Britain and the Palestine question, 1945-48: The dialectic of regional and international constraints

Towards the end of the war, Churchill advocated placing part of the responsiblity for the Middle East - including a long-term settlement of the Palestine problem - on the American government. The Labour government also strove to win the support of the United States for a settlement in Palestine, in order to mitigate Zionist pressures and to legitimize Britain’s Palestine policy in the United States: 8 Based on the State Department’s position this tendency realistically assumed that there was a British-American consensus on the need to resolve the Palestine problem in a way that would preserve Western interests in the Middle East, especially in view of the post-war Soviet threat. To Whitehall’s chagrin, however, the American input became affected increasingly by President Truman’s pro-Zionist intervention, which frustrated repeated British attempts at co-ordination with Washington. Indeed, as Bevin’s biographer commented, ‘The Jewish demands and the Arab reaction were predictable; direct intervention by the American President was not.'".