In the Shadow of Genocide: Elizabeth MacCallum Challenges Anti-Jewish Racism and Zionism

John Price

This is the first post in a two-part series based on a recently published article in the International Journal, “Resisting Palestine’s Partition: Elizabeth MacCallum, the Arab World and UN Resolution 181(II).” 

“I am a Zionist,” declared Justin Trudeau just before stepping down as prime minister.

“No one in Canada,” he stated, “should ever be afraid to call themselves a Zionist.”

Trudeau’s remarks came during a National Forum on Combatting Anti-Semitism. In response, the Israeli embassy in Ottawa welcomed his remarks, while UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, Francesco Albanese, asserted that fighting antisemitism is a duty but that Zionism infringes on Palestinian’s right to self-determination.

These contrary responses reflect sharp divisions in Canada about Israel-Palestine and also about the definition of antisemitism. For supporters of Zionism, the focus is on Hamas and its October 7 attack that killed approximately 1200 people including civilians. Supporters of Palestine point out that the Israeli response has been disproportionate and indiscriminate with over 50,000 in Gaza killed, mainly women and children.

Both sides assert the necessity of countering antisemitism but differ on what constitutes antisemitism.

Rather than helping to clarify these complex issues, Trudeau’s declaratory performance simply aligned himself with one side in what has arguably been a long and complicated history of anti-Jewish, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Arab racism in Canada.

The Nazi genocide and its aftermath marked a watershed moment in this history, one that Elizabeth MacCallum had to navigate as a newcomer to Canada’s Department of External Affairs.

Anti-Jewish Racism and Zionism

The classic study None is Too Many vividly recounts the history of anti-Jewish racism in Canada, including the deplorable M.S. St. Louis affair in 1939 when Canada refused to let hundreds of German Jewish refugees enter Canada. 

Before this, however, most people of Jewish heritage in Canada had little time for Zionism, the movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine. “I have personally never had any faith in the Zionist idea but in practice the situation has become much more complicated,” wrote former NDP leader David Lewis in 1938. As Nazi atrocities became known and with anti-Jewish racism in Canada persisting, Zionism gained momentum.

In Palestine, a three-year Arab revolt against British control over Palestine prompted the UK government to issue a 1939 White Paper declaring that a separate Jewish state in Palestine was not possible. It also stated that a further 75,000 Jewish emigrants would be allowed to settle in Palestine over the next five years but after 1944, no further immigration would be permitted “unless the Arabs of Palestine are prepared to acquiesce in it.”

This policy prompted Zionist organizations in Canada, and elsewhere, to mobilize against the White Paper. In March 1944, a delegation of the Canada Palestine Committee (CPC) met with the prime minister, Mackenzie King, to ask that he intercede with the British Government to reverse the policy outlined in the 1939 White Paper.

The Canada Palestine Committee was a powerful lobby group that was brought together to support Zionism. It included premiers, MPs, senators, and prominent labour people including A.R. Mosher and Pat Conroy, president and secretary-treasurer respectively of the Canadian Congress of Labour; Percy Bengough, president of the Trades and Labour Congress; and Stanley Knowles and M.J. Coldwell of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), predecessor to the NDP. After meeting King, the CPC submitted a 40-page document to the prime minister who asked the Department of External Affairs to respond. External Affairs officials turned to a newly hired clerk, Elizabeth MacCallum to respond to the CPC brief. Why MacCallum?

Born to missionary parents in Turkey, MacCallum spoke Arabic and Turkish and was, in fact, an accomplished writer and analyst on the Middle East, having worked for the Foreign Policy Association in New York for many years. Women, however, were not allowed to become diplomats and she was thus classified as a clerk when first hired in 1942. Her expertise soon became evident and MacCallum essentially became External Affairs’s “Middle Eastern Desk.” “None of the men were interested,” she recalled many years later.^[1]

Taking up her pen to respond to the CPC brief, MacCallum wrote a remarkable 17-page overview, “Palestine: Postwar Policy and the 1939 White Paper”, a document that today rests among the papers of Mackenzie King in Library and Archives Canada. In it, MacCallum attested that “Nazi persecution has taken a form and reached an extent unprecedented in history,” bringing to a head the demand for a Jewish state.^[2] She disputed the CPC suggestion that bringing European refugees to Canada would pit them against returning veterans. To suggest that European Jews should instead go to Palestine, she said, bordered on anti-Jewish racism: “This is not the first time it has been suggested to Canadians that it would be to their advantage to support unrestricted immigration into Palestine in order to reduce the number of applicants for admission to this country.”

MacCallum worried that CPC support for Zionism by “Canadians who consciously or unconsciously discriminate against Jews socially, professionally or economically, give substance to the fear that anti-Semitism is preparing to clothe itself in the respectable garb of a philanthropic policy…”. Writing over eighty years ago, she revealed how anti-Jewish racism and support for Zionism could be complementary, a question that remains relevant today.

MacCallum also challenged CPC assertions that Canada, as a member of the League of Nations, was obliged to support the Balfour Declaration as part of the British Mandate over Palestine:  “…the Assembly was not consulted. Neither were the Arabs.” Furthermore, she insisted, the Balfour Declaration only promised a homeland for Jews not an independent Jewish state. 

In the end, King refused to take up the CPC request to oppose the 1939 White Paper. 

MacCallum’s report gained the respect of External Affairs officials but a few, including the up-and-coming Lester Pearson, dissented. Appointed ambassador to the US in 1945 and then deputy minister for foreign affairs the following year, Pearson sympathized with Zionism, stating that he “personally thought partition was the just and only solution to the Jewish problem.”^[3]

Despite Zionist pressures, the UK government maintained its positions outlined in the 1939 White Paper during and after the war. By the end of 1946, however, US president Harry Truman signaled his support for the Zionist project. The UK-US disagreement put Canada in a pivotal position in its self-assigned role as a bridge between the two powerful states. However, with its empire in decline after the war, the UK government ceded leadership on Palestine to the US. The two powers agreed to bring the issue to the UN but in a way that avoided any discussion of Palestinian self-determination. Instead, they called for the creation of a special committee to study the future of Palestine. 

Lester Pearson played a signal role at the special session of the UN that led to the formation of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) that was to provide recommendations on Palestine for the fall sitting of the UN. The Arab states protested: “The terms of reference have actually avoided ideas and concepts like freedom, independence, self-determination, democracy, the Charter, unity, harmony, peace and justice.” Pearson, as chair of the proceedings, refused to accept these complaints.

The King government appointed as its representative on UNSCOP, Ivan Rand, a supreme court justice who had brokered what became known as the ‘Rand Formula’ for union dues during a strike at Ford motors in Windsor. Assigned by the government to assist Rand, MacCallum prepared a briefing note in which she emphasized that both Jewish and Arab peoples were striving for change.^[4] She pointed out that while the plight of Jewish peoples was “unhappily well known,” the Arab story was not: “Because of the misunderstanding which have divided Christendom from Islam – from the time of the Crusades until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in our own day – there has been no adequate knowledge in the West of the history of the Arab people to balance the knowledge it has of the history and present position of the Jews.”

MacCallum also pointed to views among prominent Jewish leaders who were opposed to partition including “extracts from speeches on the proposal for a bi-national state – by Dr. Buber, a renowned Hebrew scholar, and Dr. Judah Magnes of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.” After meeting with Rand before his departure for Palestine, MacCallum recorded that she worried about his pro-Zionist tendencies. As it turned out, Rand did embrace the Zionist project, helping to author the UNSCOP majority recommendation for partitioning Palestine, a story told in David Horowitz’s State in the Making.

UNSCOP also produced a minority report, authored by the representatives of India, Yugoslavia, and Iran titled a “Plan for A Federal-State”. This alternate plan would have created a single federal government and established distinct Jewish and Arab provinces. One of the architects of this plan, Sir Abdur Rahman of India wrote a long and impassioned essay (Vol. II) as part of the UNSCOP report to the UN, pointing out that “it would be a travesty of facts, however much it may be utilized for the purpose of propaganda for the creation of a Jewish state, to label the dislike for the Zionist as one based on anti-Semitic feeling.”

The UNSCOP report was the basis for UN deliberations on Palestine that took place at the second regular session of the UN that began in late September 1947. Fifty-seven states were represented at the UN when it began its session in New York. The Canadian delegation alone consisted of over 70 people and included cabinet ministers, parliamentarians, and advisors. Among the latter was Elizabeth MacCallum who, along with three other women, had broken the glass ceiling at External Affairs to become diplomats. 

Over the two months of proceedings, MacCallum would challenge Lester Pearson at every turn as UN delegates debated the UNSCOP Report and the future of Palestine.

John Price is a historian and anti-racist educator at the University of Victoria. He is the author of Orienting Canada: Race, Empire and the Transpacific (UBC Press, 2011); The BC Government and the Dispossession of Japanese Canadians, 1941-1949(2020); and co-author of both Challenging Racist “British Columbia”: 150 years and Counting (2021), and 1923: Challenging Racisms Past and Present(2023).

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Notes

^[1] All quotes of Elizabeth MacCallum are from “Interview with E.P. MacCallum,” July 25, 1980 (Jewish Public Library/Archives, David. J. Bercuson Fonds, Subseries 2, File 182). See full article in International Journal for details.

^[2] Elizabeth MacCallum, “Palestine: Postwar Policy and the 1939 White Paper,” W.L.M. Papers, Memoranda and Notes, 1940-1950 (LAC, MG 26 J 4, V. 310, C214206-C214936).

^[3] As cited in David J. Bercuson, Canada and the Birth of Israel: A Study in Canadian Foreign Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 51.

^[4] Elizabeth MacCallum, “Memorandum for Mr. Justice Rand, Historical Background of the Palestine Problem,” May 31, 1947 (RG25, V 4219, 5475-CD-1-40, Pt. 1, LAC).