FDR’s Failure on Palestine
“I have never so completely failed to make an impact upon a man’s mind as in his case.”
The first 100 days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency are rightly considered momentous, but David B. Woolner argues that FDR’s final 100 days also deserve attention. And Woolner provides that attention in The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and at Peace, which covers Roosevelt’s fourth term right up through his death in 1945.
Within that scope, the book tackles a variety of issues, such as the Yalta Conference and FDR’s declining health. However, one short section in the middle of the book is especially timely now. After leaving Yalta, FDR journeyed to Great Bitter Lake in Egypt to meet with Ibn Saud, king of Saudi Arabia, in an attempt to reconcile the Arab and Jewish people of Palestine.
Woolner describes FDR as a supporter of the Zionist cause. “FDR actively worked for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine,” he writes.
Woolner also notes that at least partially due to FDR’s leadership, the United States between 1936 and 1940 accepted more German and Austrian Jewish refugees than anywhere else. Among the Allies, America was alone in setting up “an independent agency dedicated to rescuing Jews during the Holocaust—the War Refugee Board, which was established by FDR in January 1944 and saved the lives of an estimated 200,000 Jews.”
Woolner provides some concise background on Palestine, including the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British government supported “the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people” in the region. But then in 1939, Neville Chamberlain’s administration produced a White Paper that proposed to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine to 10,000 people per year for five years, with no further Jewish immigration being permitted without Arab consent—which would have effectively ended further Jewish settlement.
The White Paper also called for a Palestinian state governed by both Arabs and Jews, but the Jewish population would be roughly one-third of the total.
The proposal dismayed FDR, according to Woolner, who quotes the president as saying:
“My recollection is … that while the Palestinian Mandate undoubtedly did not intend to take away the right of citizenship and of taking part in the government on the part of the Arab population, it nevertheless did intend to convert Palestine into a Jewish home in a comparatively short time. Certainly, that was the impression given to the whole world at the time.”
When FDR broached the subject with Saud in 1945, he said he felt “a personal responsibility” to help the Jews of Central Europe who had suffered because of the Nazis. He asked the king what he would suggest.
Saud’s response was swift and firm. Referring to the Jewish victims, he said, “Give them and their descendants the choicest lands and homes of the Germans who had oppressed them.”
Woolner includes FDR’s next reply: “But the Jewish survivors have a sentimental desire to settle in Palestine, and quite understandably would dread remaining in Germany where they might suffer again.”
This argument failed to impress the king, who believed that surely the Allies would so thoroughly destroy the Nazi forces and guide future German policy to ensure the protection of Jewish residents.
FDR continued to search for a compromise, but Saud refused to budge. Woolner describes FDR as saying he would “never do anything that might prove hostile to the Arabs” and “that the Allies would make no decision on Palestine without first consulting both the Jews and the Arabs.”
Saud later met with Winston Churchill and asked the prime minister to halt Jewish immigration to the region altogether. Churchill did not agree to that, but rather indicated that “he would oppose any plan of immigration which would drive the Arabs out of Palestine or deprive them of the means of livelihood there.”
Woolner says that FDR “enjoyed the cultural aspects of the encounter” with Saud but considered the meeting a failure.
“I have never so completely failed to make an impact upon a man’s mind as in his case,” FDR said.
Woolner writes:
“Caught between his support for the Zionist cause, on the one hand, and his desire to maintain good relations with the Arab world, on the other, FDR would struggle with this dilemma right up to the moment of his death.”
There is, as always, more to it than that, so read the book as well as others that address this topic from other perspectives. And it should go without saying that none of the history could possibly justify Hamas’s recent brutality toward Israeli civilians. (But apparently it does need to be said.)