow the same course'.34 And Morrison, who had been active in driving out Communists from the Labour party, argued that the Zionist cooperatives were giving rise to 'a finer thing than is happening in any part of Russia. Here are colonies in which people are working on a voluntary basis, with no element of dictatorship or compulsion behind them'.35
In the 1930s, the Labour Party's support for a Jewish national home in Palestine drew on a humanitarian concern for the victims of fascism. This concern was generally linked to nationalist and pro-imperialist sentiments, to which Labour Zionism often explicitly appealed. To the Labour Movement, Zionist colonisation - the term used, at the time, by Zionists - held out the prospect of extending socialism into the Middle East without dismantling the British Empire and of providing refuge to Jews, without social cost or political risk to British society. In this sense, Zionism was the perfect ideological supplement to the social democratic parties of the Second International, which in their policy towards the colonial world had moved away from a commitment to national self-determination and, in their own countries, sought to defend their political base in the face of right-wing and, in some cases, fascist parties by vaunting their nationalist credentials.
The Labour party's response to the Nazi extermination, which precipitated its 1944 proposal that the Arabs move out of Palestine, was largely defined by the ideological ascendancy that Zionism had acquired in the Labour movement in the 1930s. But with the election of a Labour government in 1945, the party leadership, as the guardians of British imperial interests, became subject to different pressures and entered into a bitter confrontation with Zionism. Out of this clash, the Labour Party did not come to a new understanding of the Palestine conflict. Bevin and Attlee pursued a policy in the Middle East in which ultimately the Palestinian Arab case for self-determination went by default just as it had done in the party's traditional, pro-Zionist stance.
The foreign policy of the Labour government that took office in 1945 has been closely identified with Ernest Bevin and much discussion has been devoted to determining whether Bevin was anti-Semitic or not. The term 'Bevin's foreign policy' is a useful shorthand designation. It is however misleading to interpret it in relation to Palestine as defined by his attitude to Jews. As Louis points out, Bevin's 'anti-Semitic' reputation developed from policy, not personal sentiment'.36
A paper submitted by Bevin to the Cabinet, in August 1949, summarised the importance of the Middle East for British interests:
Strategically the Middle East is a focal point of communications, a source of oil, a shieid to Africa and the Indian Ocean, and an irreplaceable offensive base. Economically, it is, owing to oil and cotton, essential to United Kingdom recovery.37
Bevin perceived Britain's position in the Middle East as under threat mostly from Russia and Arab nationalism, and to a lesser extent, from US commercial rivalry. In so far as he sought to add a distinctly Labour slant to Middle East policy, it was to give Britain a role in the region's economic development and to place London's political relations to Arab governments on a more equal and cooperative basis.
On the economic front, Bevin was prepared to recognise that past British policy had been of little benefit to the mass of the peasantry and he aspired to what he called a 'peasants, not pashas' policy. In economic terms, however, the post-war Labour government lacked the resources to deliver. The government faced, at the end of the war, an enormous debt and far from being able to fund an investment programme, it sought to cling on to the Middle East countries' sterling deposits, by opposing sterling's convertibility and thereby forcing these countries to be de facto creditors to Britain. The assistance Bevin offered was largely restricted to the provision of technical and scientific experts to be operated by the British Middle East Office in collaboration with Arab governments. Technical assistance, it was thought, could underpin British influence with a broader social base than in the past. The development work of the BMEO was limited, however, not only by resources - including a shortage of technical experts - but more seriously by the political constraints within which it operated. It could do little to improve the position of the fellaheen within the prevailing system of land ownership but Britain's strategic position depended on the conservative rulers who upheld that system. To retain British influence in the Middle East, Bevin needed the 'pashas' and in the face of the Palestine conflict none more than Abdullah, the King of Transjordan.
Bevin's close alliance with Abdullah has never been in doubt but it is only since the late 1980s that Han Pappé and Avi Shlaim - who belong to a new school of Israeli historians - have challenged the traditional Zionist account of 1948. Using documents released after 30 years by the Foreign Office, Pappé and Shlaim have shown that the British-Abdullah connection did not form a united front with the Arab nations aimed at thwarting the formation of a Jewish state. Rather, the connection operated, from an early stage of the 1948 war, on the understanding that the Zionist objective would have to be accommodated.38 Bevin's support for Abdullah during the war prevented not the formation of a Jewish state but of the sovereign Arab Palestine, which the UN had also decreed. This was to set the limit of the Labour government's 'pro-Arab' leaning. Bevin's foreign policy was, in essence, as Elizabeth Monroe has pointed out, pro-British: its primary objective was to preserve the allegiance of rulers on whom British power in the Middle East depended.39
Bevin's initial aim had been to reconcile Jewish and Arab claims by proposals for various forms of unitary state, under continued British tutelage. When this proved unsatisfactory to both sides, and the British presence in Palestine was put under pressure by a campaign of terrorism by Zionist armed groups, the Labour government decided to put Palestine's future status before the UN. The Foreign Office had believed that the international community would merely reaffirm Britain's responsibility in finding a solution to the conflict. Successful Zionist lobbying, however, and American pressure led the General Assembly to partition Palestine into two states, an Arab and a Jewish, with Jerusalem accorded a separate, international status. To the Palestine Arab leadership, as to the Arab states, the partition was unacceptable. On 15 May 1948, on the termination of the British Mandate, the Arab states declared war on the newly established Israeli state. Abdullah was the supreme commander of the Arab offensive, a position that was more than nominal by virtue of his control of the Arab Legion, the strongest of the Arab forces. The legion received its funding, arms and a cohort of officers from Britain. Abdullah's objective was however more than the proclaimed liberation of Palestine. He saw the war as an opportunity to expand his impoverished kingdom by incorporating the more developed Palestine. Pappé and Shlaim argue that Abdullah had an understanding with the Zionist leadership that, in tandem with the formation of the Jewish state, Transjordan would annex the UN-designated Arab part of Palestine. Only over Jerusalem could the two sides not accommodate each other's territorial ambitions. Elsewhere Abdullah adhered to the 'tacit understanding', as Shlaim describes it. The Arab Legion clashed with Zionist forces around Jerusalem but otherwise kept to the UN partition line. With Bevin having accepted, by early 1948, that a Jewish state was a fait accompli, the Abdullah-Zionist understanding was broadly in accord with his priorities: it promised to retain a part of Palestine under the control of Britain's most pliant ally. Bevin wanted to gain from the war only a change in the UN proposed boundaries of Israel, principally, in order to bring the Negev under Transjordan control. It was over this region of Palestine alone, Pappé argues, which Britain regarded as providing an important corridor between Egypt and the rest of the Arab world, that British and Israeli interests directly clashed.40 In the event, Israeli forces occupied the Negev, in accordance with the UN partition plan, and Galilee, in defiance of it, but central Palestine was divided between Israel and Transjordan. The Gaza strip came under Egypt's control, where the Mufti briefly headed the 'National Palestine Council'. By the end of 1948 Egypt had no further use for him and all semblance of a Palestinian Arab government ceased. The 'main aims of the British Palestine policy in the post-Mandatory period were achieved', notes Pappé. 'What had begun as an act to prevent a larger Jewish state turned into almost a crusade against an independent Palestine state by the British, the Jordanians and the Israelis'.41
Bevin's 'pro-Arab policy' did not, therefore, introduce to the Labour Party, or to the wider public, the Palestinian Arab claim to self-determination or, any sense, that here was a nation in the making. Both a bi-national state under British control, which Bevin first favoured, and the Transjordan annexation of the UN-defined Arab part of Palestine, precluded Labour ministers arguing for an Arab Palestine as a sovereign, independent nation. Nevertheless, the Labour government's pursuit of a conventional imperial policy in the Middle East necessarily led it to articulate some of the Arab world's opposition to Zionism. Thus for the first time since the 1930 Passfield White Paper controversy, an anti-Zionist case was put to, and had to be seriously considered by, Labour Party members. At the 1946 party conference, Bevin spoke about Palestine against the background of the government's decision to slightly relax restriction on Jewish immigration. The government opposed the Zionist demand of mass entry into Palestine of 100,000 Jews from the displaced persons' camps in Europe: 'I do not believe in absolutely racial States' reasoned Bevin.
I really do not, because you cannot sort the world out that way, however you try. It is too disturbing to move people who have been living there for centuries and make a racial state. You might just as well try to do that in England with the Welshmen and the Scotsmen, or, what is worse, try to make Glasgow completely Scotch and see how you would get on, or Cardiff completely Welsh. It is impossible.42
In Palestine it was none the less attempted. Bevin again evoked the rights of the indigenous people when he discussed the plight of the Palestinian refugees who fled from, or were expelled by, Zionist forces during the 1948 war.
The Arabs believe that for what they regard as a new and an alien State to be carved out of Arab land by a foreign force, against the wishes and over protests of its inhabitants, is a profound injustice. They point to the fact that since Britain gave up the Mandate - and I repeat the figure I gave just now - 500,000 Arabs have been driven from their homes. In Jaffa which was an Arab town of 70,000 allotted to the Arabs by the Assembly Resolution of 1947, there are now, so I am informed, only 5,000 Arabs.43
The publisher Victor Gollancz who, in 1943, had written Let My People Go, pleading for the Allies to rescue European Jewry from extermination was one of the few, on the left, moved to speak out on behalf of the Palestinian refugees. He felt, as a Jew, a particular responsibility and unhesitatingly identified the Arabs as the victims of the establishment of the Israeli state. Appealing to the Jewish community for financial contributions for the Palestinian refugees, he wrote:
... imagine that you are yourself one of these starving and dying people just as, five years ago, some of us tried to imagine that we were our own fellow Jews who were being gassed and cremated in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, or a few years later, that we were Germans on starvation rations in the cellars of Cologne. Have we then no responsibility in the face of this horror - no extra, no specially Jewish responsibility, over and above our common human responsibility? ... I am very far from implying that all this misery is the result, either immediately or in the final analysis, solely of Jewish actions. But two things are certain. These women and children would not be dying of starvation and exposure if the Israeli State had never been founded; and the Israeli state was founded exclusively for the salvation and rehabilitation of Jews.44
More bluntly, a woman who identified herself as a Labour supporter wrote to Bevin in response to a Picture Post report:
I was shocked and disgusted to read of the plight of several thousand Arab refugees camped in the Transjordan. To quote the reporter who reported these facts with pictures, lost, disillusioned people are waiting for a lot of 'shiny, pink men, sitting around a table' to make up their minds. Well have you?45
More common from Labour Party ranks, were expressions of support for Israel. These generally blamed the Palestinians' fate on the Arab states' rejection of the UN partition and on their subsequent attack on the newly established Jewish state. Grossman, who became a fervent advocate of Zionism, nevertheless expressed the hope that Israel would allow the refugees to return, though he argued that it would be better to provide them with alternative housing in their 'own' communities:
They [the Israelis] say how stupid it would be to move them back. After all, these villages were only mud huts anyway. They were terribly bad villages full of vermin. Give them better houses in their own Arab community either in the Arab triangle of Arab Palestine or in Transjordan.46
The destruction of Palestinian society and the dispersal of its people caused little interest either in the Labour Party or among communists. The Communist Party had some influence on the left of the Labour Party but it had abandoned its earlier hostility to a Jewish state, in line with the change in the Soviet Union's position. After 1945, the Communist movement saw Zionism as a force that could weaken British imperialism in the Middle East. In consequence, apart from a few individuals, the left neither embraced the Palestinian Arabs' right to self-determination, nor evinced much humanitarian concern for the Palestinian refugees. Bringing their plight to the attention of the British public was left almost entirely to the government, the mainstream press and a few voluntary organisations. 'The striking fact about the Palestine situation', noted Tribune in October 1949, 'is the manner in which it has dropped out of the news'. In December, however, Palestine was again newsworthy, as result of a UN appeal on behalf of the refugees. A few months later a Guardian editorial claimed: 'The plight of the Arab refugees from Palestine is slowly burning itself into the conscience of the country'.47 But this followed a House of Lords debate and the leader writer appears to have drawn the unlikely conclusion that its deliberation reflected the public mood. The 'Christian Relief in the Holy Land' appeal disappointed the expectations of its sponsors as had a similar, earlier, attempt by Catholic voluntary societies. A Foreign Office official noted that though the organisers had hoped to raise between £200,000-500,000, they collected £1,800.48 The chairperson of the organising committee explained to Bevin:
We have raised a certain amount of money and sent some goods out to the Middle East but generally speaking there has just not been the interest in the Appeal'. He attributed the indifference to 'the political implications' and to the impression that 'the United Nations was dealing with the matter.49
A more probable reason was the political parties' near silence on the refugees. A Mass Observations survey of attitudes to the Palestine conflict found, in 1947, from its sample of artisan and middle class respondents, that: 'Personal sympathy with the Arabs is very rare; for most they seem to be a rather shadowy people, whose rights, must in principle be upheld.'50
After 1949, the Palestinian Arabs rarely figured in Labour Party discourse on Israel or on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The fate of the Palestinians as a result of Israel's establishment clearly did not tally with one of the main arguments in the party's past defence of the Zionist project, namely, that it benefits the Arab population of Palestine. Grossman, in a lecture to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Israel, explained that this had been an illusion of Weizmann, the pioneer of modem Zionism, though without admitting that the Labour Party had subscribed to it.
One of the central themes of his Zionist philosophy was that the National Home was not only a Jewish need - it was essential also to the renaissance of the Arab world. It was his notion that Israel should become the pilot plant in which should take place those experiments in agriculture, in the re-conquest of the desert, in the industrialisation of a backward area and in collective living required to revive the vanished glories of Middle Eastern civilisation.
Crossman concluded: 'Not one tittle of this vision has come true.'51 Yet he attributed this failure not to the vision - or to its implementation - but to the Arab world's response, to its hostility to Israel. About the Palestinians he had little to say. Most of the refugees, he cursorily remarked, 'sit idly in the UNRWA camps today', while the Arab population remaining in Israel which he had described, in 1949, as 'a privileged and pampered minority',52 he now considered to be justifiably discriminated against: 'Ten years after the war ended, these Arab villagers are still a "fifth column" inside Israel, and one cannot be surprised that the Army and police insist on treating them as such.'53
Two decades after the publication of Crossman's lectures on Israel, Harold Wilson published his tribute to Zionism, The Chariots of Israel. In the intervening period and particularly during the 1970s, there had developed a current of opinion in the party critical of Israeli policies towards its Arab neighbours and the Palestinians. In 1973, the party's annual conference adopted a resolution which pointed to 'the failure to find a fair and humane solution to the problems of the Palestinian community' as the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict. A few months later, the party leadership's insistence on a pro-Israeli stance towards the 1973 Arab-Israeli war provoked dissension in the parliamentary party.54 Wilson's book was characteristic of the dominant view in the party. In 400 pages devoted to recounting the British involvement in Palestine, Wilson omits to mention the 1948 war's impact on the Arab inhabitants, even from the narrow angle of the Attlee government's effort to provide humanitarian assistance to the refugees. No leading Labour Party figure seems ever to have glimpsed, as Kurtz did in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the horror of what had been done in the name of a doctrine that had claimed to bring progress to the 'natives'.
1. Report of the British Red Cross Commission, 23 February 1949, FCXII Dr. 4, p. 53, British Red Cross Archives, Wonersh, Guildford.
2. Warburton, M. C., 'The Arab Refugee Situation', approx. March/April 1949, G2/P1 Church Missionary Society Archives, Birmingham University.
3. Report of the Secretary of the United Nations Relief for Palestinian Refugees, 30 September 1949, F0371/75442, Public Records Office.
4. The Times, 10 October 1949.
5. The Times, 18 November 1949.
6. Morgan Phillips to D. Weitzman, 2 February 1950, Box Palestine/Israel, Labour Party Archives, Manchester Labour History Museum.
7. Alice Bacon and Sam Watson, Report, Labour Party Delegation to Israel, 29 December-13 January 1950, p. 10.
8. Gorny, Y. (1983), The British Labour Movement and Zionism, 1917-1948, London: Frank Cass, p. 188.
9. Arnov, D. (1994), 'The Holocaust and the Birth of Israel: Reassessing a Causal Relationship', Journal of Israeli History, 15 (13).
10. Report on Attitudes to Palestine and Jews, September 1947, File Reports 2515, p. 58, Mass Observation Archives, University of Sussex.
11. Friesel, E. (1979), 'The Holocaust and the Birth of Israel', The Wiener Library Bulletin, 32 (49/50), 57.
12. Bacon and Watson, op. cit., p. 8.
13. MacDonald, J. R. (1922), A Socialist in Palestine, London: Poale Zion.
14. Ibid., p. 2.
15. Ibid., p. 19.
16. Ibid., p. 13.
17. Lockman, Z. (1976), Comrades and Enemies, Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 243.
18. Hansard, 19 June 1936, vol. 313, col. 1326.
19. Daily Herald, 12 October 1936.
20. Hansard, op. cit., col. 1354.
21. Ibid., col. 1388.
22. Labour Party Annual Conference Report, 1936, pp. 220-21.
23. Labour Party Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions, 17 January 1942. Letter from Tom Reid, International Department, Box Palestine/Israel.
24. Reid, T. 'The Palestine Problem', 238B, September 1941.
25. Berl Locker to Histadruth, 30 November 1942, Kaplansky Papers, A137/75, Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.
26. Ben-Gurion, D. (1971), Letters to Paula, London: Valentine Mitchell, p. 100.
27. Hansard, 24 November 1938, vol. 341, col. 2005.
28. Hansard, 20 July 1939, vol. 350, col. 846.
29. New Leader, 2 January 1931.
30. Hansard, 24 March 1936, vol. 310, col. 1084.
31. 'The International Post-War Settlement' NEC, Labour Party, 1944, London.
32. Hansard, 21 November 1938, vol. 341, col. 1438.
33. Quoted in Wasserstein, Β. (1979), Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1935-1945, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 179.
34. MacDonald, op. cit., p. 24.
35. Hansard, 19 June 1936, vol. 313, col. 1387.
36. Louis, W. R. (1986), 'British Imperialism and the End of the Palestine Mandate', in W. R. Louis and R. Stookey (eds), The End of the Palestine Mandate, London: J. B. Tauris, p. 1.
37. Quoted in Northedge, F. S. (1984), 'Britain and the Middle East', in R. Ovendale (ed.), The Foreign Policy of the Labour Government, Leicester: Leicester University Press, p. 149.
38. Pappé, I. (1988), Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-51, Basingstoke: Macmillan; Shlaim, A. (1988), Collusion Across the Jordan, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
39. Monroe, E. (1961), 'Mr Bevin's "Arab Policy'", St. Antony's Papers, no. 11, p. 23.
40. Pappé, op. cit., p. 58.
41. Ibid., p. 114.
42. Labour Party Annual Conference Report, 1946, p. 166.
43. Hansard, 26 January 1949, vol. 460, col. 933.
44. Gollancz, V., 'Jewish Aid for Arab Refugees', MSS.157/3/JS/2/1, Gollancz Papers, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.
45. J. H. Chubb to Bevin, 22 June 1949, FO371/75430.
46. Hansard, 26 January 1949, vol. 460, col. 995.
47. Tribune, 29 October 1948; Guardian, 31 March 1949.
48. J. T. Sheringham, 11 April 1950, FO371/82235.
49. R. Williams-Thompson to Bevin, 6 April 1950, FO371/82235.
50. Report on Attitudes to Palestine and Jews, p. 47.
51. Crossman, R. (1960), A Nation Reborn, London: Hamish Hamilton, p. 104.
52. Hansard, 26 January 1949, vol. 460, col. 995.
53. Grossman, op. cit., p. 95.
54. Watkins, D. (1984), The Exceptional Conflict, London: CAABU, p. 37.