Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Zionist settlement in Palestine was largely agricultural, the immigrants being settled in close-knit village communities on lands, often semiarid lands, purchased by funds raised by the World Zionist conference or its friends and administered under the Jewish Agency for Palestine. These organizations gave the Zionist groups, over several decades, the political and administrative experience and the patterns of self-sacrifice for a common cause which provided the functioning political structure for the state of Israel as the British mandate for Palestine was ended in 1948. The Zionist communal villages, under constant danger of attack by Arab raiders, developed a mentality somewhat like that of early American frontier settlements amid hostile Indians. Each village developed a force of trained defense fighters, its Haganah, with arms hidden in the village, or in a regional center, for the day in which they must fight for their continued existence. This Haganah organization subsequently became the Army of Israel.

British raids on Zionist centers to arrest illegal immigrants or to seize hidden arms, and Arab attacks upon incautious Zionist settlements, soon led to reprisals and counter-reprisals and to the creation of violent and bitter splinter groups within the Zionist effort. The Jewish Agency did not have absolute control over the Haganah and had decreasingly less over a number of minute reprisal groups of which the chief were the extremist Irgun Zvai Le’umi, with several thousand members, or the terrorist “Stern Gang” of less than two hundred. The latter group had murdered the British high commissioner, Lord Moyne, in November 1944, and later assassinated the United Nations mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, in September 1948.

During the years 1945-1948, the Jewish Agency sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, to remove the rigid British restrictions on Jewish immigration and Jewish land purchases, and to obtain an international loan to finance its Jewish settlement policies. These were resisted, not only because of Britain’s desires to remain on amicable relations with the Arab states, but also from the obvious lack of sympathy for the Zionist cause within the British government, especially after Churchill’s National government was replaced by a Labour Party regime in 1945. The immediate demand for admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe was rejected by the British, and efforts to smuggle some of these in gave rise to conditions of quasi-warfare between Britain and the Zionist groups. A League of the neighboring Arab states which had been formed under British sponsorship in March 1945 took as its chief aim the destruction of the Zionist plans, and sought to block Jewish immigration or use up Haganah arms by sneak raids on Zionist frontier settlements.

When the Labour government in June 1946 refused the Zionist request for admission of the 100,000 refugees, and, instead, sought to arrest the members of the Jewish Agency, the Irgun Zvai Le’umi in reprisal exploded 500 pounds of TNT under the British headquarters in the east wing of the luxurious King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing almost a hundred persons. The World Zionist Congress elections of December showed decreasing support for more moderate figures like Dr. Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion. The former won reelection as president of the World Zionist Movement by a bare majority, and refused to offer his name for reelection as president of the Jewish Agency. This increase in the extremist influence within the Zionist movement made it clear to Britain that peace in Palestine could be maintained only at a great cost which the Labour government was unable and unwilling to pay. Support for the mandate from the United States was unobtainable, since Washington generally tended to favor the Jewish side, while the British, in spite of their valiant efforts to appear impartial, clearly favored the Arabs. Death sentences on Jewish terrorists, first carried out by the British in 1947, merely intensified the violence, with the British armed forces suffering about three casualties a week, one-third fatal.

In April 1947, the British sought to escape from the situation by appealing to the United Nations, which voted in November to partition Palestine into two intertwining Jewish and Arab zones, with an international zone in Jerusalem. The Arab League rejected partition, and its members swore to resist it by force, by a “relentless war,” according to a Cairo newspaper. This war opened with Arab riots in Palestine against the UN vote at the very time that the Jews were welcoming it. Arab irregulars began to enter Palestine from Syria and Egypt as the British began to withdraw from their long effort to administer the country.

This British withdrawal from Palestine was but one aspect of the general withdrawal of Britain from its prewar world and imperial position. It was a consequence of the general political weakening of Great Britain, its acute economic and financial position in the postwar period and, above all, by the growing preference of the ordinary British voter for social welfare and higher living standards at home over the remote and impersonal glories of imperial prestige abroad.

On September 26, 1947, the British announced they would withdraw from Palestine and that failure to obtain a United Nations administration or any accepted Arab-Zionist partition would not delay this process. However, the British were determined not to hand over the administration to the only organization available which was capable of handling the job, the Jewish Agency, and as a result simply abandoned or closed down many public services and destroyed or left many essential administrative records. This created a chaotic situation in which the Arab League was unable to rule, the United Nations and Britain were unwilling to rule, and the Jewish Agency was prevented from taking over by the retiring British forces.

At the beginning of April 1948, small forces from Syria, Iraq, and Egypt entered Palestine to support the local Arabs’ efforts to prevent the Jewish Agency taking control of the country. They were followed by the Arab Legion of Transjordan, under British officers, which came in as soon as the British mandate ended on May 14, 1948. Although the Zionists were outnumbered and had inferior equipment, their courage, tenacity, and persistence, combined with the mutual rivalries and divisions among the five Arab groups, allowed the Israeli to establish and consolidate a Zionist government in several areas of Palestine. During the interval, financial support from American sympathizers allowed the Zionists to rectify the arms disequilibrium, chiefly by purchases from Czechoslovakia, which had just joined the Iron Curtain bloc in March.

As early as January, many Arab families had begun to flee from Palestine, and by June this became a flood. Many left voluntarily, encouraged by the unrealistic promises of the Arab League to return them as conquerors after the total defeat of Zionism, but a substantial number were uprooted and expelled by Zionist retaliatory actions. Eventually, in spite of the Jewish Agency’s promise that Arabs would be welcome to continue to live in Israel if they did not act to subvert the new state, the number of refugees reached an estimated 652,000 persons. Most of these were settled in camps along the frontiers in Jordan and in Egypt and were maintained by international charity administered under the United Nations.

Efforts to resettle these unfortunates within the Arab States of the Near East were blocked by these states, which refused to cooperate in any such recognition of the changed situation in Palestine and which welcomed refugee discontent as an instrument for stirring up hatred of Israel and the West among their own citizens. Large numbers of the refugees eventually left these camps and integrated themselves by their own efforts into the life of the Arab States of the Near East, but birthrates in the camps were so high that the total number in the camps decreased very slowly. In Jordan the refugees who became assimilated were so numerous and so bitter that they came to dominate that precarious state, were a constant threat to the stability of its government, forced it to destroy its friendly relations with Britain, which had founded it, and remained as an explosive threat against Israel.