Occupation. Is not nice
Peace. But not at any price
For Occupation. Is not nice
but a blight upon the peoples soul
and and imposition far from droll
1919’s US representatives King and Crane (in the post WW1 US President Woodrow Wilson’s term of Office): jointly recommended: “a national home for the Jewish people” is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.
‘Palestine Mandate Power’ Britain’s White Paper of 1939 (a policy paper issued by the government under Neville Chamberlain) was responsive to the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt.
The paper called for the establishment of a “Jewish national home” within an independent Palestinian state within 10 years but definitively rejected the idea of the creation of a Jewish state (as being contrary to the interest and to past promise made to the peoples-as-a-whole). The paper also limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 for the next 5 years – ruling that beyond that date, any such immigration levels were to be determined by the Arab majority.
On Sept. 22, 1947, the US Department of State’s ‘Middle East Office’ Loy Henderson strongly warned Secretary of State George C. Marshall that partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states was not workable and would lead to untold troubles in the future. (Henderson informed Marshall that his views were shared by “nearly every member of the Foreign Service or of the department who has worked to any appreciable extent on Near Eastern problems.”)
Although the US State Department/Department of State reflected Henderson’s anti-partition views, Harry Truman’s White House was supporting partition because of strong political pressures. (Truman was so unpopular at the time that there was speculation he might not be able to win the Democratic Party’s nomination, much less the presidential race.) As the vote in the General Assembly on partition approached, Henderson made another effort to change Truman’s mind. On Nov. 24 1948, he wrote that “I feel it again to be my duty to point out that it seems to me and all the members of my Office acquainted with the Middle East that the policy which we are following in New York at the present time is contrary to the interests of the United States and will eventually involve us in international difficulties of so grave a character that the reaction throughout the world, as well as in this country, will be very strong.”