Post-Holocaust Narratives on Zionism: The British, the Yishuv, and the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry

• In Event: The Yishuv in Empire: New Work on Jews and the British Empire in Mandate Palestine

Abstract

I am in the process of reexamining the “Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry Regarding the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine,” which in 1946 held four months of hearings in order to study the plight of Jewish displaced persons in Europe and the degree to which they could be settled in Palestine. The only books written on this Committee appeared in the 1980s. Since that time new records have become available in US and British official records as well as private papers.

Commissions that studied unrest in Palestine were nothing new under the Palestine Mandate, but this was the first such committee that was to include the US, the first to occur after the Holocaust, and the first to take place within British decolonization. It was also the first to undertake an inquiry that was truly global, holding hearings in Washington, London, Europe, and the Middle East. Most everyone who was of any importance to the Zionist undertaking and most anyone who was important in opposition to it was heard.

The British government in 1946 suggested the Committee to outflank Zionist leaders in the Yishuv and in the US. It expected that after all of the testimony was heard and weighed through cross examination, that the Committee would produce a report that maintained the immigration limitations of the White Paper of 1939 and which recommended the dissolution of the Jewish Agency and the Haganah. Britain would thus maintain its strategic position in the Middle East and Jews in DP camps in Western Europe would return to their countries of origin.

London expected this result because it aimed to establish a narrative concerning Zionism as destabilizing and even racist. The narrative was taken up by British officers and Arab leaders, and it was furthered by rough cross examination of Zionist leaders ranging from Simon Marks in London to Adolf Berman in Warsaw to David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Shertok, and other Jewish Agency leaders in Jerusalem. The narrative ultimately failed to sway the Americans on the Committee. But it was an overlooked chapter in the development of western anti-Zionist rhetoric that bleeds into anti-Semitism, deployed in the service of British strategic interests.

Author

• Norman JW Goda, University of Florida