by I. F. Stone
The news that the United States had established “free ports” would bring hope to people who have now no hope. It would encourage neutrals to let in more refugees because we could take out some of those they have already admitted. Most important, it would provide the argument of example and the evidence of sincerity in the negotiations for “free ports” in Turkey, last hope of the Balkan Jews. I ask fellow-newspapermen to show the President by their expression of opinion in their own papers that if he hesitates for fear of an unpleasant political reaction he badly misconstrues the real feelings of the American people.
Jewry in a Blind Alley
A son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, I. F. Stone supported the creation of a Jewish homeland, while also being troubled by the plight of the Palestinian Arabs and strongly backing a peaceful solution to the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs over control of the land once known as Palestine. In this essay, Stone describes early efforts to find some form of accommodation between the two communities, while warning his fellow Jews that “political agreement will be impossible so long as a single Jewish state in Palestine is demanded.” The “Bevin statement” Stone refers to was issued on November 13, 1945, by British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin; it temporized over the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine, suggesting that an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry might be able to forge a solution. Of course, today, six decades later, the conflict continues unabated, in forms that Stone would probably find depressingly familiar.
. . .
November 24, 1945
I CAME TO PALESTINE UNHAPPY, and during the first few days I became even unhappier trying to figure out solutions of the problems involved; but the longer I have been here the happier I have come to feel despite all that has happened and may happen in the next few days.
I stayed five days in Egypt visiting with many Egyptians and spending some time in a village near Cairo. I was able to see the sharp contrast in cleanliness and health between the Egyptian villager and urban poor and the Arab villager and urban poor in Palestine. I felt happy that the coming of the Jews had helped rather than hurt the Arabs.
I was deeply moved by my visits to the colonies here. From Gevulot, in the far south of the Negev desert wastes, to glorious Minara, 3,000 feet above the Upper Jordan on the far northern edge, I saw young Jews from every clime and country reclaiming the land and making something for themselves and their children under conditions which are truly heroic. This sense of consecration and common effort in the Jewish community most powerfully attract all who prize human courage, devotion, and idealism. I was not at all surprised to hear of two cases of non-Jewish demobilized British soldiers, formerly in service here, applying for admission to membership in the Jewish Kibbutzim, or communal settlements.
I felt happy to see that despite difficulties which from abroad appear insuperable there was a great and growing community here, and in visits both to Arab villages and neighboring Jewish colonies, I feel a huge reservoir of good-will between the Arab and Jew which can be tapped; and I have not sensed in talks with Arabs either in Palestine or in Egypt, despite their differences, any feeling of race hatred or dislike of Jews as a people.
But at the cost of unpopularity perhaps in the Jewish community of America I wish to say as strongly as I know how that the new Bevin statement is only the latest indication of the blind alley into which Palestinian Jewry is being led by the failure to achieve any political understanding with the Arabs. And I wish to say just as strongly that political agreement will be impossible so long as a single Jewish state in Palestine is demanded.
We have been carrying on a campaign in America on the basis of half-truths, and on this basis no effective politics can be waged and no secure life built for Yishuv.* It is true that the Arabs have benefited by the Jews coming to Palestine, and it is true that there is plenty of room here for several millions more, but I cannot find a single Jew who can find a single Arab who favors a Jewish state in Palestine! It should not be hard to understand the natural dislike of any human being for being ruled by another people or his unwillingness to trust himself to such rule.
There is only one way in which a Jewish state here could be sold to the Arab world and that would be as part of a general settlement of Anglo-Egyptian and other Arab problems which would satisfy the aspiration of the Arabs for self-development and federation. That was what made Zionism acceptable in earlier days to the wise and far-seeing Feisal and other Arab leaders, but Britain’s failure really to keep the promises given to the Arabs has made the Arabs naturally hostile to the promises given to the Jews. The Bevin statement is only another chapter in the record of broken promises to both.
The most significant point to be noted in the Bevin statement is that while consultation is assured the Arabs concerning any further Jewish immigration in accordance with the White Paper, not a single solitary word is said about a promise to consult with the Jews on the other major item in the White Paper—the undertaking to the Arabs that a start would be made in setting up self-governing institutions in Palestine within five years. I could not help noting also that in Egypt, if it were not for anti-Zionist political agitation, the British would be confronted immediately with a demand for a basic settlement of Anglo-Egyptian problems, including the Sudan, Suez, and British occupation.
It is true that the Jews are in a terrible position, on the one hand asking to be beneficiaries of British imperialism and on the other serving as its lightning rod. Two political axioms seem to be completely forgotten by Jewish world leadership. One is that politics cannot be played unless one has alternatives; one cannot bargain unless one can obtain similar wares elsewhere. The other is that in politics one saves favors for those one must win over and does not waste them on elements already in one’s pocket. So long as the Jews are dependent on Britain with no alternative policy for an agreement with the Arabs, the Jews are helpless. Incidentally the Arabs are also helpless until they reach some agreement with the Jews, because just enough will be given both sides, as by Bevin, to keep both dissatisfied and embroiled. Let us remember that as long as there is no solution of the Arab-Jewish problem, Britain has an excuse to keep ample troops near the Suez Canal. I realize this does an injustice to the subjective intent of many British leaders, but it is politically true none the less.
I understand, after being in this part of the world, why the Jews must fight against the conversion of the Yishuv into what the Royal Commission of 1937 called “one more cramped and dangerous ghetto.” Consignment to minority status in an Arab state is a violation of pledges made to the Jews, fulfilment of which they have a moral right to demand. But I understand too why the Arabs in Palestine, who are also human beings and who also have historic rights here, are prepared to fight against any subjection to a Jewish state.
I know there are other Arab states, while there is only one possibility for a Jewish state; I know that proposals to divide Palestine into two national states, put forward several times by Jewish sources, have fallen on stony ground. Nevertheless, despite present public utterances by the leadership on both sides, I think that a division on these lines, with two national states created on a parity principle, is ethically right and politically feasible and would be acceptable to a great majority of Jews and Arabs if it were imposed from above by Anglo-American or United Nations decision. Certainly only on this basis can Arab-Jewish political understanding be reached.
I heard much talk in London against partition. I think it ducks the fundamental and inescapable question of the Middle East. For the Arabs, the removal of the Jews would be a calamity. I am convinced that the Jews have already contributed much and can in the future contribute even more toward the development of the Arab world. The Arabs are a great people with great potentialities. For the Jews, conversely, the basic problem here is to get along with the Arabs, to win them by helping them and by demonstrating a sincere desire to live together on an equal basis. This is a nobler and politically sounder goal than any narrow Jewish nationalism. If Britain
and America wish peace with justice in this part of the world, with the Jew and Arab both here, I am convinced the solution lies in this, the only escape route from divide et impera.
* * *
* The Jewish community in Palestine.
Palestine Pilgrimage
Another dispatch from I. F. Stone’s very first trip abroad, which focused primarily on Palestine and the Middle East and helped lead to two books: Underground to Palestine (1946), dealing with the migration of European Jews to the Middle East in the wake of World War II, and This Is Israel (1948), a dramatic account of the founding of the new Jewish state, which combined text by Stone with photographs by Robert Capa, Jerry Cooke, and Tim Gidal. In this essay, based on his observations in Palestine and elsewhere, Stone advocates a “bi-national settlement” that would give both Jews and Arabs a homeland in Palestine.
. . .
December 8, 1945
I FEEL A LITTLE LIKE THE HERO of Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days,” though he was a slowpoke by comparison. Last Tuesday I had tea in England and dinner in Ireland. I breakfasted the next day in Newfoundland and lunched in New York. I have just returned from a six weeks’ trip abroad, a typical bit of American blitz journalism. My primary concern was Palestine, and the largest part of my time was spent there. But I had five days in London on my way and two days in Paris. I saw St. Peter’s from the skies over Rome, and I climbed the Acropolis in awe during an overnight stop in Athens. I had five days in and around Cairo before I reached Palestine, and I saw every part of the Holy Land except the Dead Sea during my stay there. I spent two days and a night in the Lebanon, and stayed three days each in Cairo and London on my way back, with short descents from lonely night skies over Cyrenaica and Malta, and a breakfast near Marseilles.
It was my first trip abroad, and if a wandering newspaperman may be forgiven his enthusiasm, I came back drunk on the beauties of the world: that last look at Manhattan’s heady towers on the way out; the infinite variety of sea and sky on the boat trip over; St. Paul’s, mighty and melancholy amid the bomb ruins in a London dusk; Paris, as one had dreamed of it, miraculously unscathed by the war; a savage sunset over the wild Balkan headlands flying into Greece; the green delta stretching from horizon to horizon as one enters the Egyptian skies; the minarets and the stars over the Citadel in Cairo; dawn over the Negev from the watch tower at Gevulot, with Sinai far in the distance; Minara, my favorite colony, which shoulders the sky 3,000 feet above the Jordan across from the enormous Harmon, where Pan dwelt; and Jerusalem, clean, white, and lovely on its ancient hills. I was moved to tears twice on my trip, once when I walked for the first time into Notre Dame in Paris, and again when I came through the narrow winding streets of the Old City to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and saw the few stones to which cling so many filial memories for a Jew.
I went over neither to uncover sensations nor to bolster preconceptions but to understand the British and the Arab as well as the Jewish point of view, to get the atmosphere of London and the flavor of Arab nationalism, and to see for myself what had been accomplished in Palestine. I dined with a Cabinet minister in London and had a two-hour off-the-record talk with Azzam Bey, head of the Arab League, in Cairo. My assignment, to achieve some grasp of the complexities and the tragedies involved in Britain’s position, Arab aspirations, and urgent Jewish needs, was an assignment that called for an Isaiah, not a mere reporter. Perhaps I learned most from chance contact and talks with humbler folk—a devout English Catholic returning on the Queen Elizabeth from captivity in Japan, a cockney Jewish mother bombed out of her home in the East End of London, a Coptic doctor struggling against the disease and squalor of an Egyptian village, a young Sephardic Jew homeless in Athens whose Spanish passport had saved him in a German death camp, a brilliant Christian Arab leader in Beirut whose sympathetic understanding of Zionism surpassed that of any Zionist I encountered, a veteran English civil servant in Haifa, and above all the young men and women of the Jewish colonies I visited, the grandest young folk I have ever met.
I hated Egypt. I have never seen such poverty. There are wise and farseeing men in the Egyptian upper class, and I had the good fortune to speak with several. But there are also a whole horde of self-serving phonies, and some Egyptian officials seem to treat their own people with an arrogance and contempt beyond that of the worst foreign imperialist. The gap between rich and poor is unbelievably wide. Of all the villages in Egypt some fourteen now have health centers, and of these fourteen, five have doctors. It was to one of these show villages, near Gizeh, with the Pyramids visible not far away, that I was taken. The filth and squalor were beyond conception, and there, as in the Muski, the ancient quarter of Cairo, I saw a sight one cannot forget—flies feasting on the corrupted eyelids of little children. In the West one speaks of exploitation, but in the West the exploiting capitalist builds, constructs, produces; his activity adds as much as if not more than it subtracts. But in Egypt exploitation is of a different and almost one-sided character. The fellah lives on the Nile and the pasha lives on the fellah. In the West when we think of colonial nationalism, we think of Gandhi and Nehru. Egypt once had a Zaglul Pasha, responsive to his people’s needs, but today one catches few if any overtones of idealism in the Wafdist movement he founded.
Egypt provides perspective on Palestine. There is the sharpest contrast between the markets of Egypt and the Arab markets in Palestine, as I saw them in the all-Arab town of Gaza or in the Arab sections of Jerusalem and Haifa. The Arab markets of Palestine are clean. The town and village Arab of Palestine is better dressed, healthier looking by far, than the Arab in Egypt, whose usual dress is a dirty, old-fashioned, single-piece garment which is almost an exact replica of the nightshirt grandpa in America used to wear. Passing from Egypt to Palestine one can see for oneself what is testified to in the Peel Royal Commission report on Palestine—that the coming of the Jews has not degraded the Arab but lifted his living standards.
I found myself immensely attracted by the life of the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine. It is the one place in the world where Jews seem completely unafraid. I did not see the displaced persons’ camps in Germany, but even in such free countries as England and France—and at home, in the United States—there are premonitory tremors in the Jewish communities, conscious or subconscious fears of the future. In Palestine a Jew can be a Jew. Period. Without apologies, and without any lengthy arguments as to whether Jews are a race, a religion, a myth, or an accident. He need explain to no one, and he feels profoundly at home; I am quite willing to attribute this to historic sentimentality, but it remains none the less a tremendous and inescapable fact. In the desert, on the barren mountains, in the once malarial marshes of the Emek, the Jew has done and is doing what seemed to reasonable men the impossible. Nowhere in the world have human beings surpassed what the Jewish colonists have accomplished in Palestine, and the consciousness of achievement, the sense of things growing, the exhilarating atmosphere of a great common effort infuses the daily life of the Yishuv. I came away feeling that no obstacles, no setbacks, nothing but perhaps a Third World War and atomic bombs in the Middle East, could stop this people.
It happens that I felt myself painfully impelled to disagree with majority opinion in the Yishuv. I am not in favor of a Jewish state in Palestine. But it would be foolish, and it would be completely to misunderstand how history and human beings work, to disparage Zionism. Only a passionate, narrow, and mystical national faith made it possible for Jews to colonize areas the goats despised. Without the Zionist movement, what has been achieved in Palestine would never have come to pass. The closest parallel in American experience is Puritanism, and Palestine is indeed much like the frontier in our own country, both in colonial times and in the West. But the strength associated with such a movement also has its corresponding defects, and the defects of Zionism are reflected in its failure to take into account the feelings and aspirations of the Palestinian Arab. The Arab has benefited from the Jewish influx, but
only indirectly. The Zionist has not hurt him, but the Zionist has made him feel shut out. This exclusiveness is natural and understandable, but it needs to be corrected if the Jews are to build for themselves a secure life in the Middle East.
I understood after seeing Egypt and talking with Christian Arabs in the Lebanon—many of them anti-Zionist only in public—why the Yishuv will fight and has a right to fight against permanent minority status under present conditions in an Arab state. But I also understand why the Palestinian Arabs, to whom Palestine is also home, who has fully as much right there as the Jew, does not wish to live as a minority in a Jewish state. No one likes to be ruled by an alien people, and though I, a Jew, found the friendliest sort of welcome visiting the Arabs, I found no Palestinian Arab in favor of a Jewish state. Relations on the day-to-day level between the two peoples are friendly and quite unlike what one expects. There is no sense of race tension as one feels it in our South or in encounters with anti-Semites in the Western world. The Arab does not hate the Jew, but he fears being dominated by him, and this fear must be allayed.
In a visit to Amir on the upper Jordan, where the Hadassah was opening a new health center for Jews and Arabs, I encountered a feeling among the Arabs that they somehow risked the displeasure of the British governing authorities if they were friendly with the Jews. I found no evidence to support this suspicion, but I believe that there is much the British could do to improve relations between leaders of the two peoples. I was told that at Haifa the chief engineer, the leading British civil servant of the municipality, had done much in a quiet unobtrusive way toward the success of the local government. Haifa’s population—and its City Council—is equally divided between Jews and Arabs. The mayoralty was long held by a respected Arab, succeeded since his death by his deputy, a Jew of Turkish origin. The chief engineer told me that he could remember no occasion on which a split vote in the council had not found Jews and Arabs on both sides. Admittedly it is easier to run a municipality than a nation, but Haifa nevertheless illustrates the fact that the two races can get along in equal partnership.