On the morning of August 24, Truman sat down for his regular Saturday breakfast meeting with his staff and some close friends, including his press secretary, Charlie Ross, Matthew Connelly, Sam Rosenman, Admiral James K. Vardaman, General Harry Vaughan, and his assistant press secretary, Eben Ayers. The night before, he had read Earl Harrison’s report, and he told the group that it made him sick. “The situation at many of the camps,” Truman said, “especially with respect to the Jews, was practically as bad as it was under the Germans.”1
Harrison’s report troubled him, as it would anyone who read it. When Harrison arrived at Dachau on July 22, Rabbi Abraham Klausner, a chaplain in the U.S. Army, introduced himself. Klausner, who had arrived at Dachau right after it had been liberated, had been writing reports to the major Jewish organizations about the poor treatment of the Jewish survivors. By the end of August, his efforts had helped to establish an Office of the Advisor on Jewish Affairs to the General Command in the European theater. Klausner looked over the itinerary that the Army had drawn up for Harrison and told him he thought it reflected only what it wanted him to see, mainly the official collection centers. Harrison asked Klausner to alter it so that he could get an accurate picture of the refugee situation. The rabbi took him and Joseph J. Schwartz, the European director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (usually referred to as “the Joint”), to see the partially bombed buildings where hundreds of refugees were housed because there was nowhere else to go. Then he took him to see the overcrowded camps.2
Harrison’s report told an abysmal story. In Germany and Austria, he had found many of the DPs living under guard behind barbed-wire fences, sometimes in the most notorious concentration camps “amidst crowded, frequently unsanitary and generally grim conditions, with nothing to do, and with a serious lack of needed medical supplies.” The DPs subsisted on bread and coffee, and the observers had seen many “pathetic malnutrition cases.” A high death rate among the former prisoners continued after liberation. At Bergen-Belsen, some twenty-three thousand people had died, most of them Jews. Not only did the prisoners live in unsanitary conditions and have little food, some of them “had no clothing other than their concentration camp garb—a rather hideous striped pajama…while others…were obliged to wear German S.S. uniforms.” And it was distressing that there was no organized effort to help them find out what had happened to or to locate their loved ones.3
“Beyond knowing that they are no longer in danger of the gas chambers, torture and other forms of violent death,” Harrison continued, “they see—and there is—little change.” An essential point, he emphasized, was that the Jewish DPs had to be viewed as Jews, not just as simple refugees, undistinguished from the others. If they were not, one would be “closing one’s eyes to their former and more barbaric persecution.” Most of the Jews, Harrison reported, wanted to leave Germany and Austria as soon as possible and go to Palestine. Many had relatives in Palestine, he wrote, while others “having experienced intolerance and persecution in their homelands for years, feel that only in Palestine will they be welcomed and find peace and quiet and be given an opportunity to live and work.”
The situation was so bad that Harrison put it in the strongest possible terms: “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.”
Pending their emigration to Palestine, Harrison suggested setting up separate quarters for the Jews, so they could receive special attention. It was a matter of “raising to a more normal level” the status of a people who had “been depressed to the lowest depths conceivable by years of organized and inhuman oppression.” It was a matter of “justice and humanity.” To really end the inhumanity, the Jewish DPs should be allowed into Palestine as quickly as possible. “The civilized world,” Harrison concluded, “owes it to this handful of survivors to provide them with a home where they can again settle down and begin to live as human beings.” Harrison concluded by seconding the request of the Jewish Agency that Britain immediately allow emigration of 100,000 of the European Jewish DPs.
Truman’s first reaction upon reading the Harrison report, Niles’s assistant, Phileo Nash, recalled, was shock. Particularly upsetting to him was to find that when asked, most of the Jewish DPs told authorities that they did not want to come to the United States, they were afraid to, and that they would feel safe only in a country where they had sovereignty, which to them meant Palestine. Their fear was that what had happened to them in Germany could happen elsewhere just as easily.4
Harrison’s report galvanized Truman to do something about the plight of the Jewish DPs in Europe. He wanted “a rapid and constructive settlement” since he considered their dire situation a problem of the “highest humanitarian importance and urgency.” If the majority wanted to go to Palestine, Truman thought they should be allowed to do so. He agreed with Harrison that the 100,000 refugees would be able to easily be absorbed into Palestine as well as get jobs, given the severe shortage of labor there. The Jewish community in Palestine was ready to receive them and help them rebuild their lives.5
Truman’s strong feelings on the subject were indicated by the letter he wrote to the new Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee. Sending him a copy of Harrison’s report, Truman urged Attlee to lift the quota and immediately allow 100,000 Jewish refugees to enter Palestine. “No single matter,” Truman wrote Attlee, “is so important for those who have known the horrors of concentration camps for over a decade as is the future of immigration possibilities into Palestine.” To be effective, Truman emphasized, “such action should not be long delayed.”6 Truman felt the issue was so important that he wrote the letter himself, without consulting any speechwriters or informing the State Department. His hope was that he would get faster results by a personal appeal to the new prime minister rather than by going through normal diplomatic channels.7
Though Truman leaned heavily on Byrnes and other advisers for his European policies, he wanted more control over issues relating to Palestine and the Jews. This was noted by the new undersecretary of state, Dean Acheson. “By the time I took up my duties…in September 1945,” Acheson recalled, “it was clear that the President himself was directing policy on Palestine.” At this time, according to Acheson, Truman was separating his short-range goals from the long-range solution, which he felt the United Nations would address. Acheson, like others at State, did not share the president’s views. He believed Palestine did not have the capacity to absorb any more Jews “without creating a grave political problem” and imperiling all Western interests in the Near East. He had learned from Felix Frankfurter, who was a close friend, and Justice Louis Brandeis to “understand but not to share the mystical emotion of the Jews to return to Palestine and end the Diaspora.” Despite his disagreements, Acheson attempted to carry out the policies desired by the president and not to undermine him.8
Acheson was right about one thing: the State Department and Truman were at loggerheads. The same day Truman wrote his letter to Clement Attlee, the Division of Near Eastern Affairs prepared a memo for Secretary Byrnes to read before going to London, where he was scheduled to attend a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers. Despite the American Zionists’ increasing demand for free immigration into Palestine, State argued, the Jews simply were not in a “position to have the knowledge and information” necessary to make a rational judgment. They would have no places to live, be subject to outbreaks of diseases such as typhoid and bubonic plague, and be subject to unemployment once Palestine industry moved from a wartime to a peacetime production schedule. Most important, it warned, any large increase in such immigration would precipitate considerable violence and possibly civil war in Palestine. To deal with this, the United States would have to allocate both troops and military supplies to the region, which would be necessary to maintain security. Its solution: “The United States Government should not favor mass or unrestricted Jewish immigration into Palestine,” since it would commit the United States “to a definite policy in favor of the establishment of a Jewish State” without consultation with the Arabs. It would also have the most harmful effect on “American interests and prestige.” The United States should definitely not do anything, State recommended, until it consulted with the British government.9
While the president was trying personal intervention with Clement Attlee, he was blindsided by a leak to the press from former Democratic Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa. In August, Gillette had taken the job as chief political adviser to the main Bergson group, the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation.10 In that capacity, he met with Truman, accompanied by Senator Owen Brewster of Maine and Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington. They informed him that they were planning to travel to London to pressure the British government. Truman requested that the group postpone their meeting until after Byrnes’s negotiations concerning Palestine and other matters were over. According to the three, Truman told them that it was the United States’ position that the doors of Palestine be immediately opened to the homeless European Jews, and he mentioned that he had written a letter to Attlee to that effect.11
Truman was furious when he learned that the two senators and Gillette had gone to the press and leaked his letter to Attlee without his permission and before he had received an answer. When Silver and Wise heard about the letter, they were delighted but cautioned that Truman’s request to Attlee for admission of the 100,000 Jewish refugees into Palestine would not solve the Jewish problem. Only the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, the two Zionists argued, would achieve that. Advising that Zionists not be too enthusiastic about the president’s proposal, Wise and Silver argued that even if it were fulfilled, “the governments concerned may feel that we are satisfied with this action and may be inclined to let it go at that.”12 Their point was not without merit. Had the British government accepted the admission of the 100,000, the Jewish Agency worried, it might have lessened its argument for the necessity of a Jewish State. “It could be argued,” the historian William Roger Louis points out, “that British rigidity on the question of the 100,000 proved to be the most serious tactical error in the controversy with the Americans.”13
While Wise and Silver were pondering Truman’s actions, in London Chaim Weizmann met with Secretary Byrnes, who told him that “the whole matter [of Palestine] was handled to a considerable degree by Mr. Truman himself” and therefore Byrnes had to be “careful not to make statements to which Mr. Truman might raise objection” (our emphasis). Byrnes asked Weizmann how long it would take, if they got the 100,000 certificates, to convey the refugees to Palestine. Weizmann thought about eighteen months and added that the climate in Palestine was more temperate than Europe’s, so that the people “could live temporarily under canvas and in barracks,” but whatever the conditions, they would be much better than the ones in which they were presently living. Byrnes, who, Weizmann thought, was impressed by this, said he would inform Truman.
Byrnes also wanted to know why the Jewish Agency had rejected Britain’s offer to use the 3,003 certificates still available from the White Paper’s quota. Weizmann replied that since they considered the White Paper to be both morally and legally invalid, it did not want to appear to be honoring its terms. Byrnes disagreed with this tactic and said the Agency should have taken the certificates and asked for more. Weizmann then mentioned that some of the Agency’s “British friends” were constantly telling him that they could do something if only the Americans could take some responsibility. Weizmann wasn’t sure what that could be. He doubted that the British would want the United States to participate in the administration of Palestine, but maybe sending a token force to Palestine or helping fund a development project for the country such as Lowdermilk’s scheme would help. Byrnes said that while he couldn’t speak for the president, he thought the Americans would try to help.14
Weizmann then wrote Byrnes a follow-up letter reiterating that the Agency’s immediate concern was to see the White Paper abrogated. This would not only eliminate immigration quotas but repeal the current land regulations, which discriminated against Jews by forbidding them to purchase land in most of Palestine. He assured Byrnes that the Jewish community would bear its full share of the financial cost for the refugees but that the United States and Britain would have to help transport them. Supporting the refugees in Europe, Weizmann knew, was becoming a financial burden for America, and he pointed out that the funds and supplies used to maintain them in the camps, where they had nothing to do, could better be used by “initiating them into productive careers in Palestine.”15
It was hard for Great Britain to grasp that it was no longer going to be one of the Great Powers of the world. Its new postwar leadership was the first that had to operate in the context of the country’s diminished role in the world. The war had cost Britain one quarter of its national wealth. The country could not pay its international debts without borrowing more from the United States. No longer able to carry out its responsibilities in the Middle East, it was now in the humiliating position of being a debtor nation to the Arab regimes, instead of the creditor it had been before the war. The new foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, also had to deal with Stalin’s apparent intention to create Soviet-controlled regimes in Eastern Europe and to replace British influence in the Middle East with Soviet influence, as well as contend with Mohandas Gandhi’s independence movement in India.16
Visitors to London who had known the capital city before the war were depressed by what they saw. Postwar London, the Jewish Agency economist David Horowitz wrote, was “grey, dreary and immeasurably fatigued. The gaps in the long streets, the empty spaces, and the piles of debris were testimony to the ferocity of the aerial bombardments…. The monotony of the diet and incessant toil had left their mark on people’s faces, bodies and spirit.” London, he found, especially at night, “was dismal and joyless.”17
Dominating the policies of the British government were Ernest Bevin and the prime minister, Clement Attlee. Attlee was the complete opposite in personality from Winston Churchill, who had inspired the nation during the war. Churchill had given eloquent and heroic speeches, meant to keep his countrymen looking ahead and buoying their spirits at the worst of times. Attlee, from all accounts, gave boring speeches and was a man lacking in charisma. The differences between Attlee and Bevin were also pronounced. Bevin, his biographer writes, was “a heavyweight in personality as well as physique, temperamental, passionate and egocentric,” while Attlee was “spare, dry and undemonstrative.”18
Bevin was “a large, powerfully built man,” attorney Bartley Crum remembered, “with heavy shell-rimmed spectacles and a way of holding his hands at his sides, fists clenched.” Bevin is today thought by many to have been an anti-Semite. But in 1945, he was regarded by his colleagues as a man who had been supportive of Zionist goals before the war. Whether or not he was anti-Semitic, his most recent biographer makes it clear that he did not comprehend the depths of despair world Jewry felt after the Holocaust. Nor did he understand that the Jews of Palestine were intent upon achieving a Jewish state and were ready to fight for it under the banner of their underground army, the Haganah.19 Bevin assumed that the Zionist agenda would be set by the moderates he knew in London, led by Chaim Weizmann, who preferred using gradualism and diplomacy to reach their goals.20
Both Bevin and Attlee gave great weight to the views of their Foreign Office advisers, who, like their State Department counterparts, overestimated the strength and fighting power of the Arab states. These men advised the new government that Britain had to support the Arabs, given the country’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil and its need to keep control of the Suez Canal, which was a gateway to British possessions in Asia.21
On September 10, Secretary Byrnes personally delivered Truman’s letter of August 31 to Clement Attlee. Two days earlier, he and Bevin had received recommendations from the Labour cabinet’s Palestine Committee. It was not good news for the Zionists. There could not be Jewish mass immigration into Palestine, the committee concluded. The White Paper could not be abrogated, and any continuance of a limited immigration of Jews had to depend on the Arabs’ agreement.22
On September 14, Attlee finally replied to Truman. Promising a more thorough letter a bit later, Attlee said he had been concerned when Byrnes had told him about Truman’s plans to issue a statement about Palestine that would disclose Harrison’s conclusions. Such a statement, he informed Truman, “could not fail to do grievous harm to relations between our two countries.” Moreover, Attlee complained, the Palestinian Jews were refusing to accept the allotted immigration certificates and were demanding instead immediate granting of the entire 100,000 they and Truman had asked for. Attlee warned that should Truman actually issue his statement, it would precipitate “a grave crisis” that would greatly interfere with the work of reconstruction after the war.23
As promised, Attlee telegraphed the president his longer and considered response two days later. First, he strongly disagreed with the view that Jews in the DP camps should be treated differently from the other victims of Hitler. To do so, he argued, would provoke “violent reactions on the part of other people who had been confined to these concentration camps.” He claimed that there was little difference in the way non-Jewish prisoners had been tortured and their general treatment. Attlee told Truman that Jews could not be put in a special racial category that would put them “at the head of the queue.” His suggested solution was to send 30,000 immediately to a camp that was available for use in Philippeville, Algeria, and another in Fedala, in Morocco, that could hold five thousand more. Finally, he reasserted that Britain had to take into consideration the view of the Arabs, whom both FDR and Churchill had promised to consult on the issue. To “break these solemn pledges,” Attlee stressed, would “set aflame the whole Middle East.” And it was Britain alone that would have to restore order.24
Truman was annoyed by Attlee’s dismissal and his insensitivity. He wrote a perfunctory response saying only that he understood the complications “from your point of view” and that he would take no further action until Secretary Byrnes returned to the capital from Europe.25 Almost immediately, the president called David Niles into his office. The president, Niles recalled, had been familiar with the pro-Zionist statements made over the years by Labour Party leaders, and he assumed that these reflected the official position of the party. In his report, Harrison had quoted the words of the Labour leader Hugh Dalton, who had said in May 1945 that it “is morally wrong and politically indefensible to impose obstacles to the entry into Palestine now of any Jews who desire to go there.” At Truman’s request, Niles gathered other resolutions and statements adopted by Labour over the years, including pro-Zionist statements made in previous years by both Attlee and Bevin. Reading these, Truman asked Niles, “How can we trust the Labour people in London when they do not respect their pledges? Today they are cheating the Jews, and where is the assurance that they won’t cheat us tomorrow?”26
Truman was disturbed that Attlee’s response was not only a retreat from Labour’s long-held position on Palestine but seemed devoid of “all human and moral considerations.” He decided that he would no longer deal personally with Attlee on the subject of Palestine and the Jews. Instead, he instructed Byrnes to formally raise the matter again when meeting with Bevin the next time he was in London. Byrnes, the most skilled of negotiators, would find that Attlee and Bevin refused to meet him halfway. It seemed that an unbridgeable gap was growing between America and Britain on the issue. Niles believed that the British intransigence on any kind of compromise on immigration helped Truman come to the conclusion that the Jews, without sovereignty, were helpless to control their destiny and to rectify all that had been taken away from them.27
On September 23, the British government announced its final decision. The Palestine issue, it proposed, should be referred to the new United Nations along with a statement that all the Allied powers had a responsibility to deal with the issue in common. Since the United States rejected any proposal that it share the administration of Palestine along with the British, no other path was open other than continuing with the stopgap measure of admitting the final allotted certificates under the White Paper and wait for resolution by the United Nations.28 Responding to this announcement two days later, Chaim Weizmann, speaking at an emergency Zionist conference in Britain, castigated the Labour Party for reneging on its many previous pledges. The Jewish Agency, he announced, had formally rejected the British plea to accept the certificates again declared the illegality of the White Paper.29
Truman seemed tense when he met with Silver and Wise on the September 29. “The war is far from over,” he told them. The United States had failed to reach agreement with the Soviets at the London meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers. Urging the Zionists to be patient, Truman complained of ethnic pressure coming at him from different groups, especially the Italians, the Poles, and the Jews. He would not “be confronted by past commitment,” he told them. He would “work in his own way.”30 Later that day, Truman met with the two leaders of the American Jewish Committee, Jacob Blaustein and Judge Proskauer. According to their recollection, Truman told them that he was irritated with both Silver and Wise, who were “insisting as they do constantly for a Jewish State,” which he assured them was “not in the cards now…and would cause a Third World War.”31 Truman assured them, however, that he was seeking a prompt and substantial increase in the number of certificates for Jewish immigration into Palestine. Political questions had to be put aside, Truman said, and the “humanitarian factor placed foremost.”32
The Zionist movement’s first public response to Truman’s call for the 100,000 Jewish refugees to be allowed to go to Palestine was to keep up the pressure through mass rallies and demonstrations, which they hoped would stir public opinion and reinforce Truman to continue his efforts. On September 30, 20,000 people packed Madison Square Garden and almost 40,000 more stood outside in cold weather for three hours to hear speeches by loudspeaker. Republican Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York was the featured speaker, followed by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, who, Lord Halifax reported to London, used his “usual eloquence” to give a “moving and effective” presentation.33
The next day, the Senate chambers were filled with senators arguing in favor of immigration for the 100,000. The tone of their speeches, Halifax reported, “was vehement and occasionally bitter.”34 In general, observed Halifax, “the tempo of agitation over Palestine is rising here,” and the Zionist movement was flooding Congress and the White House with letters and postcards. It was, he thought, “taking advantage of the fact that the elections of 1946 are approaching and that both parties are anxious to capture the Jewish vote particularly in the key state of New York.”35
Dewey’s headlining the event was particularly vexing to the administration. With midterm elections coming up, the Democrats argued that the humanitarian cause of the European refugees should not be politicized. The New York governor had unabashedly called for what Truman was hedging on, support for a Jewish home in Palestine. Five months after the war’s end, Dewey told the crowd, the European Jews “remain victims.” They had been promised the Jewish homeland a quarter of a century earlier, Dewey said, and “there was no legitimate reason for its continued denial.” The New York rally was the first in a continuing series of events in major American cities. Two weeks later, at a packed Chicago Stadium, the crowd heard speeches by Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, who asked Truman “to stand firmly” in his desire to see the Jews get their homeland in Palestine. Thousands of people signed postcards to be sent to Truman, demanding that he use U.S. power to get Britain to fulfill its promises made in the Balfour Declaration.36
The jubilation that the Jews in Palestine had felt in July at Labour’s victory was now giving way to anger and disillusionment. They felt betrayed by the direction Bevin and Attlee were taking on immigration despite their party’s recent promises. The quiet diplomacy of Weizmann was not working, and Ben-Gurion was ready to adopt more militant tactics. Preparing to use direct action against the British authorities, Ben-Gurion moved to fold the Irgun and Stern militants, whose violent actions the Haganah had previously opposed, into one new unified command together with the Haganah. The units would now be called the Jewish Resistance Movement (JRM). Bevin was not happy when he learned of their new alliance. When Weizmann met with Bevin on October 5, he found him in a belligerent mood. The Jewish Agency had turned down the last certificates left over from the White Paper. Bevin greeted Weizmann with “What do you mean by refusing certificates? Are you trying to force my hand? If you want a fight you can have it!”37
When the two continued their discussion five days later, Bevin was in a better frame of mind. Weizmann did his best to impress on him the seriousness of the Yishuv’s growing militancy and the effect it could have on the British if something weren’t done for the refugees. Britain, he told Bevin, could soon find itself pushed out of the Middle East. The granting of 100,000 entry permits, Bevin replied, would hardly solve the political problem. He was so certain of this that he impetuously told Weizmann “he would stake his political career” on its solution.38
On October 10, the Palmach, the elite group of the Haganah military, freed two hundred illegal Jewish immigrants who had been rounded up by British troops and confined to a camp near Haifa. The raid was followed by a half-day general strike that included violent demonstrations. This new use of armed resistance against British Mandate authorities further convinced Bevin and his associates that they were correct to stand firm against any efforts to allow increased immigration. The British government was convinced that, despite Weizmann’s peaceful orientation, the entire Yishuv was now supportive of terrorism. If anything, Bevin’s opposition to the Zionists was hardened rather than moderated.39
The adoption of “guided terrorism” (aimed mostly at physical targets, not people) led to an irretrievable split between Chaim Weizmann in London and the Yishuv leaders in Palestine. The split had first come to a head at the World Zionist Conference held in London that August. Rabbi Silver, Moshe Sneh, the commander in chief of the Haganah, and Ben-Gurion openly called for using forceful resistance to complement diplomacy. Weizmann called this irresponsible talk and offered the delegates his hope that the Labour government would fulfill Britain’s historic promise to the Jews. The delegates honored Weizmann but overwhelmingly rejected his proposed course of action. The subsequent announcement of the Labour government that it would continue the White Paper policy vindicated the militants’ position and isolated Weizmann.40
On the day of the first Palmach raid, two months after the conference, Ben-Gurion wrote to Weizmann, telling him he would not meet with him since Weizmann had only a “fictitious responsibility” as a leader of the movement. Weizmann, quite disturbed, replied curtly that he had received the letter, “and its contents distress me very deeply.”41 Weizmann might have lost his faith in the British government as well as the Yishuv militant leadership, but he was adamant about the necessity to avoid the use of force in the fight to gain a Jewish state. Disassociating himself from the JRM, Weizmann sent a message to the Yishuv, condemning all violence and pleading for restraint. It was to no avail. Weizmann had to acknowledge that the majority favored expanding the military campaigns against the British authorities. His statement marked the end of his leadership of the Jewish Agency.42
In the midst of these problems, Truman was facing a potentially embarrassing development. At his September 26 press conference, he had denied “that President Roosevelt had made any commitment to King Ibn Saud not to support Jewish claims if and when they arise.” Moreover, Truman told the press that “there was no record of any conference between the King of Arabia and President Roosevelt” in which FDR had made any such statement. He added that “he had looked through the records of the foreign conferences very carefully and had found no such commitment” (our emphasis). That meant that a statement made by Abdul Rahman Azzam Bey, the secretary-general of the Arab League—that FDR had shaken hands with Ibn Saud and pledged that the United States would “never support the Zionists’ fight for Palestine against the Arabs”—was incorrect. Truman noted that even if Roosevelt had done that, “he would not feel bound by any such understanding.”43
Truman’s statement distressed the Arab League, and it immediately let State know it. On October 9, Loy Henderson sent Byrnes a memo regarding what he called “urgent problems relating to Palestine.” The ministers of four Arab states were requesting a meeting with Byrnes to discuss what they thought was a firm commitment from the United States that it would not sanction any basic change in Palestine without consulting both Arabs and Jews. King Saud, Henderson reported, had sent President Truman a message indicating that he wished to make public the text of conversations held between himself and FDR after the Yalta Conference. Most problematic was that he also wished to release the text of letters FDR had sent shortly before he died, which gave him assurances regarding American policy.44
Henderson told Byrnes that in his opinion the United States had “no adequate basis for refusing King Ibn Saud’s request to publish President Roosevelt’s letter to him of April 6, 1945.” Truman should immediately choose a date to release it and make sure that this decision was made known to the Saudi Legation at Jidda.45 Clearly, the United States had to preempt any release of the correspondence between FDR and Ibn Saud.
Truman turned to Sam Rosenman for advice on how to handle the issue. After speaking with Byrnes about it, Rosenman told the president that he found it very embarrassing to be at odds with the State Department. Nevertheless, he told Truman that he strongly disagreed with the advice that Byrnes had given him. Truman himself had not taken any position that would have supported FDR’s April 5 letter to Ibn Saud. Truman, Rosenman advised, should take the position that admitting 100,000 Jews to Palestine did not mean there was a “change in the basic situation.” As he interpreted the Ibn Saud–FDR correspondence, Roosevelt had not made any promise beyond saying he would first consult with both Arab and Jewish leaders but “there was no intention on his part that he would have to obtain their consent before he took action.” Thus Rosenman advised Truman to continue to pressure Attlee for the admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine. Next he should call a conference of both Jewish and Arab leaders and formally consult with them, thereby fulfilling FDR’s promise. After that, the judge told Truman, “you can take whatever action you wish.” Finally, Rosenman thought that publication of the FDR–Ibn Saud correspondence should be postponed until mid-November—after the elections—and as for the present, he did “not see why we should publish it ourselves at this time.”46
Truman quickly read Rosenman’s memorandum and phoned him at home to tell him “he thought he agreed with it” but would wait to make a decision after a meeting with him and Press Secretary Charlie Ross the next morning. At the meeting, Rosenman first reiterated the points of his memo, then added that he had told Byrnes he did not think his suggestions “were repudiating what President Roosevelt had said because President Roosevelt had been on both sides of the fence” (our emphasis). It was correct to view FDR’s April 5 letter to Ibn Saud as “very bad and…pro-Arab,” but at other times Roosevelt had stated that he favored Jewish immigration to Palestine and even the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth there. Truman had to take into account that FDR’s letter was written a week before he died, and Rosenman was sure he did not fully understand it.
The president finally decided that he would simply let the Arabs publish the correspondence, which they were going to do anyway.47 Rosenman was disappointed with the timing. Alluding to its political impact, he told Truman that Postmaster General Robert Hannegan had informed him that “the repercussions over it in New York are terrific.”48
The letters exchanged by Roosevelt and Ibn Saud were published on October 19: the monarch’s letter dated March 10 and FDR’s answer of April 5. The Arabs alone, Ibn Saud wrote, “had a natural right to Palestine,” a fact that, he stated, “needs no explanation.” He then proceeded to give the explanation he said was not necessary. Arabs had been in Palestine since 3000 B.C., while the “Jews were merely aliens” who had come there in intervals and been turned out in 2000 B.C. Any historical claim by the Jews was nothing but “a fallacy.” To allow the Jews entry, Saud argued, would be to allow them to enter a land “already occupied” and would then “do away with the original inhabitants,” which would be “an act unparalleled in human history.” The Jews’ ambition was not only to occupy Palestine but to “take hostile action against neighboring Arab countries.” To allow a Jewish state would mean “a deadly blow to the Arabs,” who for generations would “defend themselves…against this aggression.” The Allies, he told FDR, had to “fully realize the rights of the Arabs” and “prevent the Jews from going ahead” in any matter that would threaten all the Arab nations.
Roosevelt had chosen not to deal with or answer any of Ibn Saud’s specific arguments about the Jews, history, Palestine, and the situation of the Arab states. Rather, he had issued a brief reply. He assured Ibn Saud he had given his letter “most careful attention,” and he alluded to their conversation at the Great Bitter Lake, during which he had obtained “so vivid an impression” of his views. It was then, FDR assured him, that he would “take no action…which might prove hostile to the Arab people.” The policy of the United States remained unchanged.49
Accompanying the release was a statement issued by Byrnes reiterating that Roosevelt’s stated policy was that the United States would not adopt any proposals that would change the basic situation in Palestine without “full consideration Jewish and Arab leaders.” President Truman, he said, adhered to this policy. At the same time, Byrnes announced that the United States would “continue to explore every possible means of relieving the situation of the displaced Jews of Europe.”50
The letters shocked the Zionists and the entire Jewish community. The AZEC leaders scheduled a plenary meeting, to be held the night after they were released. Silver’s first reaction was that the letters were being issued under what he called “diplomatic coercion” and could not be viewed as the definition of U.S. policy. The worst aspect of FDR’s words, however, “was his failure to reject the false and slanderous utterances” made by Ibn Saud regarding Jewish history in Palestine. What bothered him about Secretary Byrnes’s statement accompanying the release of the letters was that he gave no indication of the U.S. government’s current position on Palestine. “After all we thought that we had accomplished in securing the commitments of Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Truman…in enlisting pro-Zionist expression on the part of the American people,” he told the other AZEC leaders, “…we now find that everything is brushed aside as though it did not exist.” “We are confronted by a government,” he concluded, “which feels that it has absolutely no obligation towards us.”51
After their meeting, the leaders composed a nine-page memorandum, to be delivered by Silver and Wise on the twenty-third to Secretary Byrnes at a scheduled meeting and sent to the president two days later. U.S. policy was “clear and unmistakable,” they argued, and was in favor of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. Both FDR’s letter and Byrnes’s statement upon its release took no cognizance of the past announced policies whatsoever. It was “deeply disturbing,” they wrote to Byrnes, “that it should not have been found necessary to make affirmatively clear that American policy on Palestine has already been established by the public pronouncements of the Presidents of the United States…a policy predicated upon the right of the Jewish people to rebuild their National Home.” If the real policy was not made clear, they predicted, “serious doubts and misunderstandings” would arise on the part of the American people.52
Most upsetting to them was Roosevelt’s failure to answer Ibn Saud’s “vilifications of the Jewish people.” These slanders, they noted, should not “have been allowed to stand unchallenged by one who knew how false those statements are.” Obviously not counting on Byrnes or the State Department to correct Ibn Saud, they proceeded to answer his arguments in detail. AZEC’s leaders rejected the claim that the Arabs had legal or moral title to sovereignty over Palestine. Though they conceded that the Arabs had conquered it more than 1,300 years before, their rule was intermittent. Palestine was ruled by Christians during the Crusades and conquered by the Turks in 1518. It had remained a neglected backwater of the Ottoman Empire for three hundred years. “In the eroded, poverty-stricken and disease-ridden country which within the last few decades the Jewish people set out to reclaim,” the report continued, “it was difficult to recognize the land of milk and honey described in the Bible. In the twenty years between the two World Wars the Jews have done much to repair the ravages of the previous 1300.”
As to ethnic claims, about 75 percent of the Arabic-speaking people now in Palestine were recent immigrants or the descendents of people who came in “comparatively recent times.” “If Palestine exists as a separate concept,” they concluded, “it is because of its immemorial association with the Jews and Jewish History. At no time was there a Palestine Arab State…. The Pan-Arab claim to Palestine is an attempt to add yet another to the immense, but for the most part thinly populated and underdeveloped territories of the independent Arab states.” They added that while the Jews had “conquered deserts and swamps, revived agriculture and industry and established in Palestine a sturdy, self-reliant community,” the “great mass of the people in the various Arab states are kept down in ignorance and fanaticism, in dirt and wretchedness by a ruling class which shows little or no interest in the improvement of their miserable lot.”
The statement ended with a fact sheet on the history of U.S. policy on Palestine, detailing support for a Jewish commonwealth from presidents, Congress, governors, labor leaders, and educators. To listen to Arab threats, they concluded, would be nothing less than an act of “encouragement to terrorism.” If the United States were firm, the Arab states would accommodate to reality and accept a Jewish state. This was simply another example, they concluded, of “Roosevelt charm without any firm commitment of any kind.”53
The Zionists and their friends might have been justifiably angry, but Felix Frankfurter cautioned them “not to make tactical mistakes which might harm the cause with President Truman.” They must not forget that “he is the man who is to decide what shall be done.”54
The British were growing tired of the American criticism of British policy when it was British soldiers who were trying to keep the peace and who were under attack. Ambassador Halifax put it this way in July:
As it is the United States are in the completely illogical but, for them exceedingly comfortable position that they cannot be ignored in the Palestine problem…and yet they do not have to bear any share of the responsibility. For the Americans to be able thus to criticize and influence without responsibility is the most favourable and agreeable situation for them and, I must suppose, the exact converse for us.55
Now the British press was demanding that if the United States kept up its criticism, it was bound to either help find a solution or keep quiet. Attlee and Bevin decided that the only way to resolve the standoff was to involve the Americans in helping to find a solution. On October 19, the same day the Roosevelt–Ibn Saud letters were made public in the United States, Great Britain came up with a new proposal. It had decided to put aside for the moment its plan to bring the Palestine situation before the United Nations and would instead try to work out a joint Anglo-American solution. Would the United States, the British government asked, like to join it in the creation of a new Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry to study the issue and hopefully bring it to a satisfactory conclusion?