And as to your saying “we have no strength at the home front:” I am wholly in agreement with you. When I first heard in November 1917 that the Balfour Declaration was issued, my first words that I said at the time were: May we achieve another 70 years of the Babylonian exile under British rule. And today, too, I think that we need a period of three generations. However, without the foundation of mutual understanding between us and the Arabs, we have no hope. The fundamental error was to agree with the [British] Royal Committee that the Mandate was “unworkable.” Our duty was to stand firmly because the Mandate would have been implemented in the spirit of Balfour.
I was astounded to read in your letter about the dangers to which you were exposed, and I bless you that you were saved without a scratch…
Though, as its founder and leader, Szold exercised great influence over Hadassah, her influence did not extend to the denial of Jewish sovereignty over Eretz Yisrael and to the endorsement of a binational state there, positions which Hadassah explicitly rejected during a joint convention with the Zionist Organization of America (1942).
Szold’s opposition to the Partition Plan was predicated upon a deeply misguided belief that, as she explains in our letter, the Balfour Declaration would impact British policy so as to facilitate the emergence of Eretz Yisrael as a full country and not as the “kernel” the Jews would obtain under the Partition Plan. But, as we now know, her faith in Britain in general and the Balfour Declaration in particular was seriously misplaced, particularly given that a mere eight months after this letter was written Britain issued its infamous White Paper, which essentially nullified the Balfour Declaration and specifically found that the Declaration “could not have intended that Palestine should be converted into a Jewish state against the will of the Arab population of the country.”
Pursuant to the loathsome White Paper, the British government – in which Szold has vested such faith – abandoned the very idea of partitioning Eretz Yisrael; severely limited Jewish immigration to Eretz Yisrael in the short run and made it subject to Arab consent in the long run; and placed restrictions on the rights of Jews to buy land from Arabs.
Moreover, both history and logic have shown just how incredibly imprudent Szold was in arguing that the very creation of a Jewish state must await “a foundation of mutual understanding between us and the Arabs.” Had that policy of waiting for peaceful co-existence been adopted, there would be no Israel today and we would still be awaiting the creation of a Jewish state, even if only the multinational one envisioned by Szold.
