Der Kontext des King-Crane Reportes
The United States at this time found itself in an equivocal position:
on the one hand sympathetic to Zionist aspirations, on the other hand committed,
under President Wilson, to the principle of the self-determination of peoples.
Wilson wrote to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, an American Zionist leader, on August
31, 1918: "I welcome an opportunity to express the satisfaction I have felt
in the progress of the Zionist movement in the United States and in the Allied
countries since the declaration by Mr. Balfour…" Wilson's peace program,
however, was largely rooted in the premise that a lasting peace must be
based on the self-determination of established populations. In one of his
major statements of war aims, President Wilson had defined self-determination
as an "imperative principlc of action" and had affirmed as a basic principle
that "peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty
to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels." As to Palestine and the other
non-Turkish territories under Ottoman rule, Point Twelve of the Fourteen
Points called for an "absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development"
for the subject nationalities of the Ottoman Empire." Indeed, Prince Faisal,
representing the delegation of the Hejaz at the Paris Peace Conference,
invoked the principles enunciated by Wilson as the basis of his appeal for
the unity and independence of the Arab world. In view of the continuous
habitation of Polestine by an Arab population from the seventh to the twentieth
century and in view of the fact that Jews made up no more than 10 percent
of the country's population at the end of the First World War, Wilson's precepts
were not on their face reconcilable with the Zionist program.
Balfour himself, who championed the Zionist cause at the Paris Peace Conference
of 1919, noted the ambivalence of American policy. The Allied commitment
to the Zionist cause, he maintained, overrode "numerical self-determination",
Palestine being a unique area in which the wishes of a future community
with historical and religious claims must be matched against the wishes
of the existing community. Balfour told Felix Frankfurter and justice
Brandeis, both Zionist advocates, that he could not understand how President
Wilson reconciled his advocacy of Zionism with his commitment to the principle
of self-determination. As will be seen in succeeding chapters, the ambivalence
- or contradiction - in American policy was to persist through the decades
that followed.
No such equivocation was shown in the report of the special American commission
headed by H. C. King and Charles R. Crane, which President Wilson dispatched
to the Middle East to ascertain the wishes of the nationalities to be liberated
from Turkish rule. King and Crane reported to
the president from Jerusalem that Muslims and Christians in Palestine
were united in the "most hostile attitude" toward continuing Jewish immigration,
so much so that the Zionist program could be carried out only by force of
arms. The final King-Crane report estimated that nine tenths of the population
of Palestine - virtually the entire non-Jewish population - were "emphatically
against the entire Zionist program". The report recommended, accordingly,
that only a "greatly reduced Zionist program" of "definitely limited" Jewish
immigration be permitted and that the project for making Palestine distinctly
a Jewish commonwealth be given up.
The King-Crane report was ignored by the peace makers of 1919, and Palestine
came under the British mandate that was to last until Israel's declaration
of independence on May 14, 1948.
Tillman, Seth P., The United States in the Middle East. Interests and
obstacles, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, S. 11 f. Fussnoten
unterdrückt.