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Origins of the Blind Spot: 1917–67
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The Balfour Lens
Palestine … is in constant danger of conflagration. Sparks are flying over its borders all the time and it may be that on some unexpected day a fire will be started that will sweep ruthlessly over this land.
—Dispatch from Otis Glazebrook, U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, December 1919
In April 1922, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives convened a rather remarkable hearing to debate a joint congressional resolution endorsing the Balfour Declaration.1 A little over four years earlier, in November 1917, Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, had put the weight of the British Empire behind the creation of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, with the stipulation “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Palestine was then part of the crumbling Ottoman Empire; it came under British control following World War I, formalized in 1923 as a League of Nations mandate. As in other parts of the Levant (including Syria), however, Arabs, who then made up more than 90 percent of Palestine’s population, also hoped for independence.
Ten outside witnesses were called to testify at the four-day hearing, including Fuad Shatara and Selim Totah, two Palestine-born U.S. citizens who spoke against the resolution and were the last witnesses to address the committee. “This is our national home, the national home of the Palestinians,” said Shatara, a Brooklyn surgeon and native of Jaffa, “and I think those people are entitled to priority as the national home of the Palestinians and not aliens who have come in and have gradually become a majority.”2 Totah, a young law student originally from Ramallah, attempted a less confrontational approach: “You gentlemen and your forefathers have fought for the idea, and that is taxation with representation. We are asking for the same principles. By the operation of the Balfour Declaration a majority of Jews will be established in Palestine, and after a while by their majority they will govern the native people. Would you stand for things like that in California if the Japanese should come in and after 20 or 30 years become a majority and establish a republic of their own? Not for a moment. How would you expect 93 percent of the people in Palestine to stand for that?”3
Totah’s words sparked a heated exchange with members of the panel. “Your point is that the people should be given control of the country and shut the Jews out,” said New York Congressman W. Bourke Cockran, a strong supporter of the bill.
In particular, Totah’s insistence that the Arab majority be given a say in determining the policies of the country was met with hostility and derision, as illustrated by the following exchange between Totah and Cockran and another strongly pro-Balfour lawmaker, Ambrose Kennedy of Rhode Island.
MR. TOTAH: If they come to establish a majority, the natives have a right to limit immigration as this country has a right to control immigration.
MR. KENNEDY: But we are an organized government. There is no one over there.
MR. TOTAH: But that does not cut out the equities of the situation.
MR. KENNEDY: These Jews are making this land fertile where it was sterile.
MR. TOTAH: No, sir; I disagree with that in its entirety.
MR. KENNEDY: The places that are fertile are not sterile now. The lands that those Jews have taken, this report states, have been lands that were sterile when they got them and they have turned them into fertile lands.
MR. TOTAH: We could do that ourselves.
MR. KENNEDY: That is another matter. That is a fact that the Jews are doing that. There is no doubt. It is conceded that what you want is to be yourselves given control of this land.
MR. TOTAH: To develop it.
MR. COCKRAN: And not allow the Jew to enter in, peacefully or otherwise.
MR. TOTAH: We do not say that.
MR. COCKRAN: Peacefully or otherwise, even to buy it, no matter what the result, if they should become a majority.4
Cockran had the last word in the hearing.
And so began U.S. involvement in what is now the century-old conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land. A few months after the hearing, Congress voted overwhelmingly to endorse the goal of establishing a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. Although highly controversial both inside and outside American government circles, including within the American Jewish community, the Balfour Declaration became the primary lens through which American politicians viewed Palestine, the Zionist project, and Palestine’s Arab inhabitants. Britain’s experience as a superpower attempting to mediate between two groups with competing national claims while leaning heavily toward one of them in Palestine offered a preview of many of the problems that would later confront American peacemaking between the Israelis and the Palestinians. By the end of the Mandate in 1948, the basic elements of American policy toward the conflict and the Palestinians had begun to take shape: admiration, particularly on Capitol Hill, for Zionist economic, political, and even military power; a parallel antipathy toward a highly nationalistic and often opportunistic Palestinian political leadership; and a deeply conflicted attitude on the part of U.S. policymakers over how best to resolve the conflict.
BALFOUR AND ITS DISCONTENTS
The British began warming to the idea of a Western-oriented, Jewish outpost in the eastern Mediterranean during World War I, as a way both to strengthen the war effort and to advance their own colonial ambitions in the region.5 Sentimental factors, including a religiously inspired fascination with the Holy Land and sympathy for the plight of Europe’s persecuted Jews, also played a role in Britain’s embrace of Zionism. As the land of the Bible and the birthplace of Christianity, Palestine was regarded by many as the natural birthright of Jews (and hence also Christians), which required that the land be “reclaimed” and “restored” to its “rightful owners.”6 Such views were prevalent in the United States as well, being held by many government officials, members of Congress, and even President Woodrow Wilson.7
For the country’s Arab inhabitants, however, the designation of Palestine as a Jewish national home posed an irremediable threat. As in other parts of the Levant, nationalist sentiment in Palestine was expressed mainly through the language of pan-Arabism. But by the early 1920s, the focus of Palestinian political aspirations had begun to shift away from a unified Greater Syria to an independent Arab Palestine.8 In addition to anonymizing the country’s Arab majority as “existing non-Jewish communities,” the authors of the Balfour Declaration were careful to confer only “civil and religious rights” on the Arabs while avoiding any reference to their political or national rights. The question was debated within official British circles prior to the Declaration’s publication. When queried about the implications of a Jewish national home for the country’s Arab inhabitants, Arthur Balfour famously replied, “In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.… The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”9 The Zionists meanwhile had made no secret of their goal of making Palestine “as Jewish as England is English” through immigration and colonization. To most Palestinian Arabs, therefore, the Jewish national home was “an objective that, from its inception and logic, would lead either to the Palestinians’ permanent subjugation in their own patrimony or, as it turned out, the destruction of their national existence.”10
Although the idea of transforming Palestine into a Jewish national home remained highly controversial and the subject of intense debate both inside and outside of government, for a variety of sentimental, cultural, and political reasons both the White House and Congress came down in favor of the Balfour Declaration and Zionist plans to colonize Palestine. In keeping with the State Department’s policy of neutrality, President Woodrow Wilson’s administration stopped short of officially endorsing the Balfour Declaration, although the president personally communicated his sympathies to leaders of the Zionist movement, and occasionally did so publicly as well. Wilson’s thinking was heavily influenced by prominent Zionist figures such as Louis Brandeis, a close confidant whom he later appointed to the Supreme Court, as well by his own religious upbringing.11 Nevertheless, his views on the subject were not especially nuanced or consistent. Although an ardent believer in the liberation of colonized peoples and the right of self-determination, as a devout Christian and the son of a Presbyterian minister Wilson was also deeply attracted to the idea of the “rebirth of the Jewish people … as a blessing for all mankind.”12 Indeed, Wilson’s concept of a Jewish homeland went beyond what was laid out in the Balfour Declaration; he informed Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization, in January 1919 of his hope that “in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth,” for which he offered his “entire support … full and unhampered.”13
Wilson’s casual pronouncements about the Balfour Declaration irritated officials at the State Department, who cautioned him against being overly supportive of the Zionist cause. Officially, Palestine was regarded as a British affair and American officials were keen to avoid “foreign entanglements.” American diplomats, particularly those based in the region, also understood the potential for bloodshed in the Holy Land. “There is no difference of opinion that the opposition of the Moslems and Christians to granting any exceptional privilege to the Jews in Palestine is real, intense and universal,” the U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, Otis Glazebrook, told delegates at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.14 The King-Crane Commission, appointed by Wilson in early 1919 to ascertain the wishes of the local populations in Arab regions of the former Ottoman Empire, came to a similar conclusion. Among other things, the commission found Palestine’s Arabs to be “emphatically against the entire Zionist program” and concluded that to “subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle” of self-determination. The King-Crane Commission’s final report was completed in August 1919 but was not published until three years later, by which time the Mandate, incorporating the concept of establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine, had already been approved by the League of Nations, and the U.S. Congress had completed its deliberations on the subject.15 Several of Wilson’s advisers expressed similar concerns as those of the commission members. Secretary of State Robert Lansing asked how Wilson’s commitment to self-determination could be “harmonized with Zionism, to which the President is practically committed.”16 The president’s legal adviser, David Hunter Miller, argued similarly that “the rule of self-determination would prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.” Wilson heard similar warnings from members of his delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.17
However, members of Congress were even more enthusiastic in their support than Wilson. The American Jewish community at the time was still deeply divided over political Zionism and the question of whether Jews constituted a nation.18 However, by this point “a pioneering Zionist lobby” with the ability to make support for a Jewish homeland into an election issue was already an established presence on Capitol Hill.19 In 1919, a majority of American lawmakers were publicly supportive of Zionist objectives,20 before the House and Senate gave their formal approval to the creation of a Jewish national home in September 1922. In approving the joint resolution, members of Congress made one modification to Balfour’s original formula, stating that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of Christian and all other non-Jewish communities in Palestine” (emphasis added).21 Despite their strongly pro-Zionist leanings, members of Congress nonetheless engaged in a relatively lively debate over the issue—an increasingly rare occurrence on Capitol Hill today on matters concerning Israel. Although no members of Congress from either party spoke against it, five of the ten witnesses called before the House Foreign Affairs committee hearing in...
