George Orwell and the Palestine Question

Abstract

This article discusses George Orwell’s attitude to Zionism and the Palestine question, a controversial and emotional subject in left-wing circles in his time and since. There have been a number of studies on Orwell’s attitude to Jews and anti-Semitism and some of these have touched upon Orwell’s approach to Zionism. However, his stance on the Palestine question specifically deserves further exposition. This is so, not least because on this subject too Orwell’s views—largely anti-Zionist—differed from the prevailing, passionate beliefs of most left-wing intellectuals of his time, including some of his closest friends and political allies. Furthermore, Orwell’s views were expressed at a time when the Palestine conflict peaked during the last decade of the British Mandate with results which resound to this day.

Notes

1. David Walton, “George Orwell and Antisemitism,” Patterns of Prejudice 16.1 (1982): 30–32; John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St. George’ Orwell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 315–20; Kristin Bluemel, “St. George and the Holocaust,” Literature Interpretation Theory 14.2 (2003): 122, 132–33.

2. Melvin New, “Orwell and Antisemitism: Toward 1984”, Modern Fiction Studies 21.1 (1975): 81–105; David Walton, “George Orwell and Antisemitism,” 19–34; Tosco R. Fyvel, George Orwell: A Personal Memoir (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), 178–82; D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003); John Rodden, Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003), 195–208; Bluemel, “St. George and the Holocaust,” 119–47; John Newsinger, “Orwell, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust,” in The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, ed. John Rodden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 112–25.

3. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), 153.

4. Walton, “George Orwell and Antisemitism,” 19–23.

5. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (London: Penguin Books, 1975), 18, 118.

6. George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 1.279; hereafter abbreviated as CEJL.

7. Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume 11, Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1937–1939 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 327–29.

8. Orwell, CEJL, 1.428–29.

9. Orwell, CEJL, 2.332–34; 3.112–13.

10. Orwell to Roy Fuller, 7 March 1944, in CEJL, 3.128.

11. Orwell, “Antisemitism in Britain,” in CEJL, 3.378–88.

12. This absence was commented upon by his Jewish colleague, friend and acolyte Tosco Fyvel (George Orwell: A Personal Memoir, 177–78), and discussed more recently by Kristin Bluemel (“St. George and the Holocaust”), and by John Newsinger (“Orwell, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust”). Fyvel claimed that his only real argument with Orwell was after he published in Tribune an article entitled “Revenge is Sour” in which Orwell described witnessing a “little Viennese Jew” in American army officer uniform abusing a pitiful-looking SS-officer in a “prisoner of war” camp in south Germany. Fyvel objected to the focus “out of proportion” on the Jewish abuser in contrast to just one sentence referring to “the outrages of the Hitler regime.” See Orwell, “Revenge is Sour,” in CEJL, 4.19–22; Fyvel, George Orwell: A Personal Memoir, 179–80.

13. Newsinger argued that Orwell’s “blind spot” concerning Nazi anti-Semitism was part of his failure to engage intellectually with fascism as a whole, hostility to which he took for granted. See Newsinger, “Orwell, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust,” 112–25.

14. Orwell just summed up Hitler’s own anti-Semitism in a short book review in January 1945 as “both a cherished delusion and a cunning political device.” See Peter Davison, ed., Orwell and Politics (London: Penguin Group, 2001), 345.

15. Orwell, CEJL, 2.332; 3.382, 3.387; Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume 15, Two Wasted Years, 1943 (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), 303.

16. Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” in CEJL, 3.420–21.

17. Jean-Paul Sartre, Reflexions Sur la Question Juive (Paris: Paul Morihien, 1946), 91.

18. See Enzo Traverso, Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 26–41; and also Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2006), 123–46; T. Storm Heter, “Sartre after Auschwitz,” The European Legacy 12.7 (2007): 823–33. Orwell himself criticised Sartre harshly in a book review for The Observer in November 1948, but for other reasons: what he criticised was Sartre’s “atomized vision of society,” his notion that anti-Semitism was mostly confined to the middle classes, and his categorisation of “the Jew” as well as “the antisemite” as “a species of animal different from ourselves.” In private, Orwell wrote that he doubted “whether it would be possible to pack more nonsense into so short a space” as Sartre had done in his book (CEJL, 4.509–513.) Sartre’s book was published by Orwell’s own publisher, Secker & Warburg, with the provocative title, Portrait of the anti-Semite, which seems to have augmented Orwell’s criticism. Dismissing Sartre’s attempt to grapple with the problems created for Jews by their assimilation into French society and culture, Orwell opined that Sartre’s suggestion that the Jew “should be accepted into the national community, not as an ordinary Englishman, Frenchman, or whatever it may be, but as a Jew” was “itself dangerously close to antisemitism.” Sartre had in fact argued that “even in the most liberal-minded democrat, a shade of anti-semitism can be detected,” in that “the democrat”—the ideological and moral opposite of the “anti-Semite” and supposed “friend” of the Jew—found it hard to accept Jews who considered themselves to be part of a distinct community in France. Sartre’s view at the time seems to indicate a rather more subtle understanding of the problem faced by individuals and communities wishing to retain their religious or ethnic identity in a nation state in which they are a minority (a subject arousing much heated political and cultural discussion in present-day France). See Jean-Paul Sartre, Portrait of the anti-Semite (London: Secker & Warburg, 1948), 45–47.

19. Orwell, “Antisemitism in Britain,” in CEJL, 3.388.

20. He added that in the same way “many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudices in an inverted form” (CEJL, 3.387).

21. Orwell, CEJL, 3.423. Orwell claimed, however, that the intelligentsia “do not feel strongly about it.”

22. Jospeh Gorny, The British Labour Movement and Zionism, 1917–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 1983); Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 148–53.

23. Jewish Chronicle, 29 May 1931, 19. Brailsford, however, was aware of Arab fears of a Jewish majority in Palestine and suggested to limit Jewish immigration so that it would never exceed more than 45 percent of the population. See Gorny, The British Labour Movement and Zionism, 65.

24. Tribune, 12 August 1938, 2.

25. Fenner Brockway, Inside the Left (London: Allen & Unwin, 1942), 291.

26. The New Leader, 31 December 1937, 6; 26 May 1939, 4–5.

27. Peter Davison, ed., Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1937–1939 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 390–91. Koestler’s experiences appear as a chapter in Foreign Correspondent: Personal Adventures Abroad in Search of the News by Twelve British Journalists, ed. Wilfrid Hindle (London: George Harrap, 1939).

28. Davison, Facing Unpleasant Facts, 391; Lewis Bernstein Namier, In the Margin of History (London: Macmillan, 1939).

29. “Record Sheet of Eric Arthur Blair. George Orwell,” undated, MEPO/38/69, National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, London; hereafter abbreviated as NAUK.

30. New Leader, 16 June 1939, 8. Orwell noted in his diary the leading participants in a reception in the House of Commons by the new body in honour of Manya Shochat, a socialist revolutionary in Tsarist Russia and a radical member of Kibbutz Kfar Giladi, who was described as a “champion” of Jewish-Arab unity. See Davison, Facing Unpleasant Facts, 389–90; New Leader, 11 August 1939, 6.

31. House of Commons debates, Hansard, vol. 382, col. 1271 (6 August 1942).

32. See “News Review, 34,” 8 August 1942, written by George Orwell and broadcast by J. Bahadar Singh, in Davison, All Propaganda is Lies, 1941–1942, 456.

33. This particular “News Review” was heard in Palestine on Saturday afternoon between 2.15 and 2.30 p.m. See listing of “Week-End Wireless Programmes,” Palestine Post, 8 August 1942, 2.

34. Newsinger, “Orwell, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust,” 120–21.

35. Orwell to John Bevan, 30 December 1942, in Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume 14, Keeping Our Little Corner Clean, 1941–1942 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 271.

36. See Rory Miller, “Bible and Soil: Walter Clay Lowdermilk, the Jordan Valley Project and the Palestine Debate,” Middle Eastern Studies 39.2 (2003): 55–81.

37. The pictures showed the contrast between “the sand dunes on the Mediterranean shore” and the modern city of Tel Aviv which was established there in the past thirty years. See Walter Clay Lowdermilk, Palestine: Land of Promise (London, Victor Gollancz, 1944).

38. Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume 16, I Have Tried to Tell The Truth, 1943–1944 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 470.

39. Orwell, “Antisemitism in Britain,” in CEJL, 3.382–83.

40. See the “London Letter,” written in mid-August 1945, which appeared in the Partisan Review in the Fall issue of 1945, in CEJL, 3.450. See a repeat of this view in “The British General Election,” which appeared in the American Jewish monthly Commentary in November 1945, in Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume 17, I Belong to the Left, 1945 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 341.

41. Fyvel, George Orwell: A Personal Memoir, 140.

42. See “The Labour Government After Three Years,” Commentary, October 1948, in Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume 19, It is What I think, 1947–1948 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 443.

43. Rodden, Scenes from an Afterlife, 197.

44. Fyvel, George Orwell: A Personal Memoir, 146; Walton, “George Orwell and Antisemitism,” 30.

45. See “As I Please,” Tribune, 15 November 1946, in CEJL, 4.276–78.

46. See “The British General Election,” in Davison, I Belong to the Left, 341.

47. See “London Letter,” Partisan Review, Fall 1945, in CEJL, 3.450.

48. Walton, “George Orwell and Antisemitism,” 30; Fyvel, George Orwell: A Personal Memoir, 142.

49. For Orwell’s criticism of the “worst extremes of jingoism and racialism” in the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey’s autobiographical memoir, Drums under the Windows, which he reviewed for the Observer in October 1945, see CEJL, 4.30–32; For his concern about Scottish nationalism, and “the small but violent separatist movements which exist within our own island,” see Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, 14 February 1947, CEJL, 4.327–29.

50. Rafael Medoff, Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926–1948 (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002); Max Lerner, “Answer to a British Laborite,” Nation, 2 March 1946, 251–53.

51. Orwell, CEJL, 3.423.

52. This was in reply to suggestions made by the Foreign Office anti-Communist department that the Communists should be attacked for their anti-Semitism. Orwell argued that as long as Britain was the object of hate for Zionist Jews, the British could win no propaganda points in the Cold War “by denouncing anti-semitism in other nations.” See Orwell’s letter to Celia Kirwan, 6 April 1949, in Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume 20, Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living, 1949–1950 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 322–23.

53. See Orwell’s letter to Dwight Macdonald, 7 March 1948, in Davison, It is What I think, 281.

54. See “The Labour Government After Three Years,” in Davison, It is What I think, 443. The Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, much criticized by the Labour Left over the Palestine issue, emphasized his own working class roots in a discussion with Zionist leaders after an insurgent attack on rail installations across Palestine in November 1945. “‘I cannot bear English Tommies being killed,’ he said: ‘I do not want any Jews killed either but I love the British soldiers. They belong to my class. They are working people’.” See Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary, 1945–1951 (London: Heinemann, 1983), 178.

55. Bauman “patted with his fist the gun under his leather jacket. ‘That’s the new Esperanto,’ he concluded. ‘Surprising how easy it is to learn. Everybody understands it, from Shanghai to Madrid’.” See Arthur Koestler, Thieves in the Night (London, Macmillan, 1946), 295. See also David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (London: William Heineman, 1998), 243–50, 265–68.

56. Orwell to Mamaine Koestler, 24 January 1947, in Davison, It is What I think, 27.

57. Most of the paragraph about the book in Orwell’s letter to Mamaine Koestler was on the issue of circumcision which he claimed was a prevalent practice in the upper classes, not only for Jews. It was a subject which he even thought of following up in his Tribune column. In the novel, discovery of his circumcision by an upper-class, anti-Semitic lover, was the reason for Joseph’s feeling rejected by British society. The plausibility of this “incident” was denied by other readers too. See Cesarani, Arthur Koestler, 266.

58. See Orwell’s short comment on the Tribune’s “over-emphasis on Zionism” in his letter to Julian Symons, 2 January 1948, in CEJL, 4.448.

59. Orwell to Roy Fuller, 7 March 1944, in CEJL, 3.128.

60. Orwell to Tosco Fyvel, 31 December 1947, in Davison, It is What I think, 240–41.

61. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

62. Minute by Celia Kirwan, 30 March 1949, PR1135/G, FO1110/189, NAUK. On Gollancz’s fervent efforts to raise funds for the relief of Arabs made homeless by the 1948 war, see Ruth Dudley Edwards, Victor Gollancz: A Biography (London: Victor Gollancz, 1987) 473–90. Orwell’s comment might have come specifically after the publication of a letter by Gollancz in the Times ten days earlier on 19 March 1949, 5.