1949 Lausanne Conference Seals Fate of Palestine

By Donald Neff

It was 47 years ago, on April 27, 1949, that the first peace conference on Palestine opened in Lausanne, Switzerland, under the auspices of the U.N. Palestine Conciliation Commission. The PCC had been created the previous year to "achieve a final settlement of all questions outstanding between" Arabs and Jews in Palestine.¹ It was at Lausanne that the dismal future of the Palestinians was decided.

The prospect of forging peace treaties at Lausanne between Israel and its neighbors caused the State Department to delineate clearly U.S. policy on a number of basic issues, including America's attitude toward the boundaries of the new Jewish state, the status of Jerusalem, the fate of 726,000 Palestinian refugees and the question of a Palestinian state. The policy positions were spelled out in top-secret instructions by acting secretary of state Robert A. Lovett on Jan. 19 and given to the U.S. delegate to the PCC just before he departed for Palestine.²

Boundaries. Lovett revealed that the United States believed the boundaries of the new state of Israel should be those defined by the 1947 U.N. resolution partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. The instructions specifically noted that "Israel is not entitled" to retain its 1948 conquests beyond those borders. (Israel had been allotted by the U.N. 56 percent of the land but had ended the fighting in control of 77 percent of Palestine.) However, "If Israel desires additions to its territory, Israel should make territorial concessions elsewhere."

Jerusalem. Lovett said the status of Jerusalem should remain as called for in the partition plan, a city receiving "special and separate treatment from the rest of Palestine and should be placed under effective United Nations control." In other words, neither Arab nor Jew should call Jerusalem its capital. Lovett said that a U.N. commissioner for Jerusalem should be appointed "to supervise the administration of the area, to guarantee free access to the city and the holy places, and to insure adequate protection of the latter."

Refugees. The U.S. position on the Palestinian refugees, Lovett wrote, was the same as expressed in U.N. Resolution 194, passed Dec. 11, 1948. It called for the right of the refugees to return to their homes now occupied by Israel or, if they chose, for compensation and relocation.

Palestinians. Most significantly, Lovett revealed that the United States "favors incorporation of greater part of Arab Palestine in Transjordan. The remainder might be divided among other Arab states as seems desirable." In other words, the United States did not support self-determination for the Palestinians or an independent Palestinian state. In Washington's view, the Palestinians were not a separate people deserving the Wilsonian right to determine their own fate.

The United States did not support self-determination for the Palestinians.

Two venues were involved in the Palestine Conciliation Commission's efforts: Jerusalem, to establish an international regime for that city, and Lausanne, where the members met unsuccessfully between April 27 and Sept. 15, 1949 to resolve all other problems in order to achieve overall peace.³

Commission members were France (Claude de Boisanger), Turkey (Huseyin Cahit Yalchin) and the United States (Mark F. Ethridge). An Israeli delegation was headed by Dr. Walter Eytan, a veteran negotiator, while the Arabs appeared as one body represented by Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan. A "Palestinian Adviser," Ahmad Shuqayri, was attached to the Syrian delegation,meaning the Palestinians did not have their own independent delegate in the discussions that were focused on their future.⁴ Mark Ethridge, the U.S. delegate, was a political appointee who had been publisher of the Louisville Courier Journal and was a personal friend of President Harry S. Truman. He had no experience in Middle Eastern diplomacy, and therefore displayed a refreshing candor and impatience with the usual coded language that passed for diplomatic practice. It did not take the plain-speaking Kentuckian long to fathom the rigidity of Israel's position.

The most immediate problem faced by the PCC was the desperate situation of the refugees. Israel was totally unyielding on the issue, yet the refugees urgently needed food and housing simply to survive another day. Hundreds were dying daily. It was clear that unless their long-term plight was alleviated they would be an unrelenting source of instability, not to say a humanitarian disgrace. But Israel refused to admit that it had any responsibility for the refugees and refused to allow them to return to their homes or to compensate them.

A Personal Letter

As early as March 28, 1949, Ethridge reported to the State Department that "Failure of Jews to do so [settle the refugee problem] has prejudiced whole cause of peaceful settlement in this part of world."⁵ On April 11 he wrote a personal letter to his friend Truman:

"The Jews are still too close to the blood of their war—and too close to the bitterness of their fight against the British mandate to exercise any degree of statesmanship yet. They still feel too strongly that their security lies in military might instead of in good relations with their neighbors. The Arabs have made what the Commission considers very great concessions; the Jews have made none so far."⁶

By late April, Israel's stands on the issues at Lausanne had become so inflexible that its rigid position became the subject of news stories. An April 28 report in The New York Times said:

"As the Lausanne talks move slowly through their preliminary stages it seems to some observers that for the first time Israel is on the 'wrong' side of almost every point at issue in the eyes of world opinion, as expressed through the United Nations resolutions on Palestine. The observers reason as follows: Israel is occupying territory, notably western Galilee, that has been repeatedly assigned to the Arabs in various partition plans. Israel is acting as if Jerusalem were to be incorporated fully into the new state. Israel is encouraging further immigration of Jewish settlers while rejecting responsibility for the re-establishment of 600,000 to 1,000,000 Palestine Arabs displaced from their former homes."⁷

By the end of May, Truman himself was so disturbed by Israel's "excessive claims" and its refusal to accept any responsibility for the Palestinian refugees that he authorized the sending of a stiff message to the Jewish state. The message warned that the United States was "seriously disturbed by the attitude of Israel with respect to a territorial settlement in Palestine and to the question of Palestinian refugees. The U.S. government is gravely concerned lest Israel now endanger the possibility of arriving at a solution of the Palestine problem in such a way as to contribute to the establishment of sound and friendly relations between Israel and its neighbors.

"The government of Israel should entertain no doubt whatever that the U.S. government relies upon it to take responsible and positive action concerning Palestine refugees and that, far from supporting excessive Israeli claims to further territory within Palestine, the U.S. government believes that it is necessary for Israel to offer territorial compensation for territory which it expects to acquire beyond the boundaries" of the U.N. partition plan. If Israel continued to ignore the advice of the United Nations and the United States, the message sternly warned, "the U.S. government will regretfully be forced to the conclusion that a revision of its attitude toward Israel has become unavoidable."⁸

Despite the stern U.S. warning, U.S. diplomats in the region found that Israel continued to display a "voracious territorial appetite," "expansionist ambitions," a "take it or leave it attitude" interspersed with its threats of force. By July, the consul in Jerusalem reported that "the favorable opportunity for settlement" generated at the time of the Feb. 24 Israel-Egypt armistice agreement "has now passed" because of Israel's "harsh terms."⁹

The Lausanne peace talks ended Sept. 15, 1949, in total failure. In a top-secret report to the State Department, Ethridge placed the primary blame on Israel:

"If there is to be any assessment of blame for stalemate at Lausanne, Israel must accept primary responsibility. Her attitude toward refugees is morally reprehensible and politically short-sighted. Her position as conqueror demanding more does not make for peace. It makes for more trouble. There was never a time in the life of the commission when a generous and far-sighted attitude on the part of the Jews would not have unlocked peace."¹⁰

In the event, none of the goals sought by the United States at the conference were achieved except the denial of self-determination for the Palestinians. After Lausanne, Israel went on enlarging its frontiers, adopted Jerusalem as its exclusive capital and denied Palestinian refugees both the right of return or compensation. Moreover, within six months of the collapse of the Lausanne talks, Jordan annexed the remaining Palestinian parts of Palestine, thus creating the West Bank and denying the Palestinians their own state. The U.S. acquiesced in all these acts. The only policy enunciated at Lausanne that the United States retains today is its opposition to a Palestinian state.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Bailey, Sydney D., Four Arab-Israeli Wars and the Peace Process, London, MacMillan, 1990.

Forsythe, David P., United Nations Peacemaking: The Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.

Medzini, Meron, Israel's Foreign Relations:Selected Documents, 1947-1974, vol. 1, Jerusalem, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1976.

Sachar, Howard M., A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time , Tel Aviv, Steimatzky's Agency Ltd., 1976.

Shlaim, Avi, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine, New York, Columbia University Press, 1988.

U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1949 (vol. 6), The Near East, South Asia, and Africa, Washington, DC, U.S. Printing Office, 1977.

NOTES:

1 For studies of the conference and the commission's problems, see Neil Caplan, "A Tale of Two Cities: The Rhodes and Lausanne Conferences, 1949," Journal of Palestine Studies, Spring 1992, and, especially, Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan, pp. 461-88. Also see Medzini, Israel's Foreign Relations, vol. 1, pp. 278-80.

2 Foreign Relations of the United States 1949 (hereafter referred to as FRUS), untitled, Top Secret, p. 682. For a review of U.S. policy on Palestinian self-determination, see Sally V. Mallison and W. Thomas Mallison, "The Changing U.S. Position on Palestinian Self-Determination and the Impact of the Iran-Contra Scandal," Journal of Palestine Studies, Spring 1987, pp. 101-14.

3 The PCC effort paralleled negotiations between the parties conducted by Acting U.N. Mediator Ralph Bunche on Rhodes, which began Jan. 13, 1949. The Rhodes talks were limited to formalizing the end of the fighting with armistices, which came on Feb. 24 between Egypt and Israel; March 25 with Lebanon; April 3 with Jordan; and July 20 with Syria. Texts of the armistice agreements are in Bailey, Four Arab-Israeli Wars and the Peace Process, pp. 97-106. Iraq refused to enter into talks, thus becoming the only combatant not to sign an armistice with Israel; see Sachar, A History of Israel , pp. 347-51; Walid Khalidi, "The Palestine Problem: An Overview," Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1991, pp. 5-16.

4 Forsythe, United Nations Peacemaking, pp. 30, 48.

5 FRUS, "The Minister in Lebanon (Pinkerton) to the Secretary of State" (from Ethridge), Top Secret, NIACT (meaning Night Action), Beirut, March 28, 1949, pp. 876, 878.

6 FRUS, "Mr. Mark F. Ethridge to the President," Secret, Jerusalem, April 11, 1949, pp. 905-6.

7 Michael I. Hoffman, New York Times, 4/29/49. Also see FRUS, "The Minister in Lebanon (Pinkerton) to the Secretary of State" (from Ethridge), Top Secret NIACT, Beirut, March 28, 1949, 5 p.m., pp. 876-78; FRUS, "The Consul at Jerusalem (Burdett) to the Secretary of State," Secret, Jerusalem, Feb. 28, 1949, 9 a.m., p. 775; FRUS, "The Consul at Jerusalem (Burdett) to the Secretary of State," Top Secret, Jerusalem, April 20, 1949, 9 p.m., pp. 928-30.

8 FRUS, "The Acting Secretary of State to the Embassy in Israel," Top Secret, Priority, Washington, May 28, 1949, 11 a.m., pp. 1072-74.

9 FRUS, "The Consul at Jerusalem (Burdett) to the Secretary of State," Secret, Jerusalem, July 6, 1949, pp. 1203-05.

10 FRUS, "The Ambassador in France (Bruce) to the Secretary of State," from Ethridge, U.S. delegate at Lausanne commenting separately on Israeli note, Top Secret, Paris, June 12, 1949, 1 p.m., pp. 1124-25.