If Attlee became resolute in ending British rule in India, he was less sure-footed in reaching decisions concerning Palestine, where the interlocking problems, strategic and economic, that dictated policy immediately after the war were uppermost. There was one additional element, moreover, to the Gordian knot. Whereas his policy in India was welcomed by the United States, whose economic support was vital to Britain, in Palestine every attempt to find a solution was complicated by the influence that American Zionist organisations – and concern about the 1946 and 1948 American elections – were able to exercise on Truman. International opinion was almost universally shaped by the recent Nazi extermination policy and by the existence of a quarter of a million Jewish refugees in Europe. Attlee and Bevin were thus under pressure to resolve the Jewish refugee problem without regard to the issue of dispossessed Arabs that would follow either creation of a Jewish homeland or the partition of Palestine.
The idea of a Jewish homeland was endorsed by the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, when Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour announced that the British government ‘[viewed] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and [would] use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’.1 The Declaration was immediately denounced by Arab leaders and provoked the accusation that Britain intended to make Palestine ‘as Jewish as England is English’. The British government denied this intention in a White Paper of June 1922 and clarified its interpretation of the Balfour Declaration as proposing to create a Jewish homeland within Palestine, rather than to turn Palestine into a Jewish homeland.2
In the following month a League of Nations Mandate decreed that Britain ‘shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home … and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.’3 The Mandate charged the British government with the responsibility of consulting with the Zionist organisation to secure the co-operation of all Jews willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish national home4 while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population were not prejudiced.5
During the early 1930s, as German racial policies caused a surge of Jewish emigration to Palestine, Arab leaders became increasingly concerned that Arabs would become a minority; the Black Hand, an anti-Zionist group founded in 1930, orchestrated a campaign of terror. When its leader Sheikh Izz ad-Din-al-Qassam was killed by British police in November 1935 the Arab population organised a six-month general strike and acts of violence against Jewish settlers. In November 1936 the Palestine Royal Commission (‘The Peel Commission’) arrived in Palestine to investigate and report on the state of affairs. Members spent two months there before issuing a comprehensive report in July 1937.
The report narrated the history of Palestine since earliest times, recording that under the Mandate the Jewish population rose from about 55,000 to about 108,000 by March 1925.6 A quite unusual number, they commented, were young and highly educated. The great majority was almost passionately conscious of a national mission.7
The report concluded that the co-existence of two separate communities, to each of whom Britain had made certain promises, was not feasible and recommended partition into the north and mid-west of the country, which would be awarded to the Jews, and the south and mid-east, which would be awarded to the Arabs. The Mandate should be terminated, except in the area surrounding Jerusalem and a corridor from Jerusalem to the sea at Jaffa. It added somewhat pessimistically, but not without hope, that ‘To both Arabs and Jews Partition offers a prospect – and we see no prospect in any other policy – of obtaining the inestimable boon of peace.’8
Arab leaders condemned the report unequivocally as a breach of the British promise to grant them independence; ‘the very presence of Jews enjoying rights was a betrayal of the British word’.9 Jewish leader David Ben-Gurion was more pragmatic, believing that this was an undreamed of opportunity. It was, he said, a national consolidation in a free homeland. If through weakness, neglect or negligence, it was not seized, Zionists would have lost a chance that they might never have again.10
The Woodhead Commission, convened to examine the Peel plan in 1938, rejected partition as unworkable, and the Peel recommendations were abandoned. A White Paper of 1939 distinguished carefully between making all of Palestine a Jewish homeland and creating a Jewish homeland ‘in Palestine’, declaring that British policy was to pursue the latter. It proposed that, after the restoration of order, Palestine should become independent within ten years. In the meantime, 50,000 Jewish immigrants would be admitted over five years and 25,000 would be admitted as soon as the High Commissioner was satisfied that there was adequate provision for their maintenance.11
Both Arab and Jewish communities were disappointed with these conclusions. An inchoate Jewish campaign of violence was set aside when war broke out in 1939. Twenty years later Ben-Gurion reflected bitterly on the rejection of partition. Had partition been carried out, he said, six million Jews in Europe would not have been killed, as most of them would have been in Israel.12
British policy in 1945, established between Attlee and Bevin, was to retain British influence in the Middle East, a difficult task as Britain was committed to remove its forces from Egypt. Adjacent Palestine, therefore, assumed greater strategic importance. Both Attlee and Bevin were determined to prevent the Soviet Union from occupying any void created by British withdrawal. They were equally concerned that the United States, whose policy in the region was uncertain and inconsistent, might once again become isolationist and that Britain would be faced with the task of military occupation without American support. Truman had assumed that Churchill would win the election and wrote to him on 24 July appealing to Churchill’s ‘deep and sympathetic interest in Jewish settlement in Palestine’ and urging the lifting of immigration restrictions.13 That letter was delivered to Attlee, who responded, requesting time to consider the matter and undertaking to ‘give early and careful consideration to [the] memorandum’.14
Attlee believed that Truman’s concern was motivated principally by domestic politics. He later maintained to Francis Williams that ‘There’s no Arab vote in America, but there’s a very heavy Jewish vote and the Americans are always having elections.15 Bevin too expressed his belief that Truman’s concern to settle Jews in Palestine was to avoid having more of them in New York. Both views were only partially true. Dean Acheson, Assistant Secretary of State, recognised Truman’s deep commitment to the Jewish homeland, born from his long-standing friendship with Eddie Jacobson, formed when both served in France in 1917. Jacobson, the owner of Westport Men’s Wear in Kansas City, was a passionate Zionist from whom Truman had acquired sympathy for Zionist claims in Palestine.16
Attlee needed time to be briefed on the issue but Truman, ever suspicious of advice from ‘the clannish and snooty bunch’17 in the State Department and not unlike the Prime Minister in his desire for immediate implementation of decisions, took personal control of American policy. He distinguished between long-term and short-term plans, confident that ‘the long-range fate of Palestine was the kind of problem we had the UN for; some immediate aid, however, was needed for the Jews in Europe’.18 He accordingly assured Arabs that ‘no decision should be taken regarding the basic situation in Palestine without full consultation with Arabs and Jews’. Somewhat disingenuously, Truman later wrote that ‘to assure the Arabs that they would be consulted was by no means inconsistent with my generally sympathetic attitude toward Jewish aspirations.’19
Having allowed Attlee one month to study the problem, Truman renewed pressure for action and wrote to Attlee on 31 August. He noted that ‘the available certificates for immigration into Palestine will be exhausted in the near future’ and proposed that an additional 100,000 certificates be granted. This would ‘contribute greatly to a sound solution for the future of Jews still in Germany and Austria, and for other Jewish refugees who do not wish to remain where they are or who for understandable reasons do not desire to return to their countries of origin.’ If this were to be effective, he maintained, it should not be delayed.20
Failing to recognise the strength of the President’s determination to reach early resolution of the problem, Attlee again requested time to study the question, urging Truman to take no action ‘in the interval’. His concern was that he was being pressured into action for which the President refused to take responsibility. Whatever course Britain took, it was certain to inflame the passions of one, or the other, or both of the groups in Palestine. He therefore decided to move the USA from ‘being a private exhorter to a publicly responsible partner in Palestine affairs’.21 While formally declining to refashion immigration policy, he proposed to Truman a suggestion of Bevin’s that an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry be established. Truman promptly announced at a press conference the establishment of the committee under a rotating chairmanship.22 At the same time he released the content of his letter to Attlee of 31 August. When this failed to produce the desired result, he opened the New Year with a follow-up cable: ‘Would appreciate your advising me how many certificates per month are now being issued for admission of Jews into Palestine. I understood that there were to be three thousand but news dispatches are confusing. There is, as you know, great interest in this subject in the United States.’23
Attlee responded on 4 January, informing Truman (as he doubtless knew) that ‘the quota of 75,000 authorised under the White Paper of 1939 [was] virtually exhausted’ and that immigration was being maintained ‘at present rate of 1,500 (repeat 1,500) persons per month pending consideration of report of the Anglo-American Committee.’24
The committee submitted its report to the British and the American governments on 22 April. This was agreed to, and on 1 May the report and the ten recommendations of the committee were made known. These were that:
• There was no country other than Palestine that could find the necessary homes to accommodate displaced persons;
• 100,000 certificates should be issued immediately to victims of Nazis and Fascists, and immigration should be ‘pushed forward as rapidly as conditions will permit’;
• it must be made clear that Jew shall not dominate Arab and Arab shall not dominate Jew in Palestine and all rights of Christians, Jews and Muslims will be protected;
• because any attempt to establish an independent Palestinian state or states would result in civil war the Mandate should continue ‘pending the execution of a trusteeship agreement under the United Nations’;
• the ‘mandatory or trustee should proclaim the principle that Arab economic, educational and political advancement in Palestine is of equal importance with that of the Jews and should at once prepare measures designed to bridge the gap which now exists and raise the Arab standard of living to that of the Jews’;
• that Jewish immigration should be facilitated ‘under suitable conditions’;
• that there should be freedom of sale of land, without regard to ‘race, community or creed’, and the government should exercise close supervision of all holy places;
• plans for agricultural development should be implemented to raise the living standard of both Arabs and Jews;
• educational standards should be reformed and, in due course, compulsory education be introduced; and
• it should be made clear to all parties that terrorism, violence and the formation of private armies would be resolutely suppressed.25
The report contained equitable recommendations to which no impartial reader could object. It also had no chance of being implemented, essentially voicing Utopian principles that neither side, in entrenched positions, would accept. As Acheson succinctly summarised, ‘Unfortunately, the only significant omissions were how those goals, so unanimously desired, were to be achieved’.26
Bevin cabled Halifax in Washington on 22 April and, anticipating a violent reaction to the report, requested that it be released simultaneously in London and Washington the following week.27 Attlee and Bevin were irked by Truman’s wish to release at least part of the report immediately28 and repeated their request on 24 April. Eventually a release date of 1 May was agreed on.29
When the Cabinet discussed the recommendations, Bevin was confident that a reasonable settlement could be reached. It was an Anglo-American committee, he stressed, and the two nations should handle the problems jointly. He resisted any suggestion of referral to the UN as that would be regarded as an admission of British failure. The first step must be to approach the American government, a task that he could undertake at the Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Paris.30 Dalton estimated that the cost of settling 100,000 Jews in Palestine would be £100 million and recurrent expenditure of between £5 million and £10 million. This was no small sum for Britain to undertake. The United States must be pressed to share in this expenditure; the committee’s report had, after all, stressed the responsibility of the whole world for the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.31
At the time that the committee’s report was released the Cabinet Mission in India was having its first taste of how difficult it was to reach agreement between rival groups for whom politics and religion were one. Although circumstances in India and Palestine were radically different, Attlee must have drawn parallels between the difficulties presented by the two countries. Even if he did not at first do so, Churchill was ever willing to use the House of Commons to attack the government for its handling of either or both situations.32
Churchill was not alone in his criticism of the government’s apparent indecision. Field Marshal Montgomery visited Palestine shortly after the release of the report and was ‘much perturbed’ by what he observed, concluding that the High Commissioner was unable to make up his mind what to do. Indecision and hesitation were in evidence everywhere, emanating from Whitehall. Policy and decisions were required.33
It is baffling that Attlee, whose eventual handling of the deadlock in India was firm and decisive, incurring criticism for its very decisiveness, could be so unsure of his footing in Palestine. The most likely explanation is that, recognising Britain’s need for both political and material support from the United States, he continued to believe that joint action was a possibility. In this he was naïve. Truman continued to meet subtle implications of American responsibility with a straight bat. In May Harriman, American Ambassador in London, delivered a curtly elusive message from President to Prime Minister: ‘In view of the urgency surrounding the question of the admission to Palestine of the 100,000 Jews whose entry is recommended by the committee, I sincerely hope that it will be possible to initiate and complete the consultations with Arabs and Jews at the earliest possible moment.’34
Attlee responded graciously to Truman, mentioning that Bevin and Byrnes had spoken and referred to the need to discuss military and financial implications. This was the first anniversary of VE Day and he spoke of the ‘heartfelt gratitude of the people and government of this country for the outstanding part you played in the common victory’, concluding, ‘I trust that our comradeship in war will continue in the days of peace.’35 Attlee wondered what else he could do to flush the President out. The Foreign Office and the Colonial Office discussed this and advised him on 11 May that they could see little else that he could do at that stage. Truman had neatly stonewalled the approach, discussing Palestine as though the only issue at stake was the granting of 100,000 entry certificates.
Exchanges along these lines continued as Attlee pressed the President gently about sharing military and financial responsibilities.36 Truman responded on 17 May, agreeing to discussions between US and British experts and asking Attlee what subjects he thought they might discuss, quite ignoring Attlee’s reference to military and financial matters.37 Finally he stated terms. On 5 June he sent a cleverly constructed cable stating the quid pro quo in connection with a proposed meeting of British and American experts. He was, he said, organising the American group as quickly as possible, continuing,
As we doubt however that our plans will be sufficiently advanced for our side to begin the discussions on the Report as a whole at the time you suggest, namely one week prior to June 20, we are planning to send to London by that time one or more experts to discuss the urgent physical problems arising out of the transfer of Palestine of the 100,000 Jews mentioned in the Report.38
The implication is clear: before any discussion of military or financial assistance can take place, not only must Britain contact Jewish and Arab organisations, there must also be firm arrangements in place for the 100,000 Jews whose admission to Palestine the Report advocated. In case Attlee had not grasped the interconnection, Truman returned to the subject later, saying, ‘we feel it would be highly desirable that we begin immediately consideration of the hundred thousand Jews whose situation continues to cause grave concern’ and commits the USA to responsibility for their transport to Palestine.
Truman had ‘named the price of the papers’. Attlee could not afford to attract the world’s odium as grotesque evidence of Nazi racial policy emerged after the occupation of Germany. Montgomery alluded to this, commenting that ‘British rule existed only in name; the true rulers seemed to me to be the Jews, whose unspoken slogan was “You dare not touch us”.’39 Both Attlee and Bevin, to whom the Prime Minister entrusted British policy in Palestine, belonged to a generation for whom racial profiling and jokes, that today would be considered offensive, were common. Attlee wrote to Tom about American attitudes to Jewish immigration, jesting that in America Zionism had become a profitable racket. ‘A Zionist is defined as a Jew who collects money from another Jew to send another Jew to Palestine. The collector, I gather, takes a good percentage of his collections.’40
Yet neither Attlee nor Bevin, whose comments on Jewish immigration aroused such hatred that he was pelted with eggs in New York, was fundamentally anti-Semitic.41 Certainly Bevin was anti-Zionist and he was ever conscious that Arabs were under-represented in Parliament and Congress.42 It would be false to see Attlee’s hesitation over Palestine in counterpoint to Truman’s pro-Zionist sympathies. For India Attlee had an ‘inspiration’ that led to a conclusion; in Palestine he had no such enlightenment. All he could envisage was world opinion, led by Truman, coalescing to present Britain as the villain, while it was Britain that continued to pay for maintenance of order in a rapidly deteriorating situation. Exactly as he feared, Truman took ‘the plum out of the pudding’,43 seizing on the committee’s recommendation that 100,000 entry visas be granted immediately; once again Attlee was faced with a crisis to which he had no solution.
By now, perhaps, he had come to realise that Truman’s motivation was not purely political, that he was genuinely pro-Zionist. That realisation did nothing to stem mounting bad feeling between the two, however, as Attlee was thoroughly exasperated with the President’s pressure. Neither Attlee nor Truman was ‘of a leaning disposition’44 and Truman was personally applying the tourniquet, overruling suggestions from Acheson and Loy Henderson at the State Department.45 That pressure came closer than anything else to erode goodwill between London and Washington.
Truman also kept up diplomatic pressure; Harriman wrote to Bevin on 10 June, informing him that a group of State Department officials and US military officers would come to London on 12 June to discuss the 100,000 Jews and their movement to Palestine.
Effectively painted into a corner, Attlee replied, expressing delight at the proposed talks in London but repeating that the transfer of 100,000 people to Palestine was something that required careful planning.46 Truman maintained the pressure, responding immediately and, in a four-paragraph cable, mentioning the 100,000 Jews three times.47 As Sir Orme Sargent, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, put it in diplomatic language to Attlee, ‘It is evident from President Truman’s latest telegram to you on this subject that the two governments still have different ideas as to the purpose of the talks about to begin in London.’48
By 28 June the first phase of the talks was complete and Truman informed Attlee that the American Cabinet committee on Palestine would leave for London after the return of ‘the American experts who have been discussing in London the technical aspects of the early immigration of 100,000 Jews into Palestine.’49 There was more bad news for the Prime Minister as George Hall, Secretary of State for the Colonies, warned that the Arabs were preparing to resist any increased immigration quotas and to ‘fight with all the means in their power’.50 In the following week the Chiefs of Staff warned of the importance of preventing Soviet influence in the region and that there would be a breakdown of trust between Britain and Arabs and renewed violence from Zionists if Britain attempted to implement the report’s conclusions. There would be a need for an additional two infantry divisions, one armoured brigade and three infantry battalions, as well as additional air and naval forces. The annual cost of these reinforcements would be £96 million; it would be necessary to ask the USA to assist, but American public opinion was demanding immediate and total demobilisation.51
Almost a year had now passed since Truman urged Attlee to ‘give early and careful consideration’ to the question of immigration, yet despite the President’s repeated plea for the granting of 100,000 visas, no progress had been made beyond agreement to hold another conference. Meanwhile Zionist terrorism was mounting, and Attlee authorised military action, arresting the Zionist leaders. This provided the background for the London meeting of British and American experts (known as the Morrison-Grady group), chaired by Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook and the President’s emissary, Henry Grady. On 22 July, soon after the American team arrived, the Jewish Irgun group blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where the British Secretariat was housed, killing ninety-one people.
The attack increased pressure on the experts; three days later the contents of the Morrison-Grady plan were leaked. These incorporated most elements of Attlee’s proposals, with the added principle of Truman’s distinction between short-term and long-term measures. It urged the admission of 100,000 Jews but stressed that this must be conditional on Arab agreement. For the long-term it recommended federalisation, Jewish and Arab provinces with local powers, and American economic aid for Palestinian Arabs, amounting to $50 million.52 In a masterly piece of litotes the statement added,
We recognise that, in view of the existing situation in Palestine, any policy … will probably have to be introduced without the willing consent of either community. On the other hand, we agree that no policy should be enforced against sustained and determined resistance by either Jews or Arabs. An effort to obtain at least a measure of acquiescence from the Arabs and Jews would therefore be an essential preliminary to the introduction of the above proposals … We are not able at this stage to make recommendations regarding the course to be adopted if the conference with Arab and Jewish representatives led to the conclusion that the introduction of the policy proposed would be violently resisted by one or both of the two peoples in Palestine. In that situation further consultation between our two governments would be necessary.53
One wonders why the American delegation bothered to cross the Atlantic. Nonetheless, Attlee cabled Truman on 25 July, paying tribute to Grady and his team and urging that the committee’s recommendations be implemented without delay.54
Within days the plan had been rejected by Jews, Arabs and by Congressional leaders. The United States now acquired the mantle, handed off by Attlee, of the most hated power in the Middle East.55 Recriminations flowed across the Atlantic as Truman informed Attlee that the US could not accept the report and Churchill proposed in the Commons that Britain relinquish its mandate if the United States was not prepared to assist. Inevitably, the report languished and died.
Attlee can rarely have felt Britain’s diminished position more acutely than at this point. Dependent on American financial and moral support, he believed that Truman, with his eye on public opinion, paid too little regard to the danger of Soviet penetration of the Middle East. This concern grew when he received a cable from the Moscow Embassy. Sir Maurice Peterson cabled the Foreign Office with a summary of a lecture by Lutski, the Soviet expert on Palestine.56 Lutski’s principal target had been British imperialism in the Middle East and, secondly, American interest in the strategic position and oil resources in the region. He came out strongly in favour of the Arabs – the first Soviet spokesman to do so – and attacked the Zionist goal of a Jewish bourgeois state in Palestine. Reports in Pravda and Izvestia, however, stressed the attacks on Britain and the United States but avoided any condemnation of Zionism.57 Peterson took this as Soviet reluctance to express their long-standing disapproval of Zionism while being prepared to condemn the traditional targets, Britain and America. This added urgency to Attlee’s conviction that the United States must be compelled to take a firm stand in the Middle East.
Truman’s priorities, however, were more domestic than global. Attlee sent him a statement that he proposed to make on Morrison-Grady and eagerly awaited a reply.58 When this was received, it confirmed Attlee’s fears. Acheson informed Lord Inverchapel that the President was unable to make an announcement along the lines suggested, having received from the Cabinet ‘the strongest opposition, which had been fully shared by the leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress’. Moreover, Senator Taft and the Jewish leaders also condemned the plan. According to Acheson, the President felt that ‘so far as Palestine is concerned all the support he had in the country was falling away from under him’ and that any statement from him would produce a kind of ‘Donnybrook Fair’.59 Two and a half hours later another telegram arrived from Washington with further news from Acheson: Truman was proposing to announce that he was recalling the Grady Mission to discuss the whole matter in detail.60 A cable from Inverchapel later that morning was scathing about Truman’s motives, attributing ‘this deplorable display of weakness’ to ‘reasons of domestic politics which, it will be recalled, caused the Administration last year to use every artifice of persuasion to defer the announcement about the establishment of the Anglo-American Committee until after the New York elections.’61
It is worth examining the correspondence between Attlee and Truman in detail as it provides a key to understanding Britain’s subsequent relations with the USA. Among many of Attlee’s colleagues there was resentment at the eclipse of British power; more fundamentally, the basic disagreements over Palestine in 1946 led to mistrust that was never quite overcome. For Attlee, Britain’s duty under the Mandate was cardinal. While he understood that Truman was not so obligated, he felt betrayed by Britain’s principal ally and this led him to question American motives and to doubt whether he could depend on Washington. Some questions were ‘political’; he understood the nature of diplomacy and pursuit of national advantage. But Truman’s refusal to consider Britain’s obligations and his persistent pressing for 100,000 entry permits influenced his attitude thereafter. It reeked of abnegation of duty for political advantage. He was able to compartmentalise relations between the two countries; on the other hand he was forced to recognise that he could not depend on Truman for what he considered fundamental moral support.
While Inverchapel in Washington was outspoken on the perceived enormity of Truman’s posture, Attlee kept silent, conscious that he was more dependent on the goodwill of the President than he would wish. He suppressed his frustration, discussed the position with Harriman and proceeded to fulfil what he saw as Britain’s obligation. The Cabinet agreed that Morrison should present the experts’ conclusions in a comprehensive statement to the Commons, despite a hint from Acheson that this would be seen as undermining Truman’s position.
Attlee still believed that a round-table conference of Zionist and Arab leaders and British and American representatives might bear fruit, but this hope was dashed when Zionist leaders refused to negotiate with the British. At one point he showed his teeth by stating that, without American support, there would be modifications which would ‘relate particularly to the tempo and extent of Jewish immigration and Arab development’.62 In short, he was telling Truman, if you want to see those 100,000 entry certificates, it would be best to support us. Truman, himself no stranger to political pressure, had more cards to play. When he needed to squeeze Attlee in the following year, he instructed Lew Douglas, the US Ambassador in London, to call on Bevin with the message that admission of the 100,000 to Palestine would enable Marshall Aid funds to be processed through Congress.63
Truman remained determined to facilitate the migration, yet the prospect of achieving this had waned between 1945 and 1946. Accordingly, on 4 October, the day of Yom Kippur, he announced that he was continuing his efforts on behalf of the 100,000 and was liberalising entry into the United States.64 He added that a plan for Palestine, based on the partition of the country between Arabs and Jews, ‘would command the support of public opinion in the United States’.65
Attlee, alerted that Truman was going to speak thus, cabled the President to ask him to delay his announcement until he had a chance to speak to Bevin. Truman ignored the request and Attlee, appalled at the President’s precipitate statement, cabled him:
I have received with great regret your letter refusing even a few hours grace to the Prime Minister of the country which has the actual responsibility for the government of Palestine in order that he might acquaint you with the actual situation and the probable results of your action. These may well include the frustration of the patient efforts to achieve a settlement and the loss of still more lives in Palestine.66
After an interval of six days Truman responded. He was not unaware, he told Attlee, of Britain’s position, but his concern – and that of the American people – was with the displaced Jews facing another winter, eighteen months after their liberation. It was a grim prospect that was undermining his government. His obligation was to speak up without further delay.67 It was not a dishonest letter as Truman was not a dishonest man. But he was a politician and he was aware that the proposed date for the conference of Arab and Jewish leaders came well after the mid-term elections and that, with the approval ratings of his administration badly damaged, he needed to inject some optimism before 5 November.
Attlee was too angry to reply. He wrote to Bevin that he had not replied to Truman and did not intend to do so immediately. He would consider his reply after the Cabinet meeting on 22 October. Bevin drafted a reply to Truman for the Prime Minister’s approval.68 Attlee scrawled on it with more than normal pressure ‘NO answer to President required. CRA’.
Truman, however, – and more crucially, public opinion worldwide – was not interested in niceties of diplomacy. The President was advocating liberalised immigration policies which Attlee was apparently resisting. Zionist confidence that Jewish desiderata could be attained prompted an outright demand for all Palestine to become a Jewish state. This, commented The Times, was ‘apparently on the principle that it is necessary to ask for a yard to get a foot’.69
At the end of January 1947 the second phase of the round-table conference ended in failure and Bevin informed General Marshall, now Secretary of State, that Britain would refer the whole problem to the United Nations.70 Attempts by Marshall to keep the responsibility for Palestine firmly in Bevin’s hands failed when Britain announced that she could no longer meet commitments in Greece.71 Bevin attacked American policy towards Palestine in the Commons and was cheered.
Partition was now the favoured solution but, as Bevin advised the Cabinet, Arabs were implacably opposed to partition and the Jews demanded a sovereign Jewish state.72 Bevin and Creech Jones73 had proposed a solution, whose object was self-government in Palestine, incorporating most of the desiderata of both sides, including admission of 100,000 Jews at the rate of 4,000 monthly for two years.74 If the Cabinet approved and if the plan had some chance of being accepted by both sides, then they should proceed; if not, then the matter should be referred immediately to the United Nations. Creech Jones said that he and General Sir Alan Cunningham, the High Commissioner, had believed that partition was the only solution, but that he now doubted its practical application. Wherever the frontiers were drawn, many Arabs would be left as minorities under Jewish rule. He now agreed with Bevin on the solution proposed, provided the period of trusteeship was increased from five to ten years.
When Bevin and Creech Jones reported to Cabinet that the British proposals had been rejected by both Arabs and Jews,75 the Cabinet agreed that the matter should be referred to the UN. They clung to the possibility that notice of HMG’s intention to do so – something that neither the Jews nor the Arabs wanted – might stimulate a desire to agree before this happened.76 Bevin announced that decision in the House on 18 February, simply stating the government’s inability to influence events.77
British resentment of American leadership was matched by American distrust of imagined British imperialism, and this, to Attlee’s fury, was enhanced during June and July by an incident that suggested deep-rooted anti-semitism in the British High Command. Alexander Rubinowitz, a sixteen-year-old activist with Lehi, a Jewish resistance organisation, disappeared. There was suspicion that he had been murdered by a Palestine police squad under the command of a wartime SAS hero. Roy Farran, a swashbuckling operator, a 24-year-old major with a DSO and three Military Crosses to his name at the end of the war, had volunteered for service with the Palestine police when, after the destruction of the King David Hotel, more robust methods of anti-terrorism were adopted. His appointment rapidly became a public relations disaster. The British press – and, more importantly, the American press – were not slow to exploit the potential of the story: talk of officially sanctioned death squads, commanded by an officer with a record of savage violence and insubordination, were an embarrassment to the government. Farran meanwhile, claiming that he was being framed, fled to Syria.
Attlee was incensed, principally because he had not been informed of the incident, and pressed Creech Jones for details of the affair.78 Creech Jones demanded explanations from Cunningham.79 The press, he said, were linking the officers involved in the affair with the British Union of Fascists. When Attlee saw a copy of Creech Jones’ cable on 19 June he sent the Colonial Secretary a minute pointing out that ‘it is almost impossible for the government to abandon the defensive and to put the official statement across convincingly’.80 He was acutely conscious that the government’s credibility in Washington would be badly damaged. When, after terminating his position with the Palestine police and being arrested by the British Army on suspicion of murder, Farran escaped from the Army’s custody, that tattered credibility was irrevocably destroyed. As Creech Jones, now the target of Attlee’s severe displeasure, commented to Cunningham, ‘this is a most unfortunate occurrence as the case has already aroused considerable notice and speculation.’81 Farran had been awarded the American Legion of Merit for wartime exploits but the war was over and the image of a post-war Lawrence of Arabia, moving ‘among Jewish civilians in Jewish clothing’, was not at all appealing to American public opinion.
In the event, the case against Farran was dismissed for lack of evidence. The damage done to the British government, however, remained. The suspicion that the Army, following orders reflecting Montgomery’s tougher stance on peace-keeping methods, had connived at Farran’s escape would not go away; the effect of that suspicion on Truman’s attitude was inevitable.
During the spring and the summer it became clear that no agreed settlement was possible. In July 4,500 illegal immigrants in Haifa were returned to Europe; on 29 November the United Nations passed a resolution that Britain’s mandate would end not later than 1 August 1948 and Palestine would be partitioned. By the end of 1947 fighting had spread throughout Palestine.
Britain declared her intention to withdraw by 15 May 1948; on the day before that deadline the state of Israel came into being. Truman immediately recognised the new nation; on the following day the Arab-Israeli war was launched; concentrated attacks on Israel were orchestrated. The expected outcome, that the Arab coalition would drive the Israelis into the sea,82 was dramatically reversed and in the armistice agreements with the separate Arab countries between February and July 1949 Israel obtained 30 per cent more territory than the United Nations had assigned her.
The four years between July 1945 and the final drawing of Israel’s borders in July 1949 were punctuated by repeated demands by Truman for the granting of 100,000 entry visas for displaced Jews in Europe and by repeated refusals of those demands by Attlee. Critics of the British stance maintain that if Attlee had simply acquiesced to Truman’s urging, the civil war and subsequent all-out conflict would have been avoided. Such an argument assumes that Zionist demands would immediately have ceased and discounts Britain’s responsibility under the Mandate.
Attlee and Bevin misjudged Truman’s reasons for repeated intervention; they, moreover, had British interests to protect in relations with several Arab states. It is as possible, therefore, that Attlee wore the Mandate as an ethical carapace to cover British interests as it is that Truman used humanitarian gestures to capture votes in the north-east United States. It is nonetheless puzzling that Attlee, normally flexible in his search for solutions and decisive in implementing them, was so resistant to Truman for so long. He was successful in manoeuvring the President into sharing some of the costs of increased immigration but singularly unsuccessful in sharing the moral responsibility at the bar of world opinion. As Gerald Kaufman commented, ‘he betrayed the Jews without appeasing the Arabs’.83
The consequences of British policy in those four years were far-reaching, resulting in enormous human misery, and much of the responsibility must lie with Attlee’s government. The lack of moral leadership, indeed the lack of perceptible policy beyond consistent refusal to accede to Truman’s urgings, are untypical of Attlee. Moreover, his argumentative posture vis-à-vis the American President was dangerously at odds with his resolute determination to maintain a strong Atlantic alliance. His subsequent rationalisation that Truman throughout was merely courting votes is an astounding oversimplification.
He was determinedly correct in his interpretation of the Mandate, correct to the point of being stiff-necked. In the conditions of post-war Europe it would not have been impossible to justify increased allocation of entry visas. In his refusal to make the Arabs – or Britain – the residuary legatee of Hitler’s policy of extermination, he was legally correct but he may be judged to have been somewhat short-sighted.
1 A. J. Balfour to Lord Rothschild, 2 November 1917, para 2.
2 British White Paper, June 1922, paras 2–3.
3 League of Nations Mandate, 4 July 1922, Article 2.
4 Ibid. Article 4.
5 Ibid. Article 6.
6 Report of the Palestine Royal Commission, 4 July 1937, p. 46.
7 Ibid. p. 49.
8 Ibid. pp. 394–395.
9 ‘British Policy in Palestine 1937–1938’, The Bulletin of International News, vol. 15.no. 23, November 1938.
10 Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs, (OUP, 1985), pp. 180–182.
11 White Paper, May 1939 (‘The MacDonald White Paper’), Section II, para. 9.
12 Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete, p. 414.
13 Cited by Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers, pp. 183–184.
14 Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, pp. 394–395.
15 Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers, pp. 181.
16 McCullough, Truman, pp. 107–108; Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 169.
17 Robert H. Ferrell (editor), Off The Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman, p. 235.
18 Harry S. Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, (Memoirs, volume II), p. 140.
19 Harry S. Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, (Memoirs, volume II), p. 135.
20 The Public Papers of the Presidents, Harry S. Truman, 1945, Document 188.
21 Acheson, op. Cit. p. 171.
22 The Public Papers of the Presidents, Harry S. Truman, 1945, 13 November 1945, Document 187.
23 President to PM, 1 January 1946. TNA: PREM 8–350, T1/46.
24 PM to Truman, 4 January 1946. TNA: PREM 8/350, T6/46.
25 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Report to the United States Government and His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, 20 April 1946, Chapter 1. See also TNA: PREM 8–627/2, fols 132–143.
26 Acheson, op. Cit. p. 172.
27 TNA: PREM 8/627–2, T. 3475.
28 Halifax to FO, TNA: PREM 8/627–2, T2608.
29 Halifax to FO, TNA: PREM 8/627–2, T. 2614 and T. 2623.
30 TNA: PREM 8/627–2. CM (46) 38th Conclusions, 29 April 1946.
31 Ibid., loc. Cit.
32 See, for example, Hansard HC Deb, 06 March 1947 vol. 434 col. 676.
33 The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery, p. 423.
34 Truman to PM, 8 May 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–2.
35 PM to Truman, 9 May 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–2, T230/46.
36 PM to Truman, 11 May 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–2, T245/46.
37 Truman to PM, 17 May 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–2, T265/46.
38 Truman to PM, 5 June 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–2, T323/46.
39 The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery, p. 423.
40 Letter to Tom Attlee, 29 December 1946.
41 Attlee later denied any anti-Semitism on Bevin’s part. Granada Historical Records, Clem Attlee, pp. 38–39. Ian Mikardo notes that, according to Dalton, he was denied a junior post by Attlee because he was Jewish. Back-Bencher, p. 4.
42 Mayhew, Time to Explain, p. 119. Mayhew makes the point that Bevin allowed anti-Zionism to colour his view of Jews as a whole.
43 Acheson, op. Cit. p. 173.
44 Ibid. loc. Cit.
45 The State Department generally supported Britain in urging a UN trusteeship until Arab-Jew conflicts could be resolved. Truman’s staff, however, with their eyes on the 1948 election, wanted division and migration. On one occasion Truman aide David Niles said sharply to Loy Henderson, head of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern Affairs, ‘Look here, Loy, the most important thing for the United States is for the President to be reelected.’ McCullough, Truman, p. 600,
46 PM to Truman, 14 June 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–2, T331/46.
47 Truman to PM 14 June 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–2, T332/46.
48 TNA: PREM 8/627–2. PM 46/103, 16 June 1946.
49 Truman to PM 2 July 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–2, T369/46.
50 S. of S. to PM 4 July 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–3.
51 COS to PM, 10 July 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–3, COS (46) 188 (0).
52 25 July 1946, Statement of Policy, of the British and United States Delegations, TNA: PREM 8/627–3.
53 Ibid., paras 31–33.
54 PM to Truman, 25 July 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–3, T393/46.
55 See Acheson, Present at the Creation, pp. 175–6.
56 Moscow to FO 22 July 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–3, T2457.
57 This was taken to indicate a certain ambiguousness in Soviet policy. See Amikam Nachmani, Great Power Discord in Palestine: The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, p. 141.
58 PM to Truman, 29 July 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–3, T406.
59 Inverchapel to FO 30 July 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–3, T20.
60 Inverchapel to FO 30 July 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–3, T21.
61 Inverchapel to FO 31 July 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–3, T22.
62 PM to Truman, 9 August 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–4, T406/46.
63 Mayhew, Time to Explain, p. 118.
64 The Public Papers of the Presidents, Harry S. Truman, 1946, p. 442 ff.
65 For relations between the US State Department and the British Embassy in Washington during this period, see Acheson, op. cit., pp. 176–180.
66 PM to Truman, 4 October 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–5, T460/46.
67 Truman to PM, 10 October 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–5, T468/46.
68 Bevin to PM, 22 October 1946. TNA: PREM 8/627–5, PM/46/147.
69 The Times, 10 January 1947.
70 Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 180.
71 See Chapter 15.
72 TNA: PREM 8/627–6, CM (47) 18th Conclusions, 7 February 1947.
73 Attlee had replaced George Hall with Creech Jones, more sympathetic to the Zionist cause, on 4 October 1946.
74 6 February 1947, TNA: PREM 8/627–6, CP (47) 49.
75 13 February 1947, TNA: PREM 8/627–6, CP (47) 59.
76 TNA: PREM 8/627–6, CM (47) 22nd Conclusions, 14 February 1947.
77 Hansard, HC Deb, 18 February 1947, col. 988.
78 TNA: CO 537–2302 Prime Minister’s Minute no M247/47.
79 TNA: CO 537–2302, Telegram 1287.
80 TNA: CO 537–2302, Prime Minister’s Minute no M252/47.
81 TNA: CO 537–2302, Telegram 1309.
82 Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, p. 81.
83 Gerald Kaufman, Review of Clem Attlee by Francis Beckett, The Independent, 1 November 1947.