Britain and the Palestine Problem • 285mended partition. It would give part of northern and central Palestine to
the Jews to form their own state and leave most of the rest to the Arabs. The
Arab state was expected to join Abdallah's Transjordan. The small allot¬
ment for the Jews would hardly have given them much space, but this
foothold might later have enabled the Zionists to rescue far more European
Jews from persecution and death under the Nazis. The Palestine Arabs,
backed by other Arab states, opposed partition, fearing that Britain's accep¬
tance of the Peel Commission's plan would be a step toward their loss of
Palestine. But as often happened in this contest, Britain soon scaled down
the offer and finally retracted it.
Seeking a peace formula that would satisfy all parties, Britain called a
round-table conference of Jewish and Arab leaders (including Arabs from
other countries) in London in early 1939. By then the differences between
Palestinian Jews and Arabs had become so great that they would not even
sit around the same table. No agreement was reached, and the conference
ended inconclusively. A new war with Germany was by then imminent, and
Britain needed Arab support. It issued a policy statement called the White
Paper that announced that the mandate would end in ten years, whereupon
Palestine would become fully independent. Until then, Jewish immigration
would be limited to 15,000 each year up to 1944, after which it could con¬
tinue only with Arab consent (which hardly seemed forthcoming). The sale
of Arab land to Jews was restricted in some areas and prohibited in others.
Like the Arabs earlier, the Jews now felt angry but helpless. The White
Paper seemed to sell out Britain's commitment to help build the Jewish na¬
tional home pledged in the Balfour Declaration and the mandate itself.
Remember that this happened after Hitler's troops had marched into Aus¬
tria, after the Western democracies had consented to the dismemberment
of Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference, and during the time that
Poland was being menaced by a German attack. Europe's Jews were in peril.
Owing to the strict immigration policies of the Western democracies, they
had nowhere to go but Palestine. Now Britain, bowing to Arab pressure,
had nearly shut its gates to the Jews. The Arabs, too, spurned the White Pa¬
per, because it postponed their independence and did not stop Jewish im¬
migration and land purchases altogether.
During World War II, most of the Arab countries remained neutral.
Some of their leaders (including the exiled mufti of Jerusalem) sought out
the Nazis, hoping they would free the Arab world from both British impe¬
rialism and Zionism. But the Jews in Palestine had no choice. The threat of
annihilation by the Nazis outweighed the evils of British appeasement to
the Arabs, so they committed themselves to the Allied cause. On the advice
of the Jewish Agency's chairman, David Ben-Gurion, the Zionists agreed