Biltmore Conference - Jewish Commonwealth

Jewish Commonwealth

The significance of the Program to a Jewish Commonwealth was in stepping beyond the terms of the Balfour Declaration (which had been reaffirmed as British policy by Winston Churchill's White Paper of 1922) that there should be a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine. It was also significant because it was a first joint statement by Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish groups on Palestine, and committed such non-Zionist groups to the idea of a Jewish Commonwealth in all of Palestine. According to Ami Isseroff, the Program was "a crucial step in the development of the Zionist movement, which increasingly saw itself as opposed to Britain rather than a collaborator of Britain, and it determined that henceforth Ben-Gurion and the Zionist Executive in Palestine, rather than Weizmann would lead the Zionist movement and determine policy toward the British."

Although it spoke of the Jewish people for "the economic, agricultural and national development of the Arab peoples and states", the Biltmore Program was implicitly a rejection of the proposal for a binational solution to the question of Arab-Jewish co-existence in Palestine. Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist-Zionist group, accordingly voted against the program.

The estimates for the destruction of European Jewry grew throughout 1942 and 1943. Chaim Weizmann urged a re-evaluation of the Biltmore program in June 1943. Chaim Weizmann’s earlier estimate of 25% destruction declared at the Biltmore conference now seemed wildly optimistic. Rabbi Meyer Berlin leader of the Mizrahi Zionist party disagreed arguing that no one could know how many Jews would survive and how many would die.