Harry Truman’s decision to recognize the state of Israel just minutes after David Ben-Gurion’s midnight announcement on May 14, 1948, was the culmination of one of the most ambitious and successful lobbying campaigns in political history. It pitted the mostly Jewish member organizations and individuals of the Zionist movement against virtually the entire burgeoning US foreign policy and military establishment. Although Truman had initially been reluctant to support the idea of a Jewish state, once he had decided to do so he saw himself as choosing not only the most politically expedient option, but also the one that might just add his name to a story begun thousands of years earlier in the Bible.
The question of Palestine had not loomed large in the minds of American leaders during World War II. When it did arise, President Roosevelt had genially juggled competing interests with sympathetic-sounding promises without committing himself to them. On February 18, 1945, as Allied troops were closing in on Berlin, FDR met with the Saudi king, Ibn Saud, aboard a US navy cruiser in the Suez Canal. For Roosevelt, it was a pit stop on his way home from Yalta, the Crimean port city where he, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin sought to shape the postwar world. Roosevelt told an aide that he planned to “point out to Ibn Saud what an infinitesimal part of the whole area was occupied by Palestine and that he could not see why a portion of Palestine could not be given to the Jews without harming in any way the interests of the Arabs.” Alas, Ibn Saud informed the president that the Arabs would die “rather than yield their land to the Jews.” He suggested instead that the Germans should pay for what they had done by giving the Jews part of their own country. Roosevelt promised to include both Jews and Arabs in any policy the United States eventually endorsed. In the few weeks before his death on April 12, Roosevelt occupied himself with other matters. But he still found time to send mixed messages, both confirming his support for the Zionists and reassuring the non-Zionist leaders of the American Jewish Committee that he shared their discomfort with the notion of a Jewish state in Palestine.1
Harry Truman did not much concern himself with Palestine before becoming president. He had been a county judge in Jackson County, Missouri, and had owned a haberdashery—which had failed, leaving him with debts—before becoming a US senator. He owed his political career to the father of an army buddy, who happened to be the boss of a Missouri political machine. A popular senator and loyal Democrat, Truman became Roosevelt’s 1944 running mate as an unlikely compromise candidate after the Roosevelt team decided to dump FDR’s increasingly pro-Soviet former vice president Henry Wallace. During the eleven weeks of his vice presidency, Truman met with FDR only twice and never alone. Palestine, as far as we know, never came up in their discussions.
As president, Truman appeared at sea when faced with the need to deal with complex, competing priorities. Unlike Roosevelt, he had no gift for hiding his plans and potential machinations until the proper moment arrived to spring them. Often appearing to change his mind on key questions depending on who happened to be the last person to brief him, Truman gave his inherited team of long-serving Roosevelt aides the impression that he could be cajoled into doing whatever they thought best, however much he might complain along the way. This inspired a constant tug-of-war between his advisers until decisions became impossible to reverse. The buck may have stopped with Truman, as the plaque on his desk said, but it bounced around quite a bit before finally settling down in one place.
Truman also brought his small-town prejudices from Independence, Missouri, to the White House. Writing in his diary, he would call New York City “kike town” and complained about Jews being “very selfish” and always “demanding special treatment” without concern for other victimized groups. He even compared them to Hitler and Stalin “when they get power, physical, financial or political.” Despite his preconceptions, however, Truman formed deep relationships, both personal and professional, with individual Jews. The most famous of these was with Eddie Jacobson, his army buddy and former business partner, and the Zionists would constantly call upon Jacobson to try to convince the president to see things their way. That they ultimately succeeded is a major reason why there is a country called “Israel” today.2
The first postwar attempt to solve the matter of the future of Palestine came in January 1946 with the appointment of an eleven-member joint British-US committee meeting in Washington, DC, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry Regarding the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine. These “problems”—that is, the future of Palestine, given that it was becoming increasingly clear to most observers that Arabs and Jews were not going to be able to share the country peaceably—were considerably exacerbated by the still uncertain fate of an estimated 220,000 Jewish refugees who had survived the Holocaust, and who were now living in miserable conditions in Allied-overseen refugee camps across Europe. The committee recommended allowing 100,000 Jews to immigrate to Palestine immediately. Committee members hoped for the eventual creation of a single binational state. It would be “neither a Jewish state nor an Arab state,” and it would “fully protect and preserve the interests in the Holy Land of Christendom and of the Moslem and Jewish faiths.” In the meantime, however, the country would continue to be governed by the British. The committee deputized a two-man team, a British parliamentarian and a US diplomat, to draft an implementation plan, which became the “Morrison-Grady Plan,” named after its authors, British deputy prime minister Herbert Morrison and US diplomat Henry Grady, and was issued that July.3
Zionists did not much like the Morrison-Grady Plan, but rather than refuse to engage at all, they began a massive lobbying campaign for terms that would lead to the creation of a Jewish state. At one cabinet meeting, Truman showed the assembled a sheaf of telegrams “four inches thick.” Every single one was opposed to the implementation of the report’s recommendations. “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was here on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck?” Truman was heard to complain. But it wasn’t just angry telegram writers that Truman was worrying about. It was Jewish voters located in Democratic urban strongholds across the Northeast and Midwest, as well as Jewish financial contributors on both coasts. Truman would never stop telling people that he thought this had been the best plan for the region, and he was heard to blame “British bullheadedness and the fanaticism of our New York Jews” for undermining it.4
Truman felt that unless the United States and Britain could secure agreement between the Jews and Arabs, “the situation [would be] insoluble,” and the result could be a catastrophic war. His concerns were not unwarranted: even future Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, who since 1935 had chaired the Jewish Agency, the Zionist’s proto-governmental organization in Palestine, appeared to share them. Working under the cover of deepest secrecy, he was willing to delay the realization of the cause to which he had devoted his entire adult life, fearing that although the Jews now made up slightly more than a third of Palestine’s population, they were not yet strong enough to win a war against their potential enemies. Those enemies were not just the Arab inhabitants of Palestine itself but also the five neighboring Arab nations, which had already promised to invade in the event of a declaration of statehood.
Ben-Gurion tried to convince British prime minister Clement Attlee’s lord chancellor, Sir William Jowitt, to retain British troops in Palestine for another five to ten years, and thereby give the Jewish community a chance to strengthen itself before the ultimate battle. But Britain no longer had any interest in remaining in Palestine to enforce such a deal, even in the extremely unlikely case that one could be reached. It had emerged from World War II in dire financial straits and was in the process of drawing down its global obligations, not deepening them. Not only was policing Palestine financially costly, but British soldiers there were under increasingly effective siege from Jewish terrorist militias. In the winter of 1947, Britain announced its planned withdrawal and dumped the problem in the lap of the fledgling United Nations.5
The various institutions of the nascent, usually fractious US national security establishment demonstrated a rare unanimity and consistency when it came to Zionism: they were opposed. As early as 1942, Allen Dulles, who was running the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs at the State Department at the time (and would later become director of the Central Intelligence Agency), had voiced his objections to a merely rhetorical pro-Zionist resolution in Congress. He backed down only after it was clarified that the resolution would commit the United States “to no foreign obligation or entanglement.” Reasons for this opposition shifted with the times. In October 1945, Loy Henderson, in Dulles’s seat as chief of the Bureau of Near Eastern and African Affairs, insisted that US support for Jewish emigration to Palestine “on humanitarian or other grounds” would undermine US interests in the region. He believed it would inevitably cause “resentment… towards the United States” in the Middle East. In articulating his position, he said, “There are four hundred thousand Jews and forty million Arabs. Forty million Arabs are going to push four hundred thousand Jews into the sea. And that’s all there is to it. Oil—that is the side we ought to be on.” Assistant (and future) secretary of state Dean Acheson concurred, telling President Truman that a Zionist victory would “imperil… all Western interests in the Near East.”6
The newly formed CIA powerfully reinforced these views with a report on the likely Arab reaction to US support for the Zionists. With rare and impressive prescience, its authors predicted, among other results of a potential US pro-Zionist policy, that Arab leaders would fear Jewish expansion—that, from the Arab perspective, the Jews would probably seek to “consolidate their position through unlimited immigration” and then “attempt to expand until they become a threat to the newly won independence of each of the other Arab countries.” Operating from these assumptions, those countries could declare war on the new Jewish state and attack Jews living in the Arab nations themselves. A pro-Zionist tilt, furthermore, risked the loss of US oil concessions in those Arab nations; Islamic religious authorities might even issue a call to jihad, urging all Muslims “to fight the invader, regardless of country of origin.” Finally, and perhaps most important to the authors of the CIA’s response, was the fear of “a Soviet attempt to exploit all of the above.”7
In their struggle to build support in the United States, Zionists naturally looked to the folks who were already invested in the cause for a helping hand, especially those American Christians who, thanks to their reading of the Bible, had already bought into the Zionist cause. But instead of the merely rhetorical support they had received from Christians in the past, Jews now began asking for specific commitments on the basis of the idea of restitution. The Holocaust had been perpetrated in an ostensibly Christian nation—with some forty million Protestants and twenty million Catholics, among other Christian denominations, in a 1933 population of about seventy million—and there had not been much protest from either its religious leaders or the Vatican. Zionists therefore argued that Christendom owed the Jews their own country in reparation. As the Zionist firebrand Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver put it, “Our six million dead are a tragic commentary on the state of Christian morality and the responsiveness of Christian conscience.” On this point, if not many others, the more moderate Zionist leader Rabbi Stephen Wise concurred: “My people deserve reparation from a Christian world if there be a Christian world.”8
Prewar Zionist Christian organizations had been mostly front groups boasting illustrious signatures but little genuine substance. Emanuel Neumann, who had worked under Justice Brandeis at the Zionist Organization of America but later became Silver’s top lieutenant, had put together the so-called American Palestine Committee, an organization that was chartered in 1932 but existed largely on letterhead. Ten years later, however, he created the Christian Council on Palestine, which boasted two of America’s leading theologians, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, on its executive committee. Niebuhr, in particular, would prove to be a remarkably dedicated foot-soldier for the cause in multiple arenas simultaneously. As early as May 1933, he was already publishing articles with titles such as “Germany Must Be Told!,” and proposing Palestine as a potential solution to Germany’s Jewish problem. He would continue to speak and write on the topic over the ensuing years. In 1941, now comfortably ensconced at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, and a dedicated Roosevelt-supporting Democrat, Niebuhr founded the magazine Christianity and Crisis. He then used it to advocate for the Zionist cause over the objection of the magazine’s editorial board. Toward the end of World War II, after joining with other prominent Christian leaders to found the American Christian Palestine Committee, he traveled the country lecturing on its behalf.9
Niebuhr’s passion for the Zionist cause inspired him to wait for hours outside the 1946 meeting of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in the hopes of being invited inside. Just before the committee called it a day, they did invite him in, and he was asked to speak in place of his own boss from the Union Theological Seminary, the intensely anti-Zionist Reverend Henry Sloane Coffin, who was mysteriously absent. Niebuhr used the occasion to argue for a position so extreme that barely any Zionists had dared to voice it. About the efficacy of a binational Jewish-Arab commonwealth, Niebuhr called it a likely formula for war and instead suggested, “Perhaps ex-President Hoover’s idea that there should be a large scheme of resettlement in Iraq for the Arabs might be a way out.” Asked if this implied the forcible removal of the Arabs from Palestine, Niebuhr said yes, before adding, with almost comical understatement, “It may not appeal to the Arabs as being immediately just.”10
By raising the possibility of what we now call “transfer,” Niebuhr contradicted the official Zionist position. Ben-Gurion had told the committee, “There will not only be peace between us and Arabs, there will be an alliance between us and Arabs, there will be friendship.” But Ben-Gurion himself knew this to be nonsense. Although Ben-Gurion may once have hoped for a peaceful solution to the problem of a shared Palestine, by the time of these hearings, it was clear from the violent riots of 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936 that the Arab inhabitants would reject such an alliance or possibility of friendship. In those incidents, the Arabs had protested both the British presence and the likelihood of further Jewish immigration. In a 1937 letter to his son, Ben-Gurion had written, “A partial Jewish state is not the end, but only the beginning.… We must expel Arabs and take their places, if necessary… with the force at our disposal.” Although he would often speak sympathetically of the hardships Zionism inflicted on the Palestinians, his position on strengthening and expanding the Jewish community in Palestine never wavered. Back in Washington, Stephen Wise, a movement moderate, privately wrote Niebuhr to thank him for going “beyond where we dared to go, though not beyond where we wished to go.”11
In addition to the position he occupied among Christian clergy, Niebuhr claimed a uniquely influential voice within America’s liberal intelligentsia. The Nation magazine was ground zero for the debate over who were the imperialists and who the anti-imperialists in Palestine. Were the Zionists the good guys as they fought to eject the British, while coincidentally, and regretfully, displacing the local Arab population? Or was it the Arabs themselves, who sought to defend their homes and way of life against the technologically superior, Western-supported colonialists, who were the good guys? Writing at length in the magazine in early 1942, when the full truth of the Final Solution had not yet reached American shores, Niebuhr insisted that because Jews were “the chief victims of Nazi fury,” they needed a “‘homeland’ in which they will not be simply tolerated but which they will possess.” Niebuhr admitted that Zionist leaders were “unrealistic” in pretending that their demands would entail no “injustice” to the Arab population, but he also did not much seem to care. Zionist organizations distributed Niebuhr’s essays far and wide.12
At the dawn of the debate over Jewish statehood, liberals made their choice, and they chose the Zionists. The Nation’s editor-in-chief, Freda Kirchwey, discovered what she called “the miracle of Jewish Palestine”—the Jewish men and women who had emigrated to Palestine to help shape the future of the Zionist state, she said, were “‘free’ in the full moral meaning of the word.” They had resisted imperialist interests driven by “oil and the expectation of war; oil and the fear of Russia; oil and the shortage in America; oil and profits.” Lillie Shultz, director of Nation Associates, a nonprofit organization created to accept tax-deductible donations on behalf of The Nation, accused Ernest Bevin, Britain’s secretary of state for foreign affairs, of enjoying “a little bloodletting—particularly of Jewish blood,” as his nation sought to protect its “oil empire and… to advance the plans of the Anglo-America alliance for containing the Soviet Union.” Kirchwey accused the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who had spent much of World War II in Berlin, of being “responsible in large part for the Nazi program of extermination of the Jews.” There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of The Nation’s editorial support for the Zionists. Yet these beliefs were not the only motivations for its frequent forays into battle on behalf of the cause. Shultz secured secret payments from the Jewish Agency to Nation Associates, made in the names of individuals so as to hide their origin. She would continue to facilitate this sub-rosa financial support after the state’s founding by helping the Israelis to secretly fund and arrange visits of Christian luminaries who were likely to report back favorably on issues of concern, such as Israel’s hardline diplomatic stance vis-à-vis the return of Arab war refugees to what had been their homes in Israel.13
America’s other leading liberal publication, The New Republic, covered Palestine much as The Nation did, though with less intensity. Its early coverage was heavily critical of the British. In December 1946, former vice president Henry Wallace took over as the magazine’s editor before quitting, in July 1948, to run for president as far-left challenger to Truman. While at TNR, he took a tour of Palestine in the winter of 1946–1947 and returned home to announce that “Jewish pioneers” in Palestine were “building a new society” there. Wallace found the Zionists in Palestine ready to teach “new lessons and prov[e] new truths for the benefit of all mankind.” They sought to do this, moreover, not from a “somber spirit of sacrifice,” but with “a spirit of joy, springing from their realization that they are rebuilding their ancient nation.”14
Also reporting from Palestine for The New Republic was the legendary leftist journalist (and former Washington correspondent for The Nation) I. F. Stone. Working for an ever-changing series of left-wing publications, depending on who would pay for him and his travels, as well as whose political lines he crossed one too many times, Stone sought to combine the human drama he was witnessing with his Marxist-infused interpretation of world history. He published a series of moving newspaper columns later collected in the now classic work Underground to Palestine, and later a celebratory book with the photographer Robert Capa titled This Is Israel. Stone traveled on the crowded, barely seaworthy vessels secured by the Zionists to smuggle refugees from Europe to Palestine, eluding British warships on the way. He sought “to provide a picture of their trials and their aspirations in the hope that good people, Jewish and non-Jewish, might be moved to help them.” More than any other contemporary journalist, he succeeded in capturing the desperation of Zionist pioneers as well as their passionate optimism. Stone became enraptured by the “tremendous vitality” of those who just months earlier had been “ragged and homeless” survivors of Nazism, and who were now building Jewish Palestine. “In the desert, on the barren mountains,” and in “once malarial marshes,” he wrote, “the Jews have done and are doing what seemed to reasonable men the impossible. Nowhere in the world have human beings surpassed what the Jewish colonists have accomplished in Palestine, and the consciousness of achievement, the sense of things growing, the exhilarating atmosphere of a great common effort infuses [their daily lives].”15
Stone’s reporting created a sensation. He single-handedly lifted the circulation of the intensely pro-Zionist, left-wing daily newspaper P.M., where he filed a number of these reports, to a brief period of profitability. He cared desperately about the fate of the refugees and thrilled to the fact that as they had been “kicked around as Jews… now they want to live as Jews, to hold their heads up as Jews.” He was proud to call them his “kinsmen” and “brothers,” and said they were an inspiration to “all who prize human courage, devotion, and idealism.” And yet Stone did not ignore the fate of the Palestinian Arabs who had been displaced. He scored the Jews for failing to devote “one-tenth” of the attention to Arab relations that they had to building up the land. He refused an enormous offer of publicity funds for Underground to Palestine because it was conditioned on his willingness to remove the endorsement the book carried of Israeli-Palestinian binationalism. He would spend the next half-century of his career searching in vain for a just solution.16
One of the most intriguing publications to be found anywhere when it came to Palestine (and much else) was Commentary, the extremely ambitious intellectual magazine founded and funded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945. The magazine served multiple purposes. It helped to domesticate and assimilate the socialist sons and daughters of the Lower East Side into the liberal mainstream of American Jewish life, for example, but it simultaneously showcased the brilliance and originality of this first-born generation of American Jewish intellectuals before that same mainstream. This was during a period when established American institutions of higher learning and young Jewish intellectuals approached each other with mutual feelings of mistrust. By providing a prestigious forum for the young Jewish writers and aspiring intellectuals to display their talents, the AJC offered a way for each side to traverse at least some of the distance necessary to bridge this gap. It also helped to create a more inclusive intellectual culture for Jew and gentile alike. For Commentary, the question of Palestine was intimately tied up with the self-identity of American Jews and the image of Jews and Judaism that the Zionists were likely to create in the eyes of American gentiles. As its founding editor and guiding spirit, Elliot E. Cohen, explained in Commentary’s first issue, with millions of the Jews of Europe murdered—“Not killed in battle, not massacred in hot blood, but slaughtered like cattle, subjected to every physical indignity—processed”—it had fallen to American Jews to embrace “a far greater share of the responsibility for carrying forward, in a creative way,” their “common Jewish cultural and spiritual heritage.”17
The young Jewish intellectuals in the magazine’s orbit did not much share in the enthusiasm for the Zionist project, save for a rather distant and casual admiration for Zionist essayist Ahad Ha’am’s notion of Israel as a cultural center for Jews worldwide. The young intellectuals’ distaste for Zionism was not, however, simply a matter of the age-old conflict between Jewish particularism and universalism. It was, at bottom, visceral, as if Zionism represented one more skin of the old world to be shed in the new. “The idea of a Jewish state was abhorrent,” recalled Alfred Kazin decades later. “The world of Jews was what we were trying to escape.” It was surely no coincidence that the young, and then still radical, Norman Podhoretz first came to the attention of Commentary’s editors when, in 1951, he penned a condescendingly hostile letter about the Israelis to his mentor, Lionel Trilling. Following a six-week visit there, he called Israeli Jews “a very unattractive people,” finding them to be “gratuitously surly and boorish” as well as “arrogant” and “anxious, and therefore had little hope “to become a real honest-to-goodness New York of the East,” as if this had been—or ought to be—the Zionist ideal. Trilling passed the letter on to then-editor Elliot Cohen, and Podhoretz was invited into the magazine’s inner circle.18
Commentary’s earliest coverage of the conflict tended toward the views expressed by the far-left Zionist fringe Ihud group, where Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, and Gershom Scholem, among others, could be found. Cohen considered Zionism to be a distraction from his mission of shaping young Jewish minds to simultaneously serve the cause of American Jewry and the cause of American culture itself by proving themselves to be the equals of any of America’s leading intellectual lights. His primary correspondent in Palestine was the Prague-born Robert Weltsch, former editor of the distinguished Jüdische Rundshau (Jewish Review), the best-read Jewish publication in Germany until it was forced to shut down in 1938. A close friend and ally of Chaim Weizmann, he cast an extremely critical eye on the Zionist militants preparing for war and statehood. In New York, the democratic-socialist-minded journalist Sidney Hertzberg—father of Hendrik Hertzberg, the famed liberal editor of both The New Republic and The New Yorker—covered the machinations of Zionist politics with a similarly skeptical eye.
By far the most pessimistic reading of the Zionist future to appear in Commentary, however, was Hannah Arendt’s 1946 essay on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Herzl’s State of the Jews, the pamphlet that had launched the modern Zionist movement in 1896. Arendt, a brilliant German refugee and passionate binationalist, who, after escaping the Holocaust in Germany, had worked for a Zionist organization in Paris before being forced to leave there before the Germans arrived, now compared the Jewish infatuation with Zionism to that of a medieval Jewish community’s disastrous embrace of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi. Paying precious little heed to what was actually taking place between the already-warring Jews and Arabs two years later in May 1948, Arendt’s tone reached a fevered pitch. Just as Ben-Gurion was announcing the creation of the state, she declared the mood of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) to be one in which “terrorism and the growth of totalitarian methods are silently tolerated and secretly applauded.” The likely result would be that “the unique achievements of Zionism in Palestine”—by which she meant collective agricultural farms and other manifestations of its socialist spirit—would be “destroyed.” The new state, Arendt predicted, would be “surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities.” It would therefore “degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta.” The net result would be that “Palestinian Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people.” She called on the United Nations to impose a solution on the two warring sides—a solution, as she proposed it, that would feature “mixed Jewish-Arab municipal and rural councils.”19
More than seventy years after it was written, Arendt’s missive seems sadly divorced from reality. As the scholar Susie Linfield noted in her 2019 study The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, from the moment it was published, none of her demands seemed remotely practical. There were no Arab counterparts to the Jewish binationalists in Magnes’s Ihud group, and there was no interest in the United States or Britain in imposing peace in Palestine by military force. She also failed to address the fundamental problem that made statehood necessary: the need to find a home for the nearly quarter of a million post-Holocaust Jewish refugees who remained stranded in displaced persons (DP) camps in Europe. And yet despite all these flaws, her predictive powers appear no less remarkable: the historical development of the Jewish state, and with it the Zionist project, has proceeded very much along the lines she predicted. Arendt had her flaws, no doubt, as a political pundit, but at the same time, she demonstrated a tragically impressive gift for political prophecy.
Within the more conservative establishment media in Washington, debate over Palestine tended to reflect the prejudices of the national security bureaucracy. Insider columnists Joseph Alsop and Stewart Alsop, who were brothers, warned their readers in February 1948 that Palestine would face a “catastrophe” after the scheduled British departure in May. US officials had two “unthinkable alternatives.” The first was to do nothing. In that event, “at best, the experts anticipate that most of the great economic progress achieved by the Zionists will be destroyed; that the Jews will be driven from eastern Galilee and the Negeb [sic] strip around Tel Aviv.” But the second alternative was no picnic either. It involved sending US troops into Palestine, for “if the blood bath begins, no force will enter Palestine without American (or Russian) troops at its head.” Yet this could not be done, the Alsops claimed, as it would “inflame the entire Arab and Moslem world.”20
The New York Times’ most influential voice on foreign policy matters, reporter and columnist James “Scotty” Reston, argued in favor of what he termed “a non-partisan approach,” which he unfortunately declined to define. Reston did, however, give voice to State Department–style fears that the new Jewish state would be “likely to seek the support of this country for many of its external policies and constantly may attempt to enlist the political support of pro-Zionist organizations here to gain that assistance.” Other groups, such as “pro-British, Italian and Polish organizations,” he said, had made similar efforts. But according to “officials,” Reston wrote, the Zionists were “better organized, financed and located than the others, and must be neutralized by a Democratic-Republican decision to treat Palestine… on a nonpartisan basis.”21
Reston had a point, if not a solution. The League of Arab States, now called the “Arab League,” formed a lobbying group to pursue Arab interests in 1945, but it remained underfunded, understaffed, and overmatched by the Zionists in every way. It was also wracked by infighting both among the leaders of the Arab nations and between those nations and the largely disorganized and politically leaderless Palestinian population at the time. As a result, the most influential anti-Zionist voices outside the US government likely belonged to former US government officials working with—and often funded by—the oil industry. Ex–US intelligence official Kermit Roosevelt—a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and a future CIA officer, who would go on to mastermind a 1953 coup against the democratically elected government of Iran—joined with fellow former spies, State Department officials, and oil business executives to launch the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land in 1948. Writing in the scholarly Middle East Journal, Roosevelt complained that while virtually every American he knew with any diplomatic, educational, missionary, or business experience in the Middle East opposed the Zionists, President Truman was setting the country on a course that was clearly antithetical to its national interests. Why? Zionist pressure had been “exerted systematically and on a large scale.” This was bad news for Jews, Roosevelt warned. There was a “gap between Zionist Jews and those considerable numbers of American Jews who fervently oppose setting their race apart as a national group.” The Zionists risked making Americans “increasingly conscious of the presence of Jews” in their midst and thereby raising “the specter of increased anti-Semitism.”22
American Jews, however, now appeared ready to shed this concern in favor of the chance to make the Zionist dream a reality. According to a November 1945 Roper poll, over 80 percent of American Jews agreed that “a Jewish state in Palestine is a good thing for the Jews and every possible effort should be made to establish Palestine as a Jewish state or commonwealth for those who want to settle there.” Nearly half a million American Jews were now dues-paying members of at least one Zionist organization, and many more contributed funds and passionately shared their views. What was now called the American Zionist Emergency Council—the political arm of the Zionist groups working together to support Israel in the United States, originally created in 1939, but now vastly energized and expanded—was given the means to conduct a lobbying campaign. The size and scope of the organization had no parallel in the history of democratic politics. Despite constant infighting inside the council between supporters of Rabbi Silver and Rabbi Wise—who traded its chairmanship depending on who was up and who was down—its success outpaced not only that of its opponents, but quite possibly of every lobbying organization either before or since.
In 1941, Ben-Gurion had said, “We must storm the American people, the press, the congress—senate and house of representatives, the churches, the union leaders, the intellectuals—and when these will be with us, the government will be with us.” By the end of 1945, forty-one governors and state legislatures had signed letters calling on Truman “to open the doors of Palestine.” Fully twenty-seven speeches on Palestine were heard in the Senate in just one forty-eight-hour period in February 1947, with another thirty-four senators adding statements of support to the Congressional Record. Mailings ran into the many millions: one Connecticut town boasting just 1,500 Jews managed to send 12,000 preprinted pro-Zionist postcards to US officials. That same year, there were mass demonstrations in thirty cities in a single month. Together with the countless other municipalities that sent the same message, these pro-Zionist politicians and voices could be calculated to represent 90 percent of the US population at the time.23
Jews in Palestine were also making their case with great effectiveness. When the British announced that they were definitely ending their mandate and withdrawing their troops, the question of Palestine’s future was left to the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). When the eleven members of the committee visited Palestine, “crowds of Jews turned out to greet them” everywhere they went, according to an internal American Jewish Committee report. Arab leaders, on orders from the grand mufti, refused even to acknowledge the visits. After two weeks of this treatment, the committee gave up all attempts at communication with Palestinian Arabs, and its report reflected this.24
The final plan for the proposed partition of Palestine was drafted by Paul Mohn, Sweden’s deputy representative for UNSCOP. Mohn was the son of a philosemitic Swedish Protestant minister who had taught his son about the trials and tribulations of Jewish history. Mohn loved “the Holy Land” and admired the “Jewish intellect.” He was deeply moved by a visit to the DP camps in Europe and sympathized with the desire of the people he met there to build a Jewish homeland. Mohn had hoped to “enable the Jews and the Arabs to live side by side both as friends in peaceful times and as enemies in times of tension.” As it became obvious that this goal was impossible, however, he found he had no trouble deciding which side to favor.25
Mohn’s partition plan favored the Jewish population in every respect. In 1947, at the time he was drafting the UNSCOP plan, the United Nations calculated the Jewish population of Palestine to be about 608,000, or slightly less than a third of its inhabitants. Under the UN’s plan, however, the Jews were to be accorded 55 percent of the land, including the crucial seaport of Jaffa, with its Arab population of 70,000 as against just 10,000 Jews. Forty percent of Palestine was given to its Arabs, with the remaining 5 percent, which included Jerusalem and parts of the Negev desert, to remain under UN sovereignty until such time as everyone could agree on how it might be divided. What had been Palestine was to be split into seven separate zones—divided between Jews, Arabs, and UN control—with a proposed economic union uniting them. But given its complex structure, together with its dependence on mutual goodwill and a spirit of compromise among the two warring sides, the plan might just as well have depended on a herd of unicorns. A vote in the General Assembly was planned for November 29, 1947, the day the British mandate was to be terminated.26
As both Jews and Arabs in Palestine prepared for war, US national security officials refused to give up on their delusional hope for some sort of agreement that might prevent the Zionists from declaring a Jewish state. Even less sensibly, they continued to look for guidance to those Jewish elements who, sharing this hope, had forfeited all influence within the movement. Foremost among these was Judah Magnes. The rabbi, who was still chancellor of Hebrew University, spoke freely, condemning the Zionist “totalitarianism” that sought to unite the Jewish people “by force and violence.” As late as April 1948, he would travel from Jerusalem to the United States on a State Department–sponsored trip to try to dissuade President Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall from recognizing the Jewish state once it was declared. Magnes went so far as to argue for the implementation of sanctions against the Palestinian Jews in the hopes of somehow avoiding war. Nothing, however, could have been less likely. Not only was the rest of the Yishuv already preparing for the coming Arab invasion, but the British were refusing even to consider extending their mandate—they “cannot,” as the US consul general in Jerusalem telegraphed home, “get out of Palestine too soon.”27
Harry Truman was no Zionist. He thought that nations based on religion and/or ethnic exclusivity belonged to the past. But more than anything he wanted to avoid a war that would either end in the slaughter of more Jews or require the commitment of US troops on the ground in Palestine. Even the most optimistic scenario, the successful creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, was undesirable, because it would forever be a thorn in the side of the United States with regard to its relations with the Arab world. Yet Truman was also deeply moved by the increasingly desperate plight of the hundreds of thousands of stateless Jewish refugees—survivors of Nazi death factories, or those who had emerged from hiding places in attics and the like—who had now been shunted off to squalid, unsanitary DP camps. Truman’s “basic approach,” as he described it in his memoir, “was that the long-range fate of Palestine was the kind of problem we had the U.N. for. For the immediate future, however, some aid was needed for the Jews in Europe to find a place to live in decency.” He hoped to provide such aid, however, without simultaneously granting the Zionist demand for Jewish sovereignty.28
In June 1945, barely sixty days into his presidency, Truman sent Earl Harrison, the former commissioner of immigration and naturalization and then dean of the University of Pennsylvania, to Europe to report on the state of the Jewish refugees there. Harrison found that the Jewish DPs were still living “under guard behind barbed-wire fences… amidst crowded, frequently unsanitary and generally grim conditions, in complete idleness.” He wrote Truman, “As matters now stand we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” His recommendation was a “quick evacuation of all the non-repatriatable Jews in Germany and Austria, who wish it, to Palestine.”29
Truman agreed and forwarded the report, together with his own endorsement, both to the US supreme commander of the allied forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and to British prime minister Clement Attlee (whose Labour Party had just defeated Churchill’s Conservatives in a landslide). He asked that immediate measures be taken to allow 100,000 Jews to immigrate to Palestine. “No other single matter 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,” the president said. Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, was heard to complain that Truman apparently “did not want too many Jews in New York.”30
The conflict between the president’s head and heart would be a consistent theme of his management of the problem of Palestine. Truman’s heartfelt sympathy for the refugees’ plight, together with his admiration for the people of the Old Testament, constantly tugged at his conscience. His political instincts, along with those of his political advisers, also pulled in the direction of the Zionists. His national security team felt otherwise, though, concerned that the conflicts that could arise in a Jewish state would mean problems for the United States in the region in the future, and logically, Truman knew this to be true.
The electoral concerns were real. New York City, where half of America’s Jews already lived, was understood to be crucial to Truman’s hopes for both retaining a Democratic Congress in 1946 and winning the presidential election two years later. Rabbi Silver, a rock-ribbed Republican, was always looming as a potential opposition organizer should Jews grow dissatisfied with Truman’s response to the problem. This concern was exacerbated by the fact that New York’s popular governor, Thomas E. Dewey, looked to be his most likely Republican opponent in the presidential election.
A pattern established itself relatively quickly. When the president found himself with a choice between acceding to the Zionists’ demands or siding with his own national security bureaucracy, he would let loose with a fusillade of complaints about how infuriating the former were being before he ended up siding with them. Bevin recalled Truman saying, just before the 1946 election: “They [the Jews] somehow expect me to fulfill all the prophecies of the prophets. I tell them sometimes that I can no more fulfill all the prophecies of Ezekiel than I can of that other great Jew, Karl Marx.” On, October 4, 1946, as the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur was about to begin, and with the US midterm elections coming up in November (and just after Dewey had demanded that “hundreds of thousands” of Jews be allowed into Palestine), Truman announced US support for the Jewish Agency’s proposal for “a viable Jewish state in control of its own immigration and economic policies in an adequate area of Palestine.” Confusing as it may have been, this process would repeat itself many times over in the lead-up to 1948, the year both of Israel’s founding and of Truman’s first election contest as the Democratic candidate for president.31
Truman’s closest friends and confidants worked hardly less relentlessly on behalf of the Zionists than the Zionists themselves. The president was heard musing, not long before the 1948 election, “I am in a tough spot. The Jews are bringing all kinds of pressure on me to support the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state. On the other hand, the State Department is adamantly opposed to this. I have two Jewish assistants on my staff, David Niles and Max Lowenthal. Whenever I try to talk to them about Palestine, they soon burst into tears.” But these two were hardly the only members of his staff fighting internally for the Zionists. Samuel Rosenman had been a close adviser to FDR and his favorite speechwriter, and Truman viewed him as a valuable voice of reason and experience. Rosenman, who was the first aide to earn the title of “White House counsel,” frequently consulted with Rabbis Wise and Silver. But when Rosenman returned to private practice in February 1946, his replacement, the savvy young gentile attorney Clark Clifford, would turn out to be the key player in the president’s decision-making. Clifford, as it happens, was not particularly interested in Zionism, but he was very much interested in winning elections.32
Clifford’s calculations convinced him that it would be impossible for Democrats to retain the White House without a sweep of the heavily Jewish cities in the Northeast and Midwest. He received a steady stream of memos from Eliahu Epstein (who later Hebraicized his name to the aforementioned “Eliahu Elath”), the influential Washington representative of the Jewish Agency, and turned these over to Max Lowenthal in order to provide more arguments for the president. Lowenthal, born “Mordechai” to Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, had made his way to Harvard Law School and befriended future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter there. That acquaintance had led to an invitation to become a member of the rarefied circle of Justice Brandeis’s political protégés. Lowenthal had advised Truman in the Senate and after Truman became president during the final stages of the war. He now preferred to stay in the shadows and worked out of the comfortable confines of Washington, DC’s, tony Cosmos Club.
Clifford explained in a private memo to the president, on November 19, 1947, as UNSCOP debated the partition, that “today the Jewish bloc is interested primarily in Palestine and somewhat critical of the Truman Administration on the ground.… Unless the Palestine matter is boldly and favorably handled there is bound to be some defection on their part to the alert Dewey.” Truman and Clifford had good reason to be concerned. Not only had Dewey been the state’s governor, but New York City looked to be fertile ground for Henry Wallace, who was challenging Truman from the left on the 1948 Progressive Party ticket. Whenever the administration appeared to deviate from Truman’s stated pro-Zionist position, Wallace would speak of the “gift of a million votes” from their Progressive ranks. Truman needed little convincing on this point. As early as 1945, he explained to four US ambassadors to Arab countries that whatever their objections to a pro-Zionist policy, he had “to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism”: “I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents,” he told them.33
Clifford’s goal was to nail down the support of America’s Jews for Truman’s 1948 election by steering the machinery of US foreign policy toward the swift recognition of the creation of Israel as soon as it was announced. But his task was made significantly more complicated by the fact that Truman had appointed George Marshall as secretary of state in January 1947. With the single exception of General Eisenhower, Marshall—a former US Army chief of staff; US envoy to China in 1945–1947, in charge of negotiations between China and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces; and a future US secretary of defense—had no rivals in stature or public influence. Having appointed him to head up the State Department, Truman had no choice but to defer to him on most foreign policy questions. In September 1947, Marshall instructed the US delegation at the United Nations to do whatever was necessary to prevent the adoption of the UN partition plan, which he feared “would mean very violent Arab reaction” and “precipitate their rapprochement with the Soviet Union.” Stoking the president’s worst fears, he advised Truman that partition would likely force the United States to “put troops into Palestine” in order to avoid an Arab massacre of the Jews. But Marshall’s greatest concern was the possible expansion of Soviet influence in the region. The departure of British troops, combined with the socialist orientation of Israel’s leaders, he thought, might open the door to this scenario.34
The arguments continued to rage in public. Henry Morgenthau Jr., Franklin Roosevelt’s longtime treasury secretary and now head of the United Jewish Appeal, authored a series of articles attacking the State Department for having “suppressed vital information” that might have led to “the liberation of the Jews kept in Hitler’s death camps.” That line of reasoning not only appealed to Truman’s still strong feelings about the plight of the DPs, but also enjoyed the advantage of being true. New York governor Herbert Lehman, Dewey’s successor, who was both a Democrat and a Jew, made the same charge in the New York Times, demanding that the United States at least begin the process of repaying its debt to the Jews victimized by “persecution and hatred and bestiality,” and adding that it could do so by arranging for the immediate immigration of 150,000 refugees to Palestine. The State Department retaliated by leaking its alleged evidence, supplied by the British, that the Yishuv was being run by “hand-picked Communists or fellow travelers” eager to do Moscow’s bidding in the Middle East. This, too, was reported in the New York Times, which had previously warned, in a January 1, 1948, story, that a “Red ‘Fifth Column’ for Palestine [was] Feared” by US and British officials as ships carrying Jewish refugees arrived on its shores. Fortunately for the Zionists, however, this particular concern failed to gain traction with Truman.35
Internally, Clifford relied on Lowenthal and Epstein to draft responses to the apparently never-ending barrage of State Department objections to the UN partition plan; he would then put his own gloss on them and pass them on to Truman. In this manner, he met Marshall’s arguments on their own terms while leaving unspoken the assumption that the outcome of the 1948 election might depend on the president’s decision. He did this by cleverly insisting that he would never even think of ever raising the topic: “One’s judgment in advising as to what is best for America must in no sense be influenced by the election this fall,” he wrote. Partition, he argued, was “the only hope of avoiding military conflict for the United States in the Middle East,” and “the only course of action with respect to Palestine that will strengthen our position vis-à-vis Russia.” His point was that a trusteeship requiring US troops would only serve to alienate both sides and play into Soviet hands. (Silver had more than once intimated that, if necessary, Zionists would fight US troops just as they had fought the British.)36
Borrowing an argument initially made by Hubert Humphrey, who was then the mayor of Minneapolis, with his senatorial career and term as vice president under Lyndon Johnson still in the future, Clifford also insisted that to oppose the UN partition plan would undermine the world body at a time when it desperately needed a show of support. The United Nations, he explained, was “a God-given vehicle through which the United States can build up a community of powers in Western Europe and elsewhere to resist Soviet aggression.” Meanwhile, the president should feel free to ignore threats of an oil embargo, because “the Arab states have no customer for their oil supplies other than the United States.” Perhaps the British might have to worry about offending Muslims, because of their colonial interests, but the United States had no such obligation. Rather, the opposite was true. Why, he asked, wouldn’t the “ridiculous” sight of the United States “trembling before the threats of a few nomadic desert tribes” lead Russia or Yugoslavia to “treat us with anything but contempt in light of our shillyshallying appeasement of the Arabs?”37
Despite these careful calculations, the pull toward partition for Truman was at least as much emotional as it was political. He had received a letter from his old friend Eddie Jacobson, who had first met the future president when he served under Captain Truman during World War I. In his memoirs, Truman would call Jacobson “as fine a man as ever walked.” The experience led to the two men becoming partners in the haberdashery business after the war. Dean Acheson would later observe that what would eventually become Truman’s “deep convictions” regarding the fate of the Jews in Palestine were “in large part implanted by his close friend and former partner” Jacobson, whom a frustrated Acheson described, with considerable exaggeration, as “a passionate Zionist.” Jacobson had, in truth, been uninvolved and largely uninterested in the cause until the Zionists recruited him—but he did prove more than happy to help. He was especially useful to another key member of Clifford’s team, the pro-Zionist FDR holdover David Niles, in reaching the president when Truman felt he could not stand to hear another word on the topic.
The planned November 29, 1947, UN vote on UN General Assembly Resolution 181 approving the partition plan required two-thirds of the member states to pass. On November 25, by the Zionists’ own count, they were one vote short. Arabs and Jews employed every means of pressure at their disposal. Future secretary of state Dean Rusk, who was then in charge of the department’s UN desk, would later call the “pressure and arm-twisting applied by American and Jewish representatives” in various national capitals on behalf of the resolution “hard to describe.” So, too, was the level of world attention: the New York Times ran eighteen stories on the partition the day after the vote, and fully 360 stories in the following seven weeks, averaging roughly seven stories every day. But the vote on November 29 hardly settled matters. Indeed, it hardly settled anything at all. The final tally was 33 in favor, 13 opposed, and 10 abstentions. Both the Arab nations and the State Department continued to try to find ways to undo what had just been done. The Zionists accepted it, though at the same time they were planning to seize whatever opportunity arose to improve the already extremely generous terms accorded them.38
US national security officials detested the UN partition plan and were furious over the results of the vote, to say nothing of their orders from the president to support it. Robert McClintock, director of the State Department’s Office of UN Affairs, privately predicted that if the partition were actually allowed to proceed, “the Jews will come running to the [UN] Security Council with the claim that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside Palestine which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.” The US officials consistently sought to undermine the proposal or alter it in favor of the Arab position. Secretary of State Marshall looked forward to one day seeing the construction of a transnational oil pipeline from the Persian Gulf states to the Mediterranean seaport of Jaffa. He urged Truman to ensure that Jaffa and Safed, two strategic Arab-dominated cities that would have provided a direct line to the sea, remained under Arab control. Zionists strenuously resisted this idea, and their constant pressure had the effect of further infuriating the president, who wanted nothing more than to be done with the issue. Truman particularly detested Rabbi Silver, and not without reason. At a meeting Truman held with Zionist leaders in January 1948, Silver literally banged on the president’s desk. A furious Truman ended the discussion and confided to his diary, “No one, but no one, comes into the office of the President of the United States and shouts at him, or pounds on his desk. If anyone is going to do any shouting or pounding in here, it will be me.” He then issued instructions that he had “had it with those hotheads.” “Don’t ever admit them again,” he told staff, “and what’s more, I also never want to hear the word Palestine mentioned again.”39
The Zionist camp could have saved itself a great deal of effort and infighting if it had understood that Truman wanted to deal with the aging former president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, and only Chaim Weizmann, on the issue. The aged, aristocratic British chemist shared the president’s hatred for Silver, whom he often compared to Hitler; to Truman’s ears, his voice was honey compared to the bombastic Republican rabbi’s vinegar. When Weizmann finally got in to see Truman on March 18, 1948, entering through a side door so as not to be seen by the White House press corps, he excited the president with visions of Truman’s heroic role in history. According to the recollection of Truman’s daughter Bess, Weizmann’s “vivid description of the Jews’ [agricultural achievements in Palestine] ignited the enthusiasm of the ex-senator who had toiled for years to create regional development and flood controls in the Missouri Valley.” Truman then gave the man he so admired his most solemn promise: “You can bank on us.” That same day, the president ordered the State Department to cease its efforts to improve the Arabs’ position in the planned partition.40
Truman may have made up his mind, but his foreign policy team refused to concede this. Advised by the anti-Zionist State Department director of policy planning, George F. Kennan—later credited with authoring the US Cold War strategy of “containment”—together with a battery of Arabist ambassadors and foreign service officers, Secretary Marshall and Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett instructed US ambassador to the United Nations Warren Austin to offer the General Assembly a proposal that would suspend the partition plan and replace it with yet another temporary trusteeship. Although Austin’s February 24, 1948, speech was short on specifics, it was clear that the department intended the British to oversee the trusteeship, ignoring the fact that Britain had no interest whatever in returning to this thankless task.41
What is perhaps most remarkable about the position of the entire US security establishment is the degree to which it was completely out of touch with the reality not only on the ground in Palestine, but also in London and even on Pennsylvania Avenue. Lovett and the State Department’s Loy Henderson from the Bureau of Near Eastern and African Affairs discussed ways to bring “moderate and temperate” individuals to Washington to “break the president’s logjam.” This would have included, for example, the Ihud stalwart Rabbi Judah Magnes from Jerusalem. But it was yet another indication of how distant the State Department’s plans for Palestine were from both Truman’s political calculations and the increasingly chaotic situation in Palestine itself. Magnes had long ago forfeited whatever influence he had among Zionists. Britain was adamant about leaving, and Truman would not even consider replacing its troops with Americans (who, in any case, were unavailable in sufficient numbers, thanks to the nation’s rapid postwar demilitarization).42
Austin’s speech, meanwhile, caused chaos within the UN delegation. Eleanor Roosevelt, the passionately pro-Zionist former First Lady and perhaps the most prominent voice of the Democrats’ still-strong idealistic liberal internationalist wing, threatened to resign her post as the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights if the policy he announced was not reversed. Truman could not immediately reverse the State Department’s own reversal, however, without creating the impression of an administration whose foreign policy was out of the president’s control, though here he failed as well. A New York Times editorial noted that the speech came “as a climax to a series of moves which has seldom been matched for ineptness in the handling of any international issues by an American administration.”43
Truman grew predictably furious when he finally came to pay attention to the speech he had, in fact, approved in advance without apparently understanding it. (He would later claim, as he often did in such situations, that he had been blindsided.) In his diary, he blamed the State Department for “pull[ing] the rug [out]” from under him, reversing his stated policy, and making him out to be “a liar and a double-crosser,” and he vowed privately to get even with those “striped-pants conspirators.” Truman did agree to an off-the-record meeting with Magnes at Marshall’s request. But the president was far more concerned that Chaim Weizmann would now likely think him a “shitass.” Truman told Clifford to fix it. Clifford knew better than to contradict the president’s contention that he had been given no advance knowledge of the speech. What mattered now was Truman’s belief that he had been double-crossed and his desire for revenge.44
With the partition plan now dead in the water, Truman’s day of decision came on May 12, 1948, when he met with Marshall, Lovett, and Clifford to decide whether to recognize the new state of “Israel” when the time came two days later, when David Ben-Gurion was to declare the state into existence. Lovett and Marshall argued against recognition, citing three essential points: it was questionable under international law whether they could offer recognition when there was no actual state to recognize; the president could damage his reputation by making what might appear to be a transparent attempt to win the Jewish vote; and, given US intelligence reports about Soviet infiltration of Jewish communists into Palestine once the British departed, he had to deal with the fear that recognition might enhance Soviet interests in the region.
Clifford responded with a series of arguments designed both to counter these claims and anticipate additional ones. His 1991 memoir notes that as he spoke, General Marshall displayed signs of increasing anger and discomfort, and finally exploded. “Mr. President,” he demanded, “I thought this meeting was called to consider an important and complicated problem in foreign policy. I don’t even know why Clifford is here. He is a domestic adviser, and this is a foreign policy matter.” He accused the young aide of “pressing a political consideration with regard to this issue,” saying, “I don’t think politics should play any part in this.” Truman defended his decision to invite his political adviser, and Clifford continued with his multipronged attack on the national security establishment’s anti-Zionist consensus.45
Clifford noted how impractical its plans for trusteeship had become, given the fact that the Jews and Arabs were already fighting as the mandate drew to a close and the British were already on their way out the door. Regarding the Soviets, the United States had lost an opportunity by allowing them—through their allies, the Czechs—to be the lone weapons supplier to the Zionists, and thereby to confer de facto, if not de jure, recognition to the state. Clifford also played to the president’s sympathies regarding the awful experience of the Jews in recent times, as well as the West’s failure to fulfill Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration in support of the creation of a Jewish state there—one that subsequent US presidents had endorsed. He went on to argue that early recognition was consistent with the president’s policy from the outset, that a Jewish state already existed for all practical purposes, and that a trusteeship—even if one were possible—would postpone the promise of actual statehood indefinitely, letting down and discriminating against the Jews, and encouraging the “Arabs to enlarge the scale of violence.”46
Clifford also tied his argument to the need to support both democracy and the new United Nations. “Where there is not now and never has been any tradition of democratic government” in the Middle East, he explained, “it is important for the long-range security of our country, and indeed the world, that a nation committed to the democratic system be established there, one on which we can rely. The new Jewish state can be such a place. We should strengthen it in its infancy by prompt recognition.” For his pièce de résistance, Clifford appealed to Truman’s love of the Israelites of the Old Testament, rather than the ones who were presently making his life miserable. Quoting Deuteronomy 1:8, he recited, “Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which the Lord swore unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give unto them and to their seed after them.”47
Sensing that Truman had been mightily impressed by Clifford’s arguments, and unaware of the president’s promise to Weizmann, Marshall grew ever angrier. He announced that “if the President were to follow Mr. Clifford’s advice, and if in the elections I were to vote, I would vote against the President.” This retort understandably angered Truman, but it also boxed him in. He could not order Marshall around the way he routinely did everyone else who worked for him. So, he caved. “I understand your position, General, and I’m inclined to side with you in this matter.”48
But Marshall had said he would vote against Truman; he had not said he would resign or even criticize the president in public. And when Truman finally reversed himself yet again and defied his advice, Marshall’s resistance simply evaporated. On May 14, Clifford and Lovett labored for a deal on behalf of their respective bosses in time to respond when Ben-Gurion made his announcement declaring the creation of the state of Israel. Zionists had argued at the United Nations that the Jewish Agency, headed by Ben-Gurion, was about to become the only operational governmental authority once the British departed. Clifford used this fact to argue that US “recognition” of the state of Israel was merely the “recognition” of reality. What’s more, given Britain’s departure, the state of Israel would become the only legally constituted body in Palestine able to secure order. By the end of the day, Clifford had received Lovett’s word that the secretary would not publicly speak out against Truman’s decision. He was, after all, the president, General Marshall likely reasoned, and had a right not only to choose his own policies but also to expect the loyalty of those below him once he had done so.49
Truman signed the letter of recognition shortly after 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, giving de facto recognition to the new state and its government. In his prepared statement, which had been written even before the name of the state was announced, he crossed out the words “the Jewish State” and wrote “Israel.” He inserted the word “provisional” before the word “government.” After Rusk notified Warren Austen, who was still heading the American team at the United Nations, the defeated diplomat got into his limo and left the premises without even bothering to inform his delegation of the president’s decision. They heard about it with the rest of the world, on the radio.
What ultimately determined Truman’s decision? He was obviously worried about its political implications, which, thanks to the Zionist lobbying and propaganda campaigns, pointed in a single direction. He also cared deeply about the feelings and opinions of his old friend Eddie Jacobson, as well as Chaim Weizmann and his present and former aides David Niles, Max Lowenthal, and Sam Rosenman. He admired George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and others, too, but for them, the emotional pull was lacking. Truman was not immune to the flattery of the Zionist leaders, and he may have believed he was playing a role in a new chapter extending biblical history, a history he took seriously.
Finally, if Truman had one consistent concern as he ricocheted between the competing sides in this debate, it was for the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were sitting in DP camps, desperate to go either to America or to Palestine. America was out of the question. And to Truman, so was letting them rot in the camps while Britain, the Arab nations, and the US State and Defense Departments tried to ignore their plight. He was deeply moved by their desperate situation and remained consistent in believing they should be allowed to emigrate to Palestine. Had Britain or the Arab nations allowed their entry into Palestine, they might eventually have lost control of the country to the Jews, but there would have been no need to declare a state, and no need to fight a war over it. And yes, predictions of a possible massacre could not be ruled out. But if Ben-Gurion and the Jews were willing to risk it, then so, dammit, was Harry S. Truman.