Mike Watson
Tablet, May 2, 2022
“The British government’s opposition to Jewish aspirations ran afoul of two important actors: the Jewish defense forces and President Harry Truman.”
The story of Israel’s creation is one of the most improbable in human history: After millennia of exile and dispersion, the Jewish people once again had a state of their own. The unlikelihood of this outcome is matched only by the dramatic events that precipitated it, and it is not surprising that nearly 75 years after the United Nations resolution that partitioned the British mandate in Palestine, scholars are still trying to make sense of it all. Two new books will help readers better understand how the aftermath of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War affected Israel’s rebirth.
The first twist in the story comes early in Nick Reynold’s The 1945–1952 British Government’s Opposition to Zionism and the Emergent State of Israel. After a decade in power, Great Britain’s Tories lost the July 1945 election to the Labour Party, then led by Clement Attlee. Labour’s party platform called for abolishing restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine and reaffirmed the Balfour Declaration. Hugh Dalton, who subsequently became chancellor of the exchequer, thundered at the party conference, “It is morally wrong and politically indefensible to impose obstacles to the entry into Palestine now of any Jews who desire to go there.”
To many Zionists, the Labour Party victory looked like a godsend. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency in Palestine, was more skeptical. He was right to be: Soon after taking over the Foreign Ministry, Ernest Bevin said to Attlee about Palestine that “according to my lads in the Office, we’ve got it wrong. We’ve got to think again.”
Mike Watson is associate director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for the Future of Liberal Society.
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