Publish it not... The Middle East Cover-Up

From the personal statement by Mayhew at the beginning of the book:

Ernest Bevin felt this injustice deeply too. I remember how, at the end of a particularly tense Question Time, when he had been mercilessly harried by Jewish MPs supporting Israel, he had finally burst out, “We must also remember the Arab side of the case—there are, after all, no Arabs in the House." This remark provoked an uproar, and I reproved him for it afterwards—mistakenly, I now think—on the grounds that by singling out the Jewish as against the non-Jewish supporters of Zionism he was making it easier for his enemies to suggest that he was anti- Semitic. But Bevin was unrepentant, protesting that the Zionists were “even now paralleling the Nazis in Palestine," and that they were creatures of violence and war—“What can you expect when people are brought up from the cradle on the Old Testament?"

I did not then share Bevin's emotional commitment on Palestine, but I remember clearly his dislike of Zionist methods and tactics, and, indeed, of the Zionist philosophy itself. He was passionately and un-shakeably anti-Zionist. He held that Zionism was basically racialist, that it was inevitably wedded to violence and terror, that it demanded far more from the Arabs than they could or should be expected to accept peacefully, that its success would condemn the Middle East to decades of hatred and violence, and above all—this was his immediate concern — that by turning the Arabs against Britain and the Western countries, it would open a highroad for Stalin into the Middle East.

On all these points events proved him right; but in the immediate postwar years, so soon after the truth about the Nazis' treatment of the Jews had become widely known, his plain speaking struck many people as prejudiced and harsh, and enabled the Zionists to misrepresent him with some success as an anti-Semite, which he was not.

Then, as now, there was much confusion between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Zionism—the idea that Jewish people everywhere should gather together in a state in Palestine—is a political concept which can and should be freely debated, one which has wide support but which many tolerant civilised people, including many Jews, strenuously oppose. But in the 1940s, and indeed until quite recently, many people con¬ fused Zionism with Judaism, the religion of the Jews, so that criticising Zionism sounded like criticising somebody's religion. :Others confused Zionism with the Jewish people itself, and so made the mistake of thinking that if one were anti-Zionist one must be anti-Jewish as well. Regrettably, this last confusion was deliberately fostered by some extreme Zionists, who discouraged potential opponents by making them afraid of being thought racialists.

Even today Zionism is a subject on which it is hard to speak frankly in Western countries without giving offence. Statements to the effect that communism or capitalism are wicked or inhuman may provoke disagreement, but they do not give offence. But if Zionism is similarly denounced, almost everyone is shocked, and the speaker's motives are widely suspected.

In 1947 and 1948 it was the political pressure on the Labour Cabinet from American Zionists, exerted through the United States government, which angered Bevin most, and I shared his feelings about this to the full. At that time, Britain was dependent on American goodwill for her economic survival; and President Truman, as he later explained frankly in his memoirs, was equally dependent on Zionist goodwill for his presidential campaign funds. As a consequence, the British government was subjected to ruthless pressure from Washington to get the Arabs to accept the Zionists' demands. It was a disgraceful abuse of power. On one occasion I was exposed to the full brunt of it myself. In Bevin's absence, I had to receive the US Ambassador, Mr Lou Douglas, “with a message from the President about Palestine." Mr Douglas explained that he had been asked to repeat the President's urgent request to the British government to admit a hundred thousand Jewish refugees into Palestine immediately. In line with Bevin's views, and with the support of the Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Orme Sargent, I objected that this was simply a prescription for war. The Ambassador then replied, carefully and deliberately, that the President wished it to be known that if we could help him over this it would enable our friends in Washington to get our Marshall Aid appropriation through Congress. In other words, we must do as the Zionists wished—or starve. Bevin surrendered—he had to—but he was understandably bitter and angry. He felt it out¬ rageous that the United States, which had no responsibility for law and order in Palestine (and no intention of permitting massive Jewish immigration into the United States), should, from very questionable motives, impose an impossibly burdensome and dangerous task on Britain.

I was myself comparatively slow to understand the Palestine problem and formulate my own views about it. For one thing—hard as it is to believe this now—the Foreign Office was struggling at that time with a number of world issues of even greater importance. India and Pakistan had to be given freedom. The Marshall Aid plan had to be pushed for¬ ward. Institutions had to be created for a divided Germany. NATO had to be formed. At that time, inevitably, Palestine seemed a sideshow.

My first personal brush with Zionism occurred in the strangest manner. I had been in the Foreign Office only a few weeks when the following absurd-sounding letter was placed on my desk, dated 5 December 1946, postmarked Lisbon:

“Mr Mayhew, Under Secretary, Foreign Affairs, London. Remember the very words of the great Stephen S. Wise ‘We are going to get a Jewish state soon in Palestine’ and we fighters from Lahome Herut Israel, add ‘Also against the decision of the British Foreign Office’.

Don’t forget that the Jewry defeated with your British assistance the bloody and damned Nazis i.e. the first Germanic nation, and don’t forget too that its now your turn as the second arrogant Germanic nation to kiss our feet.

We are determined this time to squash you British sons of a bitch and we declare war to the finish against the British.

For every Jew you stinking British pigs kill in Palestine you will pay a thousandfold in fetid English blood.

The L H I has passed sentence of death on the British pig Mayhew.

The execution will soon take place by silent and new means.

Signed Lahome Herut Israel.”

I asked my secretary why he bothered me with such nonsense. He replied that the Home Office considered the assassination threat genuine and had already telephoned my home to warn my friends and relations against opening suspicious parcels. And sure enough, by coincidence or otherwise, explosive packets soon began arriving through the post for people supposed (sometimes quite wrongly) to be anti-Zionist. One arrived at Sir Anthony Eden’s home. I have been told that he actually stuffed it unopened into his pocket, and carried it around with him for some time before the security services relieved him of it. Another explosive packet was sent to Roy Farran, an avowed opponent of Zionism, and killed his brother, who opened it in error. To the best of my knowledge, however, no Jewish terrorist actually sent me an ex¬ plosive packet, or tried to assassinate me in any other way, though we had several false alarms.

I remember vividly several meetings with Zionist deputations at this time. Usually, they came to protest against harsh measures aimed at preventing illegal immigration into Palestine. On short-term human grounds, the case for unrestricted immigration was overwhelmingly strong. Scores of thousands of desperate Jewish people, fleeing from the scene of their wartime nightmare in Europe, were being channelled by Zionist organisations towards Palestine. Most of them were destitute and many were physically or mentally crippled. How could any civilised government, let alone a British Labour government, fail to admit them ? How could we use the Navy to board their ships and force them back towards Europe ? Never before or since have I known a more distressing task than that of defending the government's immigration policy to outraged deputations of Zionists. These deputations were almost always well-informed, articulate, demanding, passionate and ruthless. The most formidable of their spokesmen, without question, was Mr Sydney Silver- man; he would attack me personally in the most merciless fashion, placing on my own shoulders the responsibility for the deaths and suicides of immigrants whom we had turned back.

But in spite of everything, were we wrong? Was Ernest Bevin mistaken in thinking, as he said so often, that the Jews were asking for more than the Arabs could ever accept peacefully—more than it was in the Jews’ own long-term interest to demand? I do not think so. I thought then, and I still think, that the scale of the Zionist demands and the ruthlessness with which they were pursuing them were bound to prove in the long term to be self-defeating.

But where, at Westminster or in Whitehall, was the counter-pressure from the Arabs whose land, homes and property these Jewish immigrants would soon be seizing? It did not exist: not because the Arabs did not feel strongly about what was going on in Palestine, but because they possessed at the time virtually no political influence at all. Very few Arab states had even achieved genuine independence before 1948, and there was no one who could command a hearing on their behalf. Con¬ sequently, the British government received virtually no support during these critical times from the people whose vital interests it was trying, however ineffectually, to protect.