56 Friday, September 2, 1977 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Weizmann, Ben-Gurion Roles in Partition Debate Recalled By MAURICE SAMUELSON (Copyright 1977, JTA, Inc.) LONDON The Israeli government's adamant deci- sion to retain control of Judea and Samaria as in- tegral parts of Eretz Yis- rael is the latest move in a tortuous debate about the fate of the Holy Land which has gone on for the past 40 years. For it was in 1937 that the first serious proposal was made to solve the Arab- Jewish deadlock by parti- tioning Palestine into two national states. Under the chairmanship of Lord Peel, a British Royal Commission concluded that since Arab and Jewish aspirations were incompatible and that since the two peoples re- fused to coexist in a bi-na- tional state, partition seem- ed to be the only answer. In the 40 years which have followed, many other interested parties offered their own plans to partition Palestine. However, they differed from the Peel re- port mainly in the dividing lines which they sketched on to the map. As far as the principle of partition was concerned, though, all of them were based . on the arguments laid out lucidly in the 400 pages of the Royal Commission's report. well as a Jewish state in Pa- lestine—or whether only as a tactical device for achiev- ing the sovereign state which alone could offer sanctuary to desperate Jew- ish refugees fleeing from the growing Nazi storm in Europe. If the central prin- ciple of partition is still valid, Israel will have to be more responsive to calls for withdrawal from occupied territories. Moshe Dayan, then defense minister, claiming that Ben-Gurion's acceptance of part ition was only tactical, while Abba Eban, then for- eign minister, Itzhak Ben- Aharon and other "doves" maintained that whatever Weizmann's and Ben-Gu- don's motives in 1937, the basic partition principle of the Peel report still re- mained valid. Rejecting both a bina- tional state and cantoniza- tion as impracticable, the commissioners argued that the problem could not be solved by giving either the Arabs or the Jews all they wanted. While neither could justly rule all Palestine, they wrote, "we see no rea- son why, if it were prac- ticable, each 'race' should not rule part of it." Parti- tion, they concluded, seem- ed to offer "at least a chance of ultimate peace." But the Peel report was ahead of its time. The Arab world was violently opposed to it. Many Zionists and their supporters in Britain and the United States also rejected it. As World War II crept closer, Britain ap- The same conference re- solved that since the Arabs had many wide territories of their own, "they must not claim to exclude the Jews from this small area of Palestine, less than the size of Wales. Indeed, we should re-examine also the possibility of extending the present Palestine bound- aries by agreement with Egypt, Syria and Trans- jordan." accommodate an Arab as The question was first for- mally debated in these terms in the Israeli Labor Party five years ago, with DAVID BEN - GURION dorsed by the Zionist Execu- tive. In the darkest hour of Jewish history, even some non-Jews thought in terms of an all-Jewish Palestine after the war. The Confer- ence of the British Labor Party in 1944 (only months before the party won power) passed a famous res- olution saying the Arabs should be encouraged to move out as the Jews moved in. peased the Arabs with the 1939 White Paper holding out the prospect of full Arab control of Palestine. Only after the war ended was partition finally en- dorsed • by the Zionists and the United Nations. However, the two most in- fluential and realistic Zion- ist leaders—Chaim Weiz- mann and David Ben-Gu- rion—had already, in 1937, secretly rejoiced at the tan- gible prospect of Jewish statehood offered by Peel. They prevailed at the 20th Zionist Congress of August 1937 not to reject it out of hand, but to keep the nego- tiations open in order to strengthen the Zionist posi- tion. A burning qUestion for modern Israeli leaders is whether Weizmann and Ben-Gurion embraced parti- tion because they believed in its principle—the need to There is, in fact, evidence to support both inter- pretations of Weizinann's thinking about partition. The Zionist leader eloquent- ly recalled his first reaction to the partition proposal in his autobiography "Trial and Error." When the idea was first put to him, he recalled, he felt that "something new had been born into the Zion- ist movement, something which had to be handled with great care and tender- ness, which should not be permitted to become a mat- ter for crude slogans and controversy....A Jewish state, the idea of Jewish in- dependence in Palestine, even if only in part of Pales- tine, is such a lofty thing, that it ought to be treated CHAIM WEIZMANN like the ineffable name, which is never pronounced in vain." After recognizing the reli- gious objections to dividing the Holy Land, Weizmann nonetheless defended the idea of a small 'Jewish state in these words: "It was my own deep con- viction that God had always chosen small countries through which to convey his messages to humanity I believe that a small Jewish state, well organized, liVing in peace with its neighbors, a state on which would be lavished the love and devo- tion of Jewish communities throughout the world—such a state would be a credit to us and an equally great con- tribution to civilization." As for the political consid- erations, Weizmann thought that the establishment of a Jewish state provided a real possibility of coming to terms with the Arabs, since as long as the Mandate last- WINSTON CHURCHILL ed, the Arabs feared the Jews would absorb the whole of Palestine. Final borders could help to dis- sipate these fears, he sug- gested. When Ben-Gurion defend- ed the Peel report before the Mapai Central Com- mittee in April 1937, he stressed that a Jewish gov- ernment in alliance with Britain, which could enact its own laws and controlled enough territory, would bring in and settle two or three million Jews. "The Jewish Agency could not do this; a state could," he de- dared. But, like Weizmann, Ben- Gurion was prepared to look beyond the creation of a . small partitioned state to- wards the possibility of en- larging it. His biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar, quotes a letter BG wrote to his friend, Moshe Sharett, re- vealing his inmost thougits: "We shall smash these frontiers which are being forced upon us, and not nec- essarily by war...If we bring hundreds of thou- sands of Jews into our state, if we can strengthen our economic and military position, then a basis would be established for an agree- ment on the abolition of the frontiers between ourselves and the Arab state." The • Zionist leadership was to return to the parti- tion path to statehood when the second World War ended and the Jewish survi- vors of the Holocaust de- manded the national home which had been closed to them when millions more could have been saved. Even so, Jewish claims to all of Palestine were not' en- tirely waived. The famous Biltmore Conference of American Zionists in 1942 demanded that "Palestine be established as a Jewish commonwealth," a call en- But such schemes were soon recognized as unreal- ' istic. Finally, in August 1946, the Jewish Agency Ex- ecutive retreated from the Biltmore demand for a Jew- ish Palestine. Instead, it proposed a partition map very similar to the armi- stice lines which were to emerge from the War of In- dependence. . The armistice lines were to survive for nearly 20 years, until Israel captured the West Bank, Sinai and the Golan Heights in 1967. Subsequently, the only fur- ther changes are those which have sprung from the disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria after Yom Kippur War of 1973. • The United States, the So- viet Union, and the Eu- ropean Economic Commu- nity today support the Arab demand that the West Bank and Gaza Strip should be de- tached from Jewish control so that their Arab in- habitants should enjoy smme kind of "Palestinian homeland." In opposing it, today's Jewish leaders raise star- , tlingly similar objections to those used by the Arabs themselves in the 1930s. Such a homeland, they say, would not be the end of Arab aspirations but the be- ginning, especially if it were controlled by the Pa- lestine Liberation Organiza- tion, which is dedicated to restoring the entire country to Arab domination. On the Jewish side, admit- tedly, there are some who say that the central prin- ciples of the Peel report are still valid. In his recent New-- York Times article, Abba Eban waxed eloquent about the need for Israel to keep her predominantly Jewish character. `What makes for the ulti- mate security of a society is its human texture, the power of its solidarities, the intensity of the bonds which hold its citizens together in a mutual rhythm of expe- rience," he wrote. But even Eban, a disciple of Weizmann, rejected the other central Arab de- mand—for a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armi- stice lines—and warned against giving Israel a new neighbor "rampant with ir- redentism and aflame with a denial of Israel's legiti- macy." It would appear, there- fore, that Eban—the advo- cate of territorial com- promise—may perforce find himself joining the present Israeli government in resist- ing the new Palestine parti- tion urged by the United States. If such an international debate develops furthers seems bound to, some lieve—Israelis may, there- fore, end up re-examining sympathetically the original objections to partition voiced in 1937. The govern- ment of Neville Chamber- MOSHE SHARETT lain, after all, retreated from partition not only be- cause of Arab protests, but also because of the opposi- tion by the friends of Zion- ism in Britain itself, includ- ing Winston Churchill. In the House' of Lords, the main rebuttal to parti- tion was in the speech by Lord Samuel, the first Brit- ish High Commissioner in Palestine under the Man- date and an ardent Zionist. Although many of Sam- uel's arguments are not relevant today, others were to be dramatically in- dicated by subsequent events. For example, he challenged the Peel report's over-optimistic belief that partition "would free the Jews from the watchful hos- tility of neighboring Arab states." Far from restoring the security of the country, as the Peel commissioners in- tended, partition would make it far more pre- carious, Samuel said. PoP" cal terrorism would richer soil than before on which to flourish. How ironic it would be if Israel's present leaders were to resurrect Samuel's uncanny prophecies in their fight against a new parti- tion. Meanwhile, like Weiz- mann and Ben-Gurion be- fore them, Begin and Dayan have to decide what is in Israel's present inter- est primarily on the basis of harsh reality.