Rubble

British troops searched for bodies in the wreck of Jerusalem's King David Hotel where 80 had died in a Zionist terrorist explosion. British statesmen in London groped for something solid in the rubble of their Palestine policy. World sympathy for Zionism, though not yet a ruin, was beginning to crumble. The Arabs, who seemed to profit most by last week's events in the Holy Land, sat tight.

While the overwhelming majority of Jewish spokesmen deplored the outrage, an extremist Zionist band known as the Irgun Zvai Leumi took credit for it. Inferentially, it deprecated the loss of life by claiming to have telephoned a warning to the King David's switchboard.

In a White Paper last week, the British Colonial Office reproduced telegrams it said had been exchanged between leaders of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem and their associates in London. The wires implicated the Agency, which has always deplored violence, in terrorists acts. Agency leaders hotly denied the accusations, but it was incontestable that Haganah, the Jewish defense organization, had recently broken precedent by publicly assuming responsibility for the bombing of Palestine bridges. With the King David Hotel outrage, the policy of terrorism had gone too far for moderate Zionists.

Blueprint for Federation. The Anglo-U.S. Cabinet Committee on Palestine, which had been conferring in London for two weeks, came up with a proposal: Palestine should be "federated" into three parts, Jewish, Arab and British controlled (see map). The Jews would get about 15% of the country's 10,400 square miles, the Arabs 40%, the central government (i.e., British) the remaining 45%.

The Jewish strip would include some of the country's richest agricultural land in the valleys of Sharon and Esdraelon, and the coastal plain to which their forefathers aspired from Moses' time down to 100 B.C. (they lost control of it to the Romans some 40 years later). The Arabs would get an enclave around Jaffa; the rest of their share would be mostly hilly pastureland. The British would hold on to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and to the barren triangle from Beersheba south to the strategic base of Aqaba.

Both Zionists and Arabs protested. The Zionists claimed that their land area was not enough, that it would be "ghettoization." The Arabs could see no reason for "federation" of an area which has been Arab for the last millennium. Britain invited Arabs and Jews to discuss the plan at a London conference.

Rehearsal for Trouble. Arab spokesmen said they would not sit with Jews. In Palestine, they had instituted a boycott against Jewish merchants, with heavy fines for noncompliance. In New York, Arabs began moving to put the Palestine question on the agenda of the September meeting of U.N.'s General Assembly (in which the Arab states have five votes). That might well be the point at which Russia enters the game as the champion of Islam, a role Moscow has been quietly rehearsing for the past two years.

Britain had promised too much to both Arabs and Jews; they, in turn, had inflated the promises into a deadly feud. Now the Palestine question had become a football of power politics. Meanwhile, in the rubble of postwar Europe, still rife with antiSemitism, Jews mourned their 6,000,000 dead and dreamed of refuge in a Promised Land--which receded whenever terrorism in the Middle East turned world opinion against Zionism.

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