ABSTRACT
Within three months of taking office as Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin had started the ball rolling in his Anglo-American initiative for Palestine. As a matter of fact, in Britain’s post-war foreign affairs, there was no other area in which he was so closely involved. He himself regarded the Palestine conflict as the testing ground for his ability at the Foreign Office and even pledged to “eat his hat” if he wasn’t successful.1 One result was that the issue became identified more with Bevin than with Britain or HMG insofar as the other contenders were concernedand not without good reason. It became a self-perpetuating obsession in which the Foreign Minister found himself stripped of the support of his own staff and colleagues, not to mention that of the intellectuals of the Labour Party, although on different grounds. The former objected to the whole idea of bringing the Americans in; the latter simply supported the idea of a Jewish Palestine, an idea to which Bevin was unalterably unsympathetic. And a combination of the two, American participation in a non-Zionist solution to the problem, was the infrastructure of Bevin’s Palestine policy.
