Bevin’s main worry was that the US would
carry out its stated intention of completely with-
drawing its military forces from Europe. He
therefore encouraged the French to play a role in
Germany as Britain’s ally, but the Anglo-French
relationship was not an easy one. After much dif-
ficulty, particularly over the French desire to
detach the Ruhr from Germany, something
Britain opposed, the Dunkirk Treaty of alliance
was concluded with the French on 4 March 1947.
Its terms were designed to meet the danger of
renewed German aggression, but it was also
intended to serve as the nucleus of a Western
European grouping of nations without causing
offence to the Soviet Union and so ruining any
chance of future agreement and cooperation. The
grouping would strengthen social democracy
internally in Western Europe – after all, the com-
munist parties were strong in both France and
Italy. In following this policy Britain provided the
important lead that two years later became the
sheet anchor of Western security, the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
In 1947, Bevin was faced with two difficult prob-
lem areas on opposite shores of the Mediterranean
- Palestine and Greece. The intractable forces
problem of Palestine did more than anything else
to cast a shadow over his reputation and indeed
over the morality of the whole of Britain’s attitude
to the persecuted Jews since before the war, when
the British government had restricted the entry to
Palestine of the Jews wishing to escape from
Hitler’s Germany to no more than 75,000 over a
period of five years. As a result fanatical Zionists
accused Britain of acting as an accomplice to the
Holocaust, though other countries, especially the
US, were even more reluctant to accept Jewish
refugees. During the war British warships had
patrolled the Palestine coast and prevented escap-
ing Jews from landing (the Jews were not inhu-
manely sent back, however, but were interned in
Mauritius). This set the secret Jewish militia, the
Haganah, against the British. More extreme
groups, such as the Irgun Zwai Leumi (National
Military Organisation) and a small terrorist group,
the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (known as
the Stern Gang in Britain after their leader), began
attacking British policemen and installations in
- In November 1944 the Stern Gang assassi-
nated Lord Moyne, the British resident minister
in Cairo. Nonetheless, the majority of Jews in
Palestine and those who lived in Allied countries
fought with Britain against the common enemy.
While the great majority of Zionists con-
demned terrorism, British sympathies for the Jews
after the horrors they had suffered during the
Second World War were tempered by the effect
that terrorism against British soldiers had on
British opinion. One of the worst incidents was
the blowing up on 22 July 1946 of the King
David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the
British army headquarters. Ninety-one people
were killed – forty-one Arabs, twenty-eight
British, seventeen Jews and five of other nation-
alities. Another outrage that caused the deepest
revulsion was the hanging of two British sergeants
in ‘reprisal’ for the execution of two Irgun ter-
rorists. In all, some 300 people lost their lives as
a result of terrorism between August 1945 and
September 1947, almost half of them British.
After the war, the British government was pil-
loried for continuing to prevent large-scale immi-
gration of Jewish survivors interned in Europe.
Truman pressed for 100,000 entry permits, a plea
that Bevin condemned as cynical political pan-
dering to American-Jewish voters. The newsreels
meanwhile were showing film of the Royal Navy
intercepting ramshackle boats overloaded with
refugees and forcibly detaining the ragged pas-
sengers.
Britain’s policy was far from heroic but it
should not be saddled with all the blame for what
happened. The search for a peaceful settlement
between Arabs and Zionists had been going on
since before the war. It always ran into the same
blind alley. The Jews were not willing to live in
an Arab state; they wished to create their own
state in Palestine and to allow unrestricted access
to all Jews who wanted to come. This meant
some form of partition, which the Zionists would
accept. But the Arabs rejected the partition of
Palestine, so if partition was the only solution, it
would have to be imposed on the Arabs by mili-
tary force. Yet Britain was not willing to use its
troops to fight the Arabs, given its widespread
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