Commentary Magazine
August 1947 Foreign Affairs

Behind the Silken Curtain, by Bartley C. Crum; and Palestine Mission: A Personal Record, by Richard Crossman
by Sidney Hertzberg

Failure of a Mission

Behind the Silken Curtain.
by Bartley C. Crum.
New York, Simon and Schuster, 1947. 297 pp. $2.75.

Palestine Mission: A Personal Record.
by Richard Crossman.
New York, Harper and Brothers, 1947. 210 pp. $3.00.

Both authors were members of the Anglo-American Committee on Palestine and both books consist of their reactions to the Committee's hearings and investigations in Washington, London, Europe, Cairo, and Palestine in the winter of 1945-46.

Read together, they provide a fascinating study of the comparative status of the British and American political mind. Crossman and Crum were the youngest members of the Committee. They are both political mavericks and their credentials as mavericks reveal the contrast between British and American political development. Crossman is a left-wing socialist in a country in which the socialists hold full power. His dissidence consists in goading the Labor cabinet into adopting a full-blooded socialist foreign policy. Crum is a Willkie Republican turned Roosevelt Democrat in a country in which neither holds power. He thinks he is a pretty wild fellow because he was active in "Fight for Freedom" and is against discrimination and Franco. Crossman is a scholar and writer, a Labor M. P., and an editor of the New Statesman. The world and its problems are nothing new to him. He approaches them with a coherent political philosophy and a sophisticated and analytical mind. Crum is a corporation lawyer. He apparently believes that Wendell Willkie discovered the fact that it was one world. He approaches this world with emotional good will, overwhelming indignation, moralistic attitudinizing, and virtually no coordination.

When it was suggested in Palestine that the co-chairmen. of the Anglo-American Committee visit King Ibn Saud to make it clear that the Committee members were not enemies of the Arabs, Crum noted in his diary: "I don't see Ibn Saud's right to be consulted on this matter." The note exemplified a certain confusion about the meaning of One World, considering that it was made by a Roman Catholic resident of California who had never before been outside the United States and who never betrayed the slightest doubt about his own right to be consulted on the matter.

Both men mention their reactions to each other. Of Crossman, Crum writes: "There are persons with whom you feel en rapport at once. So it was with Dick Crossman and myself." Crossman, he adds, "had a gift for striking quickly at the nub of complicated questions." Crossman may have been overly cynical in using this gift. Crum, says Crossman, "was more keenly aware than any of his colleagues of the domestic issues involved in our investigation. Indeed, he was the only American with us who had a political career in front of him which could be made or marred by the attitude he adopted toward the Jewish question."

Crum is for partition and for a long list of Zionist immediate demands. But he does not undertake to argue for partition in his book, and in his recent speeches he seems to have changed his mind about it. Crum talks about supporting progressive forces in the Middle East and raising the standards of living for all. But the talk has no substance. It is little more than a set of slogans, without relation to his specific demands for Palestine or his general view of the world picture. This view is standard One-World know-nothingism. "Surely," Crum writes, "the United States and Russia had few points at which their basic interests were in conflict."

Stripped of its efforts at sensationalism, Crum's book has some value as the Odyssey of a naive Zionist sympathizer whose heart is in the right place. The most striking section of the book is not Crum's at all. It is the testimony of Dr. Zalman Grinberg, chairman of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Munich. Dr. Grinberg's explanation of the psychological compulsions driving refugees to Palestine is a triumph of somber eloquence.

The melodramatic title of Crum's book and the publisher's promotion compel some attention to the "sensations" lying behind the silken curtain. There aren't any. There is only the inescapable impression that Crum thought of himself as the hero of a Sax Rohmer mystery story. He is always being spied upon. Sinister British agents with names like Beeley are always thwarting his noble efforts. He is indignant over the discovery that foreign office and State Department officials have opinions. (The opinions were not the same as his.) He is endlessly amazed and preoccupied with the superficial skull-duggery of international politics. He is also indignant about more fundamental abuses. But one tires of indignation. At some point it must give way to an effort to understand why these things are so.

Crum's major revelation is a State Department file of correspondence with Arab officials. These letters prove conclusively that the State Department has been scrupulously carrying out the two-faced policy in the Near East established by Franklin D. Roosevelt and known since the publication of his correspondence with Ibn Saud. But Crum's scorn is reserved for the underlings. It simply has never been proved, and certainly not by Crum, that American presidents and secretaries of state are the helpless dupes of sinister sub-officials in the State Department.

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The Zionists have a case that deserves the scrutiny of clearer minds than Bartley Crum's. They could not ask for a keener analysis than Richard Crossman's. While Crum's book is essentially a piece of political pulp-writing, Crossman pays the Zionists the compliment of a frank and searching analysis of their case. Crossman is, if anything, more aware than Crum of the villainies of international diplomacy, but, unlike Crum, he undertakes to get at their underlying causes.

Crossman was antagonized by American Zionists. In Washington, he felt that they were making "totalitarian claims," and overstating their case. "Jewish argumentation was stimulating the anti-Semitic bacilli which breed in every Gentile's unconscious," he writes. But Palestinian Zionists, he felt, "belonged to a completely different world from that of the American Zionists." Under the circumstances, Crossman may be excused for overestimating the degree of support in the United States for Zionism. However, he offers an interesting explanation of American support for Zionism. America's frontier mentality, he says, results in natural sympathy for the Zionist pioneers. Other things being equal, he feels, Americans "will always give their sympathy to the pioneer and suspect an empire which thwarts the white settler in the name of native rights." On the other hand, the Briton, who has lived in the same district for nearly a thousand years, is instinctively sympathetic to the Arab.

In view of the tendency among some Americans to regard the Arab as a hopeless lout, Crossman's chapter on Cairo must be singled out for special recommendation. It is a brilliant commentary on the social forces at work in the Arab scene, and the dilemma of the Arab intellectual. It contains also a bitter-sweet picture of the British colonial mind in operation.

Though Crossman, like Crum, signed the unanimous report of the Anglo-American Committee which included the conclusion that Palestine must never become a Christian, Jewish, or Arab state, Crossman is personally in favor of partition. But his argument for partition, the most realistic and closely reasoned I have seen, offers little comfort to Zionist propagandists. Crossman's case is based on a compromise with reality which, he admits, will repel many progressives. It is idle to deny the existence of the Jewish problem, and this problem seems to be insoluble, he says. Certainly in Central and Eastern Europe, Hitler has made it impossible for most self-respecting Jews to rebuild their lives simply as members of a religious community in the countries where they were born. This, he admits, is a victory for Hitler.

In the modern world, survival is possible only through the nation-state. But a Jewish state, he says, will neither solve the Jewish problem nor reduce anti-Semitism. It will be some kind of solution only for the "tiny minority of Jews" who actually go to Palestine. The anti-Zionist Jews are right, he says, in feeling that a Jewish state would be an added menace to the security of the vast majority of Jews who would remain citizens of other states. And the pro-Zionist Jew is greatly mistaken in claiming that he has found the solution "when he is really formulating the 20th-century adaptation of Jewry to a hostile world."

The Jewish state as seen by Crossman will grow into the life of the Middle East and grow away from its present dependence on the West. "Within two generations, the Jews of Britain and America will feel far more spiritual kinship with their Gentile neighbors than with the Jewish commonwealth."

A partitioned Jewish state, then, is a make shift for some Jews. What kind of solution is it in terms of the total Middle East problem? It is, says Crossman, an unjust solution for both Jews and Arabs. He admits it would have to be imposed. But he specifies that it cannot be an isolated act. It must be combined with large-scale Anglo-American assistance to both the Jewish commonwealth and the surrounding Arab states. He sees it as a lesser injustice to the Arabs because he believes that the Jews have set going revolutionary forces in the Middle East which can benefit the Arabs in the long run. He would not have reached this conclusion "if the national home had merely been a national home." It is also a socialist commonwealth, and as such it will have an influence, disproportionate to its size, in accelerating the downfall of the present medieval social order. In other words, more than partition is necessary. To make it palatable, British policy in the Middle East must be reshaped to offer the Arabs "a democratic and socialist alternative to Communist revolution."

It is in this context that Crossman's advocacy of partition must be considered. Here he seems to be contradictory. Partition, he admits, is an essentially negative and un-progressive solution. It is based on a realistic acceptance of conditions that are inimical to socialism. Yet partition is acceptable to Cross-man only on the basis of a socialist solution in the whole Middle East. But if Crossman's partition is realism in terms of the Jewish problem, the precondition for its success, namely socialism in the Middle East, is certainly not realism. Do we not then have a realistic solution based on an unreal framework? If a non-partitioned, socialist, unitary independent state in Palestine must be rejected as unrealistic, should not a reorientation of Anglo-American policy in the Middle East along socialist lines also be rejected as unrealistic? But if such a reorientation is a possibility, why bother with partition? Why not separate Zionist socialism from Zionist nationalism? Crossman himself reports that the most progressive Arabs are also the most intensely nationalist in the sense of opposition to the British and the Zionists. Since any solution would have to be imposed, why impose one that would offend most deeply the comparatively progressive Arabs whose support would be essential in developing democratic socialism in the Middle East? Socialism will come ill-recommended to the Arab world if it arrives via a partitioned Jewish state forcibly imposed by Hagana plus British or United States armies. It would mean that the revolutionary dynamic that Crossman sees the Zionists bringing to the Middle East would be isolated. Partition might satisfy the ambitions of the Hashemite architects of a greater Syria, but these are not the Arabs with whom the socialist Zionists can work to build a socialist Middle East. And in the Yishuv, partition would be a blow to the socialist Zionists who have done most toward an Arab-Zionist rapprochement.

In the end, says Crossman, the fate of Jews and of the British Commonwealth is the same. This fate "is bound up with the success or failure of the United Nations." At another point he says that "the real basis for British survival would have to be the conciliation of Russia and America." This must be considered in the light of his contention that the success of the democratic socialist alternative is the world's only hope. Here another contradiction seems to have crept in.

If survival depends on Soviet-American conciliation, then the building up of a socialist alternative to Communism must be ruled out. It is obviously no way to conciliate the Soviets. Communist opposition to socialism as the basic enemy has never changed. Communist tactics toward the socialists may involve the united front in some nations and murder in others, but in both cases the long-term objective is the destruction of democratic socialism. The Soviet Union is more likely to go to war against a democratic socialist world than against a capitalist world, which it believes will disintegrate anyway. The trouble is that Cross-man's realization that democratic socialism is the only real answer to Communism is a realization shared by the Communists.