A Crisis of Leadership: Weizmann and the Zionist Reactions to the Peel Commission's Proposals, 1937-8

Abstract

The period when the Peel Commission's proposals were under active consideration proved pivotal for the complex relationship between Zionism and British governments which had seemingly started with such mutual goodwill in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration. The proposal twenty years later to create a Jewish state in Palestine through the mechanism of partition and its repudiation the following year were to test that relationship to its utmost, beginning a process of alienation which was to grow ever more acrimonious as the British Mandate endured its final decade. Central to understanding the crisis of 1937-8 is the position of Chaim Weizmann, who had been Zionism's most inspiring personality from 1917 and for whom faith in British good intentions had been a 'Rock of Gibraltar'. This paper attempts to examine the ways in which the Peel Commission's proposals tested both his powers of leadership and the reality of his long-standing belief that the aims of Zionism could be achieved through British patronage. In 1937, Weizmann could survey a career marked by achievements which assured him a unique place in modern Jewish history. In the two decades since his talent for diplomacy had helped secure and shape the Balfour Declaration, as President of the World Zionist Organization he had presided over the fortunes of the ill-defined Jewish National Home in Palestine. In 1929, his stature was recognized by his election to the presidency of an enlarged Jewish Agency, which, it was hoped, would enlist the support of non-Zionist and Zionist Jews alike. From 1933, provoked by the institutionalizing of anti-semitism in Germany, Poland and Rumania, the number of Jews settling in Palestine, sluggish for most of the 1920s, increased so dramatically that by 1936 they were estimated to number 370,483,