In the 1920s, the British turned over all of Eastern Palestine to satisfy a displaced Hashemite for reasons of transient realpolitik; throughout that decade, and well into the next, they failed to provide physical security for the Jews of Western Palestine, and indeed, as the Nebi Musa episode shows, even at times encouraged Arab violence. They discouraged the handful who tried to protest or who, like Wingate, actively tried to help the Jews protect themselves. They often favored, in misguided attempts at appeasement, the most extreme among the local Arabs; the appointment of Haj Amin al Husseini as grand mufti of Jerusalem may have been the most egregious, but it was hardly the only example. The "grand mufti," as the British dubbed him, preached anti-Jewish violence and spent World War II in Berlin, where he helped to raise an army of Muslim volunteers to fight for the Nazis. His appointment, incidentally, has been thoroughly examined by the foremost political historian of the early Mandate period, Elie Kedourie, in dry and dispassionate prose; it is curious that Kedourie is not mentioned anywhere in Segev's book.

The Mandate's second decade was even more dismal than the first. While Jewish refugees came to Palestine before 1939, the British White Paper of May, 1939 (four months before the outbreak of World War II) cut off the escape route from Europe. By this document, the British government did several things. First, it limited the right of Jews to purchase land in Palestine to a very small area. Still more grave, in 1939, was the provision limiting Jewish immigration to 15,000 a year for five years, after which there would be a "review" involving an Arab veto, with the clear implication that all Jewish immigration--to the Jewish National Home--would then halt.

Thus, at the moment of greatest peril and desperation for European Jewry, did the British cut off to all but a handful the refuge of Mandatory Palestine. Jews could leave the Reich until late in 1941 (and the ports of Romania were open until the end of the war); but from wherever Jews fled, they had to have a place that would take them in. As many as a million Jews, it has been estimated, might have made it safely to Palestine even after the war broke out, if not for the British White Paper. And even before May, 1939, how many Jews, among the tens of thousands who left Palestine in the 1920s and early 1930s, and among the hundreds of thousands who might have come but remained in Europe during that same period, were discouraged from coming, or from staying, by fears for their safety given the Arab attacks and the negligence or indifference or hostility-with a handful of glowing exceptions--of the British authorities in Palestine. Not everyone is a hero, and until the late 1930s it was not clear that the alternative to Palestine was certain persecution and death.

As a history of Mandatory Palestine, Segev's book is, at best, misleading.

The Arab Revolt of 1936 finally led to a stern British response, not out of outrage at the atttacks on Jews, but because the Arabs had the effrontery to also target the British. Segev attributes the discouragement that led Jews to re-emigrate, or not to come, solely to economic conditions. But a generalized insecurity among the Jews of Palestine, brought on by Arab terror campaigns, is still as fresh as this morning's news.

When it became clear in the late 1930s to many of Europe's Jews that they would have to flee to Palestine, the White Paper of 1939 spread despair among Jews inside and outside of Palestine. In Parliament, Winston Churchill denounced the White Paper, with its severe restrictions on Jewish immigration and its promise of an Arab veto over it within five years: "Now, there is the breach; there is the violation of the pledge; there is the abandonment of the Balfour Declaration; there is the end of the vision, of the hope, of the dream."

Segev knows, and has elsewhere admitted, that many Jews might have been saved even during the war if the British had not blocked immigration to Palestine, as they did, firing on ships and turning them away, some to return to European ports (where their human cargo ended in the death camps), some to be sunk with all aboard. Many might have been saved had the British, all through the 1920s and 1930s, actively encouraged Jewish immigration and "close Jewish settlement on the land." The White Paper of May 1939 is only the most egregious example of British indifference, or malevolence; many in Whitehall well understood its fateful consequences. Some well-known Jewish academic refugees had been allowed into Great Britain in the 1930s; the desperation of many hundreds of thousands of others to find refuge was hardly a secret. Their likely fate was also not a secret. Anthony Eden himself, well-known for his pro-Arab sympathies (he was a moving force in establishing the Arab League),

[(Continued on p.10)]

May 2001               - 9 -               Outpost