Ernest Bevin - Bevin, Palestine and Israel

Bevin, Palestine and Israel

Bevin was Foreign Secretary during the period when the Mandate of Palestine ended and the State of Israel was created. Bevin failed to secure the stated British objectives in this area of foreign policy, which included a peaceful settlement of the situation and the avoidance of involuntary population transfers.

Regarding Bevin's handling of the Middle East situation, at least one commentator, David Leitch, has suggested that Bevin lacked diplomatic finesse. Leitch argued that Bevin tended to make a bad situation worse by making ill-chosen abrasive remarks. Bevin was undeniably a plain-spoken man, some of whose remarks struck many as insensitive. Jewish critics have accused him of being anti-Semitic. One remark which caused particular anger was made when President Truman was pressing Britain to immediately admit 100,000 Jewish displaced persons to Palestine after the war. Bevin told a Labour Party meeting that American pressure to admit Jews was being applied 'because they do not want too many of them in New York.' He was, though, merely restating what he said he had been told by James Byrnes, the United States secretary of state. For refusing to remove limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine in the aftermath of the war, Bevin earned the hatred of Zionists. According to historian Howard Sachar, his political foe, Richard Crossman, a fellow Labour Party member of parliament and a pro-Zionist member of the post-war Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine, characterised his outlook during the dying days of the Mandate as "corresponding roughly with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion", the notorious forgery which was designed to inflame anti-Semitic prejudice. In Sachar's account, Crossman intimated that "the main points of Bevin's discourse were ... that the Jews had successfully organised a conspiracy against Britain and against him personally." However, the Bevin biographer, Alan Bullock, rejected suggestions that Bevin was motivated by personal anti-Semitism.

Britain's economic weakness, and its dependence on the financial support of the United States (Britain had received a large American loan in 1946, and mid-1947 was to see the launching of the Marshall Plan), left him little alternative but to yield to American pressure over Palestine policy.

At the reconvened London Conference in January 1947, the Jewish negotiators were only prepared to accept partition and the Arab negotiators only a unitary state (which would automatically have had an Arab majority). Neither would accept limited autonomy under overall British rule. When no agreement could be reached, Bevin threatened to hand the problem over to the United Nations. The threat failed to move either side, the Jewish representatives because they believed that Bevin was bluffing and the Arabs because they believed that their cause would prevail before the General Assembly. Bevin accordingly announced that he would "ask the UN to take the Palestine question into consideration." A week later, the strategic rationale supporting Britain's retaining a presence in Palestine was removed when the intention to withdraw from India in August of that year was announced. The decision to allow the United Nations to determine Palestine's future was formalised by the Attlee government's public declaration in February 1947 that Britain's Mandate in Palestine had become "unworkable." Of the UN partition plan which resulted, Bevin commented: "The majority proposal is so manifestly unjust to the Arabs that it is difficult to see how we could reconcile it with our conscience." During the remainder of the Mandate, fighting between the Jewish and Arab communities intensified. The end of the Mandate and Britain's final withdrawal from Palestine was marked by the founding of the State of Israel and the start of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, when five Arab states intervened in the inter-communal fighting. The Arab armies were led by the state with that position which was most effective, Jordan, which, with British assent, had reached a secret agreement with the Israelis which limited the fighting between their two countries. The war ended with Israel, in addition to the territory assigned by the UN for the creation of a Jewish state, also in control of much of the Mandate territory which had been assigned by the UN for the creation of an Arab state. The remainder was divided between Jordan and Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of, overwhelmingly Arab, civilians had become displaced.

Bevin was infuriated by attacks on British troops carried out by the more extreme of the Jewish militant groups, the Irgun and Lehi, commonly known as the Stern Gang. The Haganah restricted itself to less direct attacks, further restricted after the King David Hotel bombing (for which it initially gave its authorisation; later, but unknown to the Irgun, withdrawn) to illegal immigration activities.

Bevin negotiated the "Portsmouth Treaty" with Iraq (signed on 15 January 1948), which, according to then-Iraqi foreign minister Muhammad Fadhel al-Jamali, was accompanied by a British undertaking to withdraw from Palestine in such a fashion as to provide for swift Arab occupation of all its territory.

In 1946, an Irgun plan to assassinate Bevin and other British politicians was foiled by the security service, MI5.