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,1 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,