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Monday, July 23, 2012

The British 1939 Double Cross

Nadene Goldfoot
Even Churchill had second thoughts on what Britain had done with their mandate in Palestine, though he had helped to draw up the Churchill White Paper of 1922 hindering the Jews in achieving their national home.

   The British  were given the charge to help bring about the Jewish National Home and managed to double cross Chaim Weizmann and the Zionists by reducing the agreed upon allotted land and gave 75% of it to the Arabs instead. The idea that the White Paper tried to induce, that Jews were to be "illegals" in their "Home" was never universally accepted.  This had been about the  White Paper coming down on the Jews' heads keeping them out of the land.  In 1936, Protestant and Catholic leaders in New York said that the British government must uphold its covenanted pledges to the Jewish people and to the world...that the British rescind its illegal, unjust and indefensible partition of Palestine to restore Transjordania to its proper place as part of the Palestine territory and throw it open to Jewish settlement.   Britain disregarded their announcement.  


"I should feel personally embarrassed,"  Churchill said, "in the most acute manner if I lent myself, by silence or inaction, to what I must regard as an act of repudiation."  The breach, he explained, was the 1939 White Paper (McDonald's) declaration drawn up by Britain after the agreement they accepted of taking on the responsibility of the mandate to help bring about the Jewish National Homeland.  

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the USA, questioned the legality of the White Paper's policy, but the State Department supported it.  Later, the State Department acted the same way with Truman.  There was a clique of secret John Foster Dulles supporters inside the administration and were paying more attention to the British views than Truman's.  James  Forrestal, a manic, ambitious and very right-wing investment banker called the "boy wonder" of Wall Street with reservations about Palestine,  lunched with Loy Henderson, his ally and was told about the views of Ernest Bevin, the notoriously anti-Semitic British foreign secretary.  Bevin was out to get arrangements with Washington to keep London's role in the Middle East as the important one.  Bevin had described the president's support for Jewish immigration to Palestine as a "crude desire for votes in New York," and therefore was not one of Harry Truman's favorite people.  They were part of a clique against Truman ever  voting for the Jewish state.

Others shared Churchill's outrage.  A member of Parliament, Herbert Morrison, reminded the government of the aid being given by Hitler and Mussolini to the upper-class Arab leaders in Palestine ever since British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had shown his partiality to the Arabs.  The White Paper had the audacity to give the Arabs the veto over Jewish immigration.  This was 1939, when Jews were passionately trying to enter their "Jewish National Homeland."  or die in Europe.  Countries either had small quotas for Jewish immigrants or didn't allow them in their countries at all.  The USA wouldn't even extend their Jewish quotas in this dire time of need.

Morrison begged his colleagues to stop this evil thing being done.  ..I ask them to remember the sufferings of these Jewish people all over the world.  I ask them to remember that Palestine, of all places in the world, was certainly the place where they had some right to expect not to suffer or to have restrictions imposed upon them.  Look at the extent of the country---this little patch of territory.  Transjordan has been taken away.  (Transjordan was included in the Jewish National Homeland but given to the Arabs).  

Nevelle Chamberlain (18 March 1869-9 Nov 1940) should have been thinking about the encroaching  Nazis.   "I believe the persecution arose  of two motives", he wrote to his sister in a letter:  A desire to rob the Jews of their money and a jealousy of their superior cleverness.  No doubt Jews aren't a lovable people;  I don't care about them myself---but that is not sufficient to explain the Pogrom."

Chamberlain believed in appeasement of an enemy.  The White Paper of 1939 reinforced his belief.  A year earlier was the agreement in Munich that sacrificed Czechoslovakia to the Nazis to gain "Peace in our time," as he put it.  Perhaps he thought that with the White Paper the Arab Revolt would die down.  Actually it must have encouraged what George Antonius, an Arab writer and representative called a "substantial advance towards the recognition of Arab rights" and what the Jews called "a surrender to Arab terrorism" which I say is still going on today at the UN.

Resource:  From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters, pages 346-349.
The Secret War Against the Jews by John Loftus and Mark Aarons p. 161
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_White_Paper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Paper_of_1939
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Morrison





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