THREE

FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO POTSDAM

Two weeks after Truman assumed office, the struggle over the future of Palestine shifted to San Francisco, where the delegates’ main task was to prepare the charter of the new United Nations. The venue chosen had great symbolism. The conference was held at the War Memorial Opera House, a Beaux-Arts structure that had opened in 1932 and had been built as a tribute to those who had lost their lives in the First World War. A landmark in the city, its impressive columns and massive arched windows were similar to those of the Louvre in Paris. It was considered by many to be one of the most beautiful theaters in the nation, and those entering its grand hall could not help but be impressed. This time, the Opera House was not filled with maestros and divas. Instead, as one participant noted, its long, wide corridors were “crowded with men and women of every race, many dressed in national costume, including the delegates from Saudi Arabia, who wear traditional Arab robes and kaffiyehs.”¹

Although Palestine itself would not be on the agenda, crucial decisions affecting its final status could be made.² The Arab strategy was to propose new principles and guidelines for trusteeship by introducing a clause in the U.N. Charter recognizing the rights of only one people in a mandated territory. The fact that they made up the majority in Palestine would give them the right to decide the future of the country. This might sound like a reasonable, even democratic argument, but if the Arab proposals were adopted, wrote the Jewish Agency representative Eliahu Epstein, “the legal foundations of the Palestine Mandate and of the national home would be shaken.” The agency’s “main and urgent objective at this conference,” wrote Epstein, “must be to protect the present international status of Palestine.”³

The Arabs thought they had a good chance to execute their plan. Five Arab states—Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Lebanon—had founded the Arab League in Cairo on March 22, and now each state had official delegates at San Francisco. The Jews had none. Chaim Weizmann was especially angry that the Arab states had been admitted as full U.N. partners—despite their dismal war record and active support of the Axis—while the Jews, who had more than 1 million soldiers in the Allied armies and 35,000 Palestinian volunteers, were “relegated to the corridor.”⁴

Before his death, Roosevelt had told Rabbi Stephen Wise that he wanted the Jewish Agency to be invited to the founding meeting in an official capacity. Wise conveyed this to Truman, but the president went along with State’s recommendation to create a “consultant” capacity, in which interested nongovernmental parties could participate. The State Department chose two groups: the American Jewish Conference (coalition of Zionist groups) and the American Jewish Committee (non-or anti-Zionist) to have the official status of consultants to the U.S. delegation. In choosing these two organizations, State reinforced FDR’s and afterward Truman’s practice of giving both groups legitimacy as representatives of American Jewry. Showing that the Jewish community was divided over Zionism benefited State’s anti-Zionist policy. But this time the groups united, agreeing that whatever their differences concerning the creation of a Jewish state, they would work together at the conference to defend Jewish rights under the British Mandate in Palestine.

The Jewish Agency, however, could not even get its representatives access to the conference floor. Writing from Israel, David Ben-Gurion bitterly lamented, “We are a people without a state, and therefore a people without credentials, without recognition, without representation, and without the privileges of a nation, without the means of self-defense, and without any say in our fate.”⁵

 

When Epstein arrived in San Francisco from Palestine as a representative of the Jewish Agency, he kept a detailed diary of his experiences. It was his first trip to the United States, and in his diary he recorded his impressions as he tried to figure out how to conduct himself and be effective. Born in Russia, Epstein had become a Zionist and fled to Palestine in 1925. At first, he had joined other young people working as a farmhand to build the Jewish homeland. He had begun to study at the Hebrew University and in 1930 attended the American University of Beirut. The Jewish Agency had recognized his gifts, and from 1934 to 1945 he served as director of the Middle East division of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department. In that capacity, he had gone on many diplomatic missions to Arab capitals and created a wide circle of contacts. By the time he arrived in America, he could converse in Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, English, and French.

The warm, outgoing Epstein was the kind of person who could talk to almost anyone, even adversaries, in a cordial way. Therefore he tried to meet with as many people as he could in San Francisco: Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, Arabs, the British, delegates from other countries, and American journalists and politicians. He was amazed that in America all occasions, even breakfast, were used for business, and he wasted no time in getting started. Epstein found many shortcomings in the American Zionist movement. Among all the Zionists he talked to, he complained in his diary, he had not “met a single person with the requisite level of either background knowledge or practical experience in Arab or Middle Eastern affairs.”⁶ Nor did American Zionists know what the Arabs were doing to promote their cause in the United States. There was little contact between Zionists in the United States and the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, he noted, advising his Jewish Agency colleague Nahum Goldmann that something should be done about it.

He also found the Jewish presence in San Francisco chaotic. More than twenty Jewish organizations had representatives in San Francisco, and they were all busy distributing their materials and proposals to the conference’s delegates.⁷ Among them were representatives of the anti-Zionist American Council on Judaism, which claimed that Judaism was only a religion and Zionism was a betrayal of their faith. The American Jewish Committee supported Jewish immigration and demanded an end to the British White Paper but opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Peter Bergson and his followers were also there, presenting their demands for recognition of what they called the already existing “Hebrew nation” in Palestine. The Bergson group inflamed all of the other Zionists. AZEC sent out a press release that Bergson’s group “represents no one and is responsible to no one.”⁸

The Zionists, through AZEC, did set up an effective nine-man committee. They gave out more than forty separate press releases, translated into three languages, to the delegates and the reporters from the world’s press corps. And the American Jewish Conference and AZEC together sponsored eighty-eight mass rallies throughout the United States, all meant to demonstrate strong public support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.⁹

The largest rally, held in New York City—the home of the largest Jewish population in the world—drew more than sixty thousand people. Every seat in Lewisohn Stadium of the City College of New York was filled to capacity. The overflow crowd spilled out onto a playground packed with people who listened closely through speakers set up for the occasion. Senator Robert F. Wagner was loudly cheered as he proclaimed that British policy was nothing less than a revival of “the disease of appeasement.” Addressing the British government directly, Wagner accused it of going back on its word to the Jews and said it was time that it redeemed the pledge made to it long ago in the Balfour Declaration. Rabbi Stephen Wise, joined onstage by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver for the first time since they had had a public disagreement the previous December, demanded that “the Jewish case be placed upon the agenda of San Francisco.”¹⁰

The first person Epstein wanted to meet with at the San Francisco Conference was Judge Joseph Proskauer, the head of the small but influential American Jewish Committee. He wanted to see if there was any common ground between them and the Zionist organizations and, if not, to win the judge over to his side. He was pleased to find that Proskauer’s overriding concern was “the fate of the survivors of the Holocaust and his wish to find shelter for them.” Now Epstein urged Proskauer to take the next step. It was not enough to advocate bringing Jewish immigrants to Palestine, Epstein told him; it was necessary “to see to their absorption and ensure their future in the land.” That is why the Zionist dream “had to be realized.” The Zionists, he told Proskauer, sought political independence “in order to preserve and develop the progressive, democratic character of the society we have built in Palestine. We are surrounded by feudal and reactionary neighbors who are hostile to Zionism and who see in the Zionist venture a threat to their oppressive regimes. We can ensure our future only when we become masters of our own destiny.”¹¹

Epstein lobbied any delegation willing to meet with him. The French delegates, he found, were the most supportive of Jewish claims for Palestine. On May 8, he met with Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister of the postwar Czech government. Masaryk recounted his father’s prewar visit to Palestine and told Epstein how impressed he had been with the new Jewish agricultural settlements. That visit, Epstein wrote, had “deepened the elder Masaryk’s Zionist sympathies and influenced his colleagues in the Czech government in the same direction.”¹²

Epstein also met with various Latin American delegates, whose votes and position would become very important in the 1947 U.N. vote for partition. The Chilean delegate proved supportive, as did the Mexican. The Jews could rely, they told him, “on the understanding and assistance of Latin America. The Holocaust in Europe has shocked public opinion…and they understand our struggle for free Jewish immigration to Palestine and the achievement of political independence.”¹³ The delegates from South Africa, Holland, and New Zealand were also supportive. Much to his surprise, Mostafa Adle, the chairman of Iran’s delegation, told him that the Iranians “are favorably inclined toward the Jewish people and the Yishuv” and “proud of the historic event of the Jewish people’s return from Babylonian captivity to Zion by permission of their king, Cyrus.” Their current official stand of neutrality was prompted only by tension on their borders with the Soviet Union, and Adle asked that Epstein not make their meeting or his comments public.¹⁴ Finally, Epstein received encouragement from Australia’s delegate, Richard H. Nash, a member of his country’s Senate and a leader of its Labour Party. Nash knew from his fellow countrymen who had visited Palestine about the Zionists’ achievements and their contributions to the labor movement there. They had come back to Australia devoted friends of the Zionists’ cause. Jewish Palestine, they told Nash, was “an island of devotion and loyalty to the democracies” amid a sea of “espionage, subversion and deceit.”¹⁵

The Jewish groups were concerned with countering the well-financed Arab lobby. Si Kenen, the PR representative of the American Jewish Conference, pointed out to Epstein that big oil, with concessions in Saudi Arabia, was spending a small fortune to finance Arab propaganda. Senior personnel of the companies, he reported, had been assigned to the Saudi Arabian delegation to help it and the other Arab delegations with public relations, especially in their anti-Zionist activities among delegates and journalists.”¹⁶ There were reports that the Saudis were giving journalists boat rides around San Francisco Bay. “The entertainment was lavish beyond description,” Epstein wrote, and had been paid for by the big oil companies. “The seagoing merriment was certainly not in keeping with traditional Wahhabi Puritanism,” he noted in his diary, “but this did not seem to bother the Arabs aboard, who toasted the journalists drink for drink.”¹⁷

Epstein found the Arab representatives at the United Nations confident. Jews, the Arab delegates told him, should be content to live as a minority in Palestine under the reign of an Arab regime. Three Arab delegates—two from Iraq and one from Syria—told him that because of the Arab League, the Jews had no chance to win against the Arabs. Newly discovered rich oil deposits, they believed, meant that the Americans would now have to depend on Arab goodwill and cooperation, instead of the other way around. The Jews simply could not overcome “both Arab hostility and the enormous power and political influence of the international companies with interests in Arab countries.” They should be practical and realistic and reach an accommodation with the Arabs of Palestine that would ensure their existence and future in a Palestinian Arab state.¹⁸ Later during the conference, the Syrian prime minister, Faris al-Khouri, told Epstein that the creation of the Arab League meant that the Balfour Declaration had been annulled, along with any special privileges the old Mandate had given the Jews of Palestine.¹⁹

For all the Arabs’ optimism, their plan to make changes to the trusteeship guidelines met the opposition of the British, French, and American governments, whose representatives saw it as a threat to the peace and stability of countries that had diverse racial, tribal or national populations. The British feared internal disorders in Palestine and, with the French, wanted a policy that would uphold their status as colonial power. They would not support a proposal that would have given the Arab majority in Palestine the sole right to decide the future of the region. Any change from the terms of the Mandate, the British in particular feared, might open a Pandora’s box that would affect their privileges as a mandatory power. By the time of a vote, only the Arab powers at the U.N. conference voted for their own proposals.²⁰

To fill what he thought was a gap in the Zionists’ knowledge, Epstein made a study of how strong the Arab propaganda apparatus was. He counted six major pro-Arab organizations and institutes working in the United States, all of which had a pro-Arab attitude to the Palestine question. Among them was the New York–based Near Eastern College Association, founded by American Presbyterians. The best-known educational institution connected to it was the esteemed American University of Beirut. At San Francisco, Epstein counted twenty-nine former AU students in the senior posts of the Arab delegations. He noted that many Americans on the university’s staff had served in the American armed forces during the war and in diplomatic missions and intelligence services operating in the Middle East. Now some of them were “advisers on Middle Eastern affairs in different government departments in Washington, influential in the framing of United States policy in the region and in its implementation.” Two important pro-Arab educational centers in the United States, he found, were the Institute of Oriental Studies of the University of Chicago and a similar center at Princeton University, both of which were also training future diplomats and government specialists in the Middle East.

Their potential effectiveness led Epstein to worry. “I have been struck,” he wrote, “by the fragmentary knowledge our people display on the activities of the Arabs and their friends in this country, who seek to increase Arab influence in the public and political life of the United States and to weaken our position.” He feared that American interests in the oil-rich Arab states would actually make “the tasks of our opponents easier and ours more difficult.” In the past year the Foreign Service Education Foundation had been organized to train U.S. diplomats. Its focus, it seemed to Epstein, was the Middle East, and much of its funding came from American oil companies.²¹

During the summer and fall of 1945, the Arab League organized its own PR campaign in the United States, allocating a budget of $2 million for the first year. Officially the campaign was designed to familiarize Americans with all aspects of Arab life, but its main goal was to counter Zionist arguments, particularly the claim that it would be in the strategic interest of both Britain and the United States to see the creation of a Jewish state. Offices were opened in Washington, London, and Cairo, with headquarters in Jerusalem. From its Washington office, the staff worked to get their message out to journalists, businessmen, universities, church groups, student groups, organized labor, and non-Zionist Jews.²²

Despite their creation of a well-organized and-financed campaign, the Arab states and their supporters were at a disadvantage. Only 100,000 Arabs lived in the United States, while the Jewish population numbered 5 million. In a democratic country, votes counted. Moreover, the image most Americans had of Arabs was of a backward, feudal people whose life was far removed from that of the modern world. The New York Times featured a report written by C. L. Sulzberger that served to reinforce the prevailing view. “The Arabs,” Sulzberger wrote, “have so far proved themselves an impractical people, unable in the long run to merge their local differences…to form themselves into fully independent self-governing units.” They lived in “semi-servitude” that left them to fight one another in what Sulzberger called “regional, sectarian and dynastic wars.” Moreover, it was the search for oil—it was thought that Saudi Arabia alone had more untapped oil than the entire amount in the United States—that was sucking the Western powers into “one of the world’s traditional cockpits for trouble.”²³

The Zionists were beginning to win the public relations war. All the work they had done to gain American support during the war seemed to be paying off. The number of members of American Zionist organizations swelled from less than 250,000 in 1943 to 400,000 by 1945.²⁴ In April, David Niles received the results of a poll taken by Hadley Cantril, “Public Opinion Toward Creation of Jewish State in Palestine,” taken the last week in March. The results had surprised the pollster, who found that about half of Americans knew about the idea of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Sentiment, among those polled who had an opinion on the issue, ran about three to one in favor, and a great majority of those thought the U.S. government should use its influence to establish it.²⁵

An appraisal of the Zionists’ success was offered by British Ambassador Lord Halifax in his report to the British Foreign Office assessing the nature of the American relationship to the Jews, Zionism, and the Arabs. “The Jews have made Palestine and the experiment of establishing a national home there for Jews, interesting to the world at large. This interest has been greatly stimulated by the toll of suffering and persecution to which European Jewry has been subjected.” Half of the world’s Jews, he reminded the British diplomatic office, lived in the United States. Moreover, many of them held important positions in the Truman administration, and because so many were concentrated in New York City, they could possibly influence the outcome of elections. They could therefore “exert considerable pressure on the Administration, in Congress and on public opinion.”

The American public, Halifax thought, had no strong opinion on the issues concerning Jews, aside from favoring loosening of the restriction on Jews who wanted to immigrate to Palestine. And they blamed the sad plight of the Jews on the British government, since there was a feeling in liberal quarters that more Jews could have been saved from Hitler if Britain had admitted more to Palestine. Halifax saw this feeling in part as a result of anti-Semitism. “The average citizen,” he thought, “does not want them in the US and salves his conscience by advocating their admission to Palestine,” with the result that “on this issue the Jews can therefore carry with them both liberal humanitarians and many anti-Jews.”²⁶

While the delegates met at San Francisco, the world community was about to receive a shock. On April 18, readers of The New York Times learned about the extent of Nazi Germany’s war against the Jews. A delayed dispatch dated April 16 informed its readers of what the reporter called “the horror, brutality and human indecency” of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. German neighbors who had feigned ignorance of the camp’s existence were confronted with the reality when they were taken to see the remaining twenty thousand Jewish prisoners, “many of them barely living.” They learned for the first time of the torture rooms, execution chambers, gas chambers, and medical facilities, where Nazi doctors had performed fiendish experiments on living human beings. It was a scene that might have been a picture of hell: “The stench, filth and misery here,” the reporter wrote, “defied description.”²⁷

Yet the press tried. The May 7 issue of Time, the nation’s major newsmagazine, confirmed the daily papers’ reports. Here at Dachau, the reporter wrote, “was concentrated the flower of Nazi sadists whose business was torture and death.” Accompanying the U.S. Seventh Army as it liberated the camp and saw the remaining prisoners—Time put the figure at 32,000—they found the following grotesque scene: “Outside one building, half covered by a brown tarpaulin, was a stack of about five feet high and about 20 feet wide of naked dead bodies, all of them emaciated.” Readers learned about the gas chambers and the mass death of Jews that had taken place there, leaving only a few “pitiful, happy, starved, hysterical men,” who crowded the soldiers and reporters asking for help, food, and cigarettes—they were people who had “lived in a super-hell of horrors” and were now “driven half crazy by the liberation they have prayed so hopelessly for.”²⁸

“The World Must Not Forget” was the title of yet another magazine report about the Nazi atrocities. Harold Denny called it “cruelty such as the world has never known before.” Words and photos would have to be used, but, Denny assured his readers, “they were less horrible than the reality.” He and others saw their task as a simple and necessary one: “The world must know and it must not forget.” It was clear that the Allies would now have to deal with the Germans, who had become a “mentally and morally sick people.” Those liberating the camps had been forced to walk into “nightmares of human savagery and depravity.”²⁹

Soon the reporter’s observations would be confirmed by members of Congress. When, in mid-April, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, shocked by what he saw as he toured the camps, asked American newspaper reporters and editors to fly in from the United States to see what he had, American government officials went with them. The group included four senators and six congressmen. “The barbarous treatment these people received in the German concentration camps,” Eisenhower told them, “is almost unbelievable.” He made available to the press all the resources of his command, so the American people would learn why their men had been fighting.³⁰

The representative from Connecticut Clare Boothe Luce was one of the members of Congress who accepted Eisenhower’s offer. Luce, a playwright, social activist, and mainstay of the society pages, was married to the publisher of Time and Life, Henry Luce. Thus her opinion carried great weight. Luce said she hoped the people of the United States would see the newsreel footage that the Army photographers were taking as she visited the camp sites. One reporter informed readers of how “she visited the basement crematorium where, in a white walled room, thousands had been hanged from iron hooks. Her prisoner guide told her how the executioner had used clubs shaped like potato mashers to kill victims who did not die quickly enough in the noose. She saw the elevator which carried the victims up to the furnaces. Outside the crematorium she saw a wagon stacked high with shriveled bodies. She did not remain long, saying: ‘It’s just too horrible.’”³¹ On April 22, eight congressmen toured Buchenwald, one of the most infamous German camps. All said they “were shocked beyond belief” at what they saw and were told by the former prisoners. “‘This is the most horrible thing that anyone could conceive,’ said Rep. Carter Manasco, a Democrat from Alabama.”³²

Harry Truman read these gruesome reports along with the rest of America, and he saw the harrowing newsreel footage that made the reports real for many. The evidence of what had taken place literally gave him nightmares. “It was a horrible thing,” he told CBS News in 1964. “I saw and I dream about it even to this day.”³³

The question now was, what would happen to the survivors? On Truman’s very first day in office, Eliezer Kaplan, the treasurer of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, reported to the American people that the situation of the Jewish people in Europe was unbearable. “They are afraid to stay in Hungary, Romania and Poland,” he told the press. Even though some European nations had quickly passed new laws guaranteeing equality, European Jews knew that such legislation often meant nothing. “A whole generation has been raised on anti-Semitism,” Kaplan explained, and the survivors of the Holocaust “did not want to stay in the countries where their mothers, brothers and sisters were killed.” They knew that non-Jews had stood by and done nothing and even participated in the acts of mass killing. Hence, Kaplan argued, the new United Nations had “the responsibility to enable all parentless Jewish children to gain entry into Palestine.”³⁴

In London, Weizmann had delivered a memo to Churchill describing the desperate straits of the Holocaust survivors, as well as that of Jews who were living in Arab lands. Joseph Linton, the Jewish Agency officer in London, was demanding that the agency assume full powers to decide Palestinian immigration policy. In the meantime, he asked the British high commissioner to grant 100,000 entry permits to Palestine immediately.³⁵

The Americans were trying to alleviate the grim refugee situation in Europe created by the war. From May through September 1945, the military repatriated some 6 million refugees, but another million and a half refused to or could not go back to their former homes. Many of them were Jews. The military at first did not distinguish between civilian refugees who had been displaced as a result of bombing or fighting and the persecuted Jews who had survived the death camps. Instead, they were treated like any other group of displaced persons (DPs), perhaps even worse. Sometimes they found themselves put into the same barracks as Germans who had been displaced by the war and who had supported Hitler during the years of the Third Reich. German Jews released from Polish and Czech camps found that they were not given ration cards, on the grounds that they were Germans and hence part of the enemy. Some Jewish refugees found that they were put up with their former camp guards, who now also claimed to be refugees. And a worse insult, as the historian Leonard Dinnerstein has written, was that “the Allies put Germans—ex Nazis—in charge of the DP camps while the inmates were held as virtual prisoners with armed guards surrounding the centers.”³⁶

For many Jews the situation had not improved since the arrival of U.S. troops. In May and June 1945, 18,000 Jews died of starvation and disease in Bergen-Belsen; at Dachau—the same camp the press had reported on—sixty to one hundred survivors of the Holocaust were dying each day.³⁷ Not all the mistreatment of the former Nazi prisoners was due to the inability of the troops to care for so many refugees. In one notorious case, that of the camps administered by General George S. Patton, Jr., mistreatment of the Jewish refugees was due entirely to Patton’s anti-Semitism. Patton’s Third Army controlled the southern zone, where most Jewish DPs were to be found. The camps Patton was responsible for had barbed wire and were patrolled by armed guards. Patton wrote in his diary on September 15 that others “believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” The Jews had to be kept under armed guard, Patton explained; otherwise they would flee, “spread over the country like locusts,” and then be rounded up and some of them shot, only after they had “murdered and pillaged” innocent Germans.³⁸

The Jewish victims struggled to find an identity other than “displaced persons,” which is how the world referred to them. The Nazis had sought to dehumanize them, leaving them with numbers tattooed on their arms, but they called themselves “the survivors” and adopted their own symbol. The graphic symbol that they displayed when possible was a tree felled at its base that was dried and lifeless. Out of the stump sprang a new shoot, alive and well. Though aware of their losses, one observer reported, they “insisted that their survival meant that they, and not Hitler, had triumphed.” In time the tree’s new shoot would grow to maturity, and the “continuity of the life of the tree would not be broken.”³⁹

Reports about the shameful treatment of Europe’s remaining Jewry led to a new round of intensive activity on the part of America’s Jewish organizations. Jewish members of Congress made an official protest to the Department of War. In the executive branch, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., urged by Chaim Weizmann, suggested to Truman that he create a new cabinet-level position to look into it. Truman rejected the proposal. Morgenthau then went to the State Department, told it of the stories he was hearing about the terrible conditions of the Jews, and asked it to mount an immediate investigation. Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew approved the plan once he was convinced that the study would concern itself only with the plight of the Jewish refugees, for which something had to be done, and not with the Zionists’ goals of having the Jews enter Palestine and set up a Jewish state.

The protests of the Jewish groups, combined with Morgenthau’s efforts, proved successful. State agreed to send Earl G. Harrison, the former U.S. commissioner of immigration and dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, to make his own inquiry into the situation.⁴⁰ He was charged with investigating the needs of the Jewish refugees and determining where they wanted to go. Truman approved the Harrison Commission on June 22. When Epstein heard the news that Harrison would be sent to report on the refugees, he was elated. The Jewish Agency office in San Francisco, he noted in his diary, “was in a state of great excitement.” Zionist leaders in Philadelphia had phoned to say that they thought “Harrison was deeply interested in the question…and can be relied to discharge his task with skill and a sense of responsibility.” As for their own Zionist plans, Epstein made it clear that they would use the Harrison trip “as a lever to put strong pressure on world opinion to support our urgent demand that Palestine be opened to mass Jewish immigration.”⁴¹

Nahum Goldmann, the senior Jewish Agency representative in America, decided to take Epstein’s advice and meet with the State Department. On June 20, he went to the Division of Near Eastern Affairs and reported to Assistant Chief Evan Wilson on the bleak situation of European Jewry. “The mood of the Jewish people was running to one of desperation. They had seen millions of their fellow Jews ruthlessly murdered, their homes destroyed, and their culture completely stamped out.” They comforted themselves with the realization that at the war’s end, they would see their aspirations in Palestine realized. During the war, Goldmann stressed, he and Weizmann had urged that they “follow a policy of moderation and not to expect a solution…along Zionist lines before the end of the war in Europe.”

However, he warned that if something weren’t done soon, more militant leaders would arise to replace the moderate ones. Behind the scenes, in Palestine, he hinted, militant elements were working, which might not be able to be contained. The State Department knew that there was truth to his claim. Active in the background in Palestine were members of the militant group of Zionists organized into the Irgun. Unlike Israel’s mainstream Zionists, the Irgun advocated the use of terror against both the British and the Arabs and was responsible for the assassination in 1944 of Churchill’s friend Lord Moyne, the British minister of state for the Middle East and owner of the Guinness beverage company. “Anything might happen,” Goldman warned. Sixty thousand young men had been trained and were ready to fight for their homeland. He himself, he continued, “had been branded a Quisling” while visiting Palestine, and at any moment a moderate such as Weizmann might be replaced by a militant such as Abba Hillel Silver. Unless something favorable was done for the Jews, control of the Zionist movement “might pass to those not averse to violence,” and “there might even be actual bloodshed in Palestine.”

Attached to Evan Wilson’s report of the meeting with Goldmann was a cover memo from Loy Henderson, who added that some Jewish youths were being driven into the arms of Moscow and that it was quite possible that violence would soon erupt in Palestine. Alluding to the possibility that Silver could replace the moderate Rabbi Wise in the Zionist leadership in America, Henderson wrote, “we have reason to believe that there is considerable truth in the claim that the extreme Zionists are gaining support among Jews here and abroad.”⁴²

If the State Department was worried, its fears were confirmed when David Ben-Gurion, then the chairman of the Jewish Agency executive in Jerusalem, arrived in the United States a few days later. Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, made a strong impression among those who met him for the first time, such as the American lawyer Bartley Crum. Crum, who would soon become deeply involved with the Palestinian issue, was, like others, mesmerized by Ben-Gurion. A short man, but “stockily built,” he wrote, “with a halo of white hair, a determined jaw set as in stone, with piercing blue eyes under heavy white shaggy brows, was an extremely forceful personality.”⁴³

Ben-Gurion was the epitome of the early Jewish settlers in Palestine. He had come from Poland as a seventeen-year-old in 1906, the scion of an old Zionist family. During the First World War, he had voluntered for the Jewish Legion and gone to fight under General Edmund Allenby as part of the Jewish Battalion of British troops. Returning to Palestine in 1920, he had quickly risen to the top of the Yishuv leadership, founding the trade union body the Histadrut. In 1935, he had been elected chairman of the Jewish Agency executive, and presided over Jewish immigration to Palestine from Hitler’s Germany.

After arriving in the United States, Ben-Gurion, accompanied by Goldmann and Eliezer Kaplan of the American branch of the Jewish Agency, paid another visit to the State Department. After tracing the situation from Balfour to the White Paper, Ben-Gurion told Evan Wilson and Loy Henderson that “this intolerable [British] regime, had to be dealt with.” If it were not, “the Jews could not continue indefinitely to put up with the breach by the administration of its obligations to the Jewish people.” The Yishuv had to be allowed to make its own decisions and not have to take into consideration the demands of Arabs in Egypt, Iraq, or elsewhere. He understood that Arabs in Palestine were a different matter, since they had a legitimate interest in the future of Palestine. Perhaps naively, he reflected that “Jews and Arabs had lived there in amity for many years and there was no reason why they should not continue to do so.”

Again he stressed that the Jews had supported the Allied military effort and expected that the Allies would honor their promises to tend to the Yishuv’s needs now that the war had ended. “The world,” he emphasized, “must not underestimate the strength of the Jews’ feeling on this point.” They did not seek a fight with the British government but would, however, fight if necessary to defend their rights, and the “consequences would be on Great Britain’s head if the Jews were provoked into some action.” What if the British listened to them, Henderson asked. How would they deal with the Arabs? I “know the Arabs well,” Ben-Gurion responded, and “they would not really put up any kind of a fight.” The leaders of the Arab states would have little luck in rallying their people on behalf of the official Arab position.

Is not your immediate objective, Henderson then asked, to increase Jewish immigration into Palestine? Of course, Ben-Gurion replied, that was imperative. But it was not enough. The time had come to grant this and the Jews’ other demands, including the immediate establishment of a Jewish state.⁴⁴

Ben-Gurion and Goldmann mistook Henderson’s response to them. “There is reason to believe,” they reported, “that Mr. Henderson takes a more sympathetic approach to our problem than his predecessor, Mr. Wallace Murray, whose antagonism was notorious.”⁴⁵ A seasoned State Department expert on the Middle East, Henderson actually shared his colleagues’ pro-Arab orientation. He cordially listened to Ben-Gurion and the other Zionists, as giving them such an audience was part of his job.⁴⁶

Henderson was convinced that Palestine would not be able to absorb the European Jewish refugees who wanted to go there, that any U.S. support for the Zionist program would harm U.S. interests in the Islamic and Arab world, that a favorable policy toward Zionism might interfere with the flow of oil, and that the United States had to counter Soviet policy, which was tending toward support of the Arab states and seeking to make inroads in the Middle East.⁴⁷ Soviet machinations concerned him a great deal. In the early years of his career, Henderson had worked on Soviet and Eastern European affairs. He had lived in the Baltic states and in Moscow, where he had witnessed the brutality of Stalin’s regime and developed “an intense dislike of the Soviet Communists and their sympathizers abroad.”⁴⁸

His opposition to Zionism began when he was U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 1943 to 1945. The leaders of Iraq told him that if the United States backed the Zionist state in Palestine, “the whole Arab world would begin to feel that the United States had become an enemy of the Arabs.” Pro-Western Arabs would quickly be deposed, and the entire Middle East would become anti-American. Before he came back to assume his duties as the new head of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs at the State Department, he traveled to Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Egypt. There he found the same attitude as that held by the Iraqis.

When he returned to Washington to assume his new position in the State Department a few days after FDR’s death, he knew that “the problem of Palestine would be one of the crosses which I would have to bear.” As for the refugees, Henderson’s view was that they should be sent to other “civilized” Western nations. In Palestine, he later wrote, “they would not find the happy, quiet Jewish National Home which they were looking for.” It was “the Zionist juggernaut,” as he called it, that was responsible for the idea that Jews had no place but Palestine to go to. But where else, he could not say. The Zionists believed that such an opportunity might not come “in another thousand years”; hence now was “the time for the Jews to be assembled again in their old homeland.”⁴⁹

Ben-Gurion did not wait long to act. On July 1, he convened an extraordinary meeting in New York City, at the apartment of Rudolf G. Sonneborn. Sonneborn, the secretary-treasurer of a multimillion-dollar corporation, was the son of a German Jewish Baltimore family whose wealth came from his family’s oil and chemical business. The two had met in 1919 at the Versailles Peace Conference, where Sonneborn had been secretary to a Zionist delegation, and although they came from disparate backgrounds—one a man of wealth, the other a rough-and-ready man of the Yishuv—they had become friends.

New York City was sweltering that day, and the hot, fetid air rose to unbearable levels as the massive concrete buildings picked up the heat and made outdoor activity forbidding. Sonneborn, whose penthouse duplex did not have air-conditioning, opened all the windows and told his butler to prepare lots of cool drinks and ice. They would be needed, especially after the assembled guests heard what Ben-Gurion had to say.⁵⁰

Ben-Gurion was worried. This meeting, he feared, was his last hope. The previous month, he had traveled through the United States, and what he had heard made him discouraged. Jewish leaders favored help for the Jewish refugees in Europe, but he found only platitudes of support and a lackadaisical response to his requests for real monetary support and total commitment to whatever had to be done to achieve success for his movement. He sought action, and he intended to get it. He had asked Henry Montor, the director of the United Jewish Appeal, to help him find ten to thirty prominent men who were interested in Palestine and who would come to a meeting in New York—on quick notice and without any public announcement

The two were pleased to find that all seventeen men they had invited had come—some traveling from Los Angeles, Miami, and other American cities and even one from Toronto. There were one rabbi, five lawyers, and eleven businessmen. Ben-Gurion minced no words. He told them that 5 million to 6 million Jews had been exterminated by the Nazis. “The great centers of Jewish population in Eastern Europe…were no more. The Jewish communities of Western Europe were decimated. After years of hiding or living in concentration camps…those Jews, who had survived the Nazi massacres were demoralized and displaced, not merely from their homes but from all recognition as self-sustaining human beings.” The survivors wanted to go to Palestine, the Yishuv needed them, and no other country wanted them.

Then he made some startling predictions. He had just returned from London, he told them, and was convinced that the Labour Party would win the elections. His audience assumed this would be a good thing, since Labour was on record as supporting the end to the White Paper and supporting the Jewish National Home. Ben-Gurion quickly disabused them of their illusions. He believed that once Labour was in power, the new government would quickly rescind its pro-Zionist pledges and would soon give up its Mandate. The Foreign Office saw stability only with a pro-Arab Palestine and would convince the new government to follow its line. Moreover, Ben-Gurion now told his audience what he really believed—that with Britain out of Palestine, one thing was inevitable: the Arab nations, despite their differences, would unite to invade the land, with the intent of destroying the Yishuv. This time, however, the Jews would fight to defend themselves.*

The Holocaust had proven an observation about the Jewish situation he had made in Palestine in 1933 to be all too true. He had written then, “We have sinned in this land, in all other lands, we have sinned for two thousand years, the sin of weakness. We are weak—that is our crime.”⁵¹ Ben-Gurion did not want to make this mistake again. Now there could be but one solution: the survivors had to be brought to Palestine by the Zionist movement, using its own ships. Once there, the sick would be cared for and the young men and women would be trained to be ready to fight the invading Arabs, should the time come.

Ben-Gurion did not ask his guests to make any promises, and no one took notes on the meeting. Leonard Slater, who interviewed many of the participants, noted that “what was remembered best by each…was the uncertainty he felt at the end about what was expected of him.”⁵² In hindsight, Rudolf Sonneborn noted that they were being asked to “form ourselves into…an American arm of the underground Haganah. We were given no clue as to what we might be called upon to accomplish, when the call might come, or who would call us. We were simply asked to be prepared and to mobilize like-minded Americans. We were asked to keep the meeting confidential.”⁵³ Later, they would learn that what the Yishuv leader wanted from them was funds that could be used to purchase arms. Ben-Gurion would later write in his personal journal, “That was the best Zionist meeting I have ever had in the United States.”⁵⁴

While the U.N. delegates were organizing in San Francisco, Harry Truman’s major concern was the negotiations with Winston Churchill (and later Clement Attlee) and Josef Stalin, scheduled to begin at Potsdam on July 17—the conference they hoped would settle the remaining issues left over from Yalta. Here the world’s victorious leaders would discuss how to handle the administration and political order of Germany, which had surrendered unconditionally on May 8. Truman was already concerned about the Soviet Union’s many challenges to agreements made at Yalta, especially to ensure democracy in Poland, and was intent upon his promises to honor the course chartered by the late president.

With other pressing questions on the heavy agenda, such as what steps they should take to win the war against Japan, the situation of the Jews and the demand of the Zionists for a Jewish state were not uppermost in the president’s mind; nevertheless, they weighed on him. As Truman sailed to Potsdam, he brought with him several reports on the subject that he had pledged to study and consider: a petition from senators and congressmen, a report from the official Zionist coalition regarding Palestine and the Jewish refugees, a letter from the American Jewish Committee, and a brief from the State Department. All gave the president conflicting advice. Truman promised only one thing: he would study them all carefully and then chart his own course.

The petition Truman had with him had been circulated in the Senate under Robert F. Wagner, Jr.’s, name. The son of German immigrants, Wagner had grown up in a small Manhattan basement apartment. Entering Democratic politics in 1904, he was first elected to the Senate in 1926 and reelected four times after that. Known mostly for his commitment to the New Deal and his sponsorship of the Wagner Labor Relations Act, Wagner had the overwhelming support of New York’s large Jewish community.⁵⁵

Not only was Wagner responsive to the needs of New York’s striving Jewish working-class community, many only one generation away from czarist oppression, but also, as the chairman of the American Christian Palestine Committee, he was an ardent Zionist. He had gained the respect and support of the Zionists during the war years, when he had stood in the forefront of the effort to ease American immigration for Europe’s Jews. Wagner had proved his mettle when he joined with Republican Senator Robert A. Taft to sponsor the proposed congressional resolutions of 1944 in support of a Jewish homeland. He was proud of his efforts in those years to aid the victims of Nazi persecution and do what he could to save them from certain death. “In his lifetime,” Wagner told Epstein, “he had certainly committed many sins, but still hoped to get to heaven because of the staunch advocacy of Jews whom he had saved and who would testify before the Almighty in his favor.” He also told him that as a good Christian, he felt it was his duty to do all he could to assist the return of the Jews to their homeland.⁵⁶

Now, in the postwar era, Wagner was adamant that Jewish goals finally be realized. Palestine, he believed, was not only indispensable to the rehabilitation of the few European Jews who had survived but equally essential “to the health of Europe.” The Christian world that had allowed the Holocaust to happen “has Palestine on its conscience,” he told Epstein, and “if it would regain its moral self-respect, it must promptly do justice to Palestine.”⁵⁷

Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, the national secretary of the American Christian Palestine Committee, sent out the letter to members of Congress, asking them to sign the petition. A former actress and the wife of the actor Melvyn Douglas was a longtime liberal activist who worked in the film community. Like so many others, Douglas was horrified about what she called the Nazi regime’s “monstrous campaign of systematic murder and torture that has almost annihilated the Jewish communities of Europe.” Noting that the “civilized world” had been shocked by the revelations about the death camps, she urged that all those she was contacting on a list of distinguished Americans help her “do all we can to insure justice to the remnant of European Jewry.” The letter would be addressed to the president and would stress that both political parties favored unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, with the eventual outcome that it would become “a free and democratic Jewish Commonwealth.”⁵⁸

AZEC helped gather signatures and tried to make sure that the petition would include majorities from both the House of Representatives and the Senate. To attain that goal, the group’s strategies included getting influential members of each community in America to write their representatives, urging them to sign.⁵⁹

After a two-month campaign, the petition was completed. The organizers wanted to release the letter before the president went to Potsdam, in the hope that it would lead him to deal with Palestine at the meeting. At first they prepared for a major press conference, to be attended by both the majority and minority leaders of both the Senate and House, but when Wagner met with the president, he requested that a public demonstration of that sort not take place. Instead, Truman asked that Wagner present it to him personally at the White House and said he would take it with him to Potsdam and consider it carefully. Expressing sympathy with Zionist goals, Truman promised Wagner that he would “do everything he could at the forthcoming conference” but that publicity would harm their current dealings with Near East problems.⁶⁰ Following Truman’s request, Wagner presented Truman with the petition in person. It was signed by 54 Senators and 250 members of the House, favoring establishment of Palestine as a Jewish state.⁶¹

A week later, an AZEC official, Herman Shulman, reported to his executive committee that he had spoken with one of Truman’s close advisers (probably Niles), requesting a meeting with the president and Rabbi Wise before Truman left for Potsdam. The unnamed aide had reported back that Truman had said he would be happy if they would prepare a comprehensive brief dealing with the Palestine issue in all its aspects and promised that he would give it “his very careful attention.” The president wanted to remind them, however, that he had pledged to follow FDR’s policy and that eventually he planned to meet with them.

Shulman also reported that he and Wise had next met with Robert Hannegan, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a friend of Truman from Missouri. Both men were impressed with Hannegan’s apparent sympathy for their arguments. It was he, Hannegan told them, who had personally told Truman at the Chicago Democratic National Convention to include the Palestine plank in the party platform. Hannegan also asked for the brief, which he promised to personally deliver to Truman and others who were on their way to Berlin. After receiving the twelve-page document, Hannegan told them he had given it to Truman as well as to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes. Byrnes read it immediately and told Hannegan that he was “sympathetic to the Zionist aspirations.”⁶²

In their report, Wise and Shulman argued that the White Paper of 1939 directly contradicted the terms of both the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, which had been endorsed by every American president since Woodrow Wilson. It had been issued by the Neville Chamberlain government in response to Arab terrorism and was “in conformity with its general program of appeasement.” Moreover, they emphasized, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the leader of the Palestinian Arab community, was openly pro-Axis and had fled to Germany during the war. Unlike the Arabs, the Jews had fought the Axis with the other Allies, putting off their own demands to the war’s end. “Their dead lie scattered on the battlefields of Greece, Syria, and North Africa, and their economic and military contribution was all out of proportion to their numbers.” The Jews had waited patiently, but now, with the war over, they could no longer tolerate the White Paper.

Only Palestine, the report continued, could be the destination of Europe’s Jewish remnant and that of the one million Oriental Jews, who were subject to persecution in Arab lands. The Yishuv was ready to take its first million new residents. Noting that Palestine had four and a half million unoccupied acres that were regarded as uncultivable wasteland, they reminded Truman that most of the flourishing settlements had been built on similar land. In just twenty-five years, as the Jewish population of Palestine had grown, the Jews had “established some three hundred Jewish agricultural settlements, and have made Palestine the industrial center of the whole Middle East, with thousands of factories and small workshops.”

Wise and Shulman then noted that the Arabs had benefited from the Jews’ efforts to develop Palestine. As evidence, they pointed to a statement made to the British House of Commons in 1938 by the British secretary of state for the colonies, Malcolm MacDonald. MacDonald said that the Arabs could not claim that the Jews were driving them out of their country. In fact, there had been a dramatic growth in the Arab population that could only be attributed to “the Jews who have come to Palestine bringing modern health services and other advantages.”

Finally, they argued that if the United States and the other Allied powers came out for a Jewish state and free immigration to Palestine, the Arab nations would be forced to accept it as “an accomplished fact.” If the Great Powers made it clear that they would be ready to use force if necessary, the need for actually carrying through would not exist and the Arab threats would disappear. And if the United States did not carry through on pledges made beforehand for a Jewish state, it would be nothing less than a “gross betrayal of the principles of international law and good faith.”⁶³

Truman received quite different advice from the American Jewish Committee’s leader, Judge Joseph Proskauer, whose recommendations he also had with him. Declaring their opposition to a Jewish state, Proskauer wrote that his group distinguished between favoring Palestine as homeland and place of refuge and that of statehood. FDR himself, he informed Truman, had told them shortly before his death that “he had come to this belief and that he saw in the extreme Zionist agitation grave danger for the world and for Palestine itself.” But, he added, the AJC supported the consensus of all Jewish groups for “liberalization of Jewish immigration into Palestine.”⁶⁴

The brief prepared for Truman by the State Department warned him of a British trap to ensnare the United States in the Palestine problem. It recommended that if Truman spoke to Churchill, he do so with the understanding that the United States realized that Palestine was primarily a British problem, since Britain held the Mandate. It predicted that the British would make some concessions on immigration and would seek U.S. backing and support for it, but since the British themselves were divided on the subject, they could then turn around and “blame US pressure for policies that the Arabs may not like.” Therefore, the president shouldn’t commit himself to anything. Moreover, State warned him, the Zionist Jews were “growing restless” and were “determined to force a decision on Palestine this summer.” Moderates might not be able to restrain them, and the “thoroughly aroused” Arabs would oppose any changes to the White Paper by force of arms. He might be criticized by American Jews if he did not take their wishes into account, but if he took a pro-Zionist stance, the United States could draw the hatred of the entire Arab world.⁶⁵

With this advice under his belt, Truman wrote to Winston Churchill on July 24. “There is great interest in America in the Palestine problem,” he told the wartime prime minister. British policy continued to “provoke passionate protest from Americans”—a fact of which Churchill was more than aware. Truman summarized their feelings in words that indicated his sympathy: “They fervently urge the lifting of those restrictions which deny to Jews, who have been so cruelly uprooted by ruthless Nazi persecution, entrance into the land which represents for so many of them their only hope of survival.” Truman informed Churchill of his hope that the British government would lift the White Paper restrictions. Understanding that they would not be discussing this at Potsdam—as Jewish groups had hoped—Truman urged Churchill to act and not let the issue be subject to “prolonged delay.”⁶⁶

Two days after he sent the memo to Churchill, the British electorate voted overwhelmingly for the Labour Party, throwing the wartime unity coalition government and its leader out of office. Churchill was to be replaced by a Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee. Zionist leaders were overjoyed; the Labour Party had a long history of commitment to Zionism.⁶⁷ In Tel Aviv, “there was rejoicing and dancing in the streets,” since Palestine’s Jews knew that British Labour “appeared to be definitely and strongly committed to the Zionist program.”⁶⁸

As opposition leader, Attlee had been at Potsdam with Churchill, and now that he was prime minister he found Truman’s memo to Churchill waiting for him on his desk. Attlee’s formal response was terse: he would not give the president his views until his government had time to consider the issue, to which he promised careful consideration.⁶⁹ Soon the Zionist movement received disappointing news vividly recalled by David Horowitz, one of the pioneer settlers and an economist for the Jewish Agency: “Then came the great shock. It all set out as a faint and feeble whisper, which quickly assumed substance and spread like wildfire. Within no time at all the incredible truth had come out: the British Government intended to maintain the hated White Paper policy in all the articles of its repression.”⁷⁰

Truman tried to take it easy on his way home from Potsdam. He played poker with Secretary Byrnes and started each day aboard the Augusta with a slow walk around the deck. The Big Three meeting was over, and the president reflected on the successes and potential pitfalls of Potsdam. He had arranged the terms for the management of postwar Germany. Yet, as it later would become glaringly obvious, Truman had acquiesced to Stalin’s insistence that the newly liberated Eastern European nations fall under the domination of the Soviet Union. In particular, Truman agreed to the consignment of German territory in the east to Poland, although the new Polish government was already under the control of the Soviet Union. Truman and Byrnes had negotiated a “spheres-of-influence” peace, which both men hoped would ensure the continued cooperation of America and Russia in the postwar era. Their concessions were necessary, they thought, in order to gain needed agreements with the Soviets. Of special concern was Truman’s hope that Stalin would agree to enter the war against Japan, relieving the United States of bearing the entire burden of the scheduled military campaigns in the Pacific. On this he was successful, as Stalin agreed to move Soviet forces from Europe to the Pacific in time to enter the war in mid-August.⁷¹

As Truman was eating lunch in the sailors’ mess hall, he received a message that the Enola Gay had dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, which he hoped would save American lives and end the war with Japan more quickly. A major invasion of Japanese islands would now not have to take place, although the Japanese leaders did not at first accept defeat and pledged to continue fighting. It was not until a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki that the emperor announced he would accept peace and agreed to an unconditional surrender to the United States. The president announced the news to an anxious nation on August 14. For the next two days, the entire country celebrated, from gatherings in the smallest of town squares to the massive outpouring of people in New York City’s Times Square.⁷²

“Things have been in such a dizzy whirl here,” Truman wrote to his mother. Everyone had been operating at a breakneck pace, and he wished that they would calm down so he could turn his attention to the country’s domestic problems and his reform agenda. “It is going to be political maneuvers,” he thought, “that I have to watch.”⁷³ On August 16, at Truman’s first press conference after his return from Potsdam, he was asked a question that he did not expect, since the press briefing was to deal only with European affairs: Had the question of a Jewish state in Palestine been raised? a member of the press asked. Had it been mentioned during the conversations held with Churchill and Josef Stalin? No to the first question, Truman replied, but he had discussed it with Churchill and later Attlee. The president paused, wanting to move on to other issues, when he was asked a more direct query: “What is the American position on Palestine?” The president’s answer was straightforward. “The American view of Palestine is that we want to let as many of the Jews into Palestine as is possible to let into that country. Then the matter will have to be worked out diplomatically with the British and the Arabs so that if a State can be set up there, they may be able to set it up on a peaceful basis. I have no desire to send 500,000 American soldiers there to make peace in Palestine.”⁷⁴

Truman was on his way to developing his own Palestine policy. Though he wanted Britain to abrogate the White Paper and let the Jewish refugees go to Palestine, he was not going to take responsibility for creating a Jewish state. That would be the responsibility of the British and the Arabs. The State Department warnings had obviously alarmed him about the likelihood of having to send American troops to keep the peace if the Zionist project progressed. It would be better, Truman thought, if he kept his hands off of it.

It wasn’t even clear how strong Truman was on the immigration issue. American press reports indicated that Congressman Adolph J. Sabbath of Illinois had met with the president and that Truman had told him that although he favored the admission of Jews into Palestine, “he was afraid that Arab opposition would be too great” and preferred concentrating more on “Jewish rights in Europe” and less on Palestine.

Rabbi Silver felt that Truman’s statement was hardly a victory for the Zionists and could even be seen as a step backward. The best that could be said was that Truman was at least discussing the issue with the British government and that he appeared to have “good will with regard to Jewish immigration into Palestine.” On the other hand, it might encourage the Arabs to take actions that would necessitate sending in U.S. troops. If it came down to such a choice, Silver feared that Truman was “prepared to give up the idea of a Jewish state.”⁷⁵

The Arabs were also puzzled over the meaning of the president’s statement. The counselor to the Egyptian Legation told Loy Henderson they feared Truman’s words “might indicate a change in policy of this Government which would give rise to great unrest in the Arab world.” Any sudden move that proved prejudicial to Arab interest, he threatened, “might well set the Arab world in motion and result in violence on a wide scale.”⁷⁶ The Syrian minister to the United States, Nazdem al-Koudsi, on the other hand, saw Truman’s statement as positive. He emphasized the president’s assurance that nothing would be done without consultation with the Arabs and that the United States did not contemplate sending armed forces to Palestine. He feared that other Arabs might focus only on the part of the statement favoring free immigration of Jews to Palestine.⁷⁷

Loy Henderson had reason to worry. Addressing the secretary of state, he reported that the president’s press conference had been “bewildering to the Arabs,” since they believed that FDR had promised Ibn Saud that the United States would not support the Jews in Palestine. Henderson attached the text of a top secret memorandum of the conversation between Roosevelt and the Saudi monarch held on board the Quincy in February 1945. The translation by William Eddy had been approved by both sides and served as “an agreed minute of the meeting.” The secret memorandum reported on Roosevelt’s promise that he would “do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs” and “make no move hostile to the Arab people.” Noting that FDR had reiterated these points in a letter to Ibn Saud, he pointed out that all the Arab leaders seemed to know about this. “As this pledge has never been divulged by us to any other parties,” Henderson told Byrnes, “it would appear that it was Ibn Saud who made it known to the Arab League.”⁷⁸

Alarmed that the United States might be changing its policy, on August 24 Abdul Rahman Azzam Bey, the secretary-general of the Arab League and undersecretary for foreign affairs in the Egyptian government, announced publicly that FDR had given a pledge to Ibn Saud “that he would not support any move to hand over Palestine to Jews.” Ibn Saud, he added, had also told Roosevelt that if Palestine were given to the Jews, “he would start a war against the Zionists and all who supported them” and would “never rest until I and all my sons have been killed in the defense of Palestine.” Then Ibn Saud had stood and, placing his hand in Roosevelt’s hand had said, “Swear that you will never support the Zionists’ fight for Palestine against the Arabs.” According to Azzam Bey, FDR then “shook Ibn Saud’s hand and pledged he would not support the Jews against the Arabs.”⁷⁹

President Truman was very puzzled by the assertion that FDR had made such a pledge to Ibn Saud. He sent Admiral Leahy, who was at the meeting between FDR and Ibn Saud, the official summary of the conversation. Was there any contradiction between what Assam Bey asserted and the official transcript prepared by William Eddy? he asked.

The purpose of FDR’s meeting, Leahy responded, “was to endeavor to get the King of Saudi Arabia to agree to a compromise that would permit some of the displaced European Jews to find homes in Palestine.” Roosevelt had made an “excellent presentation of the Jewish Palestine difficulty as seen from his point of view,” he continued. “With great dignity, courtesy, and smiling, the King said that the Jews and Arabs now living in Palestine have learned to live together in peace, but that if Jews from outside Palestine with their foreign financial backing and higher standards of living are imported, they will make trouble for the Arab inhabitants. When this happens, as a good Arab and a ‘True Believer,’ he will have to take the Arab side against the Jews and he intends to do so.” President Roosevelt replied, Leahy wrote, “that he had no intention of getting involved in hostilities between Arabs and Jews.” Leahy said that based on other conversations with FDR he accepted Saud’s statement to mean that he would go to war in defense of the Arabs in Palestine if more Jews immigrated there. “I do not believe that President Roosevelt at any time said that he would not support a plan to establish a Jewish colony in Palestine,” Leahy concluded. “He plainly did not, however, intend to go to war with the Arabs for such a purpose.” Finally, Leahy assured Truman that Eddy’s translation was accurate.⁸⁰

To assure himself of Leahy’s accuracy, Truman then sent Leahy’s answer to Sam Rosenman. What did he think? the president asked. Agreeing with Leahy, Rosenman wrote Truman, “there is nothing inconsistent between this statement of what President Roosevelt said and your statement to the press conference the other day [August 16].” “Furthermore,” Rosenman added, “I do not think that opening the doors to Palestine is in any sense an act which is a ‘move hostile to the Arab people.’ Nor does it in my opinion contravene the conversation of President Roosevelt.”⁸¹

While Truman was pondering the implications of FDR’s meeting with Ibn Saud and what it meant for U.S. policy, he received the results of Earl Harrison’s investigation into the situation of the Jewish refugees. Harrison’s report and recommendations would challenge Truman to find a solution for the refugees and overcome the difficulties of sending them to the place they most longed to go: Palestine.