Canada and the Birth of Israel: A Study in Canadian Foreign Policy

W.M. Dobell was Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, London.

Dr. Bercuson is an established scholar of Canadian labor and social history, who left these fields in 1978 to write on Canadians who fought with the Israeli forces (The Secret Army, 1983) and the work under review. He is a trained historian, an intelligent observer, and a gifted writer, but he is not as yet a recognized Canadian foreign policy specialist.

The first 33 pages, based on a handful of standard secondary sources, take the story of Palestine from World War I to 1945. From then on till his concluding chapter, Bercuson uses Canadian, American, and British diplomatic documents, together with many Jewish organization sources, interviews and private papers. The coverage is thus exceptionally good on Canadian Jewish and (prospective) Israeli viewpoints, as well as those of two of the great powers deeply involved in the problem of Palestine from 1945 to 1948. In contrast, the perspectives of Middle Eastern and Canadian Arabs, the Russians, the French, and other interested parties receive almost no attention.

Bercuson is right to focus on British and American policy, since in the 1940s when those two powers could agree it was not difficult to determine what Canadian policy would be. But they did not agree on Palestinian policy, which provided greater latitude for Canadian policy-makers and some potential for an independent foreign policy. Bercuson writes as if this is a stance he greatly values, but his appreciation of independent judgment depends very much on how that judgment is exercised.

He is consistently hostile to British imperial policy in Palestine and India because of the bloodshed that followed the British departure, but he neglects to mention that his prescription of partition was adopted, not rejected, by the British in 1947 India. He is laudatory of American policy when it supported the goals of a nascent Israel, but critical of it when the Americans resisted some of the Israeli methods. Canadian policy is found to be “independent” in the former instances, but subservient in the latter. Given this interpretation, Mackenzie King comes out very badly as someone who placed too much faith in British judgment on Middle East matters. L.B. Pearson escapes much better, but he too is faulted for deviating at times from the prescribed path.

No reader should be deterred from acquiring this finely crafted study, though he should be on the watch for the bias. This is splendid narrative history, and most readers are likely to be swept along by the compelling presentation. This is a definitive pro-Israeli critique of Canadian policy in the late 1940s, but it is not the only critique that might be made of Canadian policy toward Palestine.