When the Labour Party Was Zionist

In December 1917, just weeks after the Balfour Declaration was issued, the [Labour] party had enthusiastically endorsed the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Ten successive party conferences, including the most recent one held in December 1944, had reaffirmed that pledge. That conference in fact had endorsed a geographically and politically expansive pro-Zionist platform that included monetary incentives to persuade Palestine’s Arab population to relocate elsewhere. Such proposals went beyond what even Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency were advocating. The Labour Party had also staunchly opposed the 1939 white paper, which it had previously denounced as both a regrettable “breach of faith” and a “breach of British honour.” Indeed, as the end of the war in Europe neared, its National Executive Committee had called for the gates of Palestine to be opened to the Jewish survivors of Hitler’s death camps. “There is surely neither hope nor meaning in a ‘Jewish National Home,’” a report of the executive’s 1944 meeting had proclaimed, “unless we are prepared to let Jews, if they wish, enter this land in such numbers as to become a majority. There was a strong case for this before the War. There is an irresistible case now, after the unspeakable atrocities of the…Nazi plan to kill all Jews in Europe.”