Jewish
organizations that now are staunch supporters of the Israeli state were
concerned with the same issues that Palestinians protest now.
At
the November 1917 issuance of the Balfour Declaration of the British
government in favor of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, many American
Jewish Committee members and officers had observed that, if successful,
the goal of a Jewish state to rule the multi-ethnic land of Palestine
would lead to oppression of non-Jews.
In an April 1918 executive
committee meeting considering the declaration, a member noted the goal
of the AJC to protect civil and religious rights of Jews living as
minorities around the world, and worried that a Jewish state could
oppress non-Jews:
If a national home in Palestine be
established, it may be that there too the good offices of this Committee
may become necessary to protect a minority against an arrogant
majority.
In 1919, AJC President Louis Marshall asserted
an AJC statement on the Balfour declaration had been definitive in
rejecting political Zionism:
In April last the American
Jewish Committee defined its position in terms which could not be
misunderstood, which indicated that, while it hailed with satisfaction
the Balfour Declaration, it did so because of the two conditions
annexed, namely, that it would not affect the rights of the non-Jewish
inhabitants of Palestine and that it was not to be regarded as in any
way affecting the status of Jews who lived in other lands.
In
September 1946, when the organization reluctantly adopted a
pro-partition position and began lobbying the UN and US government, AJC
President Joseph Proskauer told his board, “The so-called Jewish State
is not to be called by that name but will bear some appropriate
geographical designation. It will be Jewish only in the sense that the
Jews will form a majority of the population.”
Mainstream
Jewish organizations knew endless violence and oppression would result
from imposing a Jewish state in Palestine against the stated wishes of
its non-Jewish inhabitants.
The pernicious results of insisting on
forcing Jewish sovereignty over Palestine—and necessarily disrupting
Arab life there—was well understood within the Jewish organizations and
in the general press.
In November 1939, Louis D. Brandeis
objected to a planned visit to the United States by Zionist leader Chaim
Weizmann: "He (Brandeis) believed the whole thing was a mistake. He was
afraid Weizmann would press his plan for political action, based on a
future re-shuffling of populations."
In a February 1940 meeting
with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Weizman said that "of course they
(Jews) would compensate the Arabs in a reasonable way for anything they
got," creating a Jewish Palestine and incentivizing Arabs to leave.
Historian
George Antonius wrote in the widely-read book The Arab Awakening (1939)
that “the logic of facts is inexorable. It shows that no room can be
made in Palestine for a second nation except by dislodging or
exterminating the nation in possession.”
Journalist I.F. Stone
wrote on a 1945 visit to Palestine, “Without the Zionist movement, what
has been achieved in Palestine would never have come to pass. …But the
strength associated with such a movement also has its corresponding
defects, and the defects of Zionism are its failure to take into account
the feelings and aspirations of the Palestinian Arab.”
A November
1947 CIA memo noted, "many [American] Zionist organizations, while
supporting the objectives of a National Home for Jews, do not advocate
an independent Jewish nation in Palestine."
In a public letter,
Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others stated that in the years up
to statehood, Jewish terrorists "inaugurated a reign of terror in the
Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against
them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By
gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and widespread robberies,
the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute."
Commentary
monthly magazine (then published by the AJC) reported in March 1948,
"The terrorists defeated us," British officers admit. "We couldn't track
them down. The Jewish population was too frightened of them to help
us."
The AJC knew, from news reports and its on-scene
correspondent in Palestine, of the militant fervor that was building for
a Jewish state among the Zionist component.
Radical Zionist
militias engaged in increasing violence against Arabs, British mandate
administrators, and insufficiently-Zionist Jews in Palestine. Zionist
terrorism spread to incidents like the 1944 assassination of British
administrator Lord Moyne in Cairo, the 1946 bombing of the King David
Hotel in Jerusalem, and attacks on Arab communities, markets and busses.
The terrorism spread abroad to bombing of British facilities in
Rome(1946) and Vienna and a British troop train(1947).
In December
1947 AJC analyst Milton Himmelfarb wrote that one reason for the AJC
change of position to favor partition of Palestine was that “The
terrorists' activities in Palestine, and the posterings and mouthings of
their supporters here and abroad, led a number of AJC people to wonder
whether a Jewish state was the chief enemy. They began to feel that
after the state was created, the daily papers in New York at least would
no longer carry headlines screaming of King David Hotel explosions and
hangings of British sergeants; in short, ‘better an evil end than an
endless evil.’”
On the cusp of the implementation of the partition
plan, one AJC analysis of the coming "Zionization" of Jews in the
United States warned diaspora Jews would be enlisted to the Zionist
cause "beyond any consideration of good or evil."
Terrorist leader
and future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir led the September
1948 assassination of UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem –
to foil the diplomat’s efforts to encourage compromise on land taken by
Israel beyond the partition plan, and return of Arab refugees forced
from the new State of Israel.
In a draft section that was removed
from a February 15, 1948, speech that chairman (and future AJC
president) Jacob Blaustein gave on the subject of Palestine partition,
he reported "terrorist groups of Palestinian Jews took the offensive"
and that "If Partition fails, it is more than likely that these Jewish
extremists will resort to terrorism and violence in spite of efforts to
control them."
In the years since, the AJC and other mainstream
Jewish organizations have given up any notion of restraining Jewish
nationalist ambitions, abandoned concern they had for the right of
return of Palestinians exiled from their homes, and serve in the US as
defenders of whatever military power the Israeli government exercises
against the non-Jewish people of Palestine.
American Jewish
leaders increasingly took their cues from Israel, and by 1953 the AJC
set up a program of pro-Israeli propaganda, being fed by the Israeli
consul in New York obvious falsehoods such as that Israel was a "feat of
colonization unique in history, which was accomplished without
displacing anyone."
Mainstream Jewish organizations knew endless
violence and oppression would result from imposing a Jewish state in
Palestine against the stated wishes of its non-Jewish inhabitants. This
has proved accurate, most recently in Israel's methodical destruction of
the means of life for millions in Gaza, and increasing state and
settler terror against residents of the occupied West Bank.
[Above citations are from the author's book: The
Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein’s Speech, “The Meaning of
Palestine Partition to American Jews,” Given to the Baltimore Chapter,
American Jewish Committee, February 15, 1948]
