International: Hornets’ Nest

The Palestine cauldron was aboil again. Jews, now driven by the need to save survivors from the European holocaust, were demanding the immediate reopening of large-scale immigration into the Holy Land. Arabs, now united in a strong seven-land league, were protesting threateningly against any such concession. Both sides addressed their pleas and threats to Palestine’s harassed custodian, Great Britain.

Into this explosive situation last week trod President Truman. As is his wont, the President simplified the complex situation.

Barbed Wire. In Washington he released a dynamitic report from former U.S. Immigration Commissioner Earl G. Harrison, whom he had sent to the Continent last June to investigate the fate of displaced refugees, particularly Jews. Harrison’s report pulled no punches. He charged that displaced Jews are being held in unsanitary, barbed-wire camps, wearing hideous concentration-camp garb or German SS uniforms, with nothing being done for them by way of rehabilitation. Their guards are U.S. troops.

Harrison went further. “Beyond knowing that they are no longer in danger of the gas chambers, torture and other forms of violent death, they see—and there is—little change. . . As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them. . . . One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.”

First Choice. One of Harrison’s main objects had been to discover possible places of settlement for Jews. His finding: Palestine is “definitely and preeminently” the first choice. His recommendation: admit Jewish D.P.s to Palestine without delay.

To General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the President sent a copy of this sizzling document, with an equally sizzling letter. Wrote the President: policies for displaced persons are not being carried out by some subordinate officers; henceforth humane policies must be applied in the field; General Eisenhower must report back to the President as soon as possible on the steps he takes.*

Added the President: “I am communicating directly with the British Government in an effort to have the doors of Palestine opened to such of these displaced persons as wish to go there.” There was good reason to suppose that the President had spoken to Prime Minister Attlee as emphatically as he had to General Eisenhower—but no suggestion that the U.S. was prepared to take any real responsibility for Palestine.

Jews, Arabs and Britons were thoroughly aroused. To those who realized that the U.S. had economic as well as humanitarian interests in the Near East, the President looked like a man with his head in a hornets’ nest.

* Reported the General’s aides: the “cleanup” had already started, camp conditions were already much improved.