PALESTINE TURNING-POINT
I T was natural and right that Mr. Bevin should have dragged Wednesday's debate on Palestine in the House of Commons back to first principles. The abuse which has been heaped on his head during the past couple of weeks has usually made no allowance for the hard skeleton of the problem with which he has had to deal since he came to office. In their excitement over Spitfires his critics have forgotten the Balfour Declaration, and they have assumed that the Foreign Office was wrong about Palestine not only in 1949 but in all its policy ever since 1945. That, of course, is not the case. It is tempting now to believe that there was a moment in the past four years when a bolder judgement or a shrewder calcu- lation would have succeeded in producing the elusive " solution " which by now would have brought content to Palestine and peace to the Middle East. But no speaker in the debate succeeded in identifying that elusive moment. Doctrinaire Zionists and Arabists have naturally always had their answers, but these never succeed in fulfilling the fundamental requirement of Mr. Bevin's ideal solution, for the realisation of which he was right to exert every effort, that it should be " acceptable to both Arabs and Jews." Wednesday was probably the last occasion on which the Balfour Declaration could legitimately be made the backbone of a Govern- ment argument. In the last few weeks a new pattern has been forming in the Middle East which, barring a war or a miracle, is going to shape events in that region for many years to come. Among the elements of this new pattern must be included the imminent recognition of Israel by Britain, the elections in Israel itself, the peace talks at Rhodes and the appearance at work of the United Nations Conciliation Commission ; between them these events will remove the Balfour Declaration and its successors— the Hope-Simpson Report, the Peel Report, the Anglo-American Report and all the rest of them—from the blue books to the history books.
All these events spring from one central fact—the existence of a State of Israel. This State may or may not be viable, but it is certainly active, and its existence is by now no more precarious than that of some States which have been accepted for member- ship of the United Nations. It was therefore natural that the passage in the Foreign Secretary's speech which was most eagerly awaited should be that concerned with the British Government's recognition of Israel. On this point Mr. Bevin's argument was unexceptionable. We are prepared to recognise Israel as soon as it seems to be stabilised within reasonably permanent limits—as soon, that is to say, as fighting in Palestine has given place to peace. Mr. Bevin made it clear that de facia recognition is to be expected within a few days. It is true that a few days will not be enough to assure the exact boundaries within which Israel is to be confined, but to compensate for this uncertainty there is the impending recognition of Transjordan by the United States. This " very material factor," as Mr. Bevin called it, will at least set a limit beyond which Jewish ambitions will not be allowed to penetrate, for the expansionist element in Zionism, which would attack Transjordan tomorrow if it had its way, has always been the section of Zionism most tightly dependent upon American support.
The results of the Jewish elections have come as an additional damper to the extreme nationalists (the men and women who, in the last years of the mandate, were more familiarly known to the British public as " terrorists "). In Tel Aviv, Petah Tikvah and other urban centres they have gained as much as twenty per cent. of the votes, but in the country as a whole, as far as can be judged from the figures available at the time of writing, they have not secured as large a vote as they had expected, nor will they be in a position to hold a balance between the Labour members and their assorted opponents. It seems probable that the elections in Israel have turned more on domestic and less on international issues ,than might have been expected.. The vote has been domestically for peace, and internationally for respect- ability. Asked to choose between irresponsible glory and peace, the Jewish voters have chosen peace. For most of them peace has the primary advantage of bringing settled conditions for work, but it has the secondary great advantage that it brings with it a blessing from the outside world—a blessing which takes the form of loans, recognition, legal immigration and, above all, the aura of respectability.
For the Arabs the crisis of the past few weeks has no such cheerful implications. The emergence of Israel, whether diplo- matically recognised by them or not, marks the end of an era. The widest concession that the Arabs were ever prepared to make to Zionism—in the days when concessions were confined to the theoretical limits and the conference table—was equal citizenship and local autonomy for the Jewish citizens of an independent Arab Palestine. Now the paper schemes of the last thirty years have been discredited, and inevitably the leaders who were asso- ciated with them have been discredited also. It may be that most of the blame for defeat will be unloaded on to the shoulders of the British. Already there are signs that a " stab-in-the-back " myth is being created, and like most excuses of this sort it is probably destined for a long life.. But a myth is never more than half a policy. The real test for the Arab Governments will come after they have patched up an armistice or a peace with Israel ; then they will have first to explain to their own people what has hap- pened, and second to decide on what basis their future relations with the young interloper are going to be conducted. If their enmity to a Jewish State is ineradicable, then their obvious course is to combine an economic boycott with such slow political pressure as they can muster over the course of years, taking comfort from the precedent of the decline and fall of the Crusaders, and hope from the probability that Zionism has now reached its emotional climax and will inevitably begin to run into acute social and financial troubles. But it is asking too much of the Arabs, in their hour of defeat, to accept such a Fabian outlook. They are much more likely to turn hi their bitterness against those they think have deceived, them, and force some political change in their countries, whatever its nature or cost may turn out to be.
That is the danger which confronts this country and, no less, the United States. There have always been some • optimists (and their voices were heard in the debate on Wednesday) who have believed that the existence of a prosperous Jewish State in Palestine would have a beneficial effect on the Middle East as a whole by encouraging its neighbours to follow in the path of Socialism and progress. The birth of Israel is far more likely to have an exactly contrary effect, and to drive the Arabs back to their Korans and into a sullen hostility towards anything emanating from the West, whether it is Socialism, oil companies, or simply advice. Against this real danger, that the Middle East may have turned its back on the West once and for all, there are a few hopeful signs in the sky, of which we must make the most. Thl first is the long-deferred alignment between British and American, policy regarding the Middle East, which to all appearance is on the verge of realisation. The second is that the Middle East, as ti political expression, seems to be expanding. Turkey, which during the past few years has been making the first real efforts towards co-operation with her southern neighbours since 1918, has gone even further in this direction by accepting a place on the United Nations Conciliation Commission, and, more significant still; Pakistan and India are becoming increasingly concerned with What 'goes on beyond their western borders. Finally, there are the hints thrown out by President Truman about the possibility of American help for the less economically developed areas of the world, and though nobody supposes that the American 'purse is bottomless, Mr. Bevin was right in interpreting these hints as foreshadowing a constructive approach to the problems of the Middle East. For here, no less than in Europe, any American help would be no more than an example of enlightened self-interest. These are some of the straws at which we must clutch. They are not very substantial, but they are the only ones that can be seen, and with any luck Wednesday's debate, in which the Government deserved a better majority than it got, will prove to have been the last of those with which we have grown unhappily familiar—an exchange of reproaches, and bandied accusations over lost opportunities which, in fact, wert, never really lost because they never really existed.
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