A cowardly evasion¶
Core Argument¶
Here the author delivers a polemical broadside against the Labour movement’s and the Jewish left’s focus on immigration into Palestine, denouncing it as a “cowardly evasion” of the real demand: opening Britain’s own borders to Jewish refugees. The core argument is that the demand for Palestine is a tactical retreat born of fear—specifically, the fear that a genuine campaign for admission to Britain would provoke antisemitic backlash among the British people. “Palestine is a long way off, and in any case is inhabited by a backward people,” the author caricatures this reasoning, exposing what they see as a cynical calculation to avoid domestic political difficulty.
The chapter draws on the immediate post-war context, when the scale of Jewish displacement was acute and the Allied powers were expressing sanctimonious horror at Nazi extermination policies. The author argues this horror is revealed as hypocritical by the refusal of Britain, America, and even the Soviet Union to grant asylum. Stalin, it is noted, could have signalled Soviet willingness to accept refugees, especially given an acute labour shortage, but the USSR’s doors remained shut. Britain and America, despite their enormous resources, offer only the “palliative” of Palestine while failing to conduct systematic material and psychological rehabilitation to reintegrate displaced Jews into their countries of origin.
The polemic is directed squarely at the Labour government, which claims to represent socialism but refuses to grant the democratic right of asylum. The working class must instead demand that Britain and the Dominions open their gates. The problem of Palestine itself, however, remains. The author argues that Jews are being used as a tool of Anglo-American imperialism, with Britain cynically swinging between support for Arabs and Jews, balancing them against each other. The effect of limited immigration, permitted by imperialism, has been to sidetrack the anti-imperialist struggle of the Arab masses into antisemitic channels, as Arabs are driven from their land to make way for Jewish settlers.
The chapter concludes with a series of demands: withdrawal of British troops from Palestine, independence for Palestine, cooperation between Jewish and Arab workers (citing a recent strike as evidence of possibility), and the incorporation of Palestine into a Federation of Arab States with full equal rights for the Jewish minority. The slogans are blunt: no partition, open the gates of all countries, equal rights for all races, colours, and creeds.