We shall fight with Great Britain in this war as if there were no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there was no war

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 90.

A year before the Second World War erupted, the newly appointed British Colonial Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, calculated that, although he was responsible for fifty colonies around the world, the Palestine Mandate alone occupied half of his time. Churchill would describe the war between Arab and Jew in Palestine as the ‘war of mice’, for it continued – as it still does more than sixty years later – even as the world’s bull elephants clashed. In essence, the conflict between the mice was about the semantic ambiguity of the phrase ‘national home’ as promised to the Jews in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, avoiding the commitment embodied by the word ‘state’.

There has never been an historic Palestine, except as a Roman province, though there certainly were two ancient Jewish kingdoms long before that. Palestine had no separate identity during the centuries of Ottoman rule either, in the latter part of which, from the 1880s onwards, the 25,000 Orthodox Jews who lived in Jerusalem were augmented by two major waves of East European immigrants who farmed on the plains. The Balfour Declaration had served two circumstantial purposes. One was to defuse Bolshevism, whose internationalism was widely attributed to the influence of the perennially homeless Jews. The other was as a wartime expedient to win the support of US Jews, much as the Russians were promised Constantinople, and probably no more sincerely meant.

Following a three-year Arab revolt, which the British crushed ruthlessly, in 1939 MacDonald published a White Paper that drastically restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, limiting it to some 75,000 persons over five years, even though he recognized that it was largely the employment opportunities created by these industrious immigrants that had led to an increase in the local Arab population. In Zionist eyes the White Paper was a cold-blooded betrayal of a desperate people, for it coincided with the intensified persecution of European Jews in Nazi Germany and in Poland. The rest of the world (with the notable exception of dictator Leonidas Trujillo’s Dominican Republic) had responded by agreeing at the 1938 Evian Conference that there was no more room in their respective inns. The British issued the White Paper to ensure that the wider Arab world, from which Britain derived 60 per cent of its oil, did not switch to the Axis side during the imminent war. As MacDonald explained, ‘We could not let emotion rule our policy. We must accept the facts of the extremely dangerous prospect with absolute, unsentimental and, some people would say, even cynical realism. The Jews would be on our side in any case in the struggle against Hitler. Would the independent Arab nations adopt the same attitude?’

While this local example of appeasement did not lead to a recrudescence of the Anglo-Arab alliance of the First World War, it did mean that no major trouble jeopardized trans-Jordanian oil pipelines or threatened British bases in Egypt, even when the British heavy-handedly deposed the Egyptian Prime Minister. Nor, given the Nazis’ pathological hatred of the Jews, did the British have cause to worry where the latter’s sympathies might lie. The Zionist-Fascists led by Vladimir Jabotinsky were a tiny if noisy minority, although one of Jabotinsky’s most devoted disciples was Menachem Begin, later leader of the Irgun terrorist organization. The majority Zionist response to a war that was existential for the Jewish people was encapsulated by David Ben Gurion’s formula that ‘we shall fight with Great Britain in this war as if there were no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there was no war’.