The Mindanao Plan: Political Obstacles to Jewish Refugee Settlement

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees was established in the waning hours of the failed 1938 Evian Conference. Its purpose was to con- tact various governments to explore their willingness to accept European Jewish refugees for settlement. The Philippine Islands, a United States Commonwealth, responded to the committee's inquiry with a proposal to allow ten thousand Jewish refugees to immigrate as agricultural settlers. Negotiations to settle Jewish refugees on the large island of progressed over the next three years, but the Mindanao ultimately failed because its architects underestimated the extent of local opposition and the complexity of land acquisition in the Philippines. The United States' entry into the war in December 1941 ended all further efforts on the settlement project. This article examines Philippine President Manuel Quezon's key role in this process, as well as the often skeptical positions of U.S. State Department officials and the surprisingly supportive stance of Paul McNutt, the U.S. High Commissioner for the Philippines. In the months that followed the Evian Conference, the Philippine Islands, an American Commonwealth at the time, submitted a proposal to accept Jewish refugees as agricultural settlers on Island in the Philippine Archipelago. The story of this proposal, which represented the earliest evidence that the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany and Austria had been taken seriously by a government outside the Western Hemisphere, has come to light only recently. Materials related to the Jewish refugee settlement in the Philippines and the Plan were found at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the National Archives, where they had been little used for nearly sixty years. 3