Last night I heard an interview given many years ago by Malcolm MacDonald. By way of background he was colonial secretary in the Chamberlain Government, and in view of the deterioration of law and order due to the rebellion by the Arabs in Palestine(1936 - 1939) and the looming threat of a world war, he tried to stabilize the situation by placating the Arab states.
Opposing the proposed partition of Palestine, he envisaged, initiated, and organized the London (Roundtable) Conference of early 1939, in which representatives of Arab states participated along with the Palestinian Arabs, and a Jewish delegation from abroad joined the Palestinian Jewish delegation. The failure of the conference resulted in the formulation of a new British policy on Palestine embodied in MacDonald's White Paper of May 1939. This document set limits on Jewish immigration and land sales, and held out the promise of an independent state in Palestine but not a Jewish one.
In the interview he explained why the British reneged on its promises to the Jews. The word he used was cynicism. He elucidated that the Cabinet knew the Jews had only one way to go and that was to support Britain against Hitler they had no other choice. However the Arabs were wavering and their support especially because of the strategic oil reserves was not sure and so cynically the British decided to placate the Arabs and in so doing sent millions of Jews who could have escaped to Palestine to their deaths. This was because no other country in the World would take in, other than for a handful, the Jewish refugees then streaming out of Austria and Czechoslovakia and the German Jews of Polish origin who had been forced out of Germany and later when Hitler sought to impose his final solution of the Jews of Eastern Europe.
Unfortunately we see that same cynicism in play today in the form of the official USA policy as enunciated by the POTUS on settling the Middle East question. The sooner we cut the umbilical cord that connects us to the US the better.