As soon as the Anglo-American Committee finished writing up its recommendations, the interested parties dissected its implications and tried to figure out how to respond. Most British politicians thought the entire report, particularly the committee’s recommendation for the immediate immigration of the 100,000 Jewish DPs into Palestine, was a sell-out to the Americans. Harry Truman, on the other hand, was encouraged that the report called for an end to the White Paper and the quick transfer of the 100,000 DPs. He thought the committee had made significant progress.
Meeting in Paris, Jewish Agency members David Horowitz, David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Shertok (Sharett), Berl Locker, Nahum Goldmann, and Arthur Lourie poured over the report. The most hostile reaction came from the Jewish Agency leader, David Ben-Gurion. The Anglo-American Committee’s report, he declared, was nothing but “a disguised new edition of the White Paper, though more cleverly compiled.” The report was framed to evade any decision on issues which the committee members disagreed. It only had one “saving grace,” the demand for immediate immigration of the 100,000 DPs. Several of the others, however, saw the report as a “springboard for renewed political activity.” Outright rejection could be dangerous, they argued, allowing the British to maintain the status quo, alienate American and British public opinion, and do nothing to help the refugees. They decided not to take a position on it.1
Predicting Ben-Gurion’s hostile response, James McDonald rushed to head it off. In a hand-delivered note, McDonald told Ben-Gurion that whether or not the report was able to make a constructive contribution would depend upon the reception it got. He was certain that portions of the report would seem to both the Zionist leaders and the Arabs to be unwarranted and unjust, but he hoped that they would be able to utilize the opportunities recommended in the report and then “strain every effort to translate them into reality.” To do that would require heroic efforts in Palestine, in Europe, and in America. Therefore, he pleaded that Ben-Gurion “take the lead in saying that ideolalogical [sic] considerations must, for the next few months at least, take a secondary place.” Heated controversy, he warned, would only have an unfortunate effect on the U.S. government.2
Ben-Gurion was not impressed with McDonald’s argument. If anything, it infuriated him. “Crum and McDonald,” he wrote in his diary, “think they have achieved a brilliant triumph and done an historical service to the Jewish people! Now Crum demands the price—expression of thanks to Truman.”3 In a telegram he sent the same day to the American Zionists, Ben-Gurion argued that the committee was proposing a “British colonial-military state, which was no longer to be a homeland for the Jewish people, and which would never become a Jewish State.” He urged American Zionists to tell Truman not to endorse its conclusions.4
At the end of April, McDonald and Crum met with Silver and tried to convince him not to publicly criticize the report. Would Silver really want to turn Truman away from the Zionist cause? they asked. If not, they suggested a compromise: Why not urge Truman to endorse immediate action on the 100,000 DPs and postpone a decision on the rest of the report? Silver reluctantly agreed. Crum then proposed his suggestion to Truman. The president, eager to have neither Silver nor the Zionist movement oppose him, magnanimously allowed Silver and Neumann to draft the statement he would make to the public announcing the committee’s conclusions. The president wanted two points included: a sentence ensuring the protection of the holy sites and something about the Arabs’ rights. Silver wrote a handwritten draft, and the administration and the AZEC council changed some of the text the next day.5
When the committee’s report came out on May 1, Truman made his statement public:
I am very happy that the request which I made for the admission of 100,000 Jews into Palestine has been unanimously endorsed by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. The transport of these unfortunate people should now be accomplished with the greatest dispatch. The protection and safeguarding of the Holy places in Palestine sacred to Moslem, Christian and Jew is adequately provided in the report. One of the significant features in the report is that it aims to insure complete protection to the Arab population of Palestine by guaranteeing their civil and religious rights, and by recommending measures for the constant improvement in their cultural, educational and economic position.
I am also pleased that the Committee recommends in effect the abrogation of the White Paper of 1939 including existing restrictions on immigration and land acquisition to permit the further development of the Jewish National Home. It is also gratifying that the report envisages the carrying out of large scale economic development projects in Palestine which would facilitate further immigration and be of use to the entire population.
In addition to these immediate objectives the report deals with many other questions of long range political policies and questions of international law which require careful study and which I will take under advisement.6
Truman’s announcement had an immediate impact. The president’s statement, the journalist James Reston wrote, was more important than the entire Anglo-American Committee Report. The committee “merely had the power of recommendation,” observed Reston, “while the President’s comment is regarded as a statement of United States policy.”7 Loy Henderson understood this and informed British Ambassador Lord Halifax that he deeply regretted the president’s statement; that the State Department had done all it could to prevent the president from issuing it; and that up to the last minute it had put all possible pressure on the White House not to do it. Henderson confided that there were forces in the White House that the State Department was not able to control.8
Bevin wasn’t comforted by this explanation. He was tired of hearing one thing from the State Department and an altogether different one from the White House. He had sent Truman a message asking that no action be taken on the report prior to the British and American governments’ having a chance to consult. But the president had not even given him a “courtesy consultation.” Bevin’s friend and first biographer, Francis Williams, wrote that reading Truman’s statement “threw Bevin into one of the blackest rages I ever saw him in.” He immediately prepared to dash off a letter venting his anger about British soldiers being killed by those he called “illegal Jewish terrorists.”9
Bevin thought his request was quite reasonable. A few days before Truman made his statement, he had met with Secretary Byrnes in Paris and had let him know the British government would be prepared to permit immigration of the 100,000 DPs if they did not all go to Palestine. What worried Bevin most, he told Byrnes, was that the Jews were acquiring a great deal of arms, “most of them with money furnished by American Jews and are in a very aggressive frame of mind.” Jewish immigrants, he said, were in fact being picked out by the Jewish Agency for their potential as soldiers. Britain’s four divisions in Palestine were not sufficient to deal with any new population explosion, unless the United States shared in the responsibility, which meant sending American soldiers to Palestine.10
Bevin’s sour mood was also due to the failure of a gamble he had made. He had agreed to the creation of the Anglo-American Committee because he assumed that if he picked reasonable men, who were neutral on the subject, they would end up recommending the policy he and the British government favored. The White Paper, in Bevin’s view, had to stand until such time as the United Nations worked out a substitute. He had also assumed that they would come to the same conclusion as he had: that Palestine was not the answer to the plight of the Jewish refugees. They should instead be sent back to their original European homes and be assimilated. He had compounded his mistake by proclaiming that if the report were unanimous, he would do his best to implement it. But perhaps the most reckless statement he had uttered was that he would stake his political career on finding a solution to the Palestine problem.
On April 30, while Truman issued his positive statement about the committee’s report, Clement Attlee gave his own report to a meeting of the prime ministers of the Commonwealth (Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa). On the bright side, he told the ministers, the report did give Britain a “new opportunity for enlisting American cooperation.” But unfortunately, he thought, the recommendation that Palestine would be neither Jewish nor Arab would be unacceptable to both groups. Most important, Attlee said, the Jewish armed forces, which he continually called “illegal,” had been tolerated far too long. Their suppression was necessary and essential before 100,000 more immigrants would be allowed to enter the country. The bad news was that it left everything in Palestine to be carried out and financed entirely by Britain, the mandatory power. It was not right, Attlee complained, that Britain should carry the whole burden of disposing of the displaced persons. “It was high time,” he said, “that the Americans should share some of the cost, both in money and in armed forces.”11
The next day Attlee appeared before the House of Commons and elaborated on his position. The report, he said, contained long-term commitments the British were not prepared to make. He denied that 100,000 DPs could be sent to Palestine quickly and that Palestine would be able to absorb them. Second, he announced that unless the Jewish “illegal armies maintained in Palestine” were disbanded and their arms confiscated, the British government would not allow any large body of immigrants into Palestine.
The reaction of the British was ironic, given that they had been responsible for the training and organizing of the Haganah in 1941, when a German invasion of Syria and Egypt had seemed imminent. When 27,000 Jews who had volunteered to fight Hitler with the British army returned to Palestine, they remained with the military and were integrated into the Haganah. The British military authorities had then created what they called the Jewish Home Guard, which the Haganah soldiers joined. The unit included sections trained in sabotage and guerrilla warfare, to be used in case of German occupation.12 As Richard Crossman commented when he heard Attlee’s speech, “Everyone in Palestine knew that the disarming of the Haganah would involve full-scale military operations against the Jews” by the British and would “precipitate the crisis which it had been the purpose of the report to prevent.”13
Outraged, Bartley Crum told the press that the committee had specifically demanded the admission of the 100,000 refugees without any conditions. “It would be indecent and inhuman,” Crum insisted, “to try to trade their lives upon condition that the Jews of Palestine surrendered their arms.” Frank Buxton recalled that Judge Hutcheson had quoted to them from the U.S. Constitution’s clause that gave the people the right to bear arms. If Clement Attlee actually did not know how impossible it would be to disarm the Haganah, he added, he was “an incredibly stupid man.”14 The Haganah, Buxton said, was more like the American revolutionary army, “a rabble in arms in the fine sense.” It had to be distinguished from a regular armed force equipped with aircraft, tanks, trucks, and lines of communication.15
Most important was the president’s reaction. The British were quite mistaken, Truman said, if they thought that the Americans would assist them in disarming the Jewish forces in Palestine.16
American Zionists finally decided that it would be a much better tactic to support Truman than to attack him for the report’s recommendations. Lauding the president’s “statesmanlike and humane spirit,” the AZEC leaders sent him a letter, signed by Rabbis Silver and Wise, Eliahu Epstein (Elath), and other top Zionist leaders. The demand for immediate certificates for the 100,000 Jewish DPs gave them “complete satisfaction,” they told Truman, and they pledged to cooperate with the administration in working for its implementation. In both Jerusalem and the United States they put themselves at Truman’s disposal to help execute the immigration in any way they could.17 Silver and Wise then called on AZEC’s local committees to mobilize by making appointments with their senators and congressmen and sending the president letters and telegrams urging him to move forward with immigration plans immediately.18
As expected, the Arabs denounced the committee’s report and the State Department bore the brunt of their anger. Loy Henderson met the foreign ministers of five Arab countries: Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Speaking for the group, Egypt’s minister, Mahmoud Hassan, reiterated their understanding that the United States could not change policy without first consulting the Arab nations. The admission of 100,000 Jewish immigrants would in their eyes be such a basic change. It was their hope that given the hostile Arab reaction to the report, the United States would announce that it was not bound by the committee’s recommendations.19
In Jerusalem, the Arab Higher Committee called for a strike. Jamal Husseini pledged that Arabs would fight implementation of the report. He announced the possibility that their exiled leader, the Grand Mufti, would come to Syria and take charge, an event that, he threatened, might produce an Arab uprising.20 The Mufti, called the “Archvillain of the Mideast” by Newsweek magazine, had been living under house arrest in Paris. However, because of world pressure, it was expected that he would be extradited and handed over to the British and then prosecuted for war crimes. Then, on June 19, after dyeing his hair and shaving his beard, he had managed to smuggle himself out of his residence and gained asylum in Cairo, Egypt, under the protection of King Farouk.
Mohammad Haj Amin al-Husseini had been appointed Mufti in 1922 by Britain’s first high commissioner of Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel. Ironically, Samuel was Jewish and had given the authority to one of the most anti-Semitic Arab leaders. By giving him this honor, the British had hoped to channel el-Husseini’s opposition to the Balfour Declaration and Jewish settlement (which included inciting deadly riots) into more moderate behavior. Husseini quietly built his power base in Palestine, becoming president of the Supreme Muslim Council and controlling much of Arab Palestine’s civil and public life through patronage.
Husseini had been in contact with the Germans since 1936. Angered by the influx of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler, the Mufti and his followers carried out their attacks not only against the Jews but against the British and Arabs who didn’t agree with them. Forced to flee Palestine, he eventually ended up in Berlin, where he argued for the destruction of the Jewish national home by encouraging Hitler and his staff to extend its European policy of extermination to Jews living in the Middle East. The mufti, The Nation magazine editorialized, was “as much a war criminal as any Nazi still on trial at Nuremberg.” In exile in Germany during the war, the editors pointed out, the mufti had supervised propaganda, espionage, and the organization of Moslem military units in the Middle East to oppose the Allied forces.21 Speaking on Berlin radio in 1944, the mufti said, “Arabs, rise as one and…Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.” In his memoirs, he further explained that “Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every Jew from Palestine and the Arab world.”22 Until the war’s end, Husseini worked to recruit Muslim volunteers, mainly from Bosnia, for the Nazi armed forces.
In Europe, J. H. Hilldring, the State Department’s assistant secretary who was responsible for the DP camps, eyed Britain’s response to the Anglo-American Committee Report from yet another perspective. Unlike his colleagues in the department, Hilldring was more sympathetic to the Zionists. He was anxious to close down the camps, which were very expensive to maintain, and to see the refugees on their way to a better life. Hilldring told Acting Secretary Dean Acheson that the British were obviously stalling on the Anglo-American Committee’s recommendation for authorization of 100,000 immigration visas to Palestine. To deal with Attlee’s obstinacy, he suggested that the United States exert pressure on the British government. The president, he thought, should make an urgent statement demanding implementation, and the United States should formally take the responsibility for moving the refugees to Palestine from Europe. The expense would be great but a lot less than maintaining the Jewish DPs in the German and Austrian camps for yet another year.23
Could Attlee’s and Truman’s positions be reconciled? Their divergent responses to the committee’s report now hung in the air. Loy Henderson pondered what the government’s next move should be. On May 3, he drafted a proposal and sent it to Acheson, writing in the margin, “We are of course playing with dynamite.” Acheson was aware of how delicate the situation was. With Byrnes in Paris, the assistant secretary found himself increasingly embroiled in the Palestine issue. Acheson adopted Henderson’s proposal and prepared a draft for the president to be used as an answer to Clement Attlee.24
Truman worked on the letter, consulted with his advisers, and, on the eighth, wrote Attlee confirming that he thought the committee report was a sound basis for proceeding. He suggested that the British and Americans take two weeks to solicit Jewish and Arab responses to the report and its recommendations, after which the United States would consult with the British government and decide whether the report as a whole was suitable as a basis for Palestine policy. He stressed the urgency of acting quickly, so that they could proceed with arranging the movement of the 100,000 Jewish DPs.25
The British thought they would have a hard time coming up with a policy statement in that short a time frame. They were in the midst of difficult negotiations with the Egyptians on a new treaty that included the withdrawal of their forces from Egypt and asked Truman if he could delay action on the 100,000 DPs until May 20. By that time they would know whether they needed to formally request U.S. military assistance. Truman, not wanting to alienate the United States’ wartime ally, concurred.26
Bevin then presented Truman with a memo including ten points he wanted him to consider. To fulfill the committee’s recommendation, Bevin argued, would require the kind of funds and military resources that Britain could simply not handle. He wanted to know what the Americans were willing to contribute before the British government could make any decisions and asked for suppression of the Haganah and Jewish Resistance and for a guarantee of £60 million to £70 million sent by the United States in the next few years to help in administering Palestine.27
In the meantime, Prime Minister Attlee agreed with Truman’s suggestion to consult both Arab and Jewish interests before deciding how to act on the report. Attlee now informed Truman that they needed expert officials to study what military and financial obligations both powers would have to take to implement the report. He requested a month for Britain to respond formally to the committee’s recommendations.28 Truman replied that he would give Attlee the time requested and told him that the United States would itself organize an appropriate group of government officials.
Toward the end of May, Attlee finally sent Truman an updated version of his original ten points of discussion. Truman was stunned to find that Attlee had now expanded Bevin’s ten points to more than forty-three new subjects that the experts were expected to discuss.29 Truman had been warned that the British might use this opportunity for delay and obfuscation, and he was experiencing it.30 The president was growing impatient. On June 5, he wrote to Attlee that although it would take considerable time to find satisfactory answers to all of the questions Attlee raised, he wanted to “begin immediately consideration of the question of the 100,000 Jews whose situation continues to cause great concern.”
Realizing that he had to respond to the British demands for U.S. help in dealing with the situation, Truman told Attlee what he had been waiting to hear. “I can assure you now,” he told the prime minister, “that we shall take responsibility for transporting these persons as far as Palestine and shall lend necessary assistance in the matter of their temporary housing. We shall be glad to consider also providing certain longer term assistance for them.” Furthermore, because of the urgency of the problem, the president wanted to initiate discussions between the United States and Britain “on the physical problems directly connected with their transfer as soon as possible.”31
Unfortunately, the president’s offer did not have the result he desired. On June 10, Attlee turned him down on any quick action for the refugees. Her Majesty’s government, he wrote to Truman, would “not feel able to determine their policy on any one of the Committee’s recommendations until they have examined the results of the official consultations on the Report at a whole.” He added that they would also have to consider the political and military consequences of giving visas to the 100,000 before they could act.32
The following day, Truman announced that he was creating a new cabinet committee that would have the authority to negotiate with the British over Palestine. It was to be staffed by individuals chosen by the president, who would be surrogates for members of the president’s cabinet. The group would be headed, the president informed the public, by Henry F. Grady, who had been an assistant secretary of state. Its job was to work out an arrangement that would implement the recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee. It was not meant to carry out any investigations of its own.33
If the British were becoming more unpopular in America, Ernest Bevin made things much worse when he addressed the annual Labour Party conference in Bournemouth, England, on June 12. The prime minister started off well, making the point that foreign policy was the concern no longer just of statesmen but of all people living in a democracy. Turning to Palestine, Bevin explained why he thought so much pressure was coming out of New York City for admission of the 100,000: “There has been agitation in the United States, and particularly in New York, for 100,000 Jews to be put into Palestine. I hope I will not be misunderstood in America if I say that this was proposed with the purest of motives. They did not want too many Jews in New York” (our emphasis).34
If Bevin had not uttered these words, his speech might have gone over as a simple reiteration of British policy and a reasoned argument as to why he differed with Truman and the Anglo-American Committee Report. The press, of course, focused on those very words, which then provided red meat for a rally that took place only a few hours later at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Speaker after speaker denounced Bevin before the crowd of 1,200 for being not only an anti-Semite but “a traitor to the cause of liberalism and labor.” Bartley Crum led the assault. He tore up his speech and demanded that the Mandate be taken away from Britain and given to the United Nations. He called for the immediate withdrawal of British troops from Palestine and called on the Senate to review the pending U.S. loan to Britain. Rabbi Silver called Bevin’s statement “a coarse bit of anti-Semitic vulgarity reminiscent of the Nazis at their worst” and told the crowd, “We Jews have had enough. We want a national home for our people.” Rabbi Wise publicly told Truman, “it is you who are being insulted” by Britain’s refusal to open Palestine’s gates.
More troubling for the British, their new ambassador to the United States, Lord Inverchapel, reported, was the participation of Senator Edwin C. Johnson, a Colorado Democrat. His presence suggested that public opinion throughout the United States might be against the British proposals. Johnson too had given a militant speech, Inverchapel wrote, telling the crowd that the British view that more troops had to be sent to Palestine was nothing but an attempt by Britain to continue its “nefarious and shameful policies.” Johnson had not been identified with the Zionist cause, and, noted Inverchapel, his own constituency “is not believed to contain any appreciable Jewish population.” Yet he had “surprisingly strong feelings against the British position in Palestine.”35 Apparently Inverchapel was unaware that Johnson was a member of the pro-Zionist American Christian Palestine Committee.
The attack on the British loan, which had been raised at the rally, was a loaded issue. The Truman administration, while sympathetic to the Jewish groups’ demands, believed it was crucial for postwar relations with Britain and the rebuilding of the West to proceed with the loan. Niles rushed off a memo to Truman’s press secretary, Charlie Ross. If the press asked the president what he thought of Bevin’s remarks, Niles advised, the president should respond that he simply stood by his previous insistence that the 100,000 refugees be admitted to Palestine. As for the demands that the loan be reevaluated, Niles suggested that Truman say that the fact that Bevin was not moral did mean the United States had to be immoral. What Truman had to convey was that he would not let anything move him from seeking “to serve the humanitarian needs of the world, whether it is to help Jews or any other needy people.”36
The White House also knew that moderate Zionists, such as Stephen Wise, stood with the president and agreed that Britain should get the loan. Wise had written Niles that he thought the White House should “counteract the Silver mischief” and explained that he did not want to harm the interests of either the Americans or the British, just to “spite a man however nasty his speech and lamentable his conduct against Zionism.”37
Inverchapel told the Bevin that his unfavorable reference about the United States not wanting any more Jews in New York was causing an uproar. His speech was being used to tell the American public that the British government had already made up its mind not to admit the 100,000 refugees and did not ever intend to carry out the recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee. Moreover, since Truman was so closely identified with the committee and the cause of the 100,000 Jews, it was “being argued in anti-Administration circles that you have made the President look foolish.” On the positive side, Bevin was not to worry about the loan. Inverchapel had learned that morning that the loan had already successfully gone through a House committee, which had sent it to the floor of the House with a vote of 20 to 5.38
The American Zionist leaders, making good on their offer of help to make the transfer of the 100,000 Jews a reality, wrote a lengthy letter to the president under the rubric of the Jewish Agency executive. The letter dealt solely with the technical and financial problems of arranging for the immigration and settlement of 100,000 Jews in Palestine. The Agency had for many years worked on the machinery for selecting, receiving, and settling immigrants, and an additional 100,000 arriving at once would not result in any great problems. Fifty percent of them would be suited to immediate gainful employment, they emphasized, in agriculture, manufacturing, and construction. Temporary public assistance would be necessary and would cost in the vicinity of $40 million. Transportation from Europe, which the United States had agreed to sponsor, would cost around $10 million. Training, medical care, and the like would cost around $20 million, and clothing, furniture, and household utensils would add on an additional $12 million to $15 million. Housing materials would come to $40 million. Twenty-five thousand refugees would be orphaned children, and the total cost for them for a five-year period would come to $60 million. The Agency noted that the cost should rightfully be assumed by Germany as reparations, but it would proceed with the DPs’ settlement even if such funds were never allocated. Its only hope was that Truman would give its requests “sympathetic consideration.”39 Truman received the letter and quickly passed it on to David Niles, with whom he asked to discuss the issues raised.40 He appreciated the Agency’s factual and concrete suggestions.
Truman was trying to find some way around the obstacles the British were throwing up and asked Byrnes to give Attlee the message that although he understood that the British wanted to consider the entire report before reaching a decision on the 100,000 DPs, couldn’t they move ahead by ironing out the technical details of how the transfer would proceed? Then when the time came, everything would be in place. To accomplish that goal, Truman told Attlee, he had appointed Averell Harriman, now the U.S. ambassador in London, to initiate discussions with British representatives to deal with the technical issues of the transfer.41
These meetings took place as requested by Truman, but Attlee was hardly satisfied. He now requested that a representative of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff come over to London to hear the views of the British Chiefs of Staff “on overall Middle East strategic questions as they related to Palestine.” Byrnes moved quickly to put a damper on any expectation of American military help. He informed Attlee that “any military discussions between the British and US on the specific subject of Palestine are most undesirable at this time and that nothing should be done now which might be construed as indicating a US interest in the possibility of US military involvement in Palestine.”42
Attlee had, from his perspective, good reason to desire that the United States send its troops to aid British work in Palestine. Terrorist activity by the Zionist cadre had been increasing in Palestine, and the Irgun had managed to kidnap six British officers. “Drastic action,” Attlee told Truman, “can no longer be postponed.” The office of the British high commissioner for Palestine was now resolved to break up illegal organizations, which, to its eyes, included the Haganah. It was planning to raid the offices of the Jewish Agency shortly and search for incriminating documents that would identify the actual terrorists. Anyone implicated, including Haganah forces, would be arrested and headquarters of illegal groups occupied. “Open defiance” was no longer to be allowed, and establishing law and order would come first. It was the “recent outrages by the Jews” that forced it to act.43
The tough British response to Jewish terrorism led Truman to fear that the United States might end up in the position of being forced to lend military assistance to the British in Palestine. He had requested that Acheson confer with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare a report on this question, which was delivered to the president on June 21. The Joint Chiefs were clear and concise in their recommendation: “We urge that no U.S. armed forces be involved in carrying out the Committee’s recommendations…. the guiding principle be that no action should be taken which will cause repercussions in Palestine which are beyond the capabilities of British troops to control.” U.S. troops were already overextended elsewhere. That, however, was not their main concern. Though in theory U.S. troops might help to pacify Palestine, the Joint Chiefs pointed out, “the political shock attending the reappearance of U.S. armed forces in the Middle East would unnecessarily risk such serious disturbances throughout the area as to dwarf any local Palestine difficulties.”
Should U.S. troops enter the area, their report continued, both American and British interests would find their role curtailed, which might result in the Soviet Union replacing them in influence and power throughout the Middle East. This would be the equivalent of a Soviet military conquest and would affect the control of Middle Eastern oil and America’s standard of living as well as its military strength, which was based on oil. The Middle East had the largest undeveloped reserve of oil in the world, they informed the president, and they feared that the world might come to the limits of its oil resources within one generation. If the United States took part in a trusteeship of Palestine, as the British suggested, it would only lead to military involvement. For all of the above reasons, the key to U.S. policy had to be to keep the Middle East oriented toward the Western powers.44
The continual British stalling and the consequent inability of the Truman administration to make progress on the president’s promises inflamed both the Jewish community and a wider public that was sympathetic to the plight of the refugees. It was hard for them to believe that the United States could not exert enough pressure on the British to achieve what they thought was a relatively modest goal. Representative Emanuel Celler wanted to take the entire New York congressional delegation, including Democrats and Republicans, to the White House to discuss the refugee crisis. Truman, who was growing weary of this seemingly insoluble problem, was doing everything possible to avoid having another such meeting. Celler had spoken to David Niles but had not received an answer from him or the president. New York’s congressional delegation, Niles told Truman’s secretary, Matt Connelly, “were becoming impatient” and were about to tell the press that the president would not see them.45 Niles spoke to Truman about the request, but Truman still wouldn’t budge.
Celler again wrote to Connelly, to let him know that he was quite surprised to hear that Connelly could not arrange for a New York congressional delegation to meet the president. He warned that if it got out, it would give political ammunition to upstate New York Republicans before a crucial election. “It is bad politics for the President not to meet with them—even if it is on the Palestine question.” If he did not hear back, the congressman threatened, he would take it that “the jig is up” and inform the other members of congress.46
Truman finally gave in. But when the delegation entered his office, they found an annoyed Truman shuffling papers on his desk as Celler began to read their joint statement. He had scarcely read four sentences, Celler recalled, when Truman stopped him. “His voice and face were cold as he said, in effect, that he was tired of delegations visiting him for the benefit of the Poles, of the Italians, of the Greeks. I remember his saying, ‘Doesn’t anyone want something for the Americans?’”47
The Zionists tried to find other ways of reaching Truman. The president, however, continued to avoid scheduling meetings on the subject. He felt he was doing all he could and was tired and angry at the constant pressure. He took to referring to Silver and Wise as “extreme Zionists” and Celler and the New York politicians as the “pressure boys.”
But now a request was made by his friend and former business partner, Eddie Jacobson. Jacobson, the sixth child of Eastern European immigrants, was born in New York City in 1891. When he was two years old, the family moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, and then, around 1905, to Kansas City, Missouri. There, Jacobson ended his schooling after the eighth grade and went to work to help support his family. Jacobson and Truman first met when Jacobson, who was a fourteen-year-old stock boy in a Kansas City clothing store, would take the store’s deposits to the Union National Bank, where the twenty-one-year-old Truman worked.48
The two lost touch after Truman returned to work on his family’s farm in Grandview, Missouri. They met up again in 1917, when Jacobson enlisted as a private in the 2nd Field Artillery of the Missouri National Guard two months after the outbreak of World War I. Truman was first lieutenant of the battery to which Jacobson was assigned. Their regiment was then mustered into the U.S. Army as the 129th Field Artillery. While they were waiting for their overseas travel orders at Camp Doniphan, Oklahoma, Truman asked Jacobson to help him set up a canteen. They collected two dollars from each of the 1,100 men in the camp, which they paid back within six months, generating a $15,000 dividend. The canteen’s success was duly noted by Truman’s superiors and helped his career in the military.49 Admiring what he thought was special Jewish business acumen, Truman wrote home to his girlfriend, Bess Wallace, “I have a Jew in charge of the canteen by the name of Jacobson and he is a crackerjack.”50 Teaming up with Jacobson gave Truman a taste of what it meant to be Jewish. Some of the other officers began teasing him, calling him “Trumanheimer” and a “lucky Jew.” Truman answered, “I guess I should be very proud of my Jewish ability.”51
The two men were separated in France, when Truman was assigned to Battery D and promoted to captain. Returning at war’s end, Truman and Jacobson both faced an uncertain future. The one commitment they shared was to their sweethearts, Bess Wallace and Bluma Rosenbaum, whom they would marry in 1919. Truman claimed that it was love at first sight when the six-year-old Truman walked into Sunday school and saw the “little blue-eyed golden haired” five-year-old. Bess Wallace was from the top tier of Independence, Missouri, society, while Truman came from a family of farmers and horse traders. As far as the established Wallace family was concerned, the Truman family was below their station in the social scale. Yet by the time Harry and Bess were in their mid-twenties, the tenacious Truman finally won Bess’s hand.
Truman was not just marrying Bess. When she was eighteen, Bess’s adored and handsome father, David Wallace, having problems with alcohol and mounting debt, shot himself. His wife, Madge Gates Wallace, fell apart, never fully recovering. Bess took on the role of parent to her three brothers and a “semi-parent” to her mother. Whoever married Bess Wallace, wrote Truman’s daughter, Margaret, would have had to be prepared to spend a “great deal of time with Madge Gates Wallace.” The average man, she thought, would never have had the courage to take this on because her grandmother regarded all of Bess’s suitors as thieves “trying to steal her only daughter, the consolation of her tragic life.” She especially thought Harry Truman was unworthy of her daughter.52
After their wedding, Bess and Harry moved into Madge Wallace’s house. Truman tried hard to get along with his difficult mother-in-law. He accepted her rules, since she was both owner and matriarch of the home. Truman’s relatives, one of his biographers points out, rarely set foot in the Wallace household.53 Neither did Truman’s Army buddies. Mrs. Wallace’s rules included that Jews would not be welcome in her home. Truman obeyed that rule, but outside the house, he was free to do as he pleased. Truman spent many evenings having dinner and playing cards at Jacobson’s house and went on fishing and hunting trips with Jacobson and other Army buddies, where he was the cook.54
During the war, Truman’s canteen with Jacobson had been such a “profitable experience on limited capital,” they decided to team up once again in a business venture. Jacobson suggested a haberdashery.55 By that time, the twenty-eight-year-old Jacobson had had twelve years of experience in the business. The two pooled their savings and opened Truman & Jacobson’s Gents’ Furnishings in downtown Kansas City. Truman did the bookkeeping and Jacobson the buying. According to Eddie’s wife, Bluma, the partners never signed any agreements but relied on their trust in one another, a trust that lasted a lifetime.56 The business flourished at first, enthusiastically supported by their war buddies, for whom it became a gathering place. But despite their long hours and hard work, the postwar depression of 1921 forced them out of business in a year. Overnight their stock became worth almost nothing. Truman went on to become a judge of the Jackson County Court and Jacobson a traveling salesman.57
Eddie Jacobson was not a Zionist, but, like many Jews, the Holocaust made him acutely concerned for “my suffering people across the seas.” He had rejected his parents’ Orthodox Judaism, and he and his wife, Bluma, joined a Reform congregation, B’nai Jehudah, where he faithfully attended services every Friday evening. During the war, his congregation, led by Rabbi Samuel Mayerberg, actively supported the rescuing of European Jews from Hitler and getting them admitted to Palestine. Like many Reform rabbis in those years, however, Mayerberg opposed the creation of a Jewish state.58
Shortly after FDR died and Truman became president, Jacobson opened another store in Kansas City, called Westport Menswear. Now he was suddenly famous. Soon people began calling on the obscure Jacobson. They hoped that he would be willing to use his connection with the president to help them gain office or receive support for various projects. Jacobson declined. He was very protective of his friend, didn’t want to be used, and let it be known that he would not ask the president for any personal favors for himself or anyone else.
Jacobson was also approached by Zionists seeking access to Truman. Among the first was Dr. Israel Goldstein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America, who was in Kansas City in May to give a report to the Jewish community on the recent U.N. proceedings in San Francisco. Jacobson turned him down as well. In truth, Jacobson was not particularly well versed in the situation of the refugees or Zionism. But this would change. Jacobson was invited to a meeting at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Peiser, where he was introduced to the Reform Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld. The thirty-three-year-old rabbi was the director of the committee on Unity for Palestine, an arm of the Zionist Organization of America. His job, according to his son, was to “stump from one major Jewish community to the next converting anti-Zionists and winning over those who had yet to commit themselves.”59 The rabbi had several intense meetings with Jacobson, to whom he presented the Zionist case. Jacobson was so impressed with his arguments that he agreed to take the rabbi with him to see Truman.60
Jacobson’s education was also aided by his friend and attorney, A. J. Granoff. Granoff was heavily involved in Jewish affairs and had joined the Jewish fraternal organization B’nai B’rith in 1924, eventually becoming president of the Kansas City Lodge and the president of District Grand Lodge No. 2.61 He met Jacobson in the mid-1930s, when their children attended the same Sunday school at B’nai Jehudah. Their relationship developed further when Jacobson opened his store and Granoff did his legal work. Granoff never sent him a bill, but Jacobson insisted on paying him with merchandise from his store: suits, shirts, and socks.62 Later, B’nai B’rith’s international president, Frank Goldman, and secretary, Maurice Bisgyer, arranged to meet Jacobson through Granoff.63 This connection would later prove to be invaluable to the Zionist cause.
A year passed before Jacobson made good on his offer to Lelyveld. On June 26, 1946, Jacobson and Lelyveld met with Truman at the White House. Jacobson also brought Charles Kaplan, the vice president of the Shirtcraft Corporation of New York. As Jacobson, Lelyveld, and Kaplan left the White House, Jacobson, speaking for the group, told the press that they had “wanted to clear up several things” with Truman regarding Palestine. Looking at his two colleagues, he joked, “Kaplan sells shirts, I sell furnishings, and the Rabbi sells notions.”64 Despite Jacobson’s quip, the meeting was important. Truman spoke to them at length about his views on the Palestine issue. Lelyveld reported to Rabbi Silver that Truman had told them he thought he knew all there was to know about Palestine and wanted to deal only with the operational level, avoiding “long-term objectives as being beset with too many difficulties and complexities.”
Nevertheless, Lelyveld came out with “encouraging impressions.” Truman seemed committed to action on the 100,000 DPs and had instructed Grady to move on it. Again, Truman said that after the first wave arrived, they would think about the next 100,000. On the discouraging side, the rabbi was concerned that Truman was too impressed by the threats coming from the Arab League. He seemed to be repeating what he had been told by State, that Arab guerrilla warfare could interfere with access to the oil supply lines. Moreover, Truman was upset that both Silver and Wise focused solely on Zionism and seemed not to be concerned with the larger issue of world peace and Soviet expansionism. Truman, they learned, had seen Dr. Judah Magnes and considered him to be “the finest Hebrew” he had met. Magnes, of course, advocated a binational state.
Finally, Truman told them, he did not regard Bevin’s outburst at Bournemouth as an insult to him or to America. Bevin, Truman said, had understandably “blown up” because he knew that he himself was “often tempted ‘to blow up’ because of the pressure and the agitation from New York.”65 Truman had had his own outbursts due to his frustration with the seemingly unsolvable problem of the refugees and Palestine and the pressure on him to find a satisfactory solution. As much as he blamed all the parties involved, often his chief target was the “extreme Zionists.” After one such outburst, his aide George Elsey said he knew “it certainly was not an accurate expression of his real feelings, but it was in character. Whenever he felt unduly pressed, he would let off steam verbally or on paper and then return to normal.”66
After Attlee’s May 1 speech and Bevin’s statement, Jews in Palestine were devastated. Their hopes had been raised when the Anglo-American Committee had recommended the immediate transfer of the 100,000 to Palestine. Bevin had said he would implement a unanimous report, but now it was clear that he hadn’t meant it. The British were making acceptance of the committee’s recommendations contingent on a condition that the Jewish Agency could never accept, the dissolution of the Haganah. On June 19, the Haganah reacted. It blew up eight bridges on the Palestine frontier, paralyzing communications with neighboring territories. At the same time, the Irgun kidnapped five British officers and held them hostage.67 The purpose of the action was to show the Arabs that if they went to war, they would have to fight a disciplined, effective, modern armed force, capable of taking on even Britain’s battle-tested troops. “The Jews,” a reporter commented, “are no longer the clay pigeons they had been in ’36.”68
“It is an undisguised fact,” an anonymous reporter wrote, “that Britain is on the verge of an Anglo-Jewish war. Palestine is a British armed camp. Arab and British sentiment was completely against the Palestinian Jews, while the Jewish sentiment for moderation was evaporating, and the moderate Jews who used to back up Weizmann are diminishing” and moving over to the militant leadership of Ben-Gurion. Though the majority condemned the Irgun and Stern gang, he thought it significant that the Haganah, not the terrorist wing of the movement, had blown up the Jordan bridges.69
The Jewish Agency economist David Horowitz returned from England to Palestine “filled with a sense of disappointment, pessimism, dread, and an irksome foreboding of the storm to erupt.” He brought back with him substantiated reports of impending British attacks that were scheduled against the Jewish Agency, the Haganah, and in effect the entire Yishuv. He told the Agency leaders that British plans included mass arrests, forced disarming of the Haganah, and detention of Agency executive committee members. The operations could even, he thought, put the entire Yishuv “in danger of collapse.” Golda Meyerson (later Meir) told Horowitz they already knew about it. Haganah intelligence had gotten hold of secret British plans, which indicated that British troops planned to move with “one massive and lasting blow.”70 The diplomatic records confirm the reasons for their fear: Attlee had cabled Truman that the British were going to take drastic action in Palestine, necessary because of increasing Jewish terrorism.71
By now Palestine had become virtually an armed camp, a military zone of occupation run by the British armed forces. Writing in The Nation magazine, the liberal, pro-Zionist editor of the weekly, Freda Kirchwey, reported that Palestine’s population was living under “massive rolls of barbed wire.” The British Mandate authorities had instituted massive censorship. Political prisoners were held in camps protected by more barbed wire. In effect, Kirchwey wrote, “Palestine is an occupied country from end to end. The Jews and Arabs alike live under military rule while civilian officials take shelter behind sandbags and armed guards…. Press censorship is complete…. Arrests are frequently made under similar emergency decrees.” Military and police forces were so concentrated that she regularly witnessed “convoys of British tanks and trucks moving along the roads holding up civilian traffic.” Public barracks were really forts, “concrete structures formidable in size and solidity.” In addition, Arab troops from the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force were being used to police towns and highways, which infuriated Palestine’s Jews and was “calculated to provoke Jewish resentment.”72
A few days after Kirchwey wrote her article, all hell broke loose. On the morning of the twenty-ninth (afterwards referred to by the Jews of Palestine as the Black Sabbath), Horowitz awoke to the sound of explosions and gunfire on Tel Aviv’s streets. He and all the other residents of the city turned on their radios and heard an announcement repeated in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The British high commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, announced major military operations against the Yishuv, the Jewish Agency, and the Haganah. Buildings were occupied, including the Jewish Agency headquarters. Jewish settlements were searched for arms, and some, such as the largest one, Yigour, were destroyed. Tel Aviv became a military center occupied by British troops, who marched up and down the streets, sometimes firing rifles into the air to keep the population indoors. Phoning friends, Horowitz learned that two thousand people, including the major Jewish leaders in Palestine, had been arrested. They had made one exception: Chaim Weizmann had been left unharmed in his Rehovoth home. David Ben-Gurion, who was in Paris that day, also avoided arrest and detention.73
To make sure Weizmann understood that the British were serious, Cunningham phoned him at Rehovoth. The underground had to cease all military actions against the British, he told him, or “we will destroy Haifa.” Referring to the mass rallies in America, he chided Weizmann, “Who do you think will stop them—Madison Square Gardens, mass meetings…. Thousands of people are killed daily in China, Calcutta, etc., and does the world get very much excited about it?”
Attlee defended his actions by arguing that the Anglo-American Committee had recommended that the Jewish Agency help curb the terrorist organizations in Palestine and that it had failed to do so. Even so, the British had carried out their raids and arrests with a minimum of force, killing only three Jews and injuring only thirteen. Moreover, Attlee said, the raids had already uncovered arms, ammunition, and explosives belonging to the Jewish Resistance.74
Moderates like Weizmann and Goldmann knew that there would be reprisals for terrorist activities and that it had been reckless to give the British an excuse for such actions. Two days before the arrests, Goldmann had phoned Ben-Gurion, urging him to have the Jewish Agency take its own action against Zionist extremists and terrorists, particularly the Irgun and Stern Gang.75
The British raid on the Yishuv and the arrests of the Jewish Agency leaders produced outrage in the ranks of America’s Jews. Rabbis Silver and Wise called the British force “nothing less than an act of war against the Jewish people.” Its very purpose was not to stop terrorism, they charged, but “to liquidate the Jewish national home.” Significantly, they did not believe that President Truman had been warned in advance about the raids, a position that only exemplified their naiveté about how U.S.-British relations worked. They found it incredible that the Truman administration “would be accessory to this vicious and tyrannical act.”76
At the White House, the president received Rabbis Wise and Silver, Goldmann, and the Zionist leader Louis Lipsky. They asked him to intervene and told him they feared the British were out to “destroy generations of labor and achievement of the Jewish pioneers.” The group was surprised that the British had carried the arrests out while in the process of negotiating with the United States over the issue of the 100,000 DPs. They told Truman about the arrest of Jewish leaders, the destruction of Yagour, and the herding of Jewish males into detention camps. According to Goldman, Truman prevented the situation from getting any worse by phoning Attlee. He “talked very bluntly” to the prime minister, who then, without consulting the British colonial secretary or the cabinet, gave orders for the army to cease its military action in Palestine.77
After Silver and the rest of the group had left, Abe Feinberg came in to see him. Apparently Truman felt that Rabbi Silver’s behavior towards him had been especially disrespectful. Feinberg found the president “red in the face.” Was anything wrong? Feinberg asked him. Truman answered, “Yes, damn it, the presidency is something to be respected, and that clown had the nerve to shake his finger in front of me…. I told him he’d never be welcome here again”78
Nevertheless, Truman issued the following official White House statement:
The President expressed his regrets at these developments in Palestine. He informed the representatives of the Jewish Agency that the Government of the United States had not been consulted on these measures prior to their adoption by the British Government. He expressed his hope that the leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine would soon be released and that the situation would soon return to normal.79
Truman was dissembling more than lying. He had told the Zionist representatives that he had not been consulted and they and the public took his statement to mean that the British had acted without his prior knowledge. But Truman had not said that he had not known in advance that the British were about to do something. In fact, Attlee had told him on July 1 that they intended to take some action. Truman had sent a note back the next day “regretting that drastic action is considered necessary by the mandatory government,” and expressing his “hope that law and order will be maintained.”80
It was against this backdrop that the president’s cabinet committee, headed by Henry F. Grady, would make its way to London. This new committee was charged with the challenging task of reconciling American and British differences and negotiating an agreement on implementing the Anglo-American Committee’s recommendations. Grady had asked Professor Paul Hanna, a Middle East expert sympathetic to Zionism, to be part of the mission. Emanuel Neumann was worried and expressed his concerns to Hanna. “Once more,” Neumann wrote to Hanna, “there are new men with almost no background on the question, and from what I hear, not too sympathetic. I understand they want to consider the recommendations ‘in the light of American policy in the Near East.’ What that policy is, God only knows.” The State Department did not see things differently from the British Colonial Office, he observed, and if no action occurred, there would be mass suicides in the DP camps while statesmen “kept on deliberating, investigating, studying and deliberating over all again.”81