During the twelve-year presidency of Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945), European Jews suffered the Holocaust, Palestine's Arabs revolted in vain against Britain, British-yishuv relations deteriorated, and Zionists began looking more to America than to England for help. Roosevelt avoided involvement as much as he could, ex-cept for limited aid to Nazi victims. We saw in the last three chap-ters that between 1917 and 1924 three American presidents and two congresses at least in effect supported heavy Jewish immigration into Palestine. Roosevelt also supported it. However, Americans repeatedly balked at letting proportionately a much smaller Jewish immigration into their own country during the 1930s and 1940s, even when Jews faced severe persecution and genocide. Although Americans had reasons for balking, they were not as compelling as those of the Palestinian Arabs. Thus Americans were unwittingly working themselves into a double standard which would reach its climax during Harry Truman's presidency. Meanwhile, Americans were faced with the moral issues inherent in their response to the plight of European Jews. This chapter's purpose is to look not only at these events and issues but also at those which helped lay the groundwork for Israel's founding during Truman's first term.

I. Nazi Policies' Impact on Palestine, 1933-36.

   Increasing anti-Semitism in Germany and several eastern Euro-pean nations during the mid-1930s made many Zionists more de-termined to settle for nothing less than a Jewish state. This anti-Semitism also changed the thinking of many Jews who had been indifferent or hostile to Zionism. Jews poured into Palestine from these countries. Many immigrants were relatively wealthy because British-imposed quotas did not restrict those who brought enough capital. These non-quota immigrants mushroomed total legal immi-gration between 1933 and 1936 to 164,000. The large influx of well educated immigrants and of Jewish capital created a strong economy among some population segments in Palestine during those years. This during the worldwide depression!  But poverty was still rampant among Palestinian Arabs, especially farmers.
   According to one estimate, by December 1933 there were 236,300 Jews in Palestine; by December 1936 there were an estimated 385,400 - 27.8 percent of the people. Meanwhile, Arabs had increased to 983,200 in 1936, nearly a 50 percent increase since 1918.  The Peel commission Report stated in 1937 that unlike the Jewish growth, the Arab rise "has been due in only a slight degree to immigration."  The report estimated that "roughly nine-tenths of the growth has been due to natural increase."  According to Roberto Bachi, the Israeli demographer, Arab immigration was even less than the Peel commission thought. He maintains that between 1931 and 1945 an average of only nine hundred Arabs immigrated per year.  During 1931-36 this would account for only 3.4 percent of the Arab population increase. Thus 96.6 percent was due to natural increase, that is, to the degree that the birth rate was higher than the death rate.

   In the months preceding the 1936 U.S. national elections, American Jewish leaders urged Roosevelt to take stronger action to help German Jews. In August he issued a statement criticizing British policy in Palestine. In September he urged London not to set tighter limits being considered for immigration there. He told Britain that America "would regard suspension of immigration as a breach of the Mandate."  Britain replied that it would delay further limits until a commission studying the matter had finished its report. In September Roosevelt gave to the Jewish United Palestine Yearbook an open letter supporting a Jewish homeland. "It is a source of renewed hope and courage," he wrote, "that by an international accord and by the moral support of the people of the world, men and women of Jewish faith have a right to resettle the land where their faith was born and from which much of our modern civilization has emanated."  Thus the wily president placated Jewish voters at the expense of Palestinian Arabs and perhaps of the British rather than at the expense of anti-immigration U.S. voters. London could weigh this election-year sop against FDR's hands-off policy regarding Palestine, and dismiss it as not serious. He won the election with 60 percent of the vote.

II. The Palestinian Arab Strike, 1936.

   During the depression Palestinian grain prices fell, squeezing farmers' profits. To pay their debts small farmers had to sell their land. Often the buyers were Jews. Formerly most land sales to Jews had been by large owners whose life style was not hurt by the sale, although often their tenants were evicted. Now many small owners, who needed their land for their family's livelihood, found themselves landless, and often jobless, in an urban, overcrowded job market for which they lacked skills. Like ousted tenants in the Second Aliyah, many became manual workers in coastal cities. Stuck in urban slums, they had lost much of the social and cultural fabric which had helped sustain them in former tough times.  Moreover, prominent Arabs secretly added to this situation by their own very discreet and profitable land sales to Jews through secret agents. Their Arab tenants, evicted by the new Jewish owners who hired Jewish workers, joined the landless, formerly independent farmers in the slums. Leading Palestinian Arab families profited in the very land sales that these families' leaders publicly condemned. Thus, the Arab land base, already far too small in 1930 according to Hope Simpson, was shrinking even more, and the Jewish land base was greatly expanding.
   Despite Arab involvement, willing or not, in land sales, many Arabs saw the incoming Jews and capital as a threat to their nu-merical superiority. In 1936 Arabs began attacking individual Jews. The Arab Higher Committee,  led by the grand mufti of Je-rusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, called a six-month general strike. Armed Arab bands conducted guerrilla war. Palestinian Arabs widely supported the uprising. Arab countries, which formerly had shown little interest in the fate of Palestinian Arabs, also gave it aid. Despite this, Zionists again generally dismissed the strike as the work of a few demagogues who had incited unstable elements within Arab society. They also blamed Britain for not enforcing peace.  Britain brought in more troops from Egypt, and in October 1936 the Arab Higher Committee ended the strike.

III. The Peel Report, Jewish and Arab Reaction, 1936-39.

   As it had done after previous Arab uprisings, Britain appointed a commission to investigate. Chaired by Earl Peel, it came to Palestine in November 1936. For two months it interviewed Jews, Arabs and British, and Trans-Jordan's Emir Abdullah. Although Jews were only 20 percent of the people and owned less than 5 percent of the land, Zionists testified that regardless of numerical size neither side should dominate the other. Instead, each side should have parity. Zionists said this principle should remain even when Jews increased enough to outnumber Arabs, as they intended to do.  In his testimony Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency's Palestine Executive, stressed that it was not Zionist policy to make Palestine a Jewish state. He said he recognized that Arabs lived there and that they did not want Jews to dominate them any more than Jews wanted to be dominated by Arabs. He added that a state may imply "domination of others, the domination by the Jewish majority of the minority, but that is not our aim. It was not our aim at that time  and it is not our aim now."
   Thus Ben-Gurion seemed, on the surface, to be willing to settle for a binational state. But his testimony was greatly influenced by Weizmann's insistence that Jews be diplomatic about their goals, and advance "step by step." This policy infuriated Ben-Gurion and other Zionists but rather than expose their acrimonious differences to the commission they presented a united front.  By 1942 Ben-Gurion definitely wanted all of Palestine to be a Jewish state. Weizmann's testimony to the commission stressed that there were six million Jews "pent up in places where they are not wanted, and for whom the world is divided into places where they cannot live, and places into which they may not enter."  Yet, twenty-six months later, on January 31, 1939, Weizmann himself discouraged trying to open up places into which refugee Jews could enter, because such efforts would "serve merely to distract attention from [opening up] the one country," Palestine.
   Meanwhile, Grand Mufti Haj Amin testified to the royal commission that immigration should stop, land sales to Jews should be outlawed, efforts to make a national home for Jews in Palestine should end, and Palestine should become an independent Arab state. When asked whether Palestine could absorb the 400,000 Jews already there, he replied, "No." When asked whether these Jews should be expelled or "somehow removed" he responded: "We must all leave this to the future."
   The Peel Commission considered cantonizing Palestine. This idea was based on the Swiss model of a single federal government with highly autonomous cantons - regions based on ethnic diversity. However, given the chasm between the two sides, the commission dropped the idea as needing more mutual good will than seemed possible. Instead, the Peel report recommended that the mandate be terminated and the country be partitioned in such a way that, (a) the partition would be practical, (b) it would conform to British obligations, and (c) it would respect the rights of both Arabs and Jews. The commission called for a Jewish state, an Arab state that would include Trans-Jordan, and a British enclave under permanent mandate, which would include Jerusalem, Bethlehem and a narrow corridor from them to the Mediterranean. The report urged that immigration be sharply cut while details of the plan were worked out. In July 1937 Peel released the report with a map of its planned division. The report was rejected by the Arabs, sharply criticized by most Zionists, and strongly questioned by several members of Britain's government. However, the Zionists and British, in principle, accepted partition.
   In August, at the Twentieth Zionist Congress, most delegates rejected Peel's finding that national hopes of Jews and Arabs were irreconcilable. Delegates also thought that the size of the state that the plan assigned to Jews was far too small to be desirable for future immigration. However, they also knew that if they had their own independent state, even the one in the commission plan, they would be completely free to accept as many refugees as they could absorb, without British limits. The congress therefore voted to negotiate with Britain regarding its terms for a Jewish state. Mean-while, Arabs were trying to put teeth into their rejection of the Peel plan. They organized a pan-Arab congress, held in September in Bludan, Syria. It passed a resolution that it was the sacred duty of every Arab to preserve Palestine as an Arab country. Rioting had already erupted throughout Palestine after Arabs learned that Britain had endorsed Peel's partition plan. Britain's acting district commissioner for Galilee was assassinated. The British arrested five members of the Arab Higher Committee; Haj Amin fled, and remained in exile until after World War II. The insurrection, against Britain rather than against Jews, continued. Britain vigorously hunted guerrillas, confiscated arms, jailed and deported guerrilla leaders, and killed several thousand Arabs. Even after the revolt was crushed in April 1939 Britain severely punished Arabs who possessed weapons. They were never allowed to rearm or reorganize politically. This left Palestinian Arabs unprepared when Zionist-Arab fighting erupted in 1947.

IV. The Evian Conference on Refugees, July 1938.

   A poll in early 1938 showed that 82 percent of Americans sur-veyed opposed allowing many refugees into America. Concurrent polls had similar results. FDR decided that trying to pass more lenient immigration law was politically too risky.  It would be wiser to write more lenient guidelines within the Administration's authority, and to internationalize the problem, especially by trying to settle refugees in other countries. He therefore sponsored an international  onference to coordinate refugee aid; thirty-two nations would attend it in July in Evian, France. That spring, to prepare for it, Bernard Baruch, a Jewish financier and sometime adviser to FDR, devised a refugee plan. By it, the U.S. government would help Jews to resettle in underpopulated host countries in Africa that would agree to more immigrants. Baruch said his plan (a) would leave U.S. immigration policy alone; (b) it would put no strain on the U.S. economy or job market; and (c) it would not discriminate in favor of any particular religious or racial group. Some Zionists, including Rabbi Stephen Wise, Supreme Court justice Brandeis and presidential adviser Felix Frankfurter, severely criticized the plan.  Some, echoing Russian Zionists thirty-four years earlier, opposed a national home for Jews in Africa because it would take pressure off Britain to expand immigration to Palestine.  This was not the first or last time that Zionists chose a national home for Jews in Palestine over a haven elsewhere.
   Such ambivalence among Jews greatly weakened their ability at Evian to help refugees. According to historian Alan Kraut, the Jewish agencies preparing for the conference were quarreling among themselves and were poorly prepared for its diplomatic style. Instead of agreeing beforehand on their goals, the agencies came with differing proposals. Some wanted more immigration to Palestine, others wanted to settle refugees in unpopulated areas, while still others stressed protecting Jews in Europe itself. At the conference pro- and anti-Zionist Jews seriously clashed. Such feuding, notes Kraut, "only further muddled Jewish efforts to establish clear, achievable goals at Evian."

   Shortly before the conference met, the American Veterans of Foreign Wars voted for a resolution which urged suspending all immigration to America for ten years. London's conservative Sunday Express editorialized that "just now there is a big influx of foreign Jews into Britain. They are overrunning the country."  Britain stipulated that immigration to Palestine could not be discussed at the conference, and Weizmann's request to address it was refused. Virtually every delegate said that his nation had no land suitable for Jewish settlers. The Australian delegate claimed that his country had no racial problem and did not want to import one. The delegate from the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean offered to take large numbers of Jewish refugee farmers and provide land for them. But almost no Jewish refugees were farmers. Nothing came of the proposal.  (Yet many non-farmer refugees learned to farm in Palestine!) Other proposed areas, British Guiana, Madagascar, the Philippines, Portuguese Angola, and Rhodesia, were investigated but nothing came of them. The Conference formed a permanent Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR). Roosevelt hoped IGCR would solve this international problem just as his New Deal agencies solved national problems. Investigating these other proposed areas received no encouragement from Weizmann. As noted, on January 31, 1939, he wrote: "They serve merely to detract attention from the one country [Palestine] which can offer both immediate help and the prospect of permanent settlement."  Zionists did not back IGCR and it was not effective. Thus, even after the intensification of Nazi persecution of the Jews, and with the likelihood of a major war breaking out, the Zionists forewent the possibility of other havens in favor of Palestine.

V. The British White Paper of 1939.

   Between 1936 and 1939, Jews started or bought out fifty-five more settlements, bringing total Jewish farm settlements to 252.
   In the months after the Peel Report's release, British talks with Zionists and Palestinian Arabs were fruitless. Britain therefore invited both sides to the London Round Table Conference, which began on February 7, 1939. Zionists feared that Britain would try to placate the Arabs, whom it would need for oil if war with Germany erupted. London told both sides that if the three parties reached no agreement it would impose its own solution. The talks ended March 17 with no agreement; on May 17 Britain issued its own solution, the watershed 1939 white paper. It stipulated that:
   1. A single independent state should be formed within ten years.
   2. Jewish settlements would be completely prohibited in some areas and restricted in others. Future land sales were to be severely restricted.
   3. A maximum total of 75,000 immigrants could enter Palestine during the next five years. After March 1, 1944, immigrants could enter only with Arab consent.
   This last stipulation was designed to prevent Jews from becom-ing the majority within the ten year period before statehood. It would therefore prevent them from successfully voting that the single state would be Jewish. Instead, Zionists would have to form their national home within a predominantly Arab state and in a presumably hostile environment. Zionists thought this would be very difficult and "minimalist."  They were especially bitter in rejecting this third point, which limited immigration. It helped sour British-Zionist relations for the remainder of the mandate.
   Actually, the white paper did not surprise Zionists; they and Britain had discussed it at the Round Table Conference. London could claim that it merely upheld that part of the Balfour Declaration (and therefore of the mandate document) which stated that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." London assured Zionists it would always interpret the white paper in the light of Balfour and the mandate. Thus Britain would do nothing to undermine the Declaration's pledge to establish in Palestine "a national home for the Jewish people." Zionists were unconvinced. Weizmann, perhaps Britain's strongest supporter among Zionists, termed the paper a repudiation of the mandate, and lodged what he called the strongest possible protest. Ben-Gurion fumed: "the greatest betrayal perpetrated by the government of a civilized people in our generation had been formulated and explained with the artistry of experts at the game of trickery and pretended righteousness."  Several MPs agreed with the Zionists; one called the paper a cynical breach of pledges. Parliament approved it by a safe but slimmer than usual margin. On May 17 Britain began enforcing the white paper's provision which Zionists most opposed, the immigration lid.
   Arab reaction to the paper was mixed, but mostly negative.

VI. The Deterioration of British-Zionist Relations, 1939-41.

   World War II began September 1, 1939. During its first six months Britain issued no Palestinian immigration permits. Zionists increased illegal immigration by infiltrating Palestine's land borders and especially by running a British naval blockade along its coast. Violence between the Hagana and Britain escalated. The British arrested forty-three Hagana officers in late 1939, and carried out many weapons searches in Jewish homes and businesses. In 1941 Lehi (the Stern Gang), the most radical of the Jewish underground military-terrorist groups, tried to contact German diplomats in Beirut to propose that they work together against Britain.  Most Jews found that abhorrent, but Zionists faced a dilemma: They considered Germany their worst enemy; most of them also considered Britain an enemy. Ben-Gurion's stated policy was to fight the war against Germany as if there were no 1939 white paper, and fight the white paper as if there were no war.  Representing the yishuv, the Jewish Agency offered to raise a division of Jewish soldiers to fight for the Allies. For several years Britain stalled accepting the offer, giving various reasons. Probably the main reason - unstated - was its fear that the division would reemerge in Palestine after the war to fight British forces there. This British rejection was another source of bitterness among the yishuv and led to a major split between the two at the end of 1941. Britain, however, accepted individual Palestinian Jews into its military and eventually allowed a small Jewish military unit, a 3,650-person brigade, to be formed.
   Weizmann continued to favor reconciliation with Britain and attempted reconciliation with the Arabs. However, after the war started, he began to speak increasingly about what he considered the pressing need for a Jewish state in Palestine which would involve resettlement of at least some Arab Palestinians elsewhere.  Thus after 1939 the plight of Jews increased the danger of Palestinian Arabs becoming refugees. In 1940 Jabotinsky died and Menachem Begin (1913-1992) became head of the revisionist party and its underground military-terrorist unit, the Irgun. He would play a significant role in creating the Arab refugees.

VII. The Zionists' New York Biltmore Conference, May 1942.

   After the war began, most Americans, including many Jews, were reluctant to endanger U.S. neutrality. "Mention of the Jewish tragedy was associated with war-mongering."  By early 1941, as America more openly supported the Allies, this attitude changed. In April Emanuel Neumann, an official of the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC), resurrected the moribund American Palestine Committee (APC), a pro-Zionist organization of Protestant leaders. Senator Robert Wagner of New York became its nominal head. He recruited twenty-six senators, including both the majority and minority leaders, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and Attorney General Robert Jackson. The AZEC gave $50,000 of its own funds to the APC.  In April 1941 APC prevailed on seventy senators to sign an APC-sponsored declaration "to direct attention to the importance of Palestine in the solution of the problem of Jewish homelessness."  According to author Richard Stevens, the emphasis in the declaration on "'the tragic plight of refugees fleeing from persecution and finding no home,'" again tried to link the refugee problem with Palestine as the only solution.  Stevens contends:
 For while many Americans might not support the creation of a Jewish state, traditional American humanitarianism could be exploited in favor of the Zionist cause through the refugee problem. Indeed, as later events were to show, the refugee problem had to remain unsolved in order to insure the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
   In December 1942 Neumann organized the Christian Council on Palestine for pro-Zionist Protestant clergy.  Many of them viewed Israel's restoration "in the light of Biblical prophecy."
   Meanwhile, because of the worsening British-Zionist relations, Zionists in early 1942 turned more to America for support. From May 6 to 11, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion and some 600 delegates of Zionist groups primarily in the New York area met at the Biltmore Hotel to set goals and policy. Their decisions reflected positions closer to those of Begin's militant revisionists than to those of Weizmann. The Biltmore delegates voted to: (a) reject the 1939 white paper, (b) demand that Palestinian Jews be able to form a military force that would fight against Germany under the yishuv's own flag, (c) declare that the new world order that would follow the war "cannot be established on foundations of peace, justice and equality, unless the problem of Jewish homelessness is finally solved,"  (d) urge that immigration to Palestine be opened and that the Jewish Agency be given control over it, (e) urge that the Jewish Agency be given "the necessary authority for upbuilding the country, including the development of its unoccupied and uncultivated lands,"  and (f) urge that "Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth."  Thus what had previously been mainline Zionism's maximum demands became its minimum. Ben-Gurion's more hardline position gained favor over Weizmann's more gradualist approach. U.S. Zionists, if they considered the rights of Palestinian Arabs, apparently in effect decided that Zionists' rights superseded them. The Zionist Actions Committee, which was charged with implementing policy, overwhelmingly adopted the Biltmore Program.
   Tragic news from Europe soon deeply impacted the Biltmore Program's premise. The Zionists who devised that program had assumed that after the war millions of Jewish refugees would want to move to Palestine. But within three months after the Biltmore conference, rumors of Hitler's "Final Solution" began to filter out. Zionists realized that if this took place, there would be virtually no Jewish refugees left for Palestine.  But the tragedy in Europe gave Biltmore a strong emotional appeal. Just "when the politico-diplomatic value of the Biltmore Program crumbled, the heart-touching summons, on which the program rested, grew stronger."  According to Stevens, within six years, culminating in U.S. recognition of the State of Israel, the Biltmore Program had become U.S. foreign policy.  Yet in 1942 the American Jewish Committee, which was then anti-Zionist, did not endorse Biltmore.
   Six months after the Biltmore meeting, as reports of the Final Solution increased, the Balfour Declaration's twenty-fifth anniversary occurred. To observe it, sixty-eight senators, 194 congresspersons, hundreds of community leaders, and public figures signed a statement published on November 2, 1942, which called for a Jewish national home. Both the State Department and Britain's ambassador criticized such statements, contending that they could complicate U.S.-British relations and thus hurt the war effort.
   According to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., FDR privately discussed with him on December 3 the possibility of deporting Palestinian Arabs to make way for Jewish refugees. Whether Roosevelt really intended to create a new refugee group in order to settle an already-existing one is not clear. Was he again telling Jews what they wanted to hear? A few months later, on June 15, 1943, FDR assured Saudi Arabia's King Ibn-Saud that "no decision would be reached altering the basic situation in Palestine without full consultation of both Arabs and Jews."
   During 1943, with immigration to Palestine limited, Roosevelt made several efforts to open up many free-world nations, including America, to refugees. However, Zionists again opposed his plans because they did not include Palestine. According to Morris Ernst, FDR's international envoy for the project,
 it did not work out....the failure of the leading Jewish groups to support with zeal this immigration program may have caused the President not to push forward with it at that time. I talked to many people active in Jewish organizations....I made clear that no Jews...would be compelled to go anywhere and certainly not to any assigned nation.
 ...active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly accused of furthering this plan of freer immigration in order to undermine political Zionism. Those Jewish groups which favored opening our doors gave little more than lip service to the Roosevelt program. Zionist friends of mine opposed it.
   FDR eventually told Ernst: "Nothing doing on the [Jewish refugee placement] program. We can't put it over because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won't stand for it."

   By August 1943 Zionists had sufficiently increased their support among and control over American Jews that they were able more effectively to mobilize American public opinion. Under the militant leadership of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, American Zionists turned from "backstair diplomacy as the sole technique for achieving our goal"  and adopted a "program of public relations designed to create national agitation for a Jewish Palestine."  Silver urged Zionists to "build upon the broad base of public sentiment, the approval of public opinion which in the final analysis determines the attitude and action of governments in democratic society."  He warned Zionists not to put the future of their movement solely in the hands of individuals, however friendly, however great. Instead, they should "appeal to the masses...talk to the whole of America...carry on an active educational propaganda in your circle....That will sustain them [the masses] when they come to make important decisions which may involve America's participation in the ultimate solution of the Palestine problem."  Thus the strategy was to create such a substantial pro-Zionist opinion throughout the nation that Congress would be impelled to act.

   Throughout the war, Jewish leaders gave numerous plans to Allied leaders to alleviate the plight of European Jews. Some plans were enacted with varying success; others were rejected as impractical or too risky. Whatever the validity of the latter arguments, many Jews concluded that the world was indifferent to their tragedy. They lost trust in the likelihood of other people helping them in their hour of need. They felt that Gentile and even some Jewish humanity had failed them; henceforth they would rely on their own actions for their survival, whether the rest of the world approved or not. This hardening of attitude, which many Jews formed in the late '30s and '40s, was also formed by some Palestinian Arabs after 1947, for similar reasons.

VIII. Late Wartime American Zionist Developments, 1944-45.

   In January 1944 U.S. Zionists successfully lobbied Senators Robert Taft of Ohio and Robert Wagner of New York to sponsor a Senate resolution opposing the 1939 white paper and calling for the constitution of Palestine as a Jewish commonwealth. On March 9 Roosevelt authorized American Zionist leaders to say that the U.S. government had never officially endorsed the white paper, which Britain enforced throughout the war. However, FDR also approved shelving the Taft-Wagner resolution. At the end of March Senator Harry Truman, following Roosevelt's lead, op-posed raising the Palestine issue then, but he stated in letters that "when the right time comes I am willing to help make the fight for a Jewish homeland in Palestine."
   Zionists did not want Democrats in the 1944 national elections to assume that they automatically had the Jewish vote. They built a successful strategy to get both parties to compete for it by putting pro-Zionist planks into their party platforms. Significantly, both parties' planks, written to please Jewish voters and donors, called for opening Palestine to Jews but said nothing about opening the rest of the world to Jewish refugees.  The planks are another example of American Zionists stressing Palestine as the only solution rather than one of several possible solutions. If the planks accurately reflect American Jewish priorities in 1944, it would seem either that Palestine itself was a higher priority than the refugees or that Jews had given up on trying to place refugees elsewhere. However, this second option, the worldwide option, does not appear to have been pursued nearly as vigorously as was the Palestine option. Yet the worldwide option seemingly had greater potential for sheltering more refugees more quickly.
   The planks had little noticeable influence on the presidential victor. A few months after winning his fourth term, FDR, while on his way back from the Yalta Conference, met for several hours on February 14, 1945, with Saudi Arabia's King Ibn-Saud. Saud apparently impressed him greatly, and was persuasive regarding America's need for Arab friendship. The king contended that Arabs should not be penalized for European anti-Semitism, and that if any part of the world should be turned into a Jewish state it should be a section of Germany, not of Palestine, since it was Germans, not Palestinians, who had killed so many Jews. Roosevelt told Saud that the U.S. government would make no change in its basic policy in Palestine without full and prior consultation with both Jews and Arabs. On April 5, just a week before he died, FDR repeated this promise in a letter to Saud.
   Meanwhile, in the fall of 1944 delegates of the Arab states signed a document supporting the 1939 white paper, which many Arabs had rejected in 1939. They now believed that it established the rights of the Palestinian Arabs as far as Britain and the League of Nations were concerned. In March 1945 Arab states formed the Arab League.
   In summary, Roosevelt repeatedly reassured both Zionists and Arabs. He told Rabbi Wise that he was for unrestricted immigration into Palestine. He told Arab leaders that America would not support any change in Palestine opposed by Arabs.  When a British diplomat was allowed to see State Department files he remarked that Britain was not the only country to promise the same thing to two different groups. David Niles, a Zionist who was an assistant first to Roosevelt and then to Truman, wrote that he seriously doubted whether Israel would have become a state if FDR had lived.

IX. Morality in a Lifeboat Situation.

   Although American response to European victims of the Nazis is outside this book's scope, it would seem, briefly, that those whose lives were in great danger had a moral right to immigrate to America and other free countries, including Arab countries. Each of these nations had a corresponding moral obligation to accept them insofar as "the common good rightly understood" would permit. After mid-1942 free-world leaders knew that this was a lifeboat situation and that the lifeboats of most free nations were not full. (If the threat of spies being planted among the refugees was sufficiently serious, the refugees could have been restricted to camps until the threat ended. This was done on a small scale in upstate New York, where the refugees at least were safe.) Against this lifeboat argument it can be pointed out that not only Jews and Gypsies were endangered. Half of the twelve million people who died in Nazi camps were Gentiles. Some fifty million people died in the war. Several hundred million people were in danger. Where draw the line? Between mid-1942 and early 1945 it was obvious that Jews were among the most endangered. During that time the line should have been drawn to include them among those most in need of rescue.
   But did the Holocaust create for those trying to escape death a right to immigrate to Palestine (a) in large numbers and (b) with the intent of founding a Jewish state? The companion question is: Did Palestine's indigenous people, and Britain as the mandate authority, knowing of the Zionists' intent, have an obligation to accept Jewish refugees whose lives would be endangered if they did not enter Palestine? Were it not for that Zionist intent it would seem that within the limits imposed by the principle of "the common good rightly understood" the Palestinians and British theoretically would have had a moral obligation to admit at least some refugees. Presumably, however, the refugees immigrating to Palestine either (a) went there intending to establish a Jewish state which by its nature would seriously disrupt the Palestinians' common good, or (b) if they did not go there with that intent, they were recruited for that cause after they arrived. That this danger was serious was borne out by events within that very decade. It is therefore difficult to see how Palestine's indigenous people were morally obligated to accept people who so seriously endangered their own common good. To argue that they were so obligated requires that the indigenous people had a moral obligation to foster the deprivation of their own and their descendants' basic moral rights to their political self-determination, to their own culture, and to their own homes and land. It is difficult to see how people in a lifeboat are morally required to take in people whose friends who are already in the lifeboat have committed themselves to taking it over - especially if some of those friends have talked of expelling everyone but themselves. This very difficult situation has some of the appearances, at least, of a moral dilemma. For it is also difficult to place oneself in that lifeboat, decide not to accept the people trying to enter it, and then be morally comfortable with that decision. But with the Zionist leadership so clearly committed in the May 1942 Biltmore Program to having "Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth," Palestinian Arabs could reasonably presume that each additional immigrant was a clear additional threat to their own common good.
   Another factor in trying to evaluate the moral obligation of the indigenous people of Palestine and of the British with regard to the rights of the Jewish refugees was the effective opposition of the Zionists to the settling of Jewish refugees anywhere except in Palestine. Partly because of this Zionist policy it has never been clear that Palestine was really the only place to which the Jewish refugees could flee. It was never clear that Palestine was the only lifeboat. Other havens might have been opened if Zionists had not opposed them. However, the rights of the Jews who needed to flee the Nazis nevertheless existed and should have been respected regardless of the policies of Zionists. For apparently it was not the refugees but Zionists who were safely in Britain, Palestine and America who were rejecting the other havens. If, even partly through Zionist policy, other havens as a matter of fact were not sufficiently open to accept all of the Jewish refugees, that apparently left only Palestine. Granted that the Jewish refugees were apparently the victims of Zionist manipulation, did that situation place a moral obligation on the indigenous people of Palestine to accept these refugees even though it would mean forfeiting their own rights outlined above? It would seem not, for the reasons already stated.