Between the time Britain de facto gained its mandate over Palestine and Adolph Hitler became chancellor of the Third Reich, 12½ years passed. Woodrow Wilson's first two successors, with congressional concurrence, supported the Balfour Declaration and the mandate. Thus support for Zionism expanded from the policy of one president to that of three, buttressed by Congress. America became more involved morally in the Zionist-Palestinian conflict as the incidents of U.S. support increased and as the base of that support spread from the White House to Capitol Hill.

I. Developments During the Harding Presidency, 1921-23.

   Republican Warren Harding (1865-1923) took office in March 1921. After his election, author Melvin Urofsky writes, anti-Zionists in the State Department "openly proclaimed that the country had made no commitments to a Jewish homeland in Palestine."  On June 21 Harding stated: "It is impossible for one who has studied at all the services of the Hebrew people to avoid the faith that they will...be restored to their historic national home and there enter a new and yet greater phase of their contribution to the advance of humanity."  This was vaguely supportive but no commitment.
   Meanwhile, in March, Winston Churchill, head of Britain's Colonial Office, divided all mandate land east of the Jordan River (Trans-Jordan) from Mandate Palestine. He made one of Sherif Hussein's sons, Abdullah, Trans-Jordan's emir. (Abdullah was a brother of Feisal, who had briefly been king of Syria until ousted by the French. Abdullah was also the paternal grandfather of the future King Hussein of Jordan.) Abdullah was not fully independ-ent but answered to a British "adviser." Churchill's action ex-cluded any of Trans-Jordan from being considered by Britain as part of the Jewish National Home. Some Zionists objected, and still object. They consider areas of Jordan part of the historic Land of Israel because 2½ tribes lived there before the Babylonian Exile and because Jews lived there afterward as well.
   In early June 1922 Britain published the first of eventually three white papers on Palestine. It stated that the Jewish community "should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance. That is the reason why it is necessary that the existence of a Jewish National Home in Palestine should be internationally guaranteed, and that it should be formally recognised to rest upon ancient historic connection."
   By this "Home" did Britain now mean a Jewish state? On June 23, 1923, the Duke of Devonshire, Churchill's successor as head of the Colonial Office, stated: "The intention from the beginning has been to make a National Home for the Jews, but every provision has been made to prevent it from becoming in any sense a Jewish State, or a State under Jewish domination."  This statement displeased Zionists,  which indicates they desired a state, not just a semiautonomous enclave. Events would prove that Devonshire's position was not chipped in stone.
   The 1922 white paper laid down a policy that limited immigration to what Britain judged Palestine's "economic absorptive capacity" to be. That policy stressed that immigrants should not become a burden on British taxpayers, nor should they deprive Arabs of their jobs. The latter objective was undercut, however, by the Histadrut, the federation of Jewish labor unions. It urged Jewish employers to hire Jewish laborers instead of the less expensive and frequently more efficient Arab workers. This Histadrut effort enabled more immigrant workers' families to become self-sufficient and thus meet Britain's first objective, that is, that immigrants not become a burden to British taxpayers. Meeting this objective made way for yet more Jewish families to immigrate.  However, the Histadrut action also helped to further institutionalize the discriminatory hiring practices that some Zion-ists had been advocating since the Second Aliyah.
   On May 11, 1922, Harding wrote to a Zionist group:
 I am very glad to express my approval and hearty sympathy for the effort of the Palestine Foundation Fund in behalf of the restoration of Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people. I have always viewed with an interest...the proposal for the rehabilitation of Palestine, and I hope the effort now being carried on in this and other countries in this behalf may meet with the fullest measure of success.
   On June 30 the House passed Joint Resolution 322, already passed by the Senate,
 That the United States of America favors the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of Christian and all other non-Jewish communities in Palestine, and that the holy places and religious buildings and sites in Palestine shall be adequately protected.
   Harding signed the resolution on September 22. Thus Congress added its moral support to that given by two presidents, one Democrat and one Republican.
   In congresspersons' "extension of remarks" that accompanied the House discussion, they repeated several themes to support the resolution:
   1. On several previous occasions Congress had passed resolutions supporting people struggling against oppression.
   2. Jews had recently been persecuted in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania and Hungary, and needed places to move to. They should be given a chance to do this.
   3. Congress had recently (1921) limited immigration to America and so it was fitting that Congress support immigration to Palestine. (Congresspersons seemed oblivious of the irony which would place on Palestinian Arabs a situation they had recently rejected for America.)
   4. Palestine was underpopulated and could absorb 6.3 million more people, at which point, they noted, it would have the same population as Belgium, (which was 13 percent larger and had much more fresh water). (America had only half the population density of Palestine, yet Congress had already limited future immigration to America. Using their Belgium model, the congresspersons, if consistent, should have been willing to open America to a total population of more than two billion.)
   5. The Balfour Declaration adequately protected the civil and religious rights of Palestine's non-Jews. Moreover, Jews, having themselves been treated unjustly, would not treat others unjustly.
   Missing from these remarks was any desire by Congress to poll Palestinian Arabs to learn their wishes. Their objections were sometimes alluded to but dismissed. Walter Chandler, a congressperson from New York, in his "extended remarks," stated, "it does not become the American Congress or the American Government to prate too loudly at this time about the sacred rights of the Arabs in Palestine, in the light of our treatment of the Filipinos during the last quarter of a century."  He said that if Arabs "will not consent to Jewish government and domination, they shall be required to sell their lands at a just valuation" and move to another Arab territory. If they refuse to do this "they shall be driven from Palestine by force."  Chandler thus reflects a colonialist mentality. He also indicates that he envisions that a national home for Jews includes political domination over Arabs. He added that he had "feelings of intolerance" for "any attempted justification of Mahomet, his message, and his mission."  Chandler pointed out that he represented a congressional district in New York City that was at least 40 percent Jewish.

   Palestinian Arabs continued to press for a representative government; Zionists continued to oppose it because they would have been outvoted. During the 1920s Zionists developed an official formula which maintained that "Palestine belonged on the one hand to the Arabs living there but on the other it belonged to the whole Jewish people, not just to that part of it resident in Palestine."  Thus a Jew in Chicago had as much right to Palestine as an Arab resident whose family had lived there for centuries. But an Arab from nearby Amman did not have this right. According to historian Walter Zeev Laqueur, even socialist Zionists such as Shlomo Kaplanski held that the Arabs did not have the sole right of possession of Palestine. From the socialist point of view, Kaplanski wrote, Jews also had a very good claim: the right of the only landless people of the earth, the right of the dispossessed masses.
   In 1923 Vladimir Jabotinsky, who two years earlier had urged his fellow yishuv to present an "iron wall" of force to the Arabs, pointed out: "The Arabs loved their country as much as the Jews did. Instinctively they understood Zionist aspirations very well, and their decision to resist them was only natural....There was no misunderstanding between Jew and Arab, but a natural conflict."  Therefore, he argued, "No agreement was possible with the Palestinian Arab; they would accept Zionism only when they found themselves up against an 'iron wall,' when they realized they had no alternative but to accept Jewish settlement."  Jabotinsky's uncompromising stand against Palestinian Arabs and their rights was embraced first by many yishuv and then by many Israelis. An Israeli national park is named in his honor.

II. Developments During the Coolidge Presidency, 1923-28.

   Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) became president in 1923. Despite Palestinian Arabs' repeated protests against a Jewish national home, and despite State Department sympathy for Arab rights, the U.S. government in 1924 signed a covenant with Britain recognizing its mandate over Palestine. The Senate approved the treaty. America therefore also again recognized the Balfour Declaration, which was part of the mandate. (America entered into the treaty to protect American interests in Palestine, not to support Zionism, but it had that effect.) The 1924 covenant was a more formal government recognition than had been Wilson's approval of the Balfour Declaration in October 1917. It also probably had more international legal prestige than did the joint Senate-House resolution signed by Harding in 1922. Thus a second Republican president embraced and reinforced Democrat Wilson's undermining of Palestinians' moral right to (a) self-determination and (b) control of immigration into their territory.

   In 1924 David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), a leader in the Jewish labor movement in Palestine, pointed out that the disparity between Jewish and Arab wages could ruin both groups of workers. Jews received up to three times the wages paid to Palestinian Arabs,  who in turn received much higher wages than did Arabs in Syria and Iraq. "Together we shall rise or go under," Ben-Gurion asserted. In 1925 the Fourteenth Zionist Congress voted "that colonization must be based on Jewish labour."  This in effect rejected his plea.
   The congress also established the Jewish Agency to represent the entire Jewish people. The congress stipulated "that all land acquired by the agency must be held as public property"  for the use of the Jewish people.

   In 1925 a group of Palestinian Jews formed Berit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) to work for peace with Arabs. The group hoped to achieve this by convincing Zionists to make concessions to Arabs. It hoped this might lead to a binational state. Berit Shalom's goals were greeted with little enthusiasm among both Jews and Arabs. Jews did not want the national home put to a popular vote because the Arab majority would reject it. Many Arabs refused to negotiate with Jews because they viewed any concession to them as treason.  By now some Jews in Palestine openly discussed their goal of Jewish statehood. Sir John Russell, the director of an English experimental agriculture station, visited Jewish farm settlements in Palestine in 1927 and 1928. After his second visit he reported somewhat incidentally on what he called "this determination of the young people to make a Hebrew State": The "impression I formed last year was confirmed during my pres-ent visit....The purpose of the colonists is not to make money but to make a nation...they wish to found a state."

III. Riots, Commissions and the Second White Paper, 1928-30.

   Between 1920 and 1926 Jewish migration to Palestine was heavy. In December 1926 Palestine had 149,000 Jews and 770,500 Arabs. Jews, including postwar returnees, almost tripled from some 56,000 at war's end. By 1926 Jews were 15.8 percent of the people. The country's economy was quite strong. Between Decem-ber 1926 and December 1931, however, Jewish immigration was very light. Immigration and births created an average annual increase of 5,500 Jews - from 149,000 in December 1926 to 176,500 in December 1931. During this same five years the Arab population increased from 770,500 to 852,000. If the two groups continued to grow at these respective rates, it would take perhaps a century for Jews to gain a majority.
   This forecast did not stop Arab fear and resentment. For almost a year during late 1928 and 1929 Jewish-Arab tension built. On August 22 and 23, 1929, large Arab crowds with knives and clubs entered Jerusalem. After a mass meeting in a Muslim sanctuary, some Arabs attacked Jews. The undermanned police and British army refused to use Jewish police or allow many Jews to arm. Rioting spread to other cities. In Hebron, a center of Jewish studies for four centuries, sixty-six Jews, mostly yeshiva (religious) scholars, were murdered. British reinforcements arrived from Egypt and ended the rioting within a few days. The toll throughout Palestine included 133 Jews and 110 Arabs killed, and 339 Jews and 232 Arabs wounded.  Some Arab leaders, espe-cially Jerusalem's grand mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, were sus-pected of fomenting the violence.
   In 1929 London appointed a royal commission, headed by Sir Walter Shaw, to investigate. It listened to Arab complaints that Zionists displaced Arab dock workers at Jaffa and Haifa and Arab farm workers from Jewish-owned orange groves. Arabs asserted that Jewish trade unions followed consistently a policy of Jewish labor only. Arabs pointed out that the constitution of the Jewish National Fund forbade it from ever selling land to Arabs, and from hiring Arabs to work on its land. The Arabs even contended that they had gained nothing from the introduction of Jewish capital into Palestine or from the expansion of Jewish social and education services.  Zionists interviewed by the commission  brushed off these complaints as of no substance or consequence. They maintained that when the federation of Jewish trade unions, the Histadrut, tried to organize Arab workers it was accused of meddling in Arab politics. When it avoided doing so it was accused of willfully ignoring their interests.  In its Report, published in March 1930, Shaw's commission blamed the grand mufti for not having done more before the riots to encourage law and order.  However, the commission judged that the riots were "not premeditated" and not instigated by the mufti.  The report recommended that the British high commissioner for Palestine exercise more control over Jewish immigration to prevent large numbers from entering the country, as had happened in the mid-1920s.  On May 12 the Colonial Office halted issuing labor certificates, needed for immigration by poor Jews.
   Sir John Hope Simpson, a farmland expert, led a second royal commission. He estimated that 30 percent of the Arabs were already landless and that more than another 25 percent had farms too small to produce enough crops and livestock to provide even subsistence living. These farms were already too small to be productively subdivided further for their children. The Hope Simpson Commission applied the principle of "absorptive econom-ic capacity" set forth in the 1922 white paper. On October 20, 1930, the commission concluded in its report that Palestine could not absorb more than fifty thousand more immigrants. The report urged: (a) close supervision of immigration, (b) severely limiting sale of Arab land to Jews, and (c) protection of tenant farmers from the sale of land on which they worked. In a confidential unpublished addition to the report, Hope Simpson accused the Zionists of consciously trying to buy all of Palestine in such a way that the Arabs would have no way to earn a living.
   In January 1930 the High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir John Chancellor, urged London to end all preferential treatment of Jews and to grant the Arabs self-government. He too warned that land sales to Jews were creating a class of landless Arabs.  Some Zionists assert, however, that the landlessness was being caused partly by Arab capitalists buying up land. Zionists maintain that Egypt, with no Jewish immigration, also experienced landlessness.
   The conclusions of the Shaw and Hope Simpson commissions were put into the Passfield White Paper, published October 21, 1930. Led by Weizmann, Zionists bitterly attacked it, and won when it was debated in parliament. The policies it urged were completely rejected. For the time being at least, there would be no further restrictions on immigration than those in effect before the two royal commissions issued their reports. According to author Conor Cruise O'Brien, "this was the last great victory which Zionism won by purely diplomatic means" and one of Weizmann's greatest diplomatic victories.  Ironically, it was not good enough for many Zionist leaders, who severely criticized him. At the Seventeenth Zionist Congress, held in June and July 1931, Jabotinsky, the "iron wall" proponent, outmaneuvered Weizmann. He lost the presidency of the World Zionist Organization until 1935.
   By 1930 Jews were cultivating 273 square miles, some 175,000 acres, of land in 110 agricultural settlements - up from some fifty-one settlements in 1920.

IV. The Hardening of Zionist Positions, 1931.

   When examining the Zionist-Arab relationship which began developing during the late 1890s, it was noted that Zionists tended to ignore or discount the presence of Arabs. This phenomenon continued during the 1920s. According to Laqueur, most Zionist leaders continued to misjudge the Arab national movement. They were firmly convinced that the vast majority of Arabs had no interest in politics and were concerned only with improving their living standards. Zionist leaders, Laqueur contends, considered most Arabs too backward and ignorant to form their own judgements and thus were easy pray for ambitious politicians.
 The Zionist leaders were forever seeing a hidden hand behind the anti-Zionist movement. French and British agents were blamed in the early 1920s, Italian and German Fascism in the 1930s. The riots of 1921 and 1929 were explained in terms of religious fanaticism in the usual antisemitic (sic) tradition.
   Even politically sophisticated Zionists usually denied that Arabs had developed a national consciousness. Their riots were attributed to theft or murder perpetrated by criminals or by mobs incited by unscrupulous agitators.  An example of this was given by no less a leader than Nahum Sokolow (1859-1936), whom Laqueur says was more widely educated than Weizmann and "perhaps the most accomplished Zionist diplomat."  On June 30, 1931, in a speech at the Seventeenth Zionist Congress, Sokolow stated that there was no connection between the 1929 riots and the Balfour Declaration. Instead, he asserted, they were caused by Arab religious fanaticism.
   Thus after 1929 Jewish attitudes hardened. Militant "revisionists," led by Jabotinsky, became politically stronger. They deplored Jewish pleas for equality between Arabs and Jews. They rejected proposals for a binational state as incompatible with political Zionism as taught by Herzl. Revisionists wanted the Zionist congress to state clearly that the final aim of Zionism was the forming in Palestine of a specifically Jewish state. They did not get this but, as noted, they did oust Weizmann, whom they thought too "gradualist" and too pro-British. Jews who had hoped for some type of Jewish accommodation with the Arabs became much less hopeful as their peace movement became even more unpopular with the yishuv. In 1931 Jabotinsky formed the Irgun. Like the already-existing Hagana, it was an armed underground organization of militants. It would be dedicated not only to defending Jews, as was the Hagana, but to retaliation as well.

   The actions of the White House and Congress during the Harding and Coolidge administrations in support of Zionism were taken despite Wilson's pronouncements regarding peoples' right to self-determination, despite the findings of the King-Crane Commission, despite the 1920 and 1921 Arab riots, and despite the 1921 U.S. law to limit immigration to America. These factors seemingly should have been considered by the representatives of the American people as they weighed the moral aspects of their actions. Perhaps they did but found them of less import than pro-Zionist factors. Regardless of the motives behind the decisions reached then, we can still ask today whether, objectively speaking, America was then involved in an injustice against the Palestinian Arabs. If so, what, if any, restitution should be made, even though few or no Americans alive today were involved in those early 1920s decisions?
   The case is somewhat similar to that involving Americans of Japanese descent who were interned in U.S. concentration camps in 1942. More than forty years later Congress voted that an injustice had been perpetrated in the name of the American people and that they owed restitution to those who had been unjustly treated. Most of the taxpayers who incurred this onus were either children or not yet born in 1942, and were in no way personally guilty of the injustice. Yet as Americans they shared in the corporate moral responsibility incurred as a result of a decision by a few government officials in 1942. Corporate moral responsibility is therefore broader than individual moral guilt. Just as people inherit moral rights because of the actions of their forebears so they can also inherit moral responsibilities and burdens. Especially as citizens of a democracy they can inherit an obligation to correct a wrong that their ancestors committed even if they did not realize at the time that it was wrong. Thus, in the uncertainties following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government officials who ordered the internment may not have considered their action unjust. But the next generation of Americans considered it unjust and felt an obligation to make at least a token compensation for it.
   For how many generations does the corporate moral responsibility rest on citizens to correct a particular wrong committed by their ancestors? It would seem that with the passage of several generations the moral obligation would gradually decrease to the vanishing point. It seems difficult to pinpoint this time lapse; it would probably depend partly on circumstances.
   Be that as it may, Palestinians today are still being denied the exercise of their basic moral rights because of the Balfour Declaration and the mandate, both of which were supported by three American presidents and by both houses of one congress and by the Senate of another.