I read this:
Was he pushed? Ferdinand Mount states that William Ormsby-Gore, the colonial secretary in Neville Chamberlain’s government, ‘resigned’ in May 1938 because he disagreed with the cabinet’s policy on Palestine (LRB, 22 October). Maurice Cowling, in his definitive book on British politics in the 1930s, The Impact of Hitler, said that Chamberlain pushed Ormsby-Gore out of the cabinet because of his close family ties with such opponents of Appeasement as Lord Salisbury (Ormsby-Gore’s father-in-law) and Lord Cranborne (his brother-in-law). Disagreements over Palestine hardly entered into the matter. Charles Coutinho New York
And, thanks to AR, I was able to obtain the text of Mount's review.
Excerpts:
In the summer of 1937, the
commission itself urged the British administration in Palestine to take a tougher line:
the administration should have imposed martial law immediately; it should have replaced Arab policemen, imported more troops, and armed Jews; it should have exercised stricter censorship and shut down opposition newspapers; it should have arrested and tried the Arab officials who sent a petition critical of government policy; it should have imposed the death penalty more readily; it should have threatened to bomb villages that harboured rebels.
Bomber Harris, now at Middle East Command in Egypt, said of the Arab revolt that ‘one 250
lb or 500 lb bomb in each village that speaks out of turn’ would solve the problem.
Not everyone thought that way. Billy Ormsby-Gore, Britain’s colonial secretary, insisted that
‘for better or worse, the people of Great Britain were a liberal and democratic people,’ and
would not ‘for long be persuaded to use military force to settle a conflict between right and
right’.
And
the British government despaired of the mandate and seized on the recommendation
of the Peel Report that Palestine should be partitioned, only to back down under Arab
pressure. The humiliated Ormsby-Gore had had enough and resigned, having failed to square
the circle he had helped to draw twenty years earlier. In May 1939, the British government
changed its policy again and issued a White Paper setting out plans for the independence of
an undivided Palestine, only to back down once more, this time giving way to the Zionists. Throughout this tortuous and fruitless process, the commission offered plenty of criticism but
nothing in the way of a solution, no doubt because there wasn’t one.
And
The Category A mandates – applying to the
former Ottoman possessions of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine – did provisionally
recognise their existence as independent nations and looked forward to ‘such time as they are
able to stand alone’. But the commission remained sceptical that this moment would be
reached ‘anytime soon’,
If an independent nation existed in Palestine it wasn't Arab:
Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have agreed, for the purpose of giving effect to the provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, to entrust to a Mandatory selected by the said Powers the administration of the territory of Palestine, which formerly belonged to the Turkish Empire, within such boundaries as may be fixed by them; and
Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country; and
Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country;
...The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home...
...An appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine...The Zionist organization, so long as its organization and constitution are in the opinion of the Mandatory appropriate, shall be recognised as such agency...
...The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.
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13 comments:
To square Article 22, which referred to the inhabitants of the territory, with a National Home for the Jewish people, there either had to be:
a) large-scale Jewish immigration - the original idea of most at the beginning, I think: eg Balfour etc
b) medium-scale Jewish immigration - with the probable result of a partition of Palestine West of the Jordan; or I guess some sort of federated state with a Jewish province.
Andrew
Sorry, I miss your point.
The Mandate decision makes it apparent that a purpose of the mandate was to increase the Jewish population so that the Jewish national home which had been over the centuries had been deprived of its Jewish population by an Ottoman occupation which kept Jews out or limited their ability to stay or purchase property could regain its natural land historic native population.
Well, I was just reflecting on the structure of the Mandate, and especially the first two paragraphs of the preamble. Admittedly, if one adds the third paragraph and the idea of reconstitution, then only my a) would really fit the bill. But my impression is that even the Zionist organisation had been running with a more limited conception well before 1922, with talk of a separate Arab national development. The White Paper of June 1922 seems to me to have cemented such an interpretation (or mis-interpretation) before the Mandate was even agreed in July.
Andrew
I still have difficulty with what you are trying to say. Can you make a clear statement of what you want to prove? Are you intimating that the Arabs of the Mandate territory had priority over the Jewish population?
May I point out that the 1922 White Paper's origin was in the March 1921 Jerusalem Conference which decided to implant a Saudi Arabian in Transjordan. That I find odd if we are discussing the "local inhabitants", no?
No, on the contrary, I think it is clear that the building of the Jewish National Home comes across as the primary purpose of the Mandate - this from the Peel Commission which I think was perhaps the fairest of the commissions. If you would like me to make a definite point - although I am personally in the trying to learn and understand phase, so bear with me - I would ask you if you would agree that the Jewish people were not the sole beneficiary of the Mandate, as some would have it. Rather, there seem to be two principles and two (overlapping) beneficiaries in view: first (in order), from Article 22 of the LoN Covenant, the present inhabitants, Jews and Arabs and others; second, from the National Home idea, the Jewish people as a whole.
Andrew
Ah.
But as the term "Arabs" does not at all appear but rather the very general "non-Jews" which could have been intended to describe a vast variety of persons residing in the territory of the Mandate, including Arabs, Germans, Armenians, etc., your point would fail.
I had in mind the 'peoples' of Article 22. I was just using 'Arabs' as a shorthand for the Arabic-speaking people, Christian and Moslem, who I think formed the vast majority of the non-Jewish population.
Andrew
With regard to your post more specifically, I found this in 'Palestine: Retreat from the Mandate' by Michael J. Cohen, p.66: 'Ormsby-Gore resigned from office [in May 1938] a broken man, with Zionism the rock upon which his career had foundered.'
Andrew
That, obviously, is an error.
He foundered on a campaign of Arab terror which besides hundreds of Jews, killed many dozens of British officials (like the assassination of Andrews as he was leaving church on Sunday in September 1937), policemen and soldiers.
Are you at all knowledgeable about the period or are you trying to play the innocent?
Sorry, it did strike me afterwards that that could be read as an anti-Zionist comment. I am sure Cohen didn't mean it that way, and neither did I.
Andrew
Here's a passage from earlier in Cohen's book (pp 14-15), which gives more of an idea of what he meant by saying that Zionism was the rock upon which Ormsby-Gore's career had foundered:
'Fundamentally, Ormsby-Gore remained a Gentile Zionist, whose political heritage included a deep sense of obligation to the Jewish National Home, as envisaged by the architects (including himself) of the Balfour Declaration. In time he was to grow almost to resent the Zionists for his own inability to free himself from them - unlike his successor, Malcolm MacDonald, Ormsby-Gore was to become involved in a losing struggle against the pro-Arab tendencies of the senior Department, the Foreign Office. To Weizmann, he would complain that the Foreign Office was staffed with ‘new Pharaohs who knew not Joseph … assimilated Jews, the same kind that had opposed the Balfour Declaration’. Long before he was actually to leave the Colonial Office, Ormsby-Gore would bemoan his fate as intolerable and threaten resignation.'
Andrew
The "the pro-Arab tendencies" in there, similar to today, are presumed by those who maintain them to be able to placate Arab violence while seeking their own self-satisfying standing in their positions. I stand by my opinion.
I was coming back to the beginning of your post, where you quoted two different opinions about why Ormsby-Gore resigned, and providing a little evidence that the first might be closer to the truth, or at least was a major factor. I don't think you gave an opinion about that yourself, but would be interested to know if you have a view. On the matter of the appeasement of Arab violence, that seems to me to have been a major disaster from very early on in the Mandate, from Samuel especially, from the little I know. It seems madness to me to reward violence by restricting Jewish immigration. If anything, I would have thought it would have made more sense to increase the quotas every time there were attacks on Jews.
Andrew
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