Churchill, Palestine and Zionism, 1904-1922 - Douglas J. Feith

260 DOUGLAS J. FEITH
prepared to be reconciled to a regime which recognised the implications
of the Balfour Declaration.,,138
In 1939, just before the Second World War began, Churchill explicitly
linked the Chamberlain government's efforts to appease, respectively, the
Arabs in Palestine and the Germans in Europe. Both efforts, he said, were
dishonorable and doomed to fail. Both undermined British influence and
endangered international security because they signaled that Britain could
not be counted on to fulfill its commitments. The government's white
paper on Palestine of May 1939 had given the Arabs a veto over future
Jewish immigration into Palestine, thereby ensuring permanent minority
status for the Jews. Churchill voiced blistering indignation: "Now, there is
the breach; there is the violation of the pledge; there is the abandonment
of the Balfour Declaration." He asked what Britain's potential enemies
will think of this "act of abjection," this "lamentable act of default":
"What will those who have been stirring up these Arab agitators think?
Will they not be encouraged by our confession of recoil? Will they not be
tempted to say: 'They're on the run again. This is another Munich,' and
be the more stimulated in their aggression?"!39
But the white paper anticipated such criticism. It asserted that, in
promising a Jewish national home, Britain had never committed itself to
a Jewish majority or a Jewish state in Palestine. As evidence, it offered a
lengthy quotation from the Churchill white paper of 1922, in which the
then colonial secretary had played "hide the ball" regarding the aims of
Britain's Zionist policy. Churchill played this game with such care that
the new colonial secretary in 1939 could claim, plausibly if disingenuously,
that the ball never existed in the first place.
History is not a controlled experiment. We cannot know whether a
candid, forceful, and unapologetic implementation of the Jewish national
home policy would have compelled the Arab world to resign itself to the
inevitability of a Jewish state in western Palestine. We do know, however,
that the British government's purposeful vagueness about its aims in
Palestine, its severing of Transjordan from the Jewish national home, its
restrictions on Jewish immigration, its courting of Arab extremists, and
its other similar efforts to contain and defuse anti-Zionism did not have
that effect. Rather, they persuaded anti-Zionists in the Arab community,
138 Government of Palestine, A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December 1945 and January
1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, 2 vols.
(Palestine: Government Printer, 1945-6), vol. 1, 22.
139 WSC V 1070-1.