More Passover Reading:
Two Installments of

..7he Auidio rap

Community in Palestine
Takes Shape After War

By CHAIM WEIZMANN

First President of Israel

•It was Chaim Weizmann's experiments in chenz-
istry that brought him to the United States during
World War II, but he managed, during his stay here,
to advance also the cause of Jews in Palestine.

DC
Roosevelt and Churchill

Early in 1942 I received a call from John G.
Winant, American Ambassador to the Court of
St. JaMes. He informed me that President Roose-
velt had expressed the wish to have me come over
to the United States to work there on the prob-
lem of synthetic rubber. Mr. Winant advised me
earnestly to devote myself as completely as pos-
sible to chemistry. He believed that I would thus
serve best both the Allied powers and the Zionist
cause. I promised to follow his advice, and during
the fifteen months of my third visit to America
actually did little outside the scientific field.
My wife and I left America on March 11, and
on the day of departure I dropped in at 10 Downing
Street to say good by to Mr. Martin, Winston
Churchill's private secretary. I had already taken
.farewell of him when he suddenly said: "The P.M.

is in the other room. He has a few minutes' time, and
think I'll bring you in to him."
Then a strange colloquy took place, or I should say
monologue. Mr. Churchill packed a great deal into
those few minutes which we passed together, standing
on our feet. •
He first wished me luck on my American trip. "I
am glad you are going," he said, 'and I am sure you
will find a great deal of work to do there." Then, with-
Out any questioning or prompting on my part, he went
:on: "I want you to know that I have a plan, which, of
course, can only be carried into effect, • when the war
is over. I -Would like to see Ibn Saud made lord of the
Middle East—boss of the bosses—provided he settles
With you. It will be up to you to get the best possible
'c onditions. Of course, we shall help you. Keep this con-
fidential, but you might talk it over with Roosevelt when
yoit get to America. There's nothing he and I cannot do
, tif we set our minds on it."
Toward the end of my stay in America I had a long
interview with President Roosevelt, in the presence of
Sumner WelleS. He was, of course, aware in particular
of Ibn Saud,. whom he considered fanatical and difficult
I maintained the thesis that we could not rest our case
on the consent of the Arabs. As • long as their consent
was. asked they would naturally refuse it, but once
they knew that Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt both
supported the Jewish National Home, they would
acquieSce. The moment they sensed a flaw in this sup-
port they would become negative, arrogant and de-
structive.
Mr. Roosevelt again assured me of his sympathies
and of his desire to settle the problem. Throughout
this interview I was supported by Mr. Welles, who ex-
pressed the belief that America would be prepared to
help financially in the setting up of the Jewish National
Home.

Rubber and Gasoline

•

When I went to Washington I saw William Clayton,
Under Secretary of State for Economics, and my pro-
posal was to ferment corn and convert it into butyl
alcohol and acetone by my process. The butyl alcohol
could without difficulty be used for making butylene and
the butylene easily converted into butadeine, the basis
for rubber. I knew that large quantities of butadeine
were already being made out of oil, but the trouble
was, as far as I could gather, that the butadeine so
produced was not pure.
A result was that I became, to my intense distate,
the center of an argument which took on a political
character; it was the National Farmers' Union versus
the oil companies. A more welcome result was the
ultimate switching of a good deal of the production to
alcohol and its derivatives. Some time later vice
president Wallace was kind enough to write of my
war work in America in the following terms: "The
world will never know what a significant contribution
Weizmann made toward the success of the synthetic
rubber program at a time when it was badly bogged
down and going too slowly"
There was another aspect of the rubber problem
which was vitally affected, and that had to do with
isoprene. Now whether one produces butadeine from
oil or froM. alcohol there is no difference in the final
character of. the rubber, which when processed is hard,
and is best used only for the outside part of the tire,
rather than for the guts or soft inner tubing. I had
answered this problem by another process, condensation
of acetone and acetylene. I produced thereby an isoprene
Which is polymerized into isoprene rubber and gives a
soft, malleable product which blends well with the
butadeine rubber, so one could use pure butadeine
rubber for the hard outer tube and a combination of
the two rubbers for the soft inner tube.
Here, too; I must record. a long history of delay and
opposition. The government appointed an important
committee to go into the matter. Originally a member
of the Supreme Court was to head the committee, and
Justice Stone was proposed by the President. He re-
fused, and Bernard Baruch took his place. Two impor-
tant members of the committee were Professors Comp-
ton and Conant. Professor Conant was skeptical from
the outset. He said that he, too, had been trying to
synthesize isoprene from acetylene and acetone, and it
seemed to him a tedious and expensive method. I
answered in some astonishment: "But you don't know
what my process is!" In the end I handed over my
processes to a firm in Philadelphia, which began to
apply it during the war, and continues to do so now.

Return to Palestine
I had not been in Palestine since the spring of 1939,

Claim Weizmarin

Paper. All this time my wife and I had hankered after
the country, and after our home in Rehovoth. As my
seventieth birthday approached, in the autumn of 1944,
we made up our minds that we would spend it nowhere
but in Palestine.
The journey began under an ominous cloud. On
Nov. 6, • five days before we set out, Lord Moyne was
assassinated in Cairo (by the Stern Group—Ed.) I
wrote the next day to Mr. Churchill:
"I can hardly find words adequate to express the
deep moral indignation and horror which I feel at the
murder of LoreMoyne. I know that these feelings are
shared by Jewry throughout the world . . . I can assure
you that Palestine Jewry will, as its representative
bodies have declared, go to the utmost limit of its power
to cut out, root and branch, this evil from its midst."
There is not a single word in this letter which I have
ever wanted to retract, even in the days of our bitterest
disappointment.
The reception accorded me in Palestine was warm,
generbus and spontaneous. The war years had knit the
community into a powerful, self-conscious organism,
and the great war effort, out of all proportion to numer-
ical strength, had given the Jews of Palestine a height-
ened self-reliance, a justified sense of merit and achieve-
ment, a renewed claim on the democratic world, and a
high degree of technical development. The productive
capacity of the country had been given a powerful for-
ward thrust. The National Home was in fact here,
unrecognized, and by that lack of recognition frustrated
in the fulfillment of its task. Here were over 600,000
Jews capable of a vast concerted action in behalf of
the remnant of Jewry in Europe, frantically eager to
undertake it and forbidden to do so.
Side by side with these developments; in some ways
linked with them, and in part arising from the bitter
frustration of legitimate hopes, there were the negative
features I have referred to: here and there a relaxation
of the traditional Zionist purity of ethics, a touch of
militarization and a weakness for its trappings; here
and there something worse, the tragic, futile, un-Jewish
resort to terrorism, a perversion of the purely defensive
function of the Haganah; and worst of all, in certain.
circles, a readiness to compound with the evil, to play
politics with it, to condemn and not to condemn it,
to treat it not as the thing it was, namely, an unmitigated
curse to the National Home, but as a phenomenon which
might have its advantages.

*

*

During the latter years of World War II two
themes were dominant in the minds of the Jewish
people. One was despair over the tragedy of European
Jewry, the other was hope born of the impending
defeat of Hitler and belief that the democratic world
at last would give the Jewish people its chance,

X

Repudiatioy and Rebuff

Long before the end of the war the last excuse for
British policy in Palestine—pacification of the Arabs,
who were not pacified by it—had disappeared. By 1944,
and even in 1943, the victory which the Arabs had done
so little to help us obtain was in sight. The moral
authority of the democracies was supreme, and a dec-
laration for the Jewish Homeland then would have
had irresistible force. A new excuse replaced the old
one; one had to wait for the end of the war. This was
the pretext advanced me in private conversation by
Mr. Churchill, and offered by him to the House of Com-
mons on February 27, 1945, after the Yalta Conference.
The European war ended in May, 1945-; no action was
taken. In July of that year came the general elections
in England, with a Labor triumph which astonished the
whole world and delighted all liberal elements.
If ever a political party had gone unequivocally on
„record with regard to a problem, it was the British
- "Labor party with regard to the Jewish National Home.
But today it is clear from the course of events that the
promises and protestations of friendship lacked charac-
ter and substance; they did not stand up to the pressure
of those forces which, behind the scenes, have always
worked against us. It was on Nov. 13, 1945, that the
Labor government officially repudiated the promise of
the Labor party and offered us, instead of the abroga-

ONIC. 7.

The Old Tell the Young

"*.

tion of the White Paper, and relief for the Jews in deten-
tion camps—a new Commission of Inquiry!
The British government, in other words, refused to
accept the view. that six million Jews had been done to
death in Europe by various "scientific" mass methods,
and that European anti-Semitism was as viciously alive
as ever. The British government wanted the Jews to
stay on and contribute their talents (as I afterward told
the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine)
toward the rebuilding of Germany, so that the Germans
might have another chance of destroying the last rem-
nants of the Jewish people. •
Instead of the mass movement of Jews into Palestine
which the British Labor party had repeatedly promised,
there was an offer of a trickle of 1,500 refugees a month.
Instead of the generous recognition of the original pur-
poses of the Balfour Declaration, there was a reversion
to the old, shifty double emphasis on the obligation
toward the Arabs of Palestine as having equal weight
with the promise of the Homeland to the - Jews. The let-
down was complete.
Mr. Bevin, who, as the new Foreign Secretary, issued
the declaration of policy on behalf of the Labor govern-
ment, was apparently determined to make it clear that
no doubts should be entertained anywhere as to his
personal agreement with the worst implications of the
declaration. At a press conference following the issue /
of the declaration. he said, apparently apropos of oire
demand for the fulfillment of the Balfour Declaration\
and the promises of the Labor party: "If the Jews, with
all their suffering, want to get too much at the head
of the queue, you lidVe the danger of another anti-
Semitic reaction through it all."
I thought the remark gratuitiously brutal, even
coarse, but I cannot say that it surprised me. My per-
sonal contacts with Mr. Bevin have been unfortunate
where Jewish matters have been concerned. His stone
was hectoring. I first went to see him, in his capacity
as Foreign Secretary;- with regard to immigration cer-
tificates for refugees. We had been offered a ludicrously
small number, which we could not offer the unhappy,
clamoring inmates of the DP camps without a feeling of
shame. We refused the certificates. Mr. Bevin's opening
remarks to me were: "What do you mean by refusing
certificates? Are you trying to force my hand? If you
want a fight you can have it!" There was not the slight-
est effort to understand our point of view; there was
only an overbearing, quarrelsome approach. °An. earlier
contact with Mr. Bevin, when he had been Minister of ,
Labor during the war, had been somewhat happier; but
then Mr. Bevin had wanted my services.
In the autumn of 1945 Mr. Earl Harrison, after per-
sonal investigation on the spot, reported to President
Truman that there was no solution for the problem to
the European Jews other than Palestine. President
Truman then suggested to Prime Minister Attlee that
100,000 Jews be admitted immediately to Palestine, and
President Truman's suggestion was followed by Mr.
Bevin's declaration above referred to. ; This wasthe
origin of the Anglo-American Commission of 1946.
Its personnel was of high caliber, and included a
number of excellent men like Bartley Crum, of Cali-
fornia; Richard Crossman, of England; James G. Mac.
Donald, of New York. and Judge Hutchison of Texas.,
, The commission issued positive though cautious recom-,
mendatiOns, among them the admission of the 100,0001
"displaced persons," as suggested by President Truman(
It produced no effect, except to prove that the Britisli
government had never intended to take affirmative.',
action. The whole device.had been nothing but a stall.,
The White Paper remained in force, our immigration,
was still limited to the tragically derisory figure of
1,500 a month.

The Response

In 1946, when the first post-war Zionist Congress was
held in Geneva, it was a dreadful experience to run,
one's eye along row after row of delegates, finding among,
them hardly one of the friendly faces which had adorned',
past Congresses. Polish Jewry was missing; Central and
Southeast European Jewry was missing; German Jewry
was missing. The two main groups represented were
Palestinians and the Americans; between them sat the
representatives of thq fragments of European Jewry,
together with some small delegations from England,
the Dominions and South America.
The American group, led by Dr. Abba Hillel Silver,,
was from the outset the strongest, not so much because
of enlarged numbers, or by virtue of the inherent
strength of the delegates, but because of the weakness
of the rest. The twenty-second Congress therefore had
a special character, differing in at least one respect
from previous Congresses. This was the absence, among
very many delegates, of faith, or even hope, in the
British -goverrunent, and a tendency to rely on methods
never known or encouraged emong Zionists before
the war.
These methods were referred to by different names:,
"resistance," "defense," "activism.' But whatever shades],
of meaning may have been expressed, one feature was,'
common to all of them: the conviction of the need for
fighting against British authority in Palestine. My stand
on these matters was well known; I made it clear once
more at the Congress. I stated my belief that our justi*
fled protest against our frustrations, against the injus-
tices we had suffered, could have been made with dignity,
'and. force, yet without truckling to the demoralizing,
forces in the movement. I became, therefore, as in the
past, the scapegoat for the sins of the British govern.
ment. Knowing that their "assault" on the British gov.I
ernment was ineffective, the "activists," or whateve /
they would cull themselves, turned their shafts on me,
About half of the American delegation, led by Rabbi.
Silver, and part of the Palestinian, led by Mr. Ben
Gurion, had made up their minds that I was to go.
What happened in the end was that my election as
president was made impossible and no president was
elected.
I left the Congress depressed, far more by the spirit
in which it had been conducted than by the rebuff I
had received. In the early spring of 1947 my wife and
I returned to Palestine and settled again in our home
in Rehovoth. Here I busied myself with scientific work,
with the building of the new scientific institute which'
was founded for my seventieth birthday—and with the

dictation of most of these memoirs.

—International Photo

DRESSED IN CEREMONIAL GARB, Joseph Glance, 88,
faces a bowl of matzos and other Passover food at the
Home of Old Israel in New York, as he reads to neigh-
borhood children the centuries-old story of the solemn
Jewish holiday. At left are Louis and Herman Werber, 9,
twins and, at right, another set of twins, Arnold and

the hectic days preceding the issuance of the White 1 Melvin Kitzes.

In his later years, Dr. Weizmann's chemistri and
his Zionism blended into a common goal. Next week
he will tell of the role science will play in Palestine.

This is a serialization of parts of "Trial and Error," by
Chaim Weizmann, published in book form by Harper 8
Brothers. Copyright, 1949, by the Weizmann Foundation.

32 THE JEWISH. NEWS

—

Friday, April 14 1941

