1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (9 page)

In launching the committee, Bevin preempted its recommendations by publicly setting out Britain's short- and long-term goals. He hoped that the committee would propose relieving Britain of the Mandate and replacing it with an international "trusteeship." After a time, an independent, Arabmajority state would be established. He warned the Jews not to push their way to "the head of the queue," lest they trigger an anti-Semitic reaction. Meanwhile, Britain would curb Jewish immigration, imposing a ceiling of fifteen hundred entry certificates a month. The Jewish Agency denounced Bevin's "prejudging" the committee's findings.70

During February and March 1946 the committee studied the situation of the DPs in Europe, toured the Middle East, and heard out Arab and Zionist representatives and British officials. Some outside observers, such as the philo-Zionist South African prime minister Jan Smuts and Dr. Walter C. Lowdermilk, an expert on agricultural development, were also consulted.

The Palestinians' "Arab Office," headed by Musa al Alami, cautioned the AAC against regarding "Jewish colonization in Palestine and Arab resistance to it in terms of white colonization of America and Australia and the resistance of the Red Indians and Aborigenes." Nor would Zionist-engendered prosperity persuade the Arabs to shelve their opposition to a movement that was bent on their dispossession. 71 The Jewish Agency presented a report that emphasized Arab (and specifically Palestinian Arab) backwardness and Zionism's role as a bearer of enlightenment and progress. The agency offered reams of statistics and graphs to demonstrate Zionist beneficence. Of particular effect was the month the committee members spent touring DP camps, especially in Poland. Jewish Agency agents, working behind the scenes, made sure that the committee met and heard only Jews propounding the Zionist solution. The committee found that the displaced Jews in Poland lived in an "atmosphere of terror," with "pogroms ... an everyday occurrence." (Indeed, some fifteen hundred Jews were slaughtered by antiSemitic Poles in the year following the end of World War II.) The committee members were persuaded of the need for wholesale immigration of the DPs to Palestine.

Before reaching Palestine, the members visited Arab capitals. At Riyadh, King Ibn Saud told them: "The Jews are our enemies everywhere. Wherever they are found, they intrigue and work against us.... We drove the Romans out of Palestine.... How, after all this sacrifice, would a merchant [that is, Jew] come and take Palestine out of our hands for money?" Ibn Saud then presented each member with a golden dagger and an Arabian robe and headdress and showed off his harem. He offered to find Judge Singleton a spouse.72

In the hearings in Palestine, the Jewish leaders again offered statistics and graphs and argued that the Arabs already had a number of states; the Palestinian Arabs did not need a separate state of their own. Ben-Gurion banned all but mainstream Zionist spokesmen from appearing before the AAC (though, defying the leadership, Hebrew University president Yehuda Leib Magnes also testified, advocating a binational solution). The Arabs preferred to impress the AAC with "a sumptuous luncheon at Katy Antonius's or a ceremonial visit to a large estate rather than any systematic marshalling of facts and figures to make a convincing presentation."73

But perhaps more important than the formal testimony were the committee's tours around the country. The contrary realities of Zionist and Arab existence left an abiding impression. After visiting Kibbutz Mishmar Ha`emek, at the western edge of the Jezreel Valley, Crossman wrote: "I've never met a nicer community anywhere." By contrast, two hundred yards down the road, he later reported, was "the stenchiest Arab village I have ever seen," where Grossman was treated to tea "on the [earthen] floor of a filthy hovel."74

And Aydelotte later wrote: "I left Washington pretty strongly anti-Zionist.... But when you see at first hand what these Jews have done in Palestine ... the greatest creative effort in the modern world. The Arabs are not equal to anything like it and would destroy all that the Jews have done.... This we must not let them do."75 Buxton was later to compare the Haganah to the American revolutionary army, "a rabble in arms in the fine sense."76

The AAC's report was released simultaneously in Washington and London on i May. It represented, roughly, a compromise between the views of its two component blocks, the American and British. The committee accepted that most of the DPs wished to settle in Palestine and recommended that "ioo,ooo" entry permits be issued "as rapidly as conditions will permit." The committee sympathized with the propensity of each side to regard Palestine as its homeland and rejected partition. For the short and medium term, the AAC recommended that the British Mandate be converted into, or continued under the guise of, a United Nations trusteeship. Later, Palestine should be granted independence within a unitary or binational framework. The AAC's recommendations were unanimous.

But the AAC had done nothing to heal the basic Anglo-American rift. Truman once again endorsed the passage of a hundred thousand DPs to Palestine and approved the scrapping of the white paper's land sale provisions, which the AAC had deemed discriminatory; Attlee ruled out mass immigration until the Yishuv was disarmed (which he knew was a nonstarter).

The Jewish Agency endorsed the report's immigration recommendation but rejected all the rest. The Arabs rejected everything. They demanded immediate independence for an Arab-ruled Palestine, not "binationalism," whatever that might mean, and called for an immediate cessation of immigration. One Foreign Office cable, in the wake of the report, spoke of Arab hatred of the Jews as being greater than that of the Nazis. The AHC-in a letter from Jamal Husseini to Attlee-issued an "ultimatum" and threatened "jihad." In a follow-up interview with British high commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham, Hussein declared his willingness "to die" for the cause. When Cunningham responded that this didn't really trouble him and that what worried him was the welfare of "the ordinaryArab population," Husseini rejoined that "they were prepared to die too."77

The publication of the report triggered violent demonstrations in Baghdad and Palestine; in Beirut, the US Information Center was set on fire. At least one Baghdad newspaper called for jihad: "The Arabs must proclaim a crusade [that is, holy war] to save the Holy Land from [the] western gang which understands only the language of force." Another called on the Arabs to "annihilate all European Jews in Palestine."" The AAC report was officially condemned by the Arab League Council meeting at Bludan, Syria, on 8-io June 1946.

The publication of the report led to a resumption of Jewish attacks on British targets culminating in the Palmah's Night of the Bridges. On 29 June the British responded with Operation Agatha, dubbed in Zionist historiography Black Sabbath, designed to cripple the Haganah. For two weeks the security forces scoured Jewish towns and rural settlements for men and arms, even occupying the Jewish Agency building in Jerusalem (which, in fact, contained a Haganah headquarters), and arrested four JAE members, including Shertok. But HIS had obtained advanced warning, and most Haganah commanders escaped the dragnet. The operation only marginally affected Haganah capabilities.

But politically, while further damaging Britain's image in the United States, the operation persuaded the JAE (meeting in Paris in early August 1946) to abandon the path of military confrontation. 79 However, Black Sabbath also provoked vengefulness, with the IZL, ironically, taking up the cudgel for its sometime enemy, the Haganah. With faulty coordination with the Haganah, IZL sappers on z2 July placed a number of bomb-laden milk containers in the basement of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which served as a British military and administrative headquarters. The resulting explosion, which brought down one of the hotel's wings, was the single biggest terrorist outrage in the organization's history. The IZL subsequently claimed that it had given the British ample warning but that they had failed to evacuate the building; the British maintained that no adequate warning had been given. Ninety-one British, Arab, and Jewish officers and officials died.

In response, the commander of the British forces in Palestine, Lieutenant General Sir Evelyn Barker, issued a nonfraternization order in which he accused all of Palestine's Jews of complicity in the outrage. British personnel were barred from frequenting Jewish homes or businesses or to have "any social intercourse with any Jew," in order to punish "the Jews in a way the race dislikes as much as any, by striking at their pockets." Barker was subsequently rebuked by Attlee but was not removed from command.""

The upshot of the violence and of the Anglo-American discussions about the AAC report in summer 1946 was the Morrison-Grady, or Provincial Autonomy, Plan, Britain's last effort to devise a compromise. The plan left defense, foreign affairs, and most economic matters in British-or "International Trusteeship"-hands while, subdivided into four "cantons," Jews and Arabs were offered a measure of local autonomy (responsibility for municipal affairs, agriculture, education, and so on). The plan also provided for the immediate transfer to Palestine of one hundred thousand DPs and eventual independence for Palestine as a unitary (or binational) state. In September, the British convened a conference in London, attended by British officials and representatives of the Arab states, to discuss the plan. But nothing came of it. The Zionists, who did not attend, insisted on "Jewish statehood," and the Arabs demanded "immediate Arab independence." The American response was equally unequivocal: on 4 October 1946, Truman formally rejected Morrison-Grady, hesitantly endorsed partition and Jewish statehood (a solution, he said, that "would command the support of public opinion in the United States"),," and called for an immediate start to "substantial" immigration. Truman's statement was in large measure prompted by the upcoming midterm American elections. Attlee was bowled over: he complained that Truman "did not wait to acquaint [himself] with the reasons" for the plan.82 Meanwhile, the Haganah pressed on with its illegal immigration campaign.

On z7 January 1947, the British took one last shot at resolving the crisis. They reconvened the London conference, this time with the AHC represented. But the Zionists continued to boycott the talks, and the United States declined to send an observer. The Arabs continued to refitse anything short of complete, immediate independence, and the Jews, anything less than Jewish statehood in all or part of Palestine.

With no acceptable military solution to the Jewish guerrilla-terrorist and illegal immigration campaigns, and with no political solution to the ZionistArab impasse, Britain had reached the end of the road.