Bad Medicine

The U.S. was learning the full flavor of the Palestine problem and it tasted like bad medicine.

On a grey-afternoon last November, the U.S. had rammed the Palestine Partition Plan through the United Nations, carving the pocket-sized country into future Arab and Jewish states. Few had anticipated the violence of the Arab reaction. Since November, more than 1,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed. Last week the Palestine Arabs threatened an all-out war in "self-defense" if partition were finally pushed through (see INTERNATIONAL).

The U.S. had optimistically hoped that the moral force of the U.N. would be enough to accomplish partition. It was now clear that if the U.N. decision was to be anything but a dead letter, the commitment would have to be backed up with force.

Whittling. Last week the problem was being threshed out in Washington. Some Cabinet members, convinced that the U.S. had made a grievous error in backing partition, talked quietly behind closed doors of reversing U.S. policy.

U.S. Zionists, watching the slow whittling away of U.S. support, flew to arms. The mistake was not in the partition plan, they cried, but in U.S. vacillation, which encouraged the Arabs to resist. They called for a repeal of the embargo on arms to the Middle East and for U.S. initiative in forming an international police force.

Brooklyn's Representative Emanuel Celler, a longtime Zionist, demanded from the floor of the House: "What goes on here?" He thought he spotted the man responsible for the anti-partition talk: Loy Henderson, chief of the State Department's Near East and African Division. He said that Henderson was "enthusiastic but misguided," and accused him of "intriguing behind the scenes to void decisions made on higher levels." For his known opposition to partition, Henderson had been the target for Zionist attacks before. But Celler's charge of "intriguing" was wide of the mark.

The men who recommended a reversal of policy, even to the extent of repudiating partition, had persuasive arguments on their side.

They held that, in the event of a future war, the U.S. would be largely dependent on Arabian oil. It also depends on the friendship of 45 million Arabs for its chain of Middle East airfields.

But the Zionists argued desperately for their 50-year-old dream of an independent Jewish state. They had the U.S. Government in an awkward corner. Not only had the U.S. put its signature to partition; without U.S. sponsorship the plan would never have passed. They put forth practical as well as moral arguments: the Arabs needed U.S. dollars as much as the U.S. needed Arabian oil. No matter how they raged, the Arabs would not kill such a golden-egg-laying goose.

New Spain? To Americans who had opposed the creation of an international police force because that would let Soviet troops into Palestine, the Zionists had an answer. If the Palestine problem were allowed to drift, there might well be full-scale civil war when the British withdrew, giving Russia the chance to turn Palestine into a pre-World War II Spain. And in that case, the U.S. would eventually be forced to intervene, and at greater cost.

The Administration sought desperately for a way out. There was talk of a bipartisan approach to the Palestine problem, which would permit the U.S., without much clatter, to go back on its support for partition. But in an election year, when the big Jewish vote in New York was of prime importance to both parties, there was little chance of an official somersault in U.S. policy.

For 30 years Palestine had baffled, angered and at times humiliated the British. If there was any lesson the U.S. could learn from Britain's experience, it was that the problem could not be solved by a declaration.

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