Genesis, The Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict

Author:John B. Judis [ John B. Judis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

The Committee Proposals

After Jerusalem, the twelve committee members—dubbed the “twelve apostles”—repaired to the quiet beauty of Lausanne, Switzerland, to formulate their findings at the Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel on Lac Léman. They quickly agreed that the 100,000 Jewish DPs should be admitted, but could not agree on Palestine’s future.

Three Americans—Crum, McDonald, and the Boston Herald editor Frank Buxton—and one Englishman, Crossman, favored some form of Jewish state; Buxton and Crossman had been won over to the Zionist cause during the trip. Buxton’s reasoning was revealing. “He argued,” McDonald wrote in his diaries, “that the principle of eminent domain, used to justify the American conquest of Mexico and the movement of American Indians into a modern society, applied to the situation in Palestine.”28 Buxton, like Brandeis and Jabotinsky, thought of the Palestinians as the Indians or Mexicans whom the United States had, to his mind, justifiably displaced.

Five of the British committee members balked at any idea of a Jewish state, and they were joined by Hutcheson, who, as Truman’s representative on the committee and as a powerful voice in his own right, carried the day. The committee dismissed partition, which Crum, McDonald, and Crossman favored, because of the “tendency of the dam to burst”—that is, for one side to overrun the other. They saw a binational state as a form of partition. It would have to be based on creating political parity between Arabs and Jews even though Arabs were in the majority. Otherwise, it would become an Arab state and, like the other alternatives, would require outside force in order to maintain. They rejected creating an Arab state out of a merger with Transjordan because “Palestine is maritime, part of the Mediterranean region, having ties with the West and with Egypt. Transjordan is Arabian, with a traditional orientation towards Damascus and a dynastic bias toward Iraq.”29

To the committee, that left only one option: the continuation of the status quo—“No Arab, no Jewish state,” in Magnes’s words, but under overall British control. The committee spelled out its reasoning in its report:

We have reached the conclusion that the hostility between Jews and Arabs and, in particular, the determination of each to achieve domination, if necessary by violence, make it almost certain that, now and for some time to come, any attempt to establish either an independent Palestinian State or independent Palestinian States would result in civil strife such as might threaten the peace of the world. We therefore recommend that, until this hostility disappears, the Government of Palestine be continued as at present under mandate pending the execution of a trusteeship agreement under the United Nations.30

The committee assumed that by prolonging the mandate as a UN “trusteeship,” the United States and Britain would forestall rather than perpetuate the violence. That was, certainly, wishful thinking.

In its recommendations, the committee tried to include something for each of the interested parties. The Americans got their 100,000 DPs but the committee also recommended that destinations other than Palestine be explored for the remaining Jewish DPs. The British

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