10
The great anglo-american standoff over Palestine policy began in July of 1945 when Harry Truman sent what seemed like a reasonable and even a routine request to Winston Churchill that Great Britain allow some of the Jewish displaced persons living in refugee camps across Western Europe to emigrate to Palestine.[1] When the votes in that summer’s British general election were counted, Clement Attlee and the Labour Party had replaced Churchill and the Conservatives, so Truman resent his request to the new prime minister.[2] If anything, the change in government should have meant even less trouble for Truman’s request; of the two major British political parties, Labour had long been more pro-Zionist than the Conservatives. As recently as May 1945 Labour had restated its support for a Jewish state in Palestine at its party conference; Zionists everywhere rejoiced at the news that Attlee was moving to 10 Downing Street.
From the American side it all seemed very simple. The end of the fighting in Europe left nearly seven million displaced persons (known at the time as “DPs”) in the parts of Europe under control of the western Allies,[3] with many more homeless refugees in the devastated East. The Allied forces, already stretched to the limit managing their own logistics and struggling to feed the civilian populations under their control, were faced with all the problems of feeding and sheltering the refugees in the chaotic aftermath of the war. Among these refugees, the Jewish DPs presented some unique problems. While slave laborers and other Nazi victims uprooted by the war could in most cases be repatriated to their homelands, where many had friends and family waiting for them, the Jewish Holocaust survivors often had no place to go. Their former homes had been taken over by newcomers, their property confiscated, and the communities to which they once belonged no longer existed in any meaningful sense.
The issue exploded in American politics in the summer of 1945. At the behest of Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew, Truman had asked Earl Harrison, Roosevelt’s commissioner of immigration and naturalization, to investigate conditions in the DP camps in postwar Europe.[4] Harrison’s report was devastating, especially when it came to the conditions facing the Jews:
Many Jewish displaced persons…are living under guard behind barbed-wire fences…including some of the most notorious of the concentration camps…had no clothing other than their concentration camp garb.
There was more:
We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.[5]
Moshe Shertok, the political department director of the Jewish Agency, as the communal organization of Palestinian Jews was known at the time, told the British Colonial Office in the summer of 1945 that 100,000 immigration visas were urgently needed,[6] and after Harrison incorporated the figure in his report, the number was adopted in the United States as the immediate goal around which the Zionists and their supporters would rally. Across the United States, appeals from Jewish groups and their allies met with overwhelming public support when the appeals focused on relieving the desperate plight of Holocaust survivors by allowing them to emigrate to Palestine: “the one country on earth that wanted them,” as it was said at the time.[7]
Appeals focused on allowing Jewish refugees into the United States met with a cooler reception. The scale of homelessness and displacement after the war strengthened American support for strict limits on immigration; with the memories of the Depression still strong, Americans feared both the economic competition from large numbers of desperate immigrants and the cultural consequences of a wave of migration that, unless controlled, threatened to dwarf all previous episodes of mass migration into the United States. Polls showed 72 percent of the population opposed returning to the pre-1924 open immigration system, and almost as much opposition to special humanitarian quotas to cope with the postwar chaos, whether the beneficiaries of those quotas would be Jewish or not. Under the circumstances, no policymaker could seriously propose immigration to the United States as a significant element in a resolution of the European refugee problem.[8]
Immigration into Palestine appeared to be the only possible alternative to leaving European Jews in displaced persons camps, traumatized and pauperized by the Holocaust. (The deaths of hundreds of Polish Jews in antisemitic riots as they attempted to return home received wide publicity in the West and solidified the perception that there was no place for large populations of Jewish refugees in postwar Europe.) In 1946 and 1947, poll after poll showed over 75 percent of the American public supported the right of Jews to a homeland in Palestine.[9]
American Jews agreed. By November 1945, according to a Roper poll, 80 percent of American Jews supported Jewish statehood in Palestine. Membership in Zionist organizations skyrocketed; hundreds of thousands of American Jews paid dues to organizations ranging from Hadassah to B’nai B’rith, and about a million American Jews were by this point paying dues to the World Zionist Organization or its affiliates. Respected Jewish political and social organizations that had been anti-Zionist also shifted their stance in light of the Holocaust. Institutionally and individually, the bulk of American Jewry had come around.[10]
What became clear to Harry Truman in the summer of 1945 was that American support for the pro-Zionist Blackstone position was stronger than ever, and that the United States had more power to support it than ever before, but that Great Britain was no longer interested in carrying out its commitments to the Jews under the Balfour Declaration. Truman now had to ask himself what priority he should give to the old American Blackstone policy considering his need for a strong and friendly Great Britain as the Soviet threat gradually began to dominate the international scene.
Truman seized on the target of 100,000 visas, and sought to use it as the basis of a policy that he hoped could keep American liberals, Zionist activists, and the British on board. Given the endorsements from the Jewish Agency and Harrison, the number had credibility among activists. And because it was finite and limited, Truman hoped that the British could ultimately be induced to accept it. But Truman carefully did not go beyond the bare bones. He did not call for an independent Jewish state, nor did he request the 100,000 visas as the first installment of a much larger number.
The public did not think this simple, humanitarian request would be a problem. Just before departing Moscow to become America’s ambassador to the U.K., Averell Harriman told his embassy staff in 1946: “England is so weak she must follow our leadership. She will do anything that we insist [upon] and she won’t go out on a limb alone.”[11] Exactly, thought the public. So where were the visas for the Jewish DPs? What was the holdup?
Saving the Empire
The holdup was that Palestine had suddenly become critical to British postwar planning. Churchill’s attachment to the British Empire was well-known, but as the Labour government that succeeded him studied Britain’s position in the world and its economic prospects, Attlee and his foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, came to believe that with India leaving the empire, Britain’s position in the Middle East was the key not only to Britain’s global standing, but to its prosperity at home.
Much as both Attlee and his party wanted to concentrate on domestic affairs, the international situation required Britain’s urgent attention. As one of the leading powers in the Allied coalition, Britain had millions of men under arms all over the world. It was charged with a large occupation zone in defeated Germany, and the British quickly discovered that they would have to feed their former enemies and help them find coal to run their factories and heat their homes in the winter if utter chaos and mass death were to be avoided.[12] Moreover, the British Empire still included one fourth of the world’s surface and population. Britain was responsible for governing increasingly restive populations across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The Japanese had destroyed European colonial power across East and Southeast Asia; Britain found itself trying not only to reestablish order in Japanese-occupied British territories, but also to assist the Dutch and the French.
Behind all this loomed an immense economic problem. Great Britain for decades had depended on its overseas investments to provide the “invisible earnings” that underpinned the British standard of living. Virtually all of these had been sacrificed to win the war. International reserves that had taken three hundred years to accumulate were devoured in the firestorm of the six-year struggle against Nazi Germany. British industry had suffered severely from German bombing. Millions of tons of shipping had been sunk by U-boats. Meanwhile, its major trading partners in Europe were even worse off than Britain was. France and the Low Countries had been looted and occupied by the Nazis. Hundreds of thousands of their best workers had conscripted into forced labor in the Reich. People were starving in what, before 1939, had been among the most prosperous countries in the world.
British planners could see only one way out. Control over the oil resources of the Middle East would provide the United Kingdom with a source of energy that didn’t have to be paid for in scarce dollars, and would underwrite British leadership in Europe and the wider world while shoring up the British standard of living. According to the minutes of the cabinet-level Defense Committee, Bevin saw that position as essential: “Without the Middle East and its oil and other potential resources, he saw no hope of our being able to achieve the standard of life at which we were aiming in Great Britain.”[13]
Given the new power of nationalist movements in the Arab world as elsewhere, the British understood that they could not hope to control the Middle East in the old imperial way. British power would have to be exercised through relations with friendly Arab governments. The Hashemite kings of Jordan and Iraq, the sheikhs and emirs of the Gulf, and King Farouk of Egypt were willing to work with the British, and it was through good relations with these royals (plus the Shah of Iran) that the British hoped to maintain their position in a changing region.
These pro-British regimes were often weak and vulnerable to public opinion. The British feared that Arab anger over an emerging Jewish state in Palestine would endanger the network of royals and “moderate” politicians who backed continued relations with the U.K. For British policymakers, heartrending as the plight of Jewish displaced persons in the rubble of postwar Europe was, substantial Jewish immigration into Palestine meant the end of Britain’s ability to manage its relationships with the Arabs, and the end of Britain’s great power status. As the Palestine committee of the Labour government said in its report in September of 1945:
The Middle East is a region of vital consequence for Britain and the British Empire. It forms the point in the system of communications, by land sea and air which links Britain with India, Australia and the Far East; it is also the Empire’s main reservoir of mineral oil….Protection of our vital interests depends, therefore, upon the collaboration which we can obtain from these independent states….Unfortunately the future of Palestine bulks large in all Arab eyes….To enforce any such policy [to which they object] and especially one which lays us open to a charge of breach of faith, is bound seriously to undermine our position and may well lead not only to widespread disturbances…but to the withdrawal of cooperation on which our Imperial interests so largely depend.[14]
The relationship with the Arab world was only one of Britain’s problems in the Middle East. The Soviet Union clearly had designs on the region, too. The Soviets pressed territorial claims against Turkey, Soviet troops occupied much of northern Iran, and, with the victorious Red Army entrenched across the Balkans, Soviet-aligned communists in Greece posed a serious threat to the ineffective and corrupt government. If Greece fell to the communists, something that seemed more likely than not to many observers, Turkey would be outflanked and would be unable to resist Soviet pressure. With northern Iran, Turkey, and Greece in the Soviet orbit, Britain would be hard put to defend its positions farther south.
Poor and exhausted as Britain was after the war, it committed eighty thousand troops and substantial financial aid to Greece, subsidized Turkey, and warily engaged the Soviet Union over the future of Iran, all in pursuit of this last-ditch imperial strategy.[15] For Attlee’s government, these were difficult decisions to make. Not only were the Soviets popular with much of the party’s rank and file, but the burden of military spending and foreign aid on an austerity-weary population fell most heavily on Labour voters. The Greek government (corrupt, pro-monarchy, dictatorial, ineffective, and brutal) was deeply unpopular with the left wing of the Labour Party. Yet despite the many misgivings and concerns about costs, the British cabinet believed that living up to Britain’s responsibilities in the region was both necessary and right.
The Great Committee
With American public opinion believing that 100,000 visas for Jewish DPs was a simple and reasonable humanitarian ask, and the British government convinced that admitting that many Jewish immigrants into Palestine would set off a chain of events that could ultimately destroy the most important remaining support of British power, the two governments were headed for a collision that neither Truman nor Attlee wanted. The real question, made sharper by the desperation of the Jewish DPs in Europe, was how to balance the American commitment to the Blackstone approach with its alliance with Britain.
FDR had been the first president to face this dilemma. As you will remember, when Britain responded to the Arab Revolt of 1936–39 by limiting Jewish immigration even as Hitler’s attacks on Jews intensified, FDR’s policy reflected his assessment that it was more important for the United States to support Britain’s position in the Mediterranean than to make a big issue over the immigration restrictions. During the war, it seemed even more obvious that the United States needed to support Britain even if that meant putting Jewish hopes for Palestine on hold. Truman, coming to the Oval Office as the war ground to a close, had to develop a new approach. With the Axis defeated, and the United States emerging from the war a much more powerful state than Great Britain, what priority should the Blackstone approach take in postwar American policy? Should Truman continue to follow Roosevelt, subordinating Palestine to the strategic imperatives of the U.S.-British relationship, or had the time now come when the United States should put its concerns over Palestine front and center in its bilateral relationship with Great Britain?
The State Department and the defense establishment by and large thought that the British relationship should continue to take priority over the Palestine question. From their point of view, the problems of the Jews might be serious, but the confrontation with the Soviet Union, like the earlier confrontation with the Axis, required these concerns to be set aside. The tail should not wag the dog. Truman should do what Roosevelt had done and continue to subordinate his concerns about the Jewish national home to a global American strategy and its necessary corollary, the British alliance.
Truman himself was torn. Attlee for his part did not want a confrontation with Washington. He could not yield on the visa question without wrecking Britain’s only strategy for postwar recovery and independence, but perhaps there was a way to offer the Americans a bargain that both sides could live with. Admitting 100,000 Jews to Palestine would cause problems in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East. If resettling the Jews was so important to them, perhaps the Americans would absorb the costs those visas would entail? If additional troops were needed to keep the peace, would the Americans contribute to the peacekeeping force? If the Americans did not want to send troops, would they at least reimburse Britain for the costs that carrying out this American priority would impose on Britain’s overstretched defense budget? Or perhaps, once the Americans fully understood how expensive and difficult it would be to resettle Jews in Palestine they would agree with the British that some other solution for the problem of Jewish DPs in Europe needed to be found.
Truman was unlikely to follow Attlee far down this road. In 1945–46 Americans wanted a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but they wanted no part of creating it through military force. Money, especially for the resettlement of refugees, was possible, but liberals and isolationists were utterly opposed to the kind of economic aid that would allow Britain to maintain its Middle East empire on American money. Both the American left and the American right believed Britain had snookered gullible American diplomats into bankrolling its Middle East schemes in the 1920s, and the American people were not going to be fooled twice.
Yet Truman needed British help. Britain was in physical control of Palestine. Unless the United States intended to land the immigrants by force, Britain would have to agree to issue the visas. If Truman was going to get the visas that Americans wanted, he was going to have to negotiate with the U.K.
The gap between London and Washington was wide and deep. At the time of Earl Harrison’s visit, Jewish DPs in Europe were being treated on a “national” basis; that is, they were treated like non-Jewish citizens of their countries of origin. Displaced Polish Jews counted as Poles, Bulgarian Jews as Bulgarians, and so on. Harrison took a very American exception to an approach that seemed both natural and right to the British, recommending in his report that “the first and plainest need of these people is a recognition of their actual status and by this I mean their status as Jews….Refusal to recognize the Jews as such has the effect, in this situation, of closing one’s eyes to their former and more barbaric persecution.”[16]
Not singling out the Jews for special treatment was exactly the way the British believed that the situation ought to be handled. As the Foreign Office put it, “We insistently deny that it is right to segregate persons of Jewish race as such….It has been a cardinal policy hitherto that we regard the nationality factor as the determining one as regards people of Jewish race just as in the case of other racial or religious groups.”
For the British, to treat Jewish DPs first and foremost as Jews was to follow Hitler’s policy of exclusion. Hitler had denied that Jews could be true Germans, true Frenchmen, true Danes. The British genuinely believed that the best thing to do for the Jews was to reintegrate them into their national societies as quickly as possible. That meant no special treatment in DP camps and it certainly meant no special visas for Palestine. One fought antisemitism by treating Jews like everybody else.
In any case, the British responded to Truman’s visa request not with a negative but with a counterproposal that they hoped would avoid an open break with the Americans over Palestine while entangling Washington in an educational discussion that would explain to the Americans why their visa idea was such a bad one. A joint committee would be established, composed of six American and six British members. The committee would study the condition of Jewish DPs in Europe, as well as examine conditions on the ground in Palestine. It would then issue a report with recommendations about what should be done. Truman accepted the proposal, and on November 13, 1945, Ernest Bevin announced the formation of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry.
The committee idea was not popular in the United States, and anti-British liberals joined Zionists in denouncing it. Both houses of Congress passed resolutions urging Truman to use America’s leverage to permit the free entry of Jews into Palestine.[17] Soon after the joint commission was announced, Truman received a worrying letter from Eleanor Roosevelt:
I am very much distressed that Great Britain has made us take a share in another investigation of the few Jews remaining in Europe….Great Britain is always anxious to have someone pull her chestnuts out of the fire, and though I am very fond of the British individually and like a great many of them, I object very much to being used by them.[18]
In the letter, Roosevelt explained that she was not a Zionist, and that she well understood the risks involved in sending the Jews to Palestine, given Arab opposition. Nevertheless, in a way that Truman could not ignore, she was indicating an interest in the Palestine issue that would only strengthen as time went on. In February of 1946, she visited Germany (having made a “suggestion” to the army that it invite her over) and saw for herself the misery of the Holocaust survivors and their longing for Palestine. From this point on, the plight of displaced Jews in Europe became one of her central concerns and her nationally syndicated newspaper column would return to it again and again.
The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry began its work in Washington in early January of 1946 before going on to meetings in London and Palestine. Bevin announced that Britain would implement any unanimous recommendations that the committee made.[19] Truman noted these promises hopefully; perhaps the committee would offer him an easier path forward.
Lend-Lease and Loan Agreements
If the visa issue had been the only problem in Anglo-American relations in the fall of 1945, the two sides might well have found some way to coordinate their approaches to the desperate situation of the Jewish DPs. But Palestine was just one of the issues dividing the two wartime allies, and neither Truman nor Attlee could isolate this issue from the tensions affecting the rest of the bilateral relationship. In the chaotic postwar atmosphere, the international situation was rapidly changing from week to week and month to month, and the assessments in Washington and London of the value of their alliance and the steps necessary to preserve it were changing as well. In 1945, both British and American policymakers significantly underestimated the damage that the war had inflicted on Britain’s economic potential and on the health of the empire. In both London and Washington (to say nothing of Paris and Moscow) policymakers thought that Britain was likely to recover fairly quickly from the war and that, while it was unlikely to regain its prewar standing as the lead actor in world politics and the center of gravity of the global economy, it would remain a great power capable of independent action to advance its own interests around the world. Between 1945 and 1948, Washington policymakers were repeatedly changing their basic assessment of the global situation: the danger from the Soviet Union appeared to be steadily increasing, the prospects for economic and political recovery in Western Europe were steadily diminishing, and the chances that Britain would return to a stature approximating its prewar level of international power were steadily shrinking. By 1948 Washington had largely accepted that it needed Britain much more than originally believed, and that Britain was more fragile and in need of greater support if it was to play the role in Europe and the wider world that American interests required.
In 1945, though, all the best people expected Britain to recover from the war. Britain’s five largest banks reported their most profitable year in history in 1945, and The New York Times reported that their chairmen found “grounds for modified optimism about the future of their institutions as well as of the country in general.”[20] They weren’t alone; virtually everyone in the early postwar years underestimated the damage the war had done to Britain’s capacity to maintain its international system, and observers in Britain and beyond would continually make rosy predictions about how fast and how strong its recovery would be. That optimism led both American and British policymakers into taking steps that, in hindsight, did not look particularly wise.
In the United States, the overestimation of British power strengthened both liberal and conservative opponents of a strong U.S.-British alliance. Liberals thought that a resurgent Great Britain would quickly move to solidify its global empire, where possible using American aid to rebuild its imperial position, and that Britain would seek to draw the U.S. into a reactionary imperialist alliance that would both undermine the U.N. and alienate the Soviet Union. Britain, many liberals believed, wanted a Cold War between the USSR and the U.S. because that would drive the United States into Britain’s arms. Many conservatives believed that British power ensured that the USSR could not really threaten American interests. Let London rebuild Europe and worry about containing the Soviet Union in pursuit of its devious imperialistic schemes. The United States could focus on the Western Hemisphere and avoid all the risks and costs associated with global power politics and world order building. Conservative Republicans agreed with liberals that Britain would, however, do everything possible to ensnare the U.S. into supporting its imperial ambitions; they were at this stage as adamantly opposed to postwar U.S. support for Britain as the liberals were.
British leaders, while more aware of and therefore more concerned about the weak economic foundations of British power after the war than their American counterparts, also underestimated the radical decline in British power and prestige still to come. Team Attlee believed that postwar Britain could pursue an active global foreign policy even as it undertook a wholesale transformation of the British economy. Indeed, Attlee and Bevin believed that the two goals were related: that it was only by acting vigorously to uphold the empire that Britain could gain the economic breathing space it required to establish a generous welfare state, nationalize key industries, and institute free health care while expanding educational and social opportunities for the working class. This picture was attractive enough to command widespread support in the U.K. It was largely unworkable in the real world.
The Attlee government was a remarkable one. The British Labour Party had led coalition cabinets before World War II and served in the national unity government during it, but the landslide victory of July 1945 gave Labour its first outright majority in history. The Labour Party of 1945 was much more interested in domestic policy than in foreign affairs. Its ambitious program included the establishment of a national health service, a major expansion of the welfare state, and the nationalization of 20 percent of the economy, including railroads, the coal and steel industries, civil aviation, and the Bank of England. Many of the party’s members belonged to the hard left, were deeply suspicious of the United States, and believed that postwar relations with “Uncle Joe” Stalin were the key to European reconstruction and the future of world peace.
The economic problems at home for Britain could not be solved without the reestablishment of some kind of economic normality, but for the first time since the eighteenth century, the British were not the masters of their economic fate. Without support from the United States, Great Britain could scarcely stave off starvation and run its factories, much less achieve the prosperity that Attlee and his colleagues sought to achieve for the long-suffering British working class.
American support proved unexpectedly hard to get. In 1945, American public opinion had not yet realized that one of the consequences of World War II would be that the United States would have to replace Great Britain as the power most responsible for the global economic and security systems. That realization would gradually dawn as Stalin became more threatening and the world situation became more dire in the eighteen months after the war ended, but it wasn’t until the spring of 1947 that the real dimensions of America’s postwar challenges began to be felt. Until that time, the gap in perceptions between British and American policymakers produced a series of conflicts and controversies that left a lasting bitterness in Britain and contributed to the sharpness of U.S.-U.K. disagreements over Palestine.
The early postwar period was a grim era in transatlantic relations. The British were horrified by a series of American decisions during and after the war. Far from shoring Britain up as a counterweight to the Soviet Union, the American negotiators working on the postwar economic order systematically sought to force Britain to abandon the idea of imperial preference, a way of using tariffs to strengthen the economic ties between different parts of the empire. In 1945 and 1946 the Americans ended Lend-Lease assistance to Britain much more rapidly than the British expected, took a hard line in negotiations for a postwar loan, and swept aside what the British thought was an ironclad agreement over postwar nuclear cooperation.[21] These decisions fed the anti-American, anticapitalist current of opinion in the Labour Party and greatly exacerbated Britain’s postwar economic difficulties. Even normally pro-American opinion was dismayed. The Economist expressed the general feeling about American policy in December 1945 in a comment on American demands that a postwar loan carry an interest rate for fifty years: “It is aggravating to find that our reward for losing a quarter of our national wealth in the common cause is to pay tribute for half a century to those [the Americans] who have been enriched by the war….Beggars cannot be choosers. But they can by long tradition put a curse on the ambitions of the rich.”[22]
The members of the Labour government saw themselves as good guys committed to dismantling the Raj in India and transforming the empire into a commonwealth. The tradition of Liberal imperialism, in which Britain saw itself as a kind of trustee protecting peoples around the world who were unable to defend themselves from more predatory powers and helping them to develop the economic and political foundations of modernity under British auspices, was still strong. As the Labour government saw it, Britain would provide an umbrella of security protection and good governance while laying the foundation for an ultimate transition to independence within the British Commonwealth. Bevin hoped that somehow the British could bolster their Middle East position by siding with “peasants not pashas” and believed that the empire could be a force for good.[23] Additionally, the British were hurt and angered by what they saw as ingratitude. The United States sat out the war between 1939 and 1941 while the British gave everything they had to fight Hitler, saving the world from the Nazi menace at the cost of their economy. Britain, they felt, deserved American sympathy and support thanks to sacrifices made.
London consistently failed to grasp the strength of anti-British feelings in the United States. Americans remembered the aftermath of World War I, when the British pled poverty with respect to their war debts to the United States—even as they spent lavishly on maintaining British rule around the world, and extended their empire in the Middle East. The American consensus of the 1930s, unchanged by the war years, held that devious and unscrupulous British diplomats and bankers exploited American goodwill and naïveté after World War I. This view was particularly strongly held in Congress, and Congress was determined not to be fooled again.
Another problem was that the Labour government program was aggressively socialist, far to the left of the American New Deal. Money is fungible; it looked to many in the United States as if the Labour government would use American aid money to nationalize key industries and to carry out other policies that, antisocialist Americans felt, were likely to retard Britain’s economic recovery rather than to help it. Britain had many enemies and few friends in postwar Washington. Liberals despised the British Empire and wanted it destroyed. Conservatives not only loathed the empire, they hated British socialism; they wanted nothing to do with paying the bills for either project.
Ironically, the abrupt aid cutoff, the small size of the loan, and the tough conditions attached to it ultimately had more impact on events in Palestine than any of Truman’s decisions about Palestine itself. The British economic crises in 1946 and early 1947, and the grinding impact of postwar austerity on Labour and national morale, all contributed to Britain’s decision to turn the Palestine problem over to the United Nations in February 1947. America’s harsh financial treatment of Britain after the war meant that Britain could not long bear the high costs of a sustained effort to hold Palestine against the will of its Jewish inhabitants. Had Britain gained more American aid in 1945 and 1946 it would have been better placed to withstand American pressure in 1947 and 1948.
The organized American Jewish community was largely absent from the debate over financial aid to Britain after the war. When Emanuel Celler of New York attempted to block the bill authorizing the British loan, he was soundly defeated.[24] The American decisions that had the most impact on British policy in Palestine would have been exactly what they were if the organized pro-Zionist lobbies had not existed.
One Committee, Two Committees
The Anglo-American Committee produced its report in April 1946. To the chagrin of the British government, and to Truman’s great relief, the commission unanimously recommended the immediate settlement of 100,000 Jewish displaced persons in Palestine, and an end to British restrictions on land sales to Jews. Less hopefully from the Zionist point of view, the commission also came out against partition of the territory into two independent states, supported a long-term British role in the territory, and called for the dissolution of armed groups in Palestine, including the Jewish defense forces. For Truman, this looked like vindication. He was giving the Jews and the liberals what they wanted most, the 100,000 visas, but he was doing it without incurring U.S. responsibilities in Palestine and without breaking with Britain. Given the British commitment to accepting unanimous recommendations, Truman hoped for a harmonious end to an unwanted dispute.[25]
He was quickly disillusioned. The Zionists and the British both balked at key aspects of the recommendations. The Zionists could only be induced to offer grudging support of the report by a public endorsement from Truman of the elements in the report that they liked. The British flat out refused to implement the visa recommendations without implementation of the other provisions, including the disarmament of the Jews.[26] Given the determined opposition of the Palestinian Jews to that proposal, enforcing the full report was a recipe for conflict—and the British would expect American support. To commit American troops to Palestine in order to maintain order while Britain forcibly disarmed the Jewish defense forces was far beyond anything an American president could accept; there was no significant support in either the American government or the population for steps of this kind.
As waves of criticism broke over Truman’s head in the American press, the British proposed another committee. The second would review the first set of recommendations and develop plans for their implementation. From London’s point of view, this was a reasonable request. Introducing 100,000 Jews into Palestine would set off massive waves of Arab unrest, threatening violence on the scale of the 1936–39 Arab Revolt. (Indeed, the policy changes the commission recommended amounted to a withdrawal of the concessions the Arabs had won in 1939.) The British still wanted what they had wanted from the beginning: either that the United States would allow Britain to manage the Palestine question in its own way and stop nattering on about visas, or that it would provide the military and financial assistance necessary to cover the costs of the policies the Americans preferred. That the United States should choose the policy leaving Britain to bear the economic, military, and political costs of carrying it out did not appeal to anybody in British politics.
The report did nothing to calm the situation on the ground in Palestine. On the contrary. David Ben-Gurion, the political leader of the Palestinian Jews, had authorized attacks on British forces as early as October 1945. On April 25, 1946, Jewish fighters killed seven British soldiers in Tel Aviv. The violence escalated further in June, as Jewish militias blew up ten of the eleven bridges connecting British Palestine to neighboring territories in a show of force. The British struck back, seeking to capture and disarm Jewish fighters. Arrests and acts of terror and reprisal continued to mount.[27] Meanwhile, an effective campaign of illegal immigration into Palestine (with help from many of Stalin’s satellites in Eastern Europe who benefited financially from allowing exit and transit rights to Jews in exchange for healthy fees) was contributing to the tensions with the Arabs and would ultimately lead the British into a highly visible and, at times, damaging and embarrassing campaign to force desperate, starving refugees to camps in Cyprus and, when those were filled, back to the European camps.
As the British reneged on their commitment to accept unanimous resolutions and called for more study and more delay, American opinion seethed. Eleanor Roosevelt shared her unhappiness with the public. “There was really no need for a commission of inquiry, but we went along with Great Britain,” she wrote in her widely read newspaper column. She underlined the humanitarian case for allowing 100,000 displaced persons to go to Palestine, and rejected Britain’s request for American military help in managing the consequences with an airy wave of her hand: “But surely our allied Chiefs of Staff could work out some form of military defense for Palestine which would not mean an increase in manpower.”[28]
Through the storms, Truman stuck to his plan to work toward a common Anglo-American approach. Despite the fury of his liberal and Zionist critics at the delay, his options were limited. Tension with Britain over conflicting American and British perceptions and priorities over Palestine was unavoidable, but Truman saw nothing to gain in provoking a full-fledged crisis on the issue. And it is hard to see just how Truman could have forced the U.K. to shift its immigration policy without offering the kind of military and political support that American opinion would reject. Eleanor Roosevelt could gesture vaguely in the direction of miraculous military strategies that would solve Britain’s problems without requiring anything other than advice from the United States, but such magical thinking was of no help to Truman.
The second committee was therefore established to study how to implement the recommendations of the first, much to the disgust of American Zionists and Anglo-skeptic liberals. Even this committee was difficult to get under way. Attlee sent Truman a list of forty-three subjects the British wished the new commission to review. Truman responded with his first concrete offer of financial aid in transporting and resettling displaced persons to Palestine, stressing again his need to get the resettlement process started as quickly as possible. Attlee responded by saying that the British could not resettle any refugees until all the unresolved issues had been debated and examined. By now it was June, and the British were about to make Truman’s life more difficult still.
On June 12, 1946, Ernest Bevin, who was under continual pressure from the left wing of his own Labour Party for a policy many believed was cravenly pro-American, made a speech at the Labour Party conference that ignited a firestorm in the United States, solidifying liberal opposition to collaboration with the U.K. over Palestine and much else. “There has been the agitation in the United States, and particularly in New York, for 100,000 Jews to be put into Palestine. I hope I will not be misunderstood in America if I say that this was proposed with the purest of motives. They did not want too many Jews in New York.”[29]
Historically speaking, of course, Bevin was not entirely wrong. The American WASP establishment had seen Jewish immigration into Palestine as an alternative to Jewish immigration into the United States since the time of the Blackstone Memorial, and more than a few Christian advocates of the Jewish homeland had made the connection explicit. Nevertheless, in 1946 it was both tactless and wrong to make this charge. Those on the battle lines for Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1946 were liberal humanitarians who, like Eleanor Roosevelt, also favored admitting more refugees to the United States and Jewish activists who were insulted and enraged by the implication that they were serving an antisemitic agenda. The press uproar that followed demonized Bevin as a cynical and imperialistic antisemite; on his next visit to New York the dockworkers’ union refused to unload his luggage from the ship.[30] Bevin’s ill-chosen remarks combined with Britain’s violation of its pledge to accept the unanimous recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee to push American liberal and middle-class opinion away from Britain and toward the increasingly impatient and radicalized Zionist leadership.
Truman continued to push Attlee for the 100,000 visas, tasking Ambassador Averell Harriman with ironing out the practical details, including costs, in talks with British experts. Attlee, in turn, continued to press Truman for military assistance, asking for a member of the Joint Chiefs to meet with the British military to examine the strategic and military implications of the move and its ramifications throughout the Middle East. This was a nonstarter with both Truman and the U.S. military.[31]
Nevertheless, Truman still needed the visas, and he had no good alternative to negotiations with Britain if he was going to get them. He continued to support the joint commission approach, and the new committee of experts issued its report at the end of July. The Morrison-Grady Report, named for the senior British and American officials involved in the meetings, was, from the Zionist perspective, a step back from the Anglo-American Committee report in the spring. The new report by this second commission called for the creation of Jewish, Arab, and international zones in Palestine under British rule, with the Jews receiving only 17 percent of the land. Each community would control its own internal affairs, but Britain would control defense, internal security, and foreign affairs—and the British governor would have veto power over legislation in both Jewish and Arab sectors for five years. One hundred thousand Jews could immigrate in the first year, but the British authority would set immigration limits for subsequent years.[32]
Truman wanted to accept the offer as a basis for American policy, still seeing the 100,000 visas as the key deliverable which would meet his own humanitarian priorities. Since Truman understood that the British could not be forced to produce 100,000 or even 100 visas against their will, his acceptance of the Morrison-Grady recommendations came from what he saw as a realistic appraisal of the balance of forces. He had to persuade the British to move, and since he was unable to give them the military support they named as their price, he had to do what he could to satisfy them on other grounds.
The Morrison-Grady Report exploded in Truman’s face. Zionists like the rabbis Abba Hillel Silver and Stephen Wise rejected it out of hand. Liberal senators and congressmen denounced it on the floor of Congress. Even conservative Republicans like Robert Taft attacked the plan as a sellout to the British. Truman kept telling anyone who would listen that “the British control Palestine and there is no way of getting one hundred thousand Jews in there unless they want them in,” but no one seemed to be impressed with this logic. In a cabinet meeting devoted to the question of the American response to Morrison-Grady, Truman faced the usual conflicting pressures. Henry Wallace (still, uneasily, secretary of commerce) attacked the plan strongly; from Europe, Secretary of State James Byrnes (who also had presidential ambitions) advised against accepting the proposal. Reluctantly, Truman responded to Attlee that he could not accept the plan.[33]
Meanwhile, the situation in Palestine continued to deteriorate. Violence increased during the summer. In July, bombs planted in the King David Hotel, the headquarters of British administration in Jerusalem, by the Irgun killed ninety-one people, among them Arab, British, and Jewish officials.[34]
Even more ominously from Truman’s point of view, the figure of 100,000 refugees came to look increasingly unrealistic. As more Jewish refugees filtered across Europe into the western zone, the number of refugees mounted, their organizations became more effective, and their militancy and their determination grew. A quarter million or more Jewish refugees were now huddled in miserable camps, fed and housed at American expense, and desperate to reach Palestine. The liberal American press focused with growing intensity on the problems of the Jews and the violence in Palestine. Truman was seen as either heartless or incompetent. The left wing of the press and of the Democratic Party continued to believe that the United States confronted the choice between a “reactionary alliance” with imperialist Britain or a “progressive alliance” with Stalin. As Wallace declared in his Madison Square Garden speech that September,
Certainly we like the British people as individuals. But to make Britain the key to our foreign policy would be, in my opinion, the height of folly. We must not let the reactionary leadership of the Republican party force us into that position. We must not let British balance-of-power manipulations determine whether and when the United States gets into war….We are reckoning with a force which cannot be handled successfully by a “Get tough with Russia” policy. “Getting tough” never bought anything real and lasting—whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers. The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get….And I believe that we can get cooperation once Russia understands that our primary objective is neither saving the British Empire nor purchasing oil in the Near East with the lives of American soldiers.[35]
Eleanor Roosevelt was becoming more anti-British than ever. In a letter intended for Bevin and Attlee, she wrote in her gentle but implacably unrelenting way that
I can not bear to think of the Jews of Europe who have spent so many years in concentration camps, behind wire again on Cyprus [where the British were interning illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine]. Somehow it seems to me that the 100,000 Jews should be let into Palestine and that some real agreement should be reached with the Arabs. Willy-nilly, the feeling grows here that it is [not] just justice which Great Britain is looking for where the Arabs are concerned, but it is that she wishes the friendship in order to get more favorable consideration where oil concessions are concerned.[36]
The camps for refugees, established by the Allies following the war and situated in Germany, Austria, and Italy, offered the sparest of living conditions. Crowded barracks afforded little privacy and the daily diet of bread and soup was hardly appetizing. Eleanor Roosevelt had visited one of the Jewish camps and wrote movingly of a young boy: “He sang for me—a song of his people—a song of freedom. Your heart cried out that there was no freedom—and where was hope, without which human beings cannot live?”[37]
In the fall of 1946, Truman’s unpopularity was dragging his party down toward defeat in the midterms. A war-weary public viewed the deteriorating world situation with alarm. The left attacked Truman’s tough stance against the Soviets. The right accused the administration of harboring communists and retreating in the face of the communist threat. The Palestine issue brought nothing but frustration, and the American Jewish community, led at this time by the pro–Robert Taft Republican activist Rabbi Silver, attacked the administration at every turn.
“Jesus Christ couldn’t please them [the Jews] when he was on earth,” said Truman at the end of a particularly frustrating cabinet meeting. “So could anyone expect that I could have any luck?”[38]
Ground Zero
While committees considered and diplomats dithered, the future of Palestine was being shaped on the ground as the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine drove steadily toward their longtime goal of an independent state. The British had conquered Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in 1917. Since then a flood of Jewish immigrants had built a proto-state. Describing their program as “another acre, another goat,” the Zionists slowly constructed a network of farms, factories, schools, and community institutions as their population grew. By 1945 the Jewish community, with a population of about 650,000, had military forces like the Haganah, the administrative backbone of a civil government, a network of educational and cultural institutions, a communal economy that was integrated and mediated through an effective set of governing institutions and banks, and an embryonic diplomatic service that was capable of representing their interests in the international arena. Thousands of Palestinian Jews had served with the British Army during World War II, gaining military training and experience. The Jewish population of Palestine was highly educated with many scientific and technical specialists, enabling the community, among other things, to develop a sophisticated arms industry from dual-purpose technology and machine tools purchased abroad. At the end of World War II, the Jewish community of Palestine had a health care system, an educational system, local governments, and a range of economic and political institutions that were ready to function as parts of an independent state.[39]
The horrors of the Holocaust served, in the minds of Palestinian Jews above all, to prove that Zionism was the only possible path for the survival of the Jewish people. The Holocaust had not been the work of the Germans alone. In almost every country in occupied Europe, the Nazis had found willing helpers. The Jews had also observed the utter failure of any non-Jewish power to take effective steps to save European Jews from the oncoming disaster. Meanwhile, the poison of Nazi-style antisemitism had firmly established itself in the Middle East during the war; the leader of the Palestinian Arabs spent the war in German-occupied Europe, among other things recruiting European Muslims to fight for the Third Reich. While the Jews of Palestine were bitterly divided into quarreling parties and political movements, as a people they were united in the belief that they were fighting for their survival. The Jewish people could not survive without a state to protect them and to which they could immigrate when threatened, they believed. Palestine was the only possible place where such a state could arise. The Jews of Palestine approached what they saw as an inevitable showdown with the Arabs in a spirit of careful, thorough, and even ruthless preparation, believing that the survival of their people was at stake.
The Arabs of Palestine were poorly prepared for the coming confrontation. Before 1917 they lived under Ottoman administration, and that empire had provided the basics of government with little input from locals beyond the village and municipal levels. After 1917, except for religious organizations, the British provided the governing structures within which most Arabs lived. The gradual dismantling of the British administrative structure after Britain decided to withdraw would leave the Arabs scrambling to improvise the institutions needed for communal governance beyond the local level. They had taken only limited steps toward developing armed forces of their own, in part because they believed that they could count on the British or, if Britain failed, the nearby Arab powers to protect them.
Although many outside observers—misled both by a fundamentally orientalist and romanticized belief in the warlike reputation of the Arab peoples and an equally prejudiced view that discounted the martial talents of the Jewish people—failed to see it, the Palestinian Jews were coming to believe that, despite their numerical disadvantages, their organizational and technological advantages over the Palestinian Arabs would, under the right circumstances, give them a decisive edge in any military contest between the two peoples. The belief in their military capability stiffened the position of Jewish negotiators with their British counterparts. If the issue was left to the relative strengths of the two local communities in British Palestine, the Jews hoped to impose a solution on the Arabs.
Given the willingness of the Palestinian Jews to stake their fate on war, those who hoped to prevent a conflict needed to offer diplomatic solutions that the Jewish community found attractive. This was a road down which the Arabs did not wish to travel. The Palestinian Arabs were not only confident in their own military strength and that of their fellow Arabs, they believed that the tide of history was moving in their direction. National independence movements were succeeding all over the world. Arab countries like Egypt and Iraq were tearing up old treaties that gave Britain a dominant role. The Palestinians hoped and expected that the British would recognize the Arab majority of Palestine as the legitimate rulers of the country and turn the country over to them. They rejected any and all proposals for confederations, federal structures, Swiss-style cantonal arrangements, and so on—much less the option of partition into two independent states.
Meanwhile, the flashpoint in any negotiation between Arabs and Jews would come over immigration. In July 1946, Ben-Gurion proposed Jewish and Arab entities, each with full control over immigration and settlement policy, but that was as far as the Jewish leadership would or could go. Under duress, Palestinian Jews might temporarily accept a solution short of full independence, but only if they could control immigration into the Jewish parts of any kind of binational confederation.[40] There was simply no way that the Jewish leadership in Palestine could accept a political solution that did not allow the hundreds of thousands of desperate, homeless Holocaust survivors into Palestine. They would choose war, even war at long odds, over immigration restriction; an abandonment of the desperate and stateless Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would be such a fundamental betrayal of Zionist values that it would destroy the cohesion and spirit of the Palestinian Jews.
But immigration was also a do-or-die issue for the Arabs. Given the hundreds of thousands of desperate Jews in Europe (among whom young men of military age were disproportionately represented, as young adults had been better able to survive the rigors of concentration camps and war than children and the old), unrestricted Jewish immigration into Palestine would rapidly change the demographic balance and create an even greater advantage for the Jews. To the Arabs, more Jewish immigration seemed certain to end in the establishment of a Jewish state as the Jewish population grew.
In any case, the Palestinian Arabs, already enraged at the massive Jewish immigration, an influx to which no assembly of Palestinian Arabs had ever consented and that had reshaped much of their country, were utterly opposed to any additional Jewish immigration and would consider no solution that allowed it. The Jews, reeling from the horrors of the Holocaust, burning with the determination to create a secure homeland to prevent any future slaughter, and anguished over the fate of the displaced Jews of Europe, were ready to fight rather than to give up the right of Jewish immigration. The Arabs were determined to fight rather than allow it. Outside negotiators tried to square this circle right up through the outbreak of the Israeli War of Independence, but no formula satisfactory to both sides could be found.
Many, even most, observers missed this at the time, but with hindsight we can see that by 1947 the Jews of Palestine had created an embryonic state whose emergence could only be prevented by the credible threat and perhaps the deployment of clearly superior force by outside powers. There were two possibilities for such a force: it could consist of some combination of Palestinian and other Arab armies, or it could be the army of some outside power. The Americans were unwilling to commit forces to Palestine under any circumstances, and certainly not to suppress the Jews. The Soviets did not have the logistical wherewithal to intervene at this distance from their frontiers, and Soviet intervention in the Middle East would have called forth strong resistance from both the U.S. and the U.K. as the Cold War took shape. The Palestinian Arab cause, then, depended on engaging the British to resist Jewish independence, and, as a backup, on an intervention by neighboring Arab states if the British Army was defeated or went home.
For the Jews, the problem was the opposite. If the British were unwilling to help the Jews gain independence, then the Jews would have to drive the British away, defeat the local Palestinian Arabs, and either prevent or defeat a subsequent intervention by the Arabs. The Palestinian Jews could not defeat the British by force of arms, but they hoped that a combination of military and political measures could persuade the British to withdraw. The Jews of Palestine pursued a two-track approach to neutralize Great Britain: diplomatic efforts sought a compromise with the British that would induce them to withdraw while a guerrilla campaign (the British called it terrorism, not without reason) would raise the price of keeping British forces in Palestine.
Starting in the fall of 1945, military, and in some cases terrorist, resistance by Palestinian Jews to the British presence had begun to impose serious costs on a war-weary U.K. Ultimately, 100,000 British troops would be pinned down in an ugly conflict that was visibly alienating what friends the British had left in the American press. A year after V-E Day, life was still very far from normal in a Britain that continued to ration food and basic consumer goods. One diplomatic effort after another to bring the Arabs and Jews to the peace table foundered on the hopeless issue of migration. The status quo did not look sustainable. In Washington, London, and in Palestine attention began to turn to something that once seemed unthinkable: what should happen in Palestine if the British decided to leave?
Given the unbridgeable gaps between Arab and Jewish demands, beginning in the summer of 1946, the British, the Americans, and the Jews all began to look hard at partitioning the territory into two states. The Arabs continued to reject the concept, insisting on immediate independence for a one-state solution in which the Arabs would rule, the Jews would have minority rights, and all further Jewish immigration would be subject to Arab control.
In the United Kingdom during that summer, Ernest Bevin argued that partition might be the only way out of Britain’s difficulties, but Attlee and the military staff still hoped for a solution that would keep Palestine available as a base for British troops.[41] Policymakers tried to bring Arabs and Jews together for talks on some form of confederal solution, but the two communities on the ground in Palestine were united in rejecting it.
In the United States, Truman’s frustration over the collapse of Morrison-Grady and the failing negotiations with the U.K. led him to issue a carefully worded statement (timed for maximum political impact on the day before Yom Kippur and just a month before the congressional elections) saying that partition was, in his view, a solution that would be acceptable to American opinion. The statement was carefully hedged; Truman argued that the distance between the Morrison-Grady recommendations and the Jewish Agency’s demands was not unbridgeable, and that a reasonable compromise between them was something that could win American support. As is often the case when politicians attempt to please everyone, nobody liked the statement. Truman enraged the British but did not please American Zionists. The Republicans immediately outflanked him, denouncing Truman’s closeness to Britain and demanding that he push more aggressively to address the problems of the Jewish DPs. The statement did nothing to stave off the GOP landslide in the November elections, but represented a new stage in the administration’s thinking. Truman’s preference remained for some kind of confederation of Arab and Jewish provinces under a central government responsible for economic and external affairs, but by the fall of 1946 he was losing faith that the Jews and the Arabs would accept it.[42]
The Palestinian Jews were not prepared to say so publicly, but partition was beginning to look more attractive. Ben-Gurion and some of his colleagues reached the conclusion during the fall of 1946 that their demand for a Jewish state in the whole of Palestine was unrealistic. Arabs were still a majority in the territory at the time, and there was little chance that the Jews could take and hold all of Palestine by military means. Given that reality, a partition of the territory that created a Jewish state seemed preferable to a Morrison-Grady type of confederal solution that forced Jews to accept a de facto partition but left control of immigration in British hands.
The British still hoped to be able to keep bases in Palestine, and so spent the fall in a last attempt to bring the Arabs and the Jews together around some version of the Morrison-Grady compromise that would convert Palestine into a stable platform for British forces. The gap between the Arab and Jewish positions remained too wide to close, though the Arab representatives at a London conference expressed willingness to allow permanent British bases in an independent, Arab-ruled Palestine. On September 20, the Arab states outlined their position in a memorandum. British bases were possible, and Jews legally settled in Palestine could have minority rights, but the Arabs would have the final say over immigration.[43]
By the end of 1946, Britain was running out of options. Holding on to Palestine without agreement with the Jews committed Britain to a long-term, expensive counterinsurgency effort that would deeply and progressively alienate American opinion at a time when good relations with the United States were becoming more vital to Britain’s position than ever before. Any effort to conciliate the Jews involved concessions that would inflame the Arab world at a time when Britain’s hold on the Middle East remained critical to British imperial strategy.
In the end, however, it was economic weakness rather than American opposition that broke the back of Britain’s Palestine strategy and eliminated the British Army as an obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish state. Beginning on January 21, 1947, blizzards and subfreezing temperatures paralyzed transit in Britain with deep snowdrifts blocking both road and rail traffic. In some places it snowed on twenty-six of the twenty-eight days in February. Ferry service to Belgium was suspended due to pack ice on the sea routes.
Coal was used to generate electricity; heat homes, schools, and offices; and power factories. As the freeze tightened its grip, piles of coal assembled for shipping froze solid and could not be transported. The military was called in to try to chip the coal apart. Factories were shut down; radio and television broadcasts were curtailed; power cuts left the British people shivering in the dark. When the snow finally melted in March, floods blocked roads and destroyed houses. Roughly 20 percent of the industries that depended on coal and electricity were forced to shut down, and the slow economic recovery from the war was derailed. The food ration was cut to below wartime levels and unemployment shot up from 400,000 to 2.3 million. One fourth of Britain’s sheep population died in the cold, ensuring both meat and wool shortages. Crop production fell by 10 to 20 percent.[44]
The weather disaster was a serious political blow for the Labour government, in part because the controversial nationalization of the British coal mining industry had just taken effect on January 1, only weeks before widening coal shortages spread across the country. The New York Times reported from Sheffield on February 22, “This winter’s collapse of industry will be…a landmark in Labor’s history.”[45] Indeed it was, and anger at Prime Minister Attlee, who tried to blame the war, grew more and more intense.
Changes in policy had to be made. Since V-J Day, Ernest Bevin and the military chiefs had been fighting a holding action against cabinet pressure for severe cuts in foreign and defense spending. That fight could no longer be sustained. Between February 14 and February 20 of that year, the cabinet made three fateful decisions: the U.K. would withdraw its support from Greece and Turkey by March 31, it would pull out of India by June of 1948, and it would throw in the towel on Palestine, informing the United Nations of its intention to give up its mandate and to leave the future of the country for the United Nations to decide. The British Army would no longer stand between the Arabs and the Jews of Palestine.[46]
It no longer made sense to pay the price of keeping order in Palestine while hoping for some kind of political solution to emerge. Turning the insoluble and expensive problem of Palestine over to the United Nations offered an attractive way forward. Let Britain’s critics in the United States and the United Nations see what they could make of things. British authorities still believed that good relations with the Arab world and access to Middle Eastern oil were necessary to maintain what was left of Great Britain’s position as a great power. Freed from its responsibilities to both sides as the mandatory power in Palestine, Britain could concentrate on strengthening its ties to friendly Arab governments. If a Jewish state emerged with American support, Britain could throw as much of the blame as possible onto the United States, and demonstrate to the Arabs where London’s sympathies lay.
On February 18, 1947, the British cabinet informed the House of Commons that it would give up its legal authority in Palestine and evacuate its troops by August 1948. In April, Britain asked the General Assembly of the United Nations to convene a special session to consider the future of a territory for which the British Empire would no longer be responsible.[47] Truman had still not received his visas; a new and ultimately even more difficult stage of his Palestine policy was about to begin.