Opposing Partition: The Zionist Predicaments After the Shoah

In 1937, the Zionist movement was equally divided over the British proposal to partition Mandatory Palestine as enunciated in the Peel Commission report. By 1945, the enormity of the ravages of the Shoah produced a new realism. Thus, the urgency of the survivors in post-war Europe induced a change of mind. Figures such as Golda Meir and Eleanor Roosevelt now supported partition. Majorities for partition emerged in Zionist parties such as Hapoel Hamizrahi, which had adamantly opposed it previously. The Soviet Union's backing for a Jewish state, following Gromyko's UN speech, brought the Palestine Communist Party into line and persuaded Hashomer Hatzair to abandon its embrace of a bi-national state. By the UN vote on 29 November 1947, only the Revisionists, the Irgun and Lehi, still adhered to their former positions and opposed partition. Amongst the Zionist leadership, the schism was more a tactical division than an ideological one. Nahum Goldmann's speech in July 1946 in which he proclaimed that the three choices—trusteeship, bi-nationalism, and partition—had now been reduced to one, brought these differences to the surface. He argued that there were now simply not enough European Jews to create a Jewish majority in a non-partitioned state. Abba Hillel Silver opposed this approach, claiming that a maximalist pitch was necessary since the British would whittle down even minimalist borders. By the summer of 1947 with the UNSCOP recommendations, even Silver had accepted the inevitability of partition.