The United States and the Palestine Question Before 1944

In the late1910s and early 1920s, US support for the creation of a Jewish National Home in Palestine encompassed the administration, Congress and political elite, less so the US Jewish community. This quasi-unanimity came as the natural outcome of religious, societal, and political trends that built up progressively after US independence in 1776. This article identifies the factors that influenced US attitude on Palestine until 1914 and describes US policy from World War I until the eve of its victory in World War II, that is, just before Washington took a lead role in shaping the international policy on Palestine.

1776-1819: Restorationism and Colonial Spirit

During the years surrounding American independence, Protestantism dominated the religious composition of US society, Catholics being then a tiny minority. The United States had about a dozen of Protestant denominations (such as Congregationalist descendants of Puritans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, or Anglicans), and for most of them, the Old and New Testaments occupied a significant place in their belief system and social life. For instance, dozens of towns were given biblical names (such as Nazareth, Zion, Hebron, Lebanon, and Bethlehem) before the revolution, and their number continued to grow to several hundred after independence as the Union expanded westward. A millenarist discourse, the belief that Christ will come again and institute a one-thousand-year reign, had impregnated the settler society, together with questions on the place of Jews in the Millennium, their redemption, and their restoration in the Holy Land. Then the achievement of American independence invigorated the debate: could the successful new nation be itself the new Zion, the promised land, the substitute of biblical Israel? Or, having reached such an independent and flourishing status blessed by God, should it not contribute to Jewish restoration as a matter of duty, instead of waiting for its self-fulfillment as promised in the Bible? Should such restoration happen before or after the conversion of the Jews to the Christian faith?

Millennium theologians had diverse or divergent answers to these questions. But beyond their divergence, especially over the timing of the conversion of Jews, the restoration idea (“restorationism”) became somewhat familiar in public circles. Such an idea was expressed in 1783 during a Thanksgiving sermon for victory, by George Duffield, chaplain to the Continental Congress; in 1816 by Elias Boudinot, who was a theologian and also a stateman who had been the president of the Continental Congress in 1782–83; and in 1819 by former US president John Adams (1797–1801). At the same time, the dynamism generated by the achievement of independence (further consolidated by the 1812 war with Great Britain) led to missionary initiatives aimed at remote geographies as well as within internal borders (toward Indigenous people, Black Americans, and Jews). Some of the initiatives were led by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), an interdenominational Presbyterian, Congregational, and Dutch Reformed society, founded in 1810; the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America (quickly renamed American Colonization Society [ACS], founded in 1816 to support the repatriation of free Black Americans to Africa); and the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, founded in 1820 on the model of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews.

1819–1890: US Missionaries

The American colonizing spirit, coupled with millenarian eschatology and later facilitated by the introduction of the telegraph, steamships, and the railroad, heralded a process of transforming the perception of a “Heavenly Jerusalem” into an “Earthly Jerusalem.” Thus, in 1819, missionaries under the aegis of the ABCFM sailed to Palestine and other Ottoman provinces with the aim of converting the empire's Muslims, as well as the Christians and especially the Jews of Palestine, to Protestant Christianity. Their endeavor to convert the Jews or Muslims of Palestine very soon proved to be unrealistic, and they turned their efforts to the Christians of Syria, especially those living in what later became Lebanon; British missionaries took the lead in Palestine. However, visits to Palestine by US missionaries would continue to be organized throughout the nineteenth century, as would exploration missions in the framework of “biblical archeology,” which was inaugurated by an American biblical scholar, Edward Robinson, in 1837. Robinson wanted to establish by archaeological evidence the historical truth of the Bible and had no interest at all in the living inhabitants of Palestine except insofar as they could be cast as remnants of the biblical era. More generally, US religious or exploratory missions to Palestine in most of the nineteenth century were secondary to British efforts.

In terms of policy-making and strategic involvement in Ottoman affairs, Washington’s role was insignificant compared to that of Great Britain, France, and Russia. However, the United States signed in 1830 a Treaty of Commerce and Navigation with the Ottoman Porte whereby it benefited from the same capitulatory rights and privileges enjoyed by other European countries. It also appointed consular agents (very often Ottoman or European nationals) in Ramla, near Jaffa, in 1832 and in Acre in 1833, and opened a consulate in Jerusalem in 1856, after an abortive attempt in 1844. As was the case for other European consulates, the tasks of the consul or consular agents were to provide services to US citizens, who might be Jews, Christian settlers (primarily in Jaffa, Artas, and Jerusalem where American Christians established the American Colony after settling in the old city), missionaries, or travelers. As a result of the Capitulation system, a number of non-American Jews enjoyed the status of “protégés,” and those requesting US consular protection rose from 150 in 1882 to 800 in 1899.

1891–1913: A Home for Jews in Palestine, but Without the Backing of US Jews

At the end of the nineteenth century, whether in the United States itself or in Palestine, there was a growing religious and historical interest in Palestine as the Holy Land, and a favorable attitude toward something like Jewish revival in Palestine. The first serious attempt to embody this interest at the political level occurred in the early 1890s with a certain William Blackstone (1841–1935), an evangelical Presbyterian who, in 1888, travelled to the Holy Land and visited both Christian pilgrimage sites and newly established Jewish settlements. Upon his return to the United States, he decided to actively advocate the return of the Jews to Palestine and the re-establishment of a Jewish state as a prerequisite for the second coming of Jesus Christ. In March 1891, Blackstone presented President Benjamin Harrison with a petition signed by 413 figures, including church leaders, businessmen, presidents of educational institutions, newspaper owners and editors, politicians, governors, the Chief Justice, and members of Congress. After affirming that Russia “is determined that they [Russian Jews] must go,” the petition, known as the Blackstone Memorial, asked:

But where shall 2,000,000 of such poor people go? Europe is crowded and has no room for more peasant population. Shall they come to America? This will be a tremendous expense, and require years.

Why not give Palestine back to them again? According to God’s distribution of nations it is their home; an inalienable possession from which they were expelled by force.

The petition urged President Harrison to convene an international conference for this purpose with the participation of Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and 15 European countries. Blackstone’s Palestine proposal was later considered the forerunner of the Zionist program as spelled out by Herzl in 1896 and adopted by the First Zionist Congress one year later. Though the petition did not induce any US diplomatic activity at the multinational level, it elicited great publicity and debates inside the United States, and this in political rather than in eschatological terms. A whole new factor had emerged this time, the physical presence of Jewish communities in the United States, and their potential to grow quickly in number.

In the first decade of the nineteenth century, less than 3,000 Jews lived in the United States. Their number reached 230,000 in 1880, mainly due to German immigration, and 2,930,000 in 1914, due to immigration from Eastern Europe. Between 1881 and 1914, about 2 million Jews immigrated to the United States. In contrast, only about 65,000 chose to emigrate to Palestine between 1882 and 1914, and more than half of them left to the United States between 1905 and 1909. More than any time before, the overall favorable reception of Blackstone Memorial among the US elite expressed simultaneously a colonialist vision of Palestine and an interest in restricting Jewish immigration, dressed as a generous concern for the right of world Jewry to settle in the Holy Land. This should be contrasted to the position adopted by most American Jews, especially Reform Jews of German descent, against the Blackstone proposal. (Reform Judaism emerged in Germany during the Age of Enlightenment and promoted the idea of Jewish emancipation and full participation in local societies.)

1914–1924: The United States, the Balfour Declaration, and Oil

The course of World War I and its outcome ushered in a new era for Palestine, Zionism, and the whole Levant. After the outbreak of the war in August 1914, and with the Ottoman Empire fighting with Germany against the Allies, British Zionist leaders lobbied their government to adopt and support the Zionist program. In the United States, Zionist figures, led by Louis Brandeis, started a public campaign advocating the program. Brandeis was close to President Woodrow Wilson, who in 1916 appointed him judge in the Supreme Court. Wilson, though a Presbyterian sympathetic to the Zionist cause, abstained from expressing his support politically, as the United States wanted to remain neutral toward the war in Europe and with regard to the Ottoman Empire.

Washington went to war against Germany (but not against the Ottomans) on 6 April 1917, and one month later, pressed by Brandeis, Wilson expressed privately his support ”for a publicly guaranteed, legally secured homeland for the Jewish people.” Following British insistence, he secretly approved on 6 October a draft of the Balfour Declaration, which was officially announced by the British on 2 November. It was only in August 1918, after British forces had pushed the Ottomans out of most of Palestine, that Wilson let it be known that he supported the declaration.

Wilson had delivered a major speech before Congress on 8 January 1918, during which he presented his Fourteen Points for postwar world peace, proclaiming, in substance, peoples’ right to self-determination and declaring that “the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” It is difficult to see how the Fourteen Points of Wilson (who, incidentally, was known for his racism toward African Americans) could be reconciled with his support for the Jewish National Home in Palestine, unless its inhabitants, being defined in the negative (“non-Jewish”), may not ab initio have national rights, but are permitted to enjoy only “civil and religious rights,” as mentioned in the Balfour Declaration.

Wilson took part in the Paris Peace Conference that opened in January 1919, and though he sent a commission of inquiry to the Levant to ascertain the aspirations of the Near East peoples (the King-Crane Commission, reduced to American membership, after the French and British declined to participate), he did not seem interested in the commission’s recommendations. The recommendations were presented at the end of August 1919, after the Peace Conference had already agreed on the terms of the League of Nations, including Article 22 on the Mandate system. (The commission’s report was unofficially published in 1922.) Wilson had helped draw up the Covenant of the League, but he was unable to get a Senate vote permitting the United States to join the organization.

On 24 July 1922, the Council of the League confirmed the distribution of the mandates in the Levant as agreed upon at the San Remo Conference in April 1920, including Britain’s Mandate over Palestine and the terms of the Balfour Declaration. At around the same time, both internationalist and isolationist House and Senate members approved overwhelmingly a joint resolution favoring “the establishment in Palestine of the National Home for the Jewish People” in terms similar to the Balfour Declaration except in downgrading further the status of the Muslim majority of Palestine’s inhabitants by referring to “the civil and religious rights of Christian [sic] and all other non-Jewish communities.” On 21 September, President Warren Harding, Wilson’s successor, signed the joint resolution. It is worth mentioning that the resolution did not reflect in any way a consensus opinion within the American Jewish community. Already in March 1919, 31 Jewish figure (including Julius Kah, member of the House of Representatives, Henry Morgenthau, former ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Simon Wolf, former consul to Egypt) had petitioned Wilson as he was departing to the Paris Peace Conference urging him to reject the Balfour Declaration. They were joined soon by around 300 influential members of the US Jewish community.

The smooth adoption by Congress and the President (less so by the State Department) of the Jewish National Home project as affirmed in the Balfour Declaration should be contrasted with an acrimonious US-British relationship over the exploitation of oil resources within territories in the Levant that had been part of the Ottoman Empire. In spring 1914, the Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony) had obtained from the Ottomans full concessionary rights to seven plots in Palestine. The company suspended work during the war but was not permitted by the Palestine British military authorities to resume in 1919, despite US diplomatic pressure on London. In April 1920 in San Remo, Great Britain and France, together with the distribution of the mandates, signed an oil agreement that transferred to France Deutsche Bank’s share in the pre-war Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC) and had the effect of excluding US companies from participating in the TPC. Though it was true that the United States did not declare war against Turkey, the State Department view was that London and Paris got their mandates in the Levant only because the United States helped secure Germany’s defeat.

On 3 December 1924, the United States and Great Britain signed a convention in which Washington officially agreed that Great Britain would administer Palestine. (A parallel Franco-American convention was signed on 4 April regarding Syria and Lebanon.) The preamble reproduced verbatim the 28 articles of the Mandate terms as defined by the League of Nations on 24 July 1922. London, in turn, “notwithstanding the fact that the United States is not a member of the League of Nations,” recognized that the United States and its nationals would enjoy in Palestine all the rights and benefits granted by the Mandate to members of the League and their nationals, including vested US property rights in Palestine, and maintenance and establishment of educational, philanthropic, and religious institutions. As to oil, Iraqi territory proved to be much more promising than Palestine and in 1928, US companies became part of TPC (renamed Iraq Petroleum Company).

1924–1944: A Quota and the US–German–Palestinian Triangle

During the 20 years that followed the 1924 US-British convention, Washington’s policy in Palestine consisted principally in protecting US citizens, their educational and missionary undertakings, or their business enterprises. It remained sympathetic toward the Jewish National Home project, but in apparent accordance with its isolationist outlook, did not intervene in how the British dealt with the issues resulting from the implementation of the project: Jewish immigration to Palestine and land acquisition; mounting Palestinian opposition to Zionism; Arab-Jewish clashes; and the search for common grounds on Palestine with Amman, Cairo, and Riyadh. However, in the United States itself, an overall tight immigration policy, enshrined in a law enacted in 1924 (known as the Johnson-Reed Act) that set immigration quotas according to the national origin of applicants, proved to have both an indirect and direct impact on the Jewish National Home project.

In Germany, the rise of Nazism and related antisemitism were expressed in discriminatory legislative and administrative measures against German Jews, whose number was estimated to be just over 520,000 in 1933. Between 1933 and 1941, about 360,000 Jews were able to flee to Western Europe, Latin America, and Palestine. (The vast majority of those who remained, nearly 160,000, were later massacred, in addition to Jews living in European countries occupied by German forces). The number of those wishing to enter the United States was governed by the Johnson-Reed quota. In 1929 and for the following years, this quota for German applicants, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, had been set at 25,957 and it remained the same until at least 1939 despite the advent of Nazism. No amendment to increase the number was made by Congress. From 1933 to 1939, about 95,000 German Jews were able to emigrate to the United States, an average of less than 16,000 per year. By 1938, more than 300,000 Germans—most of them Jewish refugees—had applied for US visas. Only 20,000 applications were approved in 1939.

In Palestine, the surge of Jewish immigration from Germany (and also from Poland) in 1933 and after, together with threatening signs of Zionist militarization, were among the triggers of the great Palestinian Rebellion that broke out in 1936 and lasted until 1939. The British responded with repression and by arming the Haganah but were also forced to reflect on the future of Palestine, taking into account their position in the Middle East and the Mediterranean amid the mounting tension with Germany and Italy. Eventually, in May 1939, they published the MacDonald White Paper, which made a number of concessions to the Palestinians, including a ceiling of 75,000 Jewish immigrants for 5 years, after which immigration would be subject to Arab approval, and restrictions on the transfer of land to Jews in certain areas of Palestine.

In the face of these developments in and about Palestine, and Germany’s militaristic conduct in Europe and the cumulative effect of its anti-Jewish measures, the American Zionist movement gathered force all over the United States, gaining public and congressional support for an active US role in Palestine, and achieving this time the adherence of most of the Jewish community. American Zionists accused the MacDonald White Paper of violating those terms of the 1924 US–British Convention that stipulated British obligations toward the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine. As far as the State Department was concerned, however, the convention did not forbid changes to the terms of the British Mandate and the United States had no responsibility for how the Palestine Mandate should be administered. In any case, the United States had to defer to the British, who were dominant in the Middle East, a dominance that would be threatened by the breakout of World War II.

In the course of the war, the locus of the internal Zionist balance of power shifted from Great Britain to the United States. In May 1942, Zionist leaders from the US and Palestine (including David Ben-Gurion) met in the Biltmore Hotel in New York and rejected the 1939 White Paper, but more importantly, they went further and called for Palestine to become a Jewish commonwealth and for the formation of a Jewish military force fighting under its own flag. With the Nazi massacres of European Jews, followed by the Allied total victory and the US world predominance, and pushed by Congress, the US Executive would progressively take control of the Palestine agenda, starting early 1945.

The first US initiative would be to pressure London to immediately admit 100,000 European Jews in Palestine. But, at no point from 1933 to 1945 and beyond did the US Zionist movement, Congress, or the US administration adopt a similar open gate policy.