Out of Perspective

Last week Anglo-U.S. friendship was more strained than at any time since German bombs began falling on London six years ago. Isolationists were licking their chops because, in the British loan debate, practical U.S. efforts toward world cooperation met their severest postwar challenge. The reason: an all-out Zionist campaign to smear Britain.

When Zionists joined the pressure groups urging Congress to kill the loan, it was clear that the Palestine issue had grown out of all perspective. Beyond the violence in Palestine, beyond even the plight of Europe's remaining million and a half Jews, were some past & present facts and some future probabilities which called for calm examination:

In World War I Britain sought support from both Jews and Arabs. To the Jews the famous Balfour Declaration promised "a national home" in Palestine, which Zionists insist means a Jewish State. Arabs were promised self-rule in the Middle East, which the Arabs insist must include Palestine (where there are now a million Arabs, 550,000 Jews). Today stronger Arab nationalism and a sharply intensified Zionism can find no common ground.

After World War II a joint Anglo-American inquiry committee recommended that 100,000 more Jews be admitted into Palestine in 1946. Zionists took to organized violence to spur British action. The British answered by trying to suppress the Jewish underground.

The British fear that further large-scale Jewish immigration may cause a major Arab outbreak in the Middle East endangering Britain's oil supply and its road to the Far East. And if the British washed their hands of the Arab world, the U.S. would likely have to step into their shoes to keep the peace, to keep Russia out and to protect its own essential Arabian oil interests.

President Truman last week told Zionists that it was "his determination" that the British move against the underground should not delay "a policy of transferring 100,000 Jewish immigrants to Palestine with all dispatch." The nettled British promptly let it be known that in that case the U.S. would have to send troops to help keep peace in the Middle East. That the U.S. could or would send troops to Palestine was most unlikely. President Truman, with the Zionist outcry in his ears today, could well imagine the din from other pressure groups tomorrow if U.S. soldiers were killed there.

Truman's position, under pressure from the Zionists, boiled down to conflict with his on-the-spot ally in an area where the U.S. had vital interests it was unable or unwilling to protect by using its own military power.

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