December 22, 1948
U.S. chargé d’affaires Julius Holmes in a cable to the State Department recounts a luncheon meeting two days earlier with British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, focused on Palestine and its future. Bevin noted that developments in Palestine were disappointing. He cited Arab state pessimism with the U.S. and the U.K. and the growing “divisions between Arab states.” He hoped for the earliest possible settlement of the Palestine issue but said, “Prospects for U.K. obtaining its strategic requirements from Israel in the foreseeable future are poor and the possibility must be faced that within five years Israel may be a Communist state.”
Bevin’s Communist concerns stemmed from the fact that so many Jewish immigrants have come from countries behind the Iron Curtain, where they were exposed to Communist philosophy, while there was no great exodus from the democratic U.S. and U.K. Also, the leadership of the provisional Israeli government leans socialist. To have a Communist Israel lying athwart vital strategic roads in the Middle East, such as Auja-Beersheba, Gaza-Beersheba and El Kuntilla-Aqaba, would be a serious blow to British plans for the area. Bevin said that if these roads and airfield areas in the Gaza Strip were safely in Arab hands, the U.K. would not object to Israel receiving part of the Negev, which he recognized was inevitable.
One of Bevin’s military advisers spoke forcefully of the danger to the defense of the Suez Canal if there was Communist infiltration in the Middle East. Defense of British control over and near the Suez Canal had been vitally important to the British government’s desire to control Palestine after World War I. The strategic importance of the canal remains paramount in British imperial minds more than three decades later and for Western interests to the present day.
Key policymakers in the U.S. State Department share the concern that Israel’s demography will tilt the Jewish state into the Soviet bloc, but it proves to be an unfounded fear.
