5. A Truce and Trusteeship for Palestine

On April 1, 1948, the United Nations Security Council, by a unanimous vote at its 277th meeting and “in the exercise of its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security,” adopted Resolution 43 calling upon the Arab and Jewish armed groups in Palestine to cease acts of violence immediately. Requesting that the Arab Higher Committee and the Jewish Agency for Palestine make representatives available to the Security Council (SC) for the purpose of arranging a truce, it emphasized “the heavy responsibility” which would fall upon any party failing to observe such a truce. The Council also adopted by nine affirmative votes and two abstentions (the Soviet Union and Ukraine) resolution number forty-four requesting Secretary General Trygve Lie, in accordance with Article 20 of the UN Charter, to convoke a General Assembly (GA) special session starting April 16 to consider further the question of Palestine’s future government.1

The two resolutions, proposed the previous day by American head delegate Warren Austin, had their genesis in the retreat of the US State and War Departments from the GA majority vote on November 29, 1947 (Resolution 181-II) to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state at the end of the British mandate. Fearing the danger of Communist infiltration into the Near East and jeopardizing US oil needs by alienating the six governments comprising the Arab League, G-2 Army Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and State’s Near Eastern and African Affairs division and Policy Planning Staff had all concluded (as had their counterparts in London) that partition could not be implemented. In their judgment, an alternative solution had to be found. Secretary of State George C. Marshall received from President Harry S. Truman on March 8, the same day that Truman announced his decision to run for the presidency in November, approval “for use and if necessary” of State’s draft for a projected Austin speech calling for a Palestine trusteeship if a GA special session found conciliation unsuccessful. Austin exploded the political bombshell when addressing the Council on March 19. A shocked Truman, having given World Zionist Organization (WZO) president Dr. Chaim Weizmann in their secret meeting on the 18th in the White House an understanding that he would work for the establishment of a Jewish State, confined his deepest feelings to a diary entry: “I am now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I’ve never felt so in my life.”

While sending adviser Samuel Rosenman to tell Weizmann that “there was not and would not be any change in the long policy he and I had talked about.” Truman issued a public statement on March 25 explaining his stand. Repeating Austin’s point that trusteeship had been put forward because partition could not be carried out by peaceful means at the present time, he emphasized that trusteeship was not proposed as a substitute for partition, but as an effort to fill the vacuum soon to be created by the mandate’s termination on May 15. An immediate truce had to be reached between the two contesting communities in Palestine “if we are to avert tragedy,” and the United States was prepared to take its share of responsibility if the UN agreed to its proposal. Open warfare was “just over the horizon” otherwise, his declaration ended, and the country’s regard for the UN, for the peace of the world, “and for our own self-interest” did “not permit us to do less.”

At a press conference the same day, Truman remarked that his past position favoring large-scale Jewish immigration into Palestine had not changed, but he believed that the first thing to do was to restore peace in the country and arrange a settlement that would halt the bloodshed. He also hoped that trusteeship would produce the kind of peaceful settlement that would result in there not being any need for the proclamation of “the Jewish Government.” The US policy, the president concluded, was to back up a UN trusteeship by all possible means, but that did not necessarily mean sending American troops to Palestine.2

One hour later, Marshall publicly reiterated State’s search for peace in Palestine through a trusteeship, but avoided discussion on the military force needed for its implementation. He tried to persuade Jewish Agency representatives Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) and Eliyahu Epstein (later Elath) of State’s sincere designs, but they thought the truce would not solve “anything basic,” and displayed considerable doubt that the trusteeship would help the situation. Responding to what he considered Russian delegate Andrei Gromyko’s “irresponsible” charge at the Council on March 30 that Austin’s statements were preparing the ground to “bury” the partition plan which the USSR continued to support, Undersecretary of State Robert A. Lovett felt it “most desirable” to get the maximum number of Council votes possible and obtain the United Kingdom’s support for the US proposal calling for a special GA session.

Shertok’s impassioned plea to the Council on the afternoon of April 1 that it was not yet too late to implement the GA’s partition recommendation, and that the US truce proposal gave the false impression that both sides were at fault while 7,500 armed Arabs had invaded Palestine and Arab states were voting appropriations to supply arms and men for the Palestine conflict, fell on deaf ears. In reply, Egypt’s Mahmoud Bey Fawzi emphatically denied participation of the Arab states in the Palestine struggle, and declared that the Arabs would oppose any truce meant to keep the peace by armed force during the partition of the country.3

Pablo de Azcárate y Flores thought the American stance totally removed from the Palestine reality. Leading a six-man advance team of the UN Palestine Commission that had been created at the time of the November 1947 partition vote to transfer the present British administration to the new regimes at the end of the mandate, he quickly concluded that partition appeared “the most reasonable formula.” The former Spanish Republic Ambassador to the Court of St. James and a longtime senior member of the League of Nations secretariat, this experienced diplomat had already written in mid-March to Ralph Bunche, primary advisor to the 1947 UN Special Committee to Palestine (UNSCOP) and now principal secretary to the Commission, that the Arabs could not “destroy or get rid” of the present Jewish population of 600,000; an Arab state containing the yishuv (Palestinian Jewish community) as a “minority” was “simply unworkable.” Indeed, the boundaries between the “real war zones” of the two warring native peoples showed that partition was being carried out in fact and “making progress every day.” The Jews, in particular, Azcárate added, were prepared to take over a great number of public services without any difficulty whatsoever. The Commission’s military expert on the advance team, Colonial Roscher Lund of Norway, concurred, even advising that Shertok suggest to the Security Council that the Scandinavian force of 10,000 men at present in Germany under British command should be utilized for the task of policing Jerusalem.4

Talk of trusteeship, Azcárate informed the Commission and Bunche that month, just when the two contenders in Palestine were already fighting and ready to engage in open war as soon as the mandate ended, sounded “at least unreal.” Partition was an on-going fact, the Arabs and the Jews controlling their own respective zones while “killing and destroying each other.” The only practical possibility of avoiding this war, in his opinion, would be for Washington and London to pressure the Arab states to accept partition and halt arms deliveries to their kin in Palestine, and to prevent all possible acts of aggression or provocation of the Jewish armed forces against the Arabs. Personal experiences in the Spanish Civil War dominating his whole thinking, Azcárate told Jewish Agency liaison Walter Eytan, he was “desperately eager” to save Palestine from the suffering which Spain had undergone a decade earlier. An international administrative nucleus in Jerusalem, he thought, could be “a sort of common platform” for eventually covering parts, or even all, of the country.⁵

This turn of events drove Lie into a sense of hopelessness. He had already told Austin that the American delegation’s insistence that partition had to be implemented by peaceful means was impossible, and if it were not enforced, “the UN would go downhill rapidly to nothing.” Stunned at the US reversal with Austin’s speech of March 19, he had reminded the Council at the time that UNSCOP had discussed the question of trusteeship for Palestine and dropped the idea once concluding that both Arabs and Jews would oppose it, thus requiring larger UN forces to enforce a settlement. Skeptical at Austin’s assurance, in response to his question that day, that the Americans were “of course” ready to back up any UN decision, and now witness to scheduling a GA special session (thus suspending the Palestine Commission’s efforts to implement partition), he sought—unsuccessfully—to persuade Austin that they both should resign in protest; Gromyko expressed to Lie his hope and that of his government that the dramatic step would not be taken. Like Azcárate and Lund, Lie personally believed that no truce would be achieved in Palestine, but that increased fighting would again erupt there.

The secretary general’s pessimism was conveyed by Byron Price, his administrative assistant, to Marshall on April 3. Both Security Council officials felt strongly that Washington’s activities concerning the Palestine question were “seriously threatening” the life of the United Nations. Three days later, Shertok cabled Agency Executive colleague Goldie Myerson (later Golda Meir) in Jerusalem about Lie’s impressions of the situation within the meetings of the Nine-Power Council: “confusion, absence of leadership.”6

Shertok, leading the Jewish Agency’s case at the United Nations, could not evade great pressure at this point. As a first response on April 1, he took a seat at the Council gathering to declare that, counter to its resolution to have all political and military activities suspended during the truce by both parties to the dispute and to set up a trusteeship, the Jews of Palestine would not relinquish creating a state: “We have passed, in fact, the threshold of statehood. We refuse to be thrown back.” Nor would they halt obtaining necessary weapons for their defense against open Arab aggression, he averred. Yet the same day, he received a letter from Alfonso López, the current Council president, who cited resolution 43 requesting that Shertok make representatives available to the Council as soon as possible towards arranging a truce in Palestine. Five months earlier, López, Colombia’s former delegate for the GA vote on partition, had pressed Bogotá for a “no” and received permission to “abstain.” Contacted on November 28, 1947, by the British and some Arab leaders, he had proposed postponing a final decision for a couple of months; US head delegate Herschel V. Johnson had to nudge Austin to vote “no” to this sudden move. On the decisive morning of November 29, López had tried again to advance the Arab agenda with the support of the Chilean delegate, but the latter changed his mind and refrained from doing so.

More recently, on February 24, 1948, López had offered a resolution to the Council for appointing a committee of its members to see if an agreement between the Jewish Agency and the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) could be reached, as well as to consider a GA special session for the purpose of “reconsidering” the Assembly’s partition resolution “as a whole or in part.” He also recommended that the United Kingdom postpone its termination of the mandate to July 15, 1948, and, accordingly, its arrangements for the evacuation of its troops from Palestine. This had forced Austin that same day to introduce an initial US draft resolution at the earliest moment which hinted at the American delegation’s imminent reversal, reaffirming as it did support for Resolution 181 (II), but also asking the Council’s five permanent members to look “at once” into the question of possible threats to peace arising out of the Palestine question, and to call on all governments to take all possible action to prevent or reduce “the disorders” now occurring there. López’s consistent bias did not augur well for his impartial chairing of the Council’s new talks on a truce for Palestine.7

The UN Palestine Commission resolved to continue its work, including the selection of Provisional Councils of Government. For Panama member Eduardo Morgan, no difficulty existed regarding the creation of such a council in the Jewish state, and he thought that the Security Council should take action against “the aggressor” Arab groups resorting to force against the UN resolution. Azcárate recommended to Bunche on April 1 that a truce, beginning with Jerusalem, be sought between the Jewish Agency and the Arab League, not the AHC; that the present administrative structure of Palestine in which de facto partition had been to a considerable extent carried out be respected and maintained; and that Jewish immigration be limited during the truce negotiations to the Jews interned by His Majesty’s Government (HMG) in Cyprus. The Commission’s legal expert on the advance team, Constantin A. Stavropoulos, thought that trusteeship was an “entirely unreal solution,” telling Eytan that it was being put forward simply to gain time, because America “had got itself so tied up in knots” on the Palestine question and simply did not know what to do next. He regarded partition and the “virtual independence” of the Jews in Palestine as “unalterable facts,” and thought that the yishuv would be well advised to increase its manpower and economic strength within the framework of trusteeship as long as it lasts, “as in the end the issue was sure to be settled by fighting.” Palestine is in a “state of chaos,” the Commission announced, with only a two weeks’ wheat supply on hand on May 15.⁸

Responding to Shertok’s request for an official reply to López’s letter of April 1 about representation on the truce talks, three days later the Jewish Agency executive in Jerusalem welcomed the Council’s efforts to produce a cessation of hostilities in Palestine and to prevent a continuation of bloodshed in the future. Noting that the yishuv had to defend itself against the Arabs’ launching a series of attacks ever since the GA partition vote, it charged the mandatory for having failed to preserve law and order. HMG had not stemmed the invasion of Palestine by organized guerilla bands from neighboring Arab countries, had continued providing weapons to the Arab states, and had “suffered these foreign invaders” to establish themselves in military camps in Palestine, from where they disrupted communications in various parts of the country and besieged the Old City of Jerusalem.

The Agency, this April 4 document went on, would gladly agree to a military truce which would put an end to all acts of violence, and restore unhindered movement on all roads and highways, as well as free access to the Holy Places. All foreign troops and guerillas would have to be withdrawn, and all units of the British-trained Arab Legion of Transjordan removed from Palestine, preventing as well such incursions in the future. An international commission must supervise execution of the truce, the Agency not able to rely upon the British authorities in this respect. Finally, a military truce could not impede Jewish immigration, or affect preparations now in progress to assure essential public services and for “the establishment of an autonomous government in the area of the Jewish State immediately after the termination of the Mandate on May 15.”9

The same day, even as 50,000 US veterans of all faiths swung down New York City’s Fifth Ave. to the cheers of some 250,000 spectators in protest against the US reversal of policy on Palestine, Shertok wired Myerson and David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency executive, that the meeting on April 6 of the Actions Committee (HaVa’ad HaPo’el HaTsiyoni) should stick to the joint declaration against trusteeship and do the utmost to defeat it at the special session, even if the chances would be “extremely uncertain.” To some young members of the Agency’s political department who sharply criticized the yishuv leadership’s military response, particularly in view of Jerusalem’s dire position “verging on catastrophic,” and called for pulling out of some isolated Jewish settlements slated to be in the Arab state, Shertok replied that the yishuv had a “deep-rooted aversion” to abandoning any position “to very last.” As regards a truce for Jerusalem and having women and children leave the Old City, the US line merging Jerusalem with the “general problem” delayed possible action. He was “fully alive” to the necessity for a respite, but that depended also on the “other party.” He doubted the Arabs’ readiness to compromise after political advantage would be gained. It was very important, Shertok advised Eytan on April 5, that the Palestine Commission immediately issue a report summarizing Azcárate’s experience. This should emphasize that partition “in fact exists”; that it could have been implemented in accordance with Resolution 181 (II) had the British remained “genuinely neutral and not in fact obstructing”; and that the yishuv was ripe for independence and determined to establish the Jewish State.10

The British persisted in their official stand that HMG would continue to adhere to its neutral attitude, much to the disappointment of Marshall and his department. Harold Beeley, main advisor on Palestine to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, had advised Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones at the end of March that little if any hope existed as to a temporary trusteeship, although a truce and suspending the Palestine Commission’s work were steps in the right direction, leading to a GA special session. Bevin and his colleagues, reported the High Commissioner for Canada to his superior, were “really obsessed” with the special tasks and responsibilities that concurrence in any new compromise might thrust upon them beyond May 15. “HMG’s policy is now simply to get out of Palestine as quickly as possible without regard to the consequences,” Alan Cunningham, the country’s last High Commissioner, wrote despairingly to Creech Jones on March 25. BenGurion told Cunningham of his eagerness “to have an agreement that everybody in Jerusalem should go freely about their business,” but the AHC’s Hussein Khalidi stated emphatically that the Arabs would gain nothing from a truce. “The Jews are the only ones to welcome it,” emphatically stated this highest ranking AHC executive member in Jerusalem, because they would like to see [the] 100,000 Jews in the Sacred City in perfect security so that the Hagana gangs would not have to worry about them.”¹¹

Hoping to obtain a cease-fire considering that “many innocent lives have been lost and much that has been achieved in the progress of many years has been destroyed,” Cunningham appealed in a radio broadcast on the evening of April 3 to the two “contending parties” to arrive at some arrangement to bring a halt to bloodshed. Pointing out that the British were due to remain in the country only “for a short time longer,” he offered his services to the leaders of both sides to negotiate an armistice. Unable to leave Jerusalem for the Agency executive’s meeting in Tel-Aviv, Yitshak Ben-Zvi, head of the Va’ad HaLeumi (National Council), urged the executive to accept the High Commissioner’s plea in order to save Jerusalem, “without doubt our weak point.” The city had been cut off from supplies for ten days, his fearful, somber letter noted, with the Jewish Quarter in the Old City under siege for the past four months and the southern and northern outskirts holding out with difficulty. Demoralization was spreading among considerable sections of the Jewish population. The Arabs did not want a cease-fire, Ben-Zvi conceded, but the British, for humanitarian, political, and prestige reasons, were in favor. While adhering to the executive’s formal reply of April 4 to López’s request, he closed, a cease-fire was essential to save the Jews of Jerusalem from “annihilation and destruction” pending the UN’s political decision.12

The Agency should devote all its energies to securing a trusteeship that would be “as compatible as possible” with the ultimate creation of a Jewish State, Azcárate advised Eytan on April 5. Speaking as a friend, he warned that, as the situation in 1936 Spain had shown, “non-intervention” would occur if the Jews resisted trusteeship, and they could not afford to fight both the Arabs and contend with nonintervention by the Western Powers. In the course of the imminent GA special session debate, the Zionists’ putting forward helpful proposals for Palestine’s future would gain the sympathy and support of most of the delegations. Rather than continuing to harp on their past grievances and indulging in recriminations against the British—although “fully understandable”—which would do no good in the Assembly or anywhere else, they should engage in constructive political work at the UN headquarters in Lake Success. Later on, within the framework of that trusteeship, they should use every opportunity to build up their strength, the more effectively done the sooner they would obtain a Jewish State. Azcárate assured Eytan that he would be proud to play some part in the future administration of affairs in Palestine.¹³

A few hours later, the US delegation submitted its fifteen-point formulation of General Principles regarding a temporary trusteeship for Palestine. Austin invited the Council members (excepting the USSR and Ukraine) to his office, where he presented the plan while announcing that it did not commit the United States at this stage. Perhaps most contentious were the points that the agreement would be of “indefinite” duration subject to “prompt termination” whenever the Arab and Jewish communities agreed upon the country’s future government, and that a Governor-General would be given the authority to call upon other governments when necessary towards the maintenance of security in Palestine. Most of the Council members present initially criticized the plan’s vagueness, France’s Alexandre Parodi especially critical that all questions of substance, such as immigration, were evaded, and that the crucial question of enforcement had been shirked. While HMG’s V. G. Lawford remained non-committal, Columbia’s Gonzales Fernandez stressed the shortness of time, and urged a truce and prolongation of the mandate. Syria’s Faris El-Khouri, declaring that the Arab States were “parties directly concerned,” assumed that the Arabs and Jews would fight it out, in due course “get tired,” and compromise. China’s Tingfu Tsiang argued that unilateral termination of the Mandate was unlawful. Canada’s permanent delegate, A. G. L. McNaughton, wrote to Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester B. Pearson (who agreed) that a trusteeship agreement could not even be concluded without United Kingdom’s concurrence.14

A worried Lawford, pressed at the April 5 meeting to take a stand on the trusteeship proposal, given Article 79 of the UN Charter requiring the mandatory’s consent if the GA approved that measure, asked the Foreign Office for clarification. Even his friend Parodi had told him privately after the meeting that he had with difficulty restrained himself from pointing out that Lawford’s attitude really rendered the whole discussion “futile.” Bevin replied two days later, ordering Cadogan first to repeat his earlier statement to the Security Council that HMG would relinquish all rights as mandatory on May 15. He should then say that if the GA approved a trusteeship before that date, the British would not make use of the “veto” which their position as mandatory power might be held to confer on them. Cadogan, at the same time, had to make it absolutely clear to the Council that this statement did not commit London in any way to take part in the administration or enforcement of a trusteeship or of any other settlement.¹⁵

The US delegation sought a truce, declared Dean Rusk to the UN Division of Public Liaison on April 5, because the Arabs were better armed, and the Jews would “undoubtedly be slaughtered” in the event of large-scale fighting. In the forefront of the American delegation’s effort and aided by his deputy, Robert McClintock, Rusk, State’s director of the Office of United Nations Affairs, had already recommended in a “top secret” memorandum to State on February 3 that the United States should support any measures “falling short of the use of armed force” by the Security Council to restrain external aggression against Palestine from the contiguous Arab states. Yet, he continued at the time, if partition could not be implemented without force, the US should then support calling a GA special session to reconsider the entire problem, with the probable outcome that a UN trusteeship would be proposed and “terminable” when the Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine could agree on a modus vivendi for a unitary federal state or for partition. Immediately following Austin’s speech of March 19, Rusk had made a strong appeal to Britain’s UN adviser, Gladwyn Jebb, for HMG’s support, noting that it would at least keep the Russians out of Palestine except to the extent that the USSR would participate in the Palestine trust if they chose to join the Trusteeship Council. He hoped that if London did back the American scheme, the British might reconsider their proposed dates for evacuation.16

Few Security Council delegates were more censorious of the US plan than Parodi. France’s first ambassador to the United Nations openly expressed to the Agency’s Aubrey (later Abba) Eban his government’s resentment at being called to follow the Americans “blindly into a cul-de-sac.” Having voted for partition the past November on the false assumption that American support would be steadfast, France could not again commit her vote to the United States if there were no certainty of “an equitable and stable settlement.” Given the lack, among other matters, in the General Principles of clear enforcement, which had “wrecked” the partition solution, he could not envisage his superiors in Paris voting for the proposal in its present form. Perhaps the Americans would in three months “traverse the whole journey” which HMG had accomplished in the period culminating in the 1939 White Paper, in which case they would then commit themselves to a “frankly” pro-Arab resolution; France would then “disengage herself,” not prepared to be a party to the “violent suppression” of Jewish rights which the GA had so recently approved.

While relaxing nothing of its “vigilant preparation,” Parodi advised Eban that the Jewish Agency should seek to work for improved provisions in the trusteeship agreement. A two-thirds Assembly vote might ensue if there were no other plan available for adoption. He indicated a readiness to work for an agreement on immigration, within the terms of the trusteeship proposal, based on the entry of 200,000 Jews in three years. He agreed with the Agency’s point that the constitutional provisions of the American plan, going against everything that experience and judgment had proved, were based on the unitary majority proposal (favoring the current Arab population). If Jewish immigration were to be absorbed, he agreed with Shertok’s exposition of the Agency’s need to control economic policy. In Eban’s view, Parodi favored a trusteeship superimposed upon a territorial partition within which Jews and Arabs exercised fairly complete autonomy, this territorial delimitation following the lines of the Assembly’s November plan. The Frenchman’s strong reservations about the present proposal, Eban advised his colleagues, coupled with Soviet opposition and British detachment, would seriously undermine the “great-power basis” of US policy. Furthermore, the task of enforcement would imply a unilateral responsibility, which might not be “palatable” to American public opinion.17

Loy Henderson, chief of State’s Near Eastern division, did not sit idly by awaiting the Council members’ official response to the American truce/trusteeship proposals. He suggested to Lovett that “moderates and temperate” individuals like Judah Magnes, Hebrew University president and binationalist advocate, and Arab League secretary general Azzam Pasha be invited to the United States as soon as possible to possibly break “the present log jam” in the UN. The “extreme public positions” taken by the Jewish Agency and the Arab Higher Committee regarding sovereignty, Henderson argued, made it increasingly difficult for them to modify their positions sufficiently for arranging a UN truce and interim governmental machinery after May 15. (At the same moment, the Agency’s Vivian [Chaim] Herzog heard from military correspondent George Fielding Eliot that Marshall was loathe to regard the American Zionist leaders as representatives of the yishuv, while Senator Arthur Vandenberg [R, Michigan] told Detroit Jewish News publisher Philip Slomovitz in deepest confidence that the Secretary of State was prepared to resign because of their pressure unless Truman yielded to him.) Lovett, having requested Bevin and French Foreign Secretary Georges Bidault on April 9 to join in sponsoring the American proposal, approved Henderson’s suggestion the next day, and telegrams to that effect were dispatched to Jerusalem and Cairo.¹⁸

While Azcárate thought Ben-Gurion’s March 21 public assertion against a trusteeship of any duration a “most unwise and imprudent statement,” the Arab attitude towards trusteeship did not offer much solace either. In a talk with Azcárate, the Egyptian Consul favored a maximum period of two or three years, but with the 30,000 imprisoned Jewish “illegal” immigrants in Cyprus, transported there by the British Navy’s halting their overcrowded vessels which sought to reach Palestine’s shores, to be absorbed within the Arab states. Husseini notified the Security Council on the 9th that the Arabs would not negotiate any truce with the Jewish Agency because the AHC did not consider the Agency as representing Palestine’s Jews. AHC chairman Haj Amin, the former Grand Mufti of Palestine who had spearheaded the Arab assaults against the yishuv since April 1920, violently rejected any truce outright. The struggle in Palestine would continue until the Arabs realized their national objective, he told a Cairo newspaper, a point he repeated at the Arab League meeting of April 10. Writing to the three foreign consuls in Jerusalem, Haj Amin added that all of Palestine was a holy place to the Arabs, not just Jerusalem alone, to be protected against the intruder. Prime Minister Mahmoud El Nokrashy Pasha advised US Ambassador Pinkney Tuck in Cairo that the definite duration of the trusteeship had to be stipulated together with guarantees against an increase in Jewish armaments, numbers, and land purchases in Palestine, accompanied by an assurance that trusteeship would not jeopardize Arab “national aspirations” towards final, complete independence as a “united Arab nation.”

The Arab League, Azzam Pasha would soon declare to Tuck, did not support the American plan of temporary trusteeship, which it considered would serve only “to create a new regime and bring about another phase of trouble between Arabs and Jews.” The League favored, as a practical matter, a continuance of the British Mandate, since HMG military forces aided by the UN’s “moral and material backing” could lead to the final disarmament and creation of “a new Palestine state.” Azzam added to British Ambassador Ronald Campbell that Jewish immigration had to cease in the meantime, and if civil war broke out in Palestine the Arabs were confident of success, although it might take years, owing to their “inexhaustible” manpower reserves.19

Shertok, quickly pointing out to the Canadian delegation and others that the temporary trusteeship plan would “perpetuate outside rule,” was encouraged by the “glaringly negative character” of the American scheme. In his opinion, it facilitated mobilizing opposition and the United States’ own possible retreat in the event of failure. Gromyko informed Shertok that his group would vote against trusteeship, and the Agency delegation hoped that several Latin American representatives would do likewise. While informing Palestine Commission chairman Karel Lisicky of Czechoslovakia about the grave food situation in Jerusalem, given the mandatory government’s utter failure to maintain law and order on the highways, Shertok took comfort from a growing conviction in UN circles that the American trusteeship proposals would not win the necessary two-thirds majority. Still, as reported to him by Agency political secretary Leo Kohn on April 7, all efforts at a truce in Jerusalem had failed so far owing to the “adamant attitude” of Haj Amin, who opposed any Jewish state in Palestine.20

Azcárate’s reservations about the fifteen points’ General Principles, which he transmitted to Bunche that day, began with its call for a cabinet and a democratically elected legislature, which he considered unreal, given the “very wrong and dangerous” impression that elections could be held at once. In addition, “locally recruited police and volunteer forces” would be insufficient from the first moment of the truce; an international police force of volunteers was “indispensable” at the very start. Immigration and land purchases should not be negotiated in consultation with the two warring communities, but left in the GovernorGeneral’s hands. Arrangements to provide the trusteeship with a solid and stable financial basis had to be made at once. The trusteeship’s “indefinite duration,” a formula difficult to be accepted by either side, should be changed to one year. The Jews might conclude that all possible partition was eliminated by the plan, Shertok observed, while that suggestion contradicted point one’s assertion that a temporary trusteeship would not prejudice the “rights, claims, or position of the parties concerned” or the character of the eventual political settlement.²¹

Privately, while convinced, as he had written to Bunche on more than one occasion, that the fact of partition was becoming “plainer every day,” Azcárate sadly told Eytan that he saw no hope nor even advisability of resisting the new US proposals; if these were American policy, they could not be resisted. Almost with tears in his eyes, he made a very moving plea to urge the Zionist leaders to face this issue squarely. Their policy of uncompromisingly opposing any trusteeship, whether temporary or permanent, would lead them “straight to disaster.” Their “purely destructive criticism,” even if every word were true, would avail them “nothing.” He advised Eytan to press his superiors to accept a limited trusteeship, no more than for one or two years, and during that time gather all their strength in order to be ready for “the final struggle”— political or military—when it came. Trusteeship would allow them “to fight another day.” He and Lund, whom Eytan described as “behaving like real bricks,” shared these views.22

AHC executive member Jamal Husseini, refusing on the afternoon of April 7 to sit down at the same table with Shertok when López convened the first meeting to discuss a truce, took an unequivocal stand. The UN Charter required the application of “strictly democratic principles” in Palestine, and all illegal Jewish immigrants (those who entered without the permission of the existing authority) and those militant, right-wing “elements” in Palestine which the Jewish Agency admitted were beyond its control should be expelled from the country. If these immigrants were to leave, then the Arabs could “insure” that the non-Palestinian Arabs who entered Palestine “illicitly” would also leave. Otherwise, Husseini emphasized, not as a threat but “merely a fact,” the outside Arab incursions would continue. Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations required the mandatory to establish as quickly as possible a local government to represent the people and to hand over power to this government, as HMG had done in the case of Transjordan. The British had no right to leave a vacuum on their departure, and the Arabs would not ask them to stay one day later than May 16. They would “defend their country with their blood,” but a definite solution must be found. “The Arabs would cooperate,” Husseini closed, “but only on a lasting basis.”²³

Called in an hour later, Shertok noted to López that he had already indicated to the Security Council and to Lie the Jewish Agency’s attitude regarding the truce proposals. The yishuv leadership was prepared for an unconditional truce immediately provided that the current 7,500 foreign Arab troops and the 3,000 men of the Arab Legion leave Palestine forthwith, with all such future incursions to cease under the supervision of an international body. Palestine’s Jews were forced to defend themselves; there was “a false equality” by putting on an equal footing armed Arab incursion with so-called illegal Jewish immigration. Indeed, the term “illegal immigration” with regard to the Arabs’ opposition was irrelevant because the Arabs “do not recognize the right of the Jews to any form of immigration.” Three things had to be borne in mind, Shertok emphasized: the international guaranteed right of the Jews to immigration into Palestine; over the past sixty years they had come to live there; and they continue to come unarmed. “We will not accept of our free will any imposed settlement,” he wished to make it clear, and “we stand on the compromise settlement of November 29.” To López’s comment that the Jews should enter into these negotiations with an “open mind,” Shertok responded that they could not accept a truce which would serve as “a preparatory stage” for further Arab aggression, and it should not be assumed that peace in Palestine would be achieved by a “considerable reduction” of Jewish rights and interests.24

With Husseini’s objection to Jewish sovereignty and Shertok’s insistence that the GA resolution of November 29 was (as he summarized the meeting to Ben-Gurion and Myerson) “our irreducible minimum,” the first meetings had ended inconclusively—as would the second. Husseini asserted to López the next afternoon that the Arabs wanted a declaration that the Palestine problem would be solved according to the strict principles of democracy and selfdetermination in accordance with the UN Charter. Jewish immigration, a breach of faith by the British and counter to the 1939 White Paper, had been forced upon the Arabs, and if it continued after May 15 “it would be impossible to restrain” the Arab people from counteraction without the use of armed force. Jewish immigration from Cyprus and the countries of Eastern Europe after the mandate ended would alone contribute largely to the renewal of fighting. Nor was López’s suggestion for limiting Jewish immigration during the truce reasonable: all immigration should cease. There was a “most acute” housing and food shortage in Palestine, which had two hundred inhabitants to the square mile and half of this area could not be cultivated, while there was a very great increase of population. As their conversation drew to a close after two hours, López expressed his regret that there had not been as much progress as he had expected. To reporters Husseini declared that he had refused to consult with any Jewish Agency representative as the AHC had never recognized the Agency “and never will.”²⁵

That evening, Shertok remarked to López that the longer a truce lasted the better, but it was not for the Agency to express any wish as to the best approach since the Jews had not started the fighting. Arab bands had to be removed and incursions had to stop. As for the cessation of “political activity” mentioned in the Council’s first resolution of April 1, which López took to mean keeping “in abeyance” preparations to implement the partition plan pending a GA decision, Shertok quickly noted that “the Agency was already the government,” and it would be “insane” not to continue making preparations for carrying out Resolution 181 (II), which entailed the setting up of an authority. These developments showed “the natural logic” of the partition plan. Both Lie and Azcárate had declared that partition already existed.

A truce for Jerusalem might be possible, Shertok went on, including safety of food and water: a large Iraqi military unit was camped on that city’s water supply and the mandatory had not intervened. The Jews would be ready for cooperation with the Arabs after May 15 as regards food supply and other common services, such as post and railway, for the whole of Palestine. In the absence of a mandatory government or any alternative, it was “a matter of self-preservation” for the Jews to control the area in which they were vitally interested. On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly had conferred certain rights on the Jews, “and they refused to renounce these rights or to see them impaired.” Immigration was “the crux of the matter,” Shertok noted, and there was no possibility of linking it to the truce: the Jews would not yield under threat of violence. They had refused to halt it during the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, and they would refuse now.26

A second private meeting in Austin’s office, held that same day again in the absence of Gromyko, yielded little consensus. No one had done “any work” on a possible trusteeship. Cadogan conveyed the Foreign Office’s cable of that date regarding a “veto” if a GA trusteeship were approved before May 15, and his colleague Trafford Smith indicated that the local Palestine police forces could not maintain law and order in mixed Arab-Jewish areas. El-Khouri declared that the Arabs would honor a truce so long as “activities for partition are not continued.” Austin opined that a unanimous Council resolution endorsing the General Principles before May 15 would be “a great uplift to the world,” but Parodi again noted the vagueness regarding implementation and immigration. Only El-Khouri made specific comments on all of the fifteen points, which he said should have been put forward the previous November, and again emphasized that “all States directly concerned” had to agree to the terms of the Trusteeship Agreement. After the meeting, Smith told Canada’s Michael Ignatieff that he agreed with Parodi’s criticisms: progress would likely not be made unless the United States made a more definite commitment as to outside forces, immigration, and guarantees for minorities. The Americans, this Colonial Office’s representative thought, were trying to leave the United Kingdom with the major commitment for Palestine, and avoid as far as possible “assuming any commitment itself except in the most generalized form.”27

Shertok’s meeting with Lovett and Rusk on April 9 and another with Rusk the same day did not shake his resolve. He emphasized the Agency’s uncompromising opposition to trusteeship, and that any truce should focus on military, not political, matters. The Agency might make a declaration not to bring in armed male immigrants, but would continue with setting up a central administration to function as of May 16 in the entire area assigned the Jewish State by the GA’s November 1947 resolution. It would oppose an indefinite trusteeship; a truce for a fixed period would be easier, but not to prejudice Jewish rights. As to Lovett’s wish to “avoid anarchy” on May 15 and have “a breathing spell,” Shertok asserted that State exaggerated Arab strength, and if the United States “took care” of Jerusalem “we would hold our own,” particularly if the Hagana was helped with weapons. Obtaining a two-thirds vote for trusteeship was “doubtful,” Shertok declared, and “improbable” if the US delegation did not exert itself to achieve that end. An international police force for Jerusalem on behalf of “the world and civilization” did not involve difficulties that could arise for policing the entire country. Finally, the Agency’s ability to control Jewish underground dissidents and enforce truce discipline depended on the conviction that a truce did not affect Jewish statehood. “Conversations inconclusive,” he wired Ben-Gurion.²⁸

Rusk’s stand during his second talk with Shertok carried ominous overtones. The United States was a civilized government and would have to take action, he declared. Wanting to halt the probability of intensified bloodshed in Palestine, the State Department had decided that “they must tide the situation over in some way, come what may.” It stood by the public statements of Truman and Marshall on March 25, wishing above all to prevent “a major conflagration.” The Jews might be able to hold out in the beginning, but “in the long run” would be “overpowered.” All rights would be preserved under a trusteeship, but he finally admitted that State wanted the truce to go on during the trusteeship, “so that in the nature of things it amounted to the same.” Rusk still believed that the Arabs might accept a continuance of immigration. As for Jerusalem, he warned that the Arabs would fight if the Jews did something for that city which was strictly in accordance with the GA’s November recommendation. State would therefore have to produce a different solution, which might include, for example, access to a port, possibly Haifa. Shertok’s understanding of this comment was confined to his summary of their meeting: “Such a provision would cut the Jewish State in two.”29

Charles Fahy, State’s former Legal Counselor and now on retainer for the Jewish Agency executive’s American Section, found Rusk staunchly holding to his views. According to his report to section chairman Abba Hillel Silver of his meeting with Rusk the same day, Fahy heard the department’s director of UN Affairs say directly that a truce in fighting was impossible without a suspension “for the time being” of the creation of the Jewish State. Accompanying a truce might be joint Jewish and Arab commissions or boards of some sort, but failure to arrange a truce “gravely endangers” the Jewish population of Palestine. Moreover, the resulting bloodshed would set in motion “a chain of events,” the end of which could not be foreseen in terms of world peace. This would create “a grave domestic and international problem” for the United States.

The Zionists, Rusk charged, were not in a position to argue (as Fahy did then) that the United States should not exert pressure to push through its present proposals, given the “influence exerted” by the Jewish Agency for the GA resolution of the previous November. The Assembly had approved the resolution, which was subsequently not given a chance to work, Fahy retorted. The current General Principles “certainly could not be said to be workable,” he asserted, and the United States’ position would be doubly weakened if after abandoning the November resolution it pressed through another which would be found to be unworkable. At this point, Rusk responded that he would like to review the situation, and emphasize the truce as the matter which must be pressed, not the proposals of trusteeship.³⁰

On April 10, the Palestine Commission reported to the GA that it could not fulfill its assignment because of the “armed hostility of both Palestinian and non-Palestinian Arab elements, the lack of cooperation from the mandatory power, the disintegrating security situation in Palestine,” and the Security Council’s not furnishing it the necessary armed assistance. The previous day, Cadogan told Austin that HMG doubted whether there was any prospect of agreement based on the US trusteeship proposals, and he cited his superiors’ estimate that five divisions together with several aircraft squadrons and a fairly large naval force would be needed to impose a trusteeship regime.

At the same time, López had informed the members convening again in Austin’s office that his two meetings with Husseini and Shertok had produced no common ground, “illegal” Jewish immigration the heart of the problem. He suggested that, under these circumstances, the Security Council should appeal for a truce and ask the United Kingdom to keep the mandate for some time longer. Both sides, López thought, were “too worked up emotionally” to listen to reason, and he doubted that an Arab-Jewish agreement would be reached at the present time. The only specific suggestion made at the meeting was Austin’s stressing that the truce should be on “a stand-still basis,” including immigration, and that it should not be employed to impose any political statement, but only to institute peace and order, and to establish a temporary government in Palestine to take over from the mandatory.31

Gromyko, absent at the first two informal meetings in Austin’s office, had received instructions on April 9 from Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to defend the partition resolution. He was to point out that the Security Council had not exhausted all the resources at its disposal to put this into practice, and to charge HMG with hampering the Commission’s work in Palestine. As for the US trusteeship proposal, by repealing the November majority decision it would aggravate the Jewish-Arab struggle in Palestine and “intensify unrest” in the region, compromise the GA’s position, and leave the country in a “semi-colonial position.” Finally, trusteeship contradicted the principle of autonomy, and was marked by distrust of the local population to organize Palestine’s administration independently on a democratic basis.

When Gromyko did attend the third private meeting at the US delegation’s headquarters on April 12, at which the Palestine Commission’s role was debated, he protested the discussion of a truce at such a venue, and wondered if this was done to have some delegations avoid embarrassment. López countered that he was fully within his rights to take advice from the other Council members in this manner. The same day, Australia’s Herbert V. Evatt informed Austin of his country’s continued support for partition, that recommendation’s lack of success due less to fighting in Palestine and more to the “vacillation” that had taken place in the attitude of some of the powers most concerned and to the absence of “positive restraints” on the Arabs, which all UN members had the duty to exercise in carrying out the GA November resolution. New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Peter Fraser, sent similar instructions to his minister in Washington and to the country’s UN Department, hoping as well that the “great powers” would give partition their support.32

The mandatory administration, Cadogan admitted at López’s next meeting on April 13 (to which Gromyko was not invited), had “disintegrated” to the point where it was not possible for the British further to delay their departure. Yet the Security Council, a frustrated Bunche informed Azcárate, had given the Palestine Commission no instructions or guidance to date, while the United States’ fifteen-point plan was “general and often vague.” Pressing for a truce and an international trusteeship, Azcárate continued to favor partition as the formula which “reduces to a minimum” the friction between Arabs and Jews. His cable along these lines to Lie and Bunche the next day ended thus: “Consider most unfair for Jews continue encouraging establishment state without providing appropriate international military assistance to defend it against Arab attack.” Not surprisingly, the Commission’s unanimous report to the GA, published on April 14, charged the mandatory with rejecting “any progressive transfer of authority,” including refusing to let it arrive in Palestine earlier than May 1 and to organize Jewish and Arab militias in advance, as well as taking measures such as blocking Palestine sterling balances (thus limiting what Bunche considered the flow of essential imports to Palestine) without consulting the Commission. ³³

The Arabs had started attacking the Jews, the Jewish Agency executive stressed in replying to Cunningham’s personal appeal for a cease-fire, and if they halted this the Agency would as well. It is understood, Kohn communicated to the High Commissioner, that a ceasefire implied freedom of movement on all roads in town and in country. Reiterating the Agency’s demand to the mandatory government, he posited that as long as the British authorities were in the country, their duty was to prevent the incursion of armed bands from across the frontiers and to expel those which had entered. The very fact of the invasion of military personnel and of guerilla bands, as well as the import of arms and ammunition from across the frontiers was, in the yishuv’s view, an act of aggression and a danger to its security. If in the Security Council’s current deliberations this expulsion and future prevention of incursion were not assured, the yishuv would reserve for itself “freedom of action to insure its security.”³⁴

Given the mounting violence in Palestine, a troubled Shertok began to search for some possible concessions on the Jewish Agency’s part. If the executive in Jerusalem considered it advisable, he had wired BenGurion on April 9, perhaps Shertok might “informally and without prejudice” probe the possibility of dropping the condition on the removal of existing outside Arab bands, and insist only on the prevention of future incursions. While maintaining so far both conditions “as absolute,” he saw great advantage in securing a truce by this concession should it prove possible. Two days later, having received no response, he sent a second telegram to Ben-Gurion, expressing his view that truce negotiations should not be broken off. He strongly urged the executive to refrain from “demonstrative acts proclamations” pending May 15. All resolutions should be kept regarding the Agency’s preparation in taking over internal matters, except for measures rendered imperative by the necessity to maintain essential services in the interim. He awaited an immediate reply.35

Weizmann resolved at this point to write to Truman in the hope of inducing the President to recognize the Jewish State, whose establishment the US Government was at that moment trying to prevent in the UN. He was fully aware that the Jewish Agency and the American Zionist Emergency Council under Silver’s chairmanship were mounting an offensive against the trusteeship proposal, fully agreeing with the private warning of Uruguay’s UN permanent representative, Enrique R. Fabregat, fervent partition champion at the UNSCOP deliberations and the Assembly vote, that any new victorious plan would ultimately mean that the yishuv would be “completely liquidated,” and the Jews should therefore not yield “one inch” on partition’s “irrevocability.” Yet the seventy-four-year-old, ailing Zionist chief, having received Truman’s earlier pledge in their March 18 meeting, wished to make his own appeal with a letter on April 9. The logic of partition, the private communication began, compelled him to go on record against the idea of trusteeship, “a leap into the unknown.” Asking the British to carry on, as the State Department was rumored to be considering, he thought would be “the worst possibility of all.”

Deciding to add a paragraph to Eban’s first draft, Weizmann went on to confide his trembling to think of “the wave of violence and repression which would sweep Palestine” if rule continued under the British or indeed any foreign reign. Certain that Truman would not be a part to the “further disappointment of pathetic hopes” shared by the 100,000 Holocaust survivors still present in the Displaced Persons camps in Europe, he declared that the choice for the Jewish people was “between statehood and extermination.” “History and providence have placed this issue in your hands,” Weizmann concluded, “and I am confident that you will yet decide it in the spirit of the moral law.” He sent a copy to Marshall, expressing regret that the two could not meet, as Weizmann had wished to give him information that would have “been of use and prevented difficulties.”36

Truman chose not to answer the letter. (Lovett, sent a copy by Weizmann, would acknowledge it after two weeks with the expressed hope that the UN’s action would lead to the “restoration and peaceful conditions” in Palestine and to agreement between Arabs and Jews resident there “on their future government.”) The President and Marshall had recently received from James V. Forrestal, the country’s first Secretary of Defense as of September 1947, the estimate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who thought that a complete effective truce was impossible because of the “extremists” on both sides; that 100,000 troops, aside from destroyers and considerable air support, would be needed to impose and supervise trusteeship; and that even if the US provided 46,800 of these soldiers, it would necessitate at least partial mobilization, over-extend the army, require a supplementary budget, and could not be fully deployed prior to May 15. In addition, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey’s board directors had just released a public statement (which Rusk deputy McClintock placed in State’s “Palestine File”) about the vital necessity of Middle Eastern oil for Western Hemisphere oil supplies and the European Recovery Program. The latter, more popularly known as the Marshall Plan, had just begun with the intention to improve prosperity on the Continent and prevent the spread of Communism on that soil.³⁷

On the other hand, sharp rising domestic criticism was heard from such as the independently minded Senator Wayne Morse (R, Oregon), who warned that reversals by the United States and others would prevent the UN from surviving as an instrumentality for maintaining peace, a charge echoed in young Boston Congressman John F. Kennedy’s public castigation of the trusteeship plan as “one of the most unfortunate reversals in American policy” and in his demand to lift the US arms embargo against shipments to the Middle East, instituted on November 14 last, so that the Jewish people in Palestine could “defend themselves and carve out their partition.” Truman also had to contend with a movement within the Democratic Party to champion Dwight D. Eisenhower’s candidacy for the presidential election come November. On April 9, he declared at his weekly press conference that he had no comment to make about Palestine other than that it was pending before the UN, or whether the Administration was considering any modification of the arms embargo. McClintock, hearing that the lack of detail in State’s General Principles “considerably disturbed” informed Austin that Lovett had personally signed off on the truce proposal, and that it had been cleared by the White House. At the same time, Truman quietly gave permission to Eddie Jacobson, his former haberdashery store partner, to tell Weizmann that the President stood by his earlier promises to the Zionist leader.38

When Austin, joined by American UN delegation colleagues John C. Ross and Philip Jessup, visited Weizmann’s sick-bed at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel to say how dangerous it would be for peace if the Jews of Palestine proclaimed a state on May 15, they received a sharp rejoinder. Palestinian Jewry “would be off its head if it postponed statehood for anything as foolish as the American trusteeship proposal,” Weizmann shot back. Further, he considered the yishuv’s intention to proclaim statehood as soon as the Mandate ended “thoroughly justified and eminently realistic,” a conviction which he repeated when Parodi conveyed to him the “veiled threat” that the United States would send cruisers to the Mediterranean in order to enforce the arms blockade. Quoting a remark of Baron Edouard de Rothschild, he told Trafford Smith that “Les Americains sont les gens qui vous lâchent,” and expressed amazement that they had not produced a single great man since President Woodrow Wilson. When Truman adviser Rosenman, also a member of the small committee planning the President’s re-election campaign, approached him with an offer to help on condition of strict secrecy, Weizmann readily agreed. Various short memoranda were given him to brief this “newcomer” for action at the appropriate moment.³⁹

While what Azcárate had characterized to Bunche as the “minor war” between Arab and Jew in Palestine rapidly escalated, particularly with the Hagana’s radical turn to offensive operations as of April 1 aided by a first secret delivery of Czech weapons, Eban delivered to Ross on April 12, as well as to Lie and Azcárate, the Jewish Agency’s observations (actually his authorship) on the General Principles. First, the Agency found it necessary to discuss the general applicability of trusteeship to Palestine. As to the former, the US proposal prejudiced Jewish rights, while any plan would not meet with the Arabs’ acceptance “until they are confronted with the Jews as a permanent and equal factor with which they have to come to terms. The Jews will accept no position of subjection to the Arabs and will continually press on towards independence.”

Eban then turned to criticize the specific American proposal. The unique Statute of Jerusalem was not bound in any way by the trusteeship provisions of the UN Charter, and so provided no precedent or justification for establishing permanent foreign rule over the country as a whole. The provision for a “democratically elected legislature,” the gravest feature of the entire proposal, ignored “the dual character” of Palestine’s national composition, two separate nations which “do not hold the ends of life in common or agree on the central purposes of the state.” There was no end in sight of trusteeship’s enforcement, while the provisions envisaged for immigration and land purchase were not specified, thus ignoring the “inseparable connection” between the concepts of Jewish statehood and Jewish immigration.

As to the applicability of trusteeship to Palestine, Eban’s lengthy memo observed, both peoples had “an urgent desire for national freedom,” a fact acknowledged by the 1937 Peel Commission, UNSCOP, and throughout the General Assembly’s second regular session. The movement to set aside Resolution 181 (II) had already weakened the GA’s moral authority, and revealed the Security Council as a body unable either to secure UN Charter observance or to resist aggression. The Palestine Mandate, sui generis, recognized world Jewry’s rights in that country, rights derived from the Mandate, preserved under Article 80 of the Charter, and confirmed by the GA partition vote, which were to be continued in force until such time as that Mandate was replaced by a new agreement. British policy in the Near East, firmly wedded to the alliance with the Arab League, had been “sharply directed” against those fundamental Jewish interests which the Assembly had recently approved and recognized Palestinian Jewry “as a nation fit for imminent independence.”

Henceforth, the memo continued, the “violent reversal” of the historic vote on November 29, 1947, would have the Jews think of no other “political idiom but that of national sovereignty.” In the yishuv’s politics, economy, defense, and other major spheres in the daily routine of life, “an existing tendency of Jewish autonomy” existed and would continue to flourish. (Its Provisional Government would be established on April 13.) While Palestine was moving forward “inexorably” towards partition in a pattern of growing decentralization across the country, the US proposal “comes on the scene in an attempt to galvanize a dying mandate into life or to build a new trusteeship on the wreckage of the old.” Because the very concept of trusteeship is “so flagrantly out of accord with the general principles and current realities of the Palestine situation,” the Agency’s “observations” declared, no improvement in these proposals could make them a useful starting-point in the quest for a political settlement.40

López, never to be deterred in his course, brought a proposal on April 15 as Colombia’s delegate to the Security Council for a truce regarding all military and political activity in Palestine, HMG to use “its best efforts” for as long as it remained the Mandatory Power had been aggravated to effectuate this desired end. While America and Canada expressed their acceptance, both Shertok and Husseini strongly objected. Gromyko charged that the proposal ignored the Jews’ right to immigration and that Arab irregulars had to leave the country. With a few corrections, the truce proposal was adopted one day after the special session began, the mandatory named to supervise the truce. The USSR and Ukraine abstained.⁴¹

A secret State Department cable to the Foreign Office actually accused the British government of “an abdication of its responsibilities” rather than cooperation with its strongest ally. Reading this, British Ambassador in Washington Lord Inverchapel wrote to Bevin that he had naturally been “at pains to remind State Department officials of the strength and unity of public feeling in Britain on this issue as a result of our heavy casualties and sacrifices, and to recall how much Britain’s difficulties as the Mandatory Power have been aggravated by the irresponsible back-seat driving of the US Administration, Congress and public opinion.” To the sympathetic American Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Lewis W. Douglas, Bevin responded that British public opinion would not support any longer keeping troops in Palestine, nor was he sure that troops would be necessary at all if a firm decision were reached for the creation of a unitary Palestinian State. Could the US Government not really send in their troops? he asked. The Jews, the Foreign Secretary thought, would be much more reluctant to fight against American troops than against those of other countries.42

On April 16, Cadogan pledged to the Security Council that the Arab Legion would be withdrawn from Palestine before May 15, drawing the Agency’s reaction that the British were handing over to the Legion vast quantities of military stores, ammunition, and equipment. While rejecting a plea to immediately recognize the Hagana, form a Jewish militia in Palestine under UN authority and allow it to acquire weapons, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee stated that he doubted HMG’s small and infrequent supply of arms to the regular Arab forces by treaty were or would likely “be put to an improper use in Palestine.” HMG would not recognize the Jewish Agency after May 15, announced Bevin in the House of Commons. The true explanation of UK policy, Beeley confided to the Canadian delegation, was his government’s wish that the Middle East remain outside the Soviet sphere of influence. Dropping the Palestine Mandate, “a festering sore” which if allowed to continue might have forced the Arab world into the Soviet camp, would “consolidate” the UK’s position in that region. A policy of non-intervention would most likely lead to heavy bloodshed in Palestine, with the Jews, in Beeley’s opinion, left in complete control of the Tel Aviv-Haifa seaboard area. Jerusalem and outlying Jewish communities he judged to be “indefensible.”⁴³

Not able to “simply stand aloof” when confronted by the dire prospect of a deteriorating situation in Palestine, especially when the Mandatory Power proved unwilling “to assume helpful responsibilities,” Lovett explained in considerable detail to Fahy on April 16 why the United States came to propose a truce and a trusteeship. These seemed “the best possible” proposals to avoid the likelihood of increasing violence and chaos in the weeks preceding May 15, without the United States abandoning the GA November resolution “as the ultimate solution it desired.” The delegation would exhibit no “unusual exertion” for approval of the trusteeship proposal; the matter was up to the Assembly. If that proposal did not receive acceptance, he seemed to feel that one for Jerusalem to protect the Holy Places should be urged, and indicated that the United States might move in that direction “at the appropriate time.” The activities of some Jewish organizations in the United States and their pressure tactics were “harmful,” he opined. Behind Lovett’s real concern in this regard, Fahy concluded, was the feeling that the US government was doing all that it could under the circumstances, and that more confidence by the “Jewish elements” in the country “is desirable.”44

For Palestine’s imperturbable Chief Secretary Henry Gurney, never one to let the country’s descent into chaos prevent his golf game, the Zionists did not “care two-pence” for the United Nations while Husseini even refused to sit in the same room with Shertok. The mandatory officers had “given all they’ve had,” but now the British were “merely fed up” with Palestine. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Gurney refused to ask London to free funds for the import of necessary fuel and fuel products after the shutdown of the Haifa oil refineries.) Everyone knew that the UN was not in a position to take action, Truman’s recent announcement motivated not by the interests of peace but focused on the US election year, and the Palestine Commission at Lake Success “a really surprisingly incompetent body.” If the Security Council were put on the Greek stage, Gurney imagined, it would have Austin suggesting “something that commits nobody to anything at all,” Truman repeat “I am still backing partition,” the British delegation chorus declare HMG was leaving “this thoroughly wicked child” on May 15th, Shertok and Husseini adhering to their uncompromising lines, and the play ending with loud catcalls from the chorus of Guatemalans and Uruguayans, thunder and lightning, and the arrival of a herald bearing the agenda for the next meeting of the General Assembly on disputed Kashmir. The UN discussions, Gurney concluded, “seem to be more and more futile and unreal.”⁴⁵

Although hearing from Ben-Gurion on April 16 that the yishuv’s grim fortunes had dramatically shifted to victories, especially regarding control of Jerusalem’s hills and the greatly outnumbered Hagana’s rout of Fawzi al-Kaukji’s Arab Liberation Army at kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek, the Agency executive chairman certain that the fate of Palestine’s Jews depended on the arrival of military equipment rather than on developments at Lake Success, Shertok persisted in the truce negotiations. These had been conducted, he cabled Ben-Gurion three days later, not in order to provide ourselves “with alibi for non-compliance,” but in an earnest effort to achieve a truce, “which we need badly.” The Agency had to avoid the impression that it was deliberately flouting the truce, and observing the truce did not involve evacuation of the Arab positions now occupied by the Hagana. No conditions were set in that respect, after all, while the Agency’s condition regarding the evacuation of outside Arab forces had not been accepted.

Ben-Gurion agreed with Shertok that the “most dangerous” aspect of the truce proposals was the mandatory’s supervision of its terms. He replied on April 19, one day after he was appointed head of the People’s Administration and also head of the yishuv’s security matters, that while the Agency executive informed Cunningham that if the Arabs agreed to a cease-fire they would act likewise, the High Commissioner had not received any intimation of agreement from the other side. In fact, the Arab attacks continued without respite, particularly in Jerusalem. Finally, “this does not mean acceptance truce conditions.” Shertok sent Ben-Gurion’s cable to López without its final sentence.46

The same day, the Palestine Commission decided to suspend its efforts to set up a provisional council of government for the proposed Jewish State, while also learning that its efforts to create a volunteer police force consisting of Britons for Jerusalem’s security had failed. Without an adequate international police force to implement partition, a despairing Azácarte cabled Lie and Bunche, he considered the advance group’s presence in Jerusalem “unnecessary and undesirable.” He remained convinced, as he told Cunningham, that partition was “the formula” that reduced to a minimum the friction between Arabs and Jews. That would make easier their collaboration, in his opinion, and the only possible way for the Arabs to achieve “their very legitimate claim” to national independence and sovereignty.⁴⁷

On April 20, Austin presented the GA Political and Security Committee “tentative suggestions” for a temporary trusteeship in Palestine, administered by a Governor-General to continue for three years or until such time as the Jews and Arabs agreed on the future government of Palestine. At the same time, he stated that the United States was prepared to discharge its share of responsibility in providing troops to carry out trusteeship, provided that other countries took part and a truce prevailed. Carl Berendsen (New Zealand), Gunner Hagglof (Sweden), John Hood (Australia), and Gromyko proposed a reversion to partition, Berendsen particularly eloquent in calling for the UN to follow the course set on November 29, 1947, or the alternative “is inevitable confusion and dismay.” A British spokesman reiterated that HMG would end the mandate on May 15, that there would be no British troops left in Palestine after August 1, and that between those dates there would be no enforcement by British forces not having the consent of both communities.⁴⁸

The Jewish Agency again requested, in a letter to López, the immediate withdrawal of the Arab Legion, whose units had actively participated recently in an attack on the Jewish settlement of Neveh Ya’akov. Jessup’s attempt on the 21st to railroad through the US trusteeship plan by its referral to the Trusteeship Committee failed, six delegations arguing that it represented an attempt to achieve implicit approval of the American proposal. The same day, Austin requested the Security Council to take up again the question of implementing the truce resolution of April 17, and a meeting of the Council was set for six days later.49

Truman continued to feel very strongly that he would “try to do something” about Palestine before the GA special session ended. While prepared to appoint his own representative to the UN delegation (a step pressed for by the Zionists) as a counter to some pro-Arab advisers there, he told two top leaders of the Democratic Party that carrying out the partition resolution would not garner sufficient votes in the Security Council. Rosenman’s transmission of memoranda favoring a truce for Jerusalem as an aid to the Jewish State’s success and warning the Arab states not to commit aggression, documents supplied by Weizmann’s associates, made their mark; he reported to Weizmann soon thereafter that Truman would intervene regarding Jerusalem. The President, “horrified” at the Arab massacre of seventy-eight Jews in a Hadassah Hospital convoy on April 13, with no intervention from a mandatory garrison two hundred yards away, was also perplexed by Zionist “inflexibility” regarding the truce negotiations. He soon defended Austin’s announcement about supplying US troops for a Palestine police force in his role as America’s Commander-in-Chief, the same day that Austin, responding to a petition from about 5,000 members of the bar protesting the US reversal of support for partition, replied that “all of us should get together to patch up” the Palestine government “and administer it until some arrangement can be made.”⁵⁰

The pertinent UN bodies pressed forward during April 21–22 on a truce and a trusteeship, with little success. The Trusteeship Council, with the Americans’ Francis B. Sayre taking the lead against the opposition of the delegates from New Zealand and Australia, declared that it would take no action for UN rule over Jerusalem — as stipulated in Resolution 181 (II) — until the GA had reached a conclusion. Parodi asked the Political and Security Committee to appoint a governor to recruit a special police force to protect the Holy City of Jerusalem; Hood introduced a resolutions directing the Palestine Commission to create one or both provisional councils of government, the Arab League states to prohibit their nationals from activities designed to obstruct the November 29 resolution. Silver, who already on April 1 had declared the US truce proposals “wholly unsatisfactory and futile,” informed the Security Council that the Jews would establish their state officially on May 16.

Austin revealed that the United States had not been able to get any country to agree to send troops to Palestine if no truce was agreed upon. El-Khouri charged the Jews with terrorism in Haifa, sparking Guatemala’s Jorge Garcia-Granados, avid Zionist ever since his UNSCOP participation, to ask the Syrian delegate whether the Arabs in Palestine were throwing flowers at the Jews. “The only morally sound position for the secretariat now to take was to support partition,” Bunche told his colleagues on April 22, “since the partition process had already gone very far.” At the moment, Lie concluded this meeting in his office, it looked as though the Jews and Arabs would be left to fight it out, which he considered “a terrible prospect.”51

Assuming that the Security Council’s proposal for a truce would succeed, the interim period of trusteeship therefore not requiring a great amount of force to support it, on April 22 Bevin’s staff prepared the outline of a revised plan for an interim government to continue for at least one year. A Council of Ministers, composed of an equal number of Jews and Arabs under a non-Palestinian Governor appointed by the UN and with a non-Palestinian volunteer police force, would work towards a final settlement. The existing Land Transfers Regulations of 1940 under the White Paper should be maintained, and Jewish immigration fixed at a rate of 4,000 per month for two years or for the duration of the interim government, whichever was the shorter period. Cantonal frontiers, drawn in such a way as to make possible an exchange of rural populations, should prevail, the cantons having the right of secession five years after the independent state was established. However, Lord Listowel, deputizing for Creech Jones (then at the UN), pointed out the unreality of the scheme, “not the least chance” that the representative Arab and Jewish leaders would agree to sit together in such a Council at the present time or accept this plan. Pressed by Ambassador Douglas to “fill the breach in Palestine until a UN solution had been found,” Bevin would go no further than say that HMG would give “immediate consideration” to an agreement if one were reached between Jews and Arabs.⁵²

April 23, 1948, marked significant shifts in this drama. The Security Council passed a US resolution (which Truman had approved earlier that day) that the consuls in Jerusalem of France, Belgium, and the United States join as a Truce Commission to supervise compliance with the Council’s truce call of the 17th and report to López within four days. (Russia, Ukraine, and Colombia abstained in the vote.) Even as the Hagana set up its rule over Haifa, Cadogan told the Council that the Arabs had brought on that decisive defeat because large numbers of them had filtered into the city. King Abdullah of Transjordan urged all Arab nations “to join my army in a movement to Palestine to retain the Arab character of that country,” while Lebanese UN delegate Charles Malik declared that the Arabs would oppose anything except a unitary state. Creech Jones, addressing the Political and Security Committee, declared that there could be no settlement in Palestine at present unless it were backed up with a “very substantial” means of enforcement; the Colonial Secretary did not indicate the British attitude toward the American proposal.53

Late that same afternoon, Weizmann received electrifying news from Rosenman. Truman had just told this well-placed adviser “I have Dr. Weizmann on my conscience.” The President went on to aver that he had not realized on March 18 when speaking to the Zionist leader that the State Department had gone so far in abandoning the partition plan. He wished to “find his way back” to the GA resolution of November 29, and if the special session could be “surmounted” without reversing partition, and if a Jewish state were declared, he would recognize it immediately. Truman stipulated one absolute condition: he would deal only with Weizmann. For that reason, Weizmann had to postpone his departure for about three to four weeks so that Truman could receive him as soon as he was ready for an official announcement. Weizmann shared this report “in absolute secrecy” with closest associates upon returning to his hotel suite that evening. He soon sent Rosenman a confidential memo for Truman’s attention asserting that the President’s intentions might be thwarted by the “rapid developments” of events transpiring in Lake Success towards a UN trusteeship, and that he should intercede with London regarding the Arab Legion and Abdullah’s threat of invasion.⁵⁴

The Hagana’s conquest of Tiberias and of Haifa, sparking a large exodus of Arabs from the two cities, raised yet another clash at the UN between the Arab and Jewish representatives. El-Khouri charged on April 23 that this mass flight reflected the Jewish policy to “destroy” the Arab population within the area accorded the Jews in the GA partition resolution. With information from Eliyahu Sasson, the top Arab specialist in the Agency’s political department, Shertok countered that this phenomenon was apparently not the consequence of “only fear and weakness.” Rather, it was being organized by followers of the AHC’s Husseini leadership and carried out with the cooperation of invading Arab forces in order to vilify the Jews, and create in the Arab world and world opinion the impression that such invasion was not in defiance of the UN November 1947 decision but to rescue persecuted Arabs in Palestine. The foreign Arab commanders’ actual disappearance in the initial stage of every serious battle, under the pretext that they were going to bring reinforcements, left the native inhabitants to their fate, spreading chaos and panic—and flight.

Addressing both the Security Council and the GA Political and Security Committee on this issue, Shertok stressed that the Jews did not wish to chase the Arabs from the homes, but desired that the Arabs live in “full security” in the Jewish State. Brigadier I. N. Clayton, adviser on Arab affairs at the British Embassy in Cairo, thought au contraire, telling the US Embassy’s First Secretary that the Arab Legion’s march into Palestine after the British evacuation offered the best guarantee for security, with the amalgamation of Transjordan and Palestine an “excellent” solution to the Palestine problem.55

Rusk did not give up hope, sending from April 22 through the next two weeks a total of five drafts of a US truce and trusteeship proposal to the representatives of the Jewish Agency and of the member states of the Arab League. (McClintock had drafted a first draft as early as April 11.) To Judge Joseph M. Proskauer, president of the non-Zionist American Jewish Committee who, keenly interested in a cease-fire for Jerusalem, encouraged this objective with Lovett and Rusk, State’s Office of UN Affairs director had stressed on the 19th that it was essential to have a truce—“if only [the] Jewish Agency wouldn’t insist on declaring State on May 15.” Proskauer replied that he was “sick and tired of hearing you ask [the] Jewish Agency to give up without indicating what [the] Arabs are to give. Jamal refused to sit down at [the] same table with Shertok.” Towards the end of that meeting, Rusk suggested two “reasonable” people with whom the Agency might sit down: the Turkish representative and Fawzi of Egypt. The latter choice appeared qustionable, given that the delegate from Cairo had told the Near East Division’s Samuel Kopper on April 6 that the Arab States were willing to go along on truce arrangements provided that these did not allow for an independent Jewish State and that that illegal Jewish immigration ceased “forthwith.”56

A joint memo by Jacob Robinson, the Agency’s Legal Counsel, and Epstein pointed out serious flaws in Rusk’s first draft, yet Proskauer thought otherwise. He was persuaded by an initial “provisional draft” on April 27 (to which he contributed), and urged Shertok that day to accept a truce limited in duration. It would stop bloodshed; allow “cooling time” for working out some modification of the partition plan; strengthen the yishuv (its political factions not an “undivided house”) militarily; and gain goodwill with the US government and the UN. “The Jewish Agency cannot fight the world,” Proskauer cautioned, “and brave words may result only in the death of brave men.”⁵⁷

The American pressure did not let up. Rusk had Douglas again emphasize to Bevin that if the situation developed whereby the Soviets could use Palestine as a point of entry into the Middle East, American public opinion would “compel” Washington to “reconsider” the value of their commitments in Greece, Turkey, and Iran against Soviet influence. Rusk had to admit on April 26 to organizations accredited to the UN that the US had found no “takers” to cooperate in the sending of troops, and Husseini insisted at the Council on the “wicked” Mandate being replaced by “the whole of Palestine as one unit.” Yet Lovett, worried that the Palestine situation might easily lead to a “general conflagration” with terrible repercussions on the world scene, made a thinly veiled threat to the Agency executive’s Nahum Goldmann two days later.

In an off-the-record meeting with Goldmann on April 28, Lovett warned that if the Zionists prevented a truce in Palestine, the United States would block any military and financial help being given to the yishuv, and publish a White Paper incriminating them (along with the British and the Arabs), which would do “great harm” to America’s Jews and increase antisemitism in the country. Shertok immediately cabled Ben-Gurion this disturbing news. (One week later, two State Department officials quietly drafted a resolution for the Security Council to impose economic and other sanctions against any Palestine organization or government failing to comply with the truce.) The same day, Cadogan sent Palestine Commission chairman Lisicky a letter marked “secret” insisting that British assets in oil supplies, commercial interests, foodstuffs, and military stores be safeguarded and guaranteed after the mandate ended. To make sure that they would have enough to cover an anticipated deficit of almost £9 million, the British impounded the funds of the Palestine Currency Board, totaling almost £50 million.58

Douglas’s appeal, following the request from Rusk, that HMG shift from her present attitude to cooperate with the US truce/trusteeship proposal received a frigid reception. Was Abdullah to stand “idly by,” Attlee and Bevin insisted to him on the 28th, when the Jews “were allowed to be aggressors on his co-religionists and fellow-Arabs in the State of Palestine?” The number of Arabs who are infiltrated into Palestine was not large, and any acts they had committed “had been exaggerated. After all, Palestine was an Arab country.” “Was it aggression for Arabs to come into Palestine from their own countries,” they queried, “and non-aggression for Jews to come in by sea to the tens of thousands?” The Jews entered as unarmed immigrants, Douglas responded, leading Attlee to immediately remark: “That was just Hitler’s method”; they were soon armed once they got in. When the Ambassador finally asked if HMG would be willing to “play a part” after May 15, they answered that London would give no undertaking before knowing whether the truce terms had been accepted by both sides. “We feared that we would be left to carry the whole weight again,” the pair concluded, “and this we would not and could not undertake to do.” London had requested the Arab governments not to invade Palestine providing the Jews ceased their attacks, and they thought that Washington should take the same action with the Jews. “After all,” Bevin told Douglas the next day, “the present Jewish action was the direct outcome” of US policy, and therefore HMG felt that the Americans, and they alone, “could really remedy the situation.⁵⁹

While the Agency and the AHC contemplated a Trusteeship Council formulation by the Belgian delegation to obtain a cease-fire for Jerusalem’s Old City, Parodi proposed a special police form of 1,000 volunteers for Jerusalem. On April 28, the chairman of the Truce Commission warned Abdullah that any warlike decision or action by his forces to march shortly across the Palestine frontiers would be the cause of “the gravest censure” by the Security Council and the entire UN as a possible threat to peace. Shertok, however, had to hasten writing a letter to Marshall in order to clear up a “serious misunderstanding.” The previous day, the Secretary of State had declared at an off-therecord press conference, drawing upon a McClintock memo which Lovett had requested, that an agreement for truce had virtually been reached between the Agency and the Arab League on thirteen of Rusk’s fourteen points—immigration the exceptional issue. This statement disturbed Shertok greatly.

Shertok had already indicated leading the Jewish Agency’s cause at the UN, had already indicated a number of difficulties and objections to the truce draft when shown it on the previous evening. He had repeated these to the Security Council on April 27, primarily the truce’s deferment of statehood and rendering its attainment in the future “most uncertain.” In addition, the Agency could never accept British supervision of a truce or the “gross inequality” of a US arms embargo, which left the Jews at a decided disadvantage compared with the Arab states. Shertok quickly pointed this out to Proskauer as well, in reply to the judge’s urgent letter of the previous day. Concurrently, a telegram from the Truce Commission described the rapid deterioration of the general situation in Palestine, noting to the Council that the “intensity of fighting is increasing steadily.”60

As April drew to a close, Arthur Lourie, directing the Agency’s office in New York, concluded to Eytan that the GA Political Committee’s discussions “are almost incredible in their apparent futility,” wrangling for days over questions of procedure and “an atmosphere of cynicism and gloom” hanging over the whole meetings. Hosting a private meeting of the representatives of the Western Hemisphere, Austin forcefully stressed that the United States was deliberately seeking collaboration from other UN members, not under any circumstances aiming to “throw their weight about” and impose a solution. Upon his return to New York for consultations, Azcárate had announced that partition was a fact, and the only question was how long it would be before the fact is recognized. Reporting home, Cunningham declared that the Arabs in Jerusalem were either under no control or acting under the orders of a number of Iraqi and Syrian military leaders without coordination, looting common and the AHC “virtually not functioning.” Greatly disappointed as the local British administration disintegrated and worried for the safety of his people, the High Commissioner even suggested to Creech Jones an earlier termination of the mandate, only to be told that this would bring “general dismay, a very serious loss of reputation here with intensification of malicious criticism,” and “possibly bring to naught” the efforts of those laboring to bring “some alleviation to the current situation and future prospects there.”61

Proskauer, finding support from Goldmann—which a satisfied Rusk conveyed to Lovett—persisted, pressing Ben-Gurion to accept the truce. Yet at that same moment, Abdullah publicly advised the Jewish bodies in Palestine to halt their aggression, and accept citizenship in a Palestine State under his rule. For its part, the British UN delegation informed its Agency counterpart that all pressure from the State Department to persuade HMG to prolong its tenure had failed. It seemed absurd, Eban wrote to a colleague in Paris, for Parodi to hail a US scheme which its original sponsors did not seem to regard very highly themselves.⁶²

Indeed, on April 30 the US delegation modified its plans for Palestine, and proposed to the Trusteeship Council a “simple and temporary” trusteeship for Jerusalem. (That did not prevent State mandarins, responding to Jessup’s request, from preparing two possible alternative plans for UN action establishing a provisional government for all of Palestine.) In disagreement, Britain’s UN Counselor John Fletcher-Cooke suggested instead that the present government of Jerusalem, headed by District Commissioner R. M. Graves, should be replaced by a neutral chairman appointed by Cunningham. Australia’s delegate, dissenting, called all such plans illegal, and suggested a return to the Security Council’s draft statute for Jerusalem. Husseini agreed with the Britisher’s proposal, but Shertok did not, saying that the Jews could not undertake a formal cease-fire there unless the Arab siege was lifted. Separately, he suggested to Ben-Gurion to publish a “modest communiqué,” indicating that the yishuv’s government actually existed, so that if by accepting truce terms the Agency would be precluded from proclaiming sovereignty on May 16 its position was not prejudiced, and it could argue that the government was already in “full working order” when the truce agreement was concluded.⁶³

The Arabs stood firm. The AHC had still not responded to Cunningham’s appeal for a cease-fire, Khalidi having left early that month for Damascus and not returned to Jerusalem. On April 26 Husseini declared to the Political Committee that the country’s Arabs would proclaim the whole of Palestine an independent state on May 16 unless in the meantime the GA created a temporary trusteeship that would lead to a sovereign unitary state. On April 28, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Feisal spoke on behalf of all the Arab delegates meeting in his apartment when telling Rusk and Jessup that Jewish immigration could at most continue at the British legal quota of 1,500 per month, but it had to “cease altogether” after the truce. (One week earlier, Feisal had told Jessup and Kopper that Palestine had already received its “fair share” of Jewish immigrants, and that those coming for some time from Eastern Europe “had been of a communist nature.”)

Azzam Pasha said the same thing to the British in Cairo as had Feisal about Jewish immigration. This was the same Arab leader who had frankly told Eban and the Agency’s David Horowitz in September 1947 that the Arab peoples viewed Palestine’s Jews as “an alien organism,” which the Arabs would eventually eject in the same manner as they had the European Crusaders after two hundred years of living uninvited in their midst. Arab Legion units, at the same time, fired on Jerusalem’s Talpiyot and Mekor Hayim neighborhoods, and exchanged artillery shelling for three days against the Hagana’s taking control of the Gesher police station in the Beit Sh’an Valley until ordered to return to their barracks.64

Truman, as he told Rusk on April 30, wished to get the Palestine matter “settled” rather than approach it from the point of view of personal political considerations. He agreed with State that an immediate truce there seemed to be the government’s basic objective. In addition, it was “fundamental” that the truce should not be used as “a cloak” for a change in the military position of either warring side. After Rusk pointed to “extremists” like Silver, who, unlike Goldmann, Shertok, and some Jewish leaders in Palestine, made “a formidable war party” which “complicated” the department’s task considerably, the President remarked that he wished Marshall to know that he was ready to take whatever steps the Secretary thought would hasten the completion of a truce, prepared to “go the limit” in helping the UN bring this about. “If the Jews refuse to accept a truce on reasonable grounds they need not expect anything from us” he replied to Rusk’s statement that the Arabs might accept the truce and the Jews would not, which might then create “difficult problems” for him. The Arabs should be told that our policy was firm, Truman concluded, and be reminded that “we have a difficult political problem within this country.” Expressly stating his concern over the Russian aspect of the situation, he ended by saying to Rusk “go and get a truce”—there was no other answer to this situation.65

The same day, Bevin informed Creech Jones that, from the point of view of HMG’s relations with the Americans, he would be “glad” to see the increasingly “unreal” US trusteeship plan “die of its own accord rather than for us to intervene to finish it off.” He preferred that the British concentrate for the time being on the positive work of furthering the local truce for Jerusalem, thinking that as May 15 approached, “eleventh hour considerations” might make the two parties “rather amenable to reason,” and that the truce offered the best way out. If the Colonial Secretary were to mention in the Security Council “limiting the struggle,” Bevin thought it better for him not to specifically refer to arms embargoes: Britain’s position as regards the supply of weapons to the Arab States was in American eyes “particularly vulnerable.”⁶⁶

On May 1, while the Hagana took almost full control of Jerusalem’s strategic Katamon neighborhood and Syrian army troops attacked the Dan, Dafna, Kfar Szold, and Lehavot HaBashan settlements in the Upper Galilee, the thirty-three-year-old Eban explained directly to the GA’s Political Committee why the defeat of the US trusteeship plan was important and urgent, asserting that Jewish sovereignty was already a reality in everything but name. The world Zionist movement, having created solid, coherent institutions in Palestine over the years, was now poised on the threshold of sovereignty, and it also possessed a certificate of national legitimacy from the UN. Further, the Americans’ “violent reversal” of policy ran counter to mankind’s conscience haunted by the spectacle of Jewish survivors still languishing behind barbed wire in Europe, whose capabilities and ideals “will be fully at home” in the Jewish state, and above all reflected a blatant acceptance of illicit force as the arbiter of international policy, thereby covering the UN in “universal derision.” The time had come, his address ended, for the emancipation of “two historic peoples from a long period of tutelage” and allowing for a vision of mutual cooperation. “Congratulations,” Gromyko soon told Eban in his booming bass voice during a luncheon at Lie’s Forest Hills home, “you have killed American trusteeship.”⁶⁷

At this point, while Shertok declared to the Trusteeship Council that the Agency was “utterly opposed” to the American plan for the duration of any time period, trusteeship had no takers either in the Arab camp. Husseini and Iraq delegate Awni al-Khalidi saw it as an attempt to impose partition indirectly. The Arab states might have to enter Palestine to establish “law and order” after May 15, Fawzi told Rusk, while Feisal added in another interview that they “could not ever” accept a Jewish state, which would be “an abscess to the political body of the Arabs.” A scheme to have Jerusalem placed under the International Red Cross flag and a truce for the entire country drew Husseini’s quick response: “No Partition!” Conceding the absence of governments’ willingness to supply forces to implement a trusteeship, the American plan (so Creech Jones wrote to Bevin) was “now dying a natural death,” The Colonial Secretary gave Rusk on May 2 his opinion that the Jews would agree to sovereignty in a coastal state running from Tel Aviv to Haifa, with Abdullah’s forces partitioning the country along a line across to and including Jaffa, Aqaba going to Saudi Arabia monarch Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, Syria getting the northeastern corner of Palestine, and “liquidating” Haj Amin. Cuban delegate Guillermo Belt, who had cast “no” at the November 29, 1947 vote, proposed that a subcommittee create a provisional UN regime after May 15, pressing for an agreement based upon “a free and independent state in Palestine.”68

On May 6, a GA vote of 35 to 0 (with 17 abstentions) approved the Trusteeship Council resolution to have the mandatory appoint a neutral Special Municipal Commissioner to take over the entire Jerusalem administration ten days hence. Berendsen saw no point in this “man of straw,” while Julius Katz-Suchy, Poland’s delegate and a Jew, continued to back partition and questioned the legality of this appointment. Parodi, the new Security Council president, proposed that a provisional government last only a few months; Tsiang deemed trusteeship “reactionary” and in general unpopular; Russia’s Semyon Tsarapkin thought that even bare consideration of the French proposal in effect ignored the November 29 resolution. The same day, the US delegation’s Ross relayed to State that after a meeting with Parodi and Creech Jones, “a basis for agreement on truce terms has not been found.” Hearing the Colonial Secretary declare that recent military successes had made the Jews determined “not to budge” from statehood and unlimited immigration, while “inflamed Arab opinion” would sweep any Arab government in compliance with UN decrees, Parodi confided to Austin that his government would never permit French boats to do what the British Royal Navy had “done to the Jews” seeking entry into Palestine. Creech Jones offered nothing further to a closed meeting of the subcommittee the next day than saying that “at this late hour, what is not possible by consent is not possible at all.”69

Rusk had tried another tack. On the morning of May 3, he proposed to Lovett that an immediate cease-fire begin in Palestine two days hence, with the Mandate extended for ten days, and an airplane furnished by Truman fly to the Middle East with representatives of the AHC, the Arab States, and the Jewish Agency joining members of the Truce Commission to conclude a truce during that time. The President agreed to make his plane “Sacred Cow” available, a receptive Shertok was informed, and US Consul Thomas Wasson in Jerusalem transmitted the message to the Jewish Agency. Upon consulting his colleagues in Jerusalem, Shertok wrote to Rusk the next day that they did not consider warranted the “somewhat spectacular proceeding now suggested.” This persuaded Rusk to inform Lovett that the Agency, in light of the Jews’ present military superiority in Palestine, would prefer to “round out” its commonwealth after May 15, thereby becoming the “actual aggressors” against Palestine’s Arabs. He thought Creech Jones’s May 2 partition solution “the wisest course of action.” The United States was doing “everything it can,” Truman told the press on May 6, to get the Palestine problem settled peacefully. Bevin turned down flat Rusk’s idea, however, declaring in Commons that HMG would not depart from its position to retain the Mandate until May 15, despite Marshall’s expression to Inverchapel of “very strong hope” that London would agree to an extension “in the great interests of peace.”⁷⁰

The State Department found encouragement in Marshall’s private talk with Magnes and Rusk’s with Goldmann, who separately had each urged the United States to press for a truce and a trusteeship. The Secretary set up an off-the-record meeting for Magnes with Truman on May 5, during which the President praised the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry’s report for a binationalist state and wide Jewish immigration as the best solution; expressed bitterness that the Jewish and Arab leaders had rejected his “Sacred Cow” offer; and pledged that it was “our duty” to “find a way” of solving the Palestine quagmire. The next day, Truman approved State’s draft of proposed articles for a three-month cease-fire under the Truce Commission’s authority, during which neither side could take steps to proclaim statehood or to seek international recognition to that end. He remained bitter, and so told New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, about the British and “New York Jews” (which he conflated with “New York Zionists,” to Sulzberger’s discomfort), also deeply concerned, as was Lovett, about the development of antisemitism in the United States as a result of Zionist activism.71

Yet reports still circulated in the State Department and the White House to the effect that Shertok had agreed to conditions for a military truce and “political standstill” in Palestine, forcing him to write to Marshall on the 7th at Epstein’s suggestion that his letter of April 29 had made clear the Agency’s objections to the proposed US truce. Private individuals (a hint to Proskauer, Magnes, and Goldmann) who took an opposing line, he pointed out, did not represent Palestinian Jewry, bore no constitutional responsibility for its future, and were not in a position to give effect to what they advocated. He was about to fly home for consultation with the Agency executive, which alone would have to decide on its immediate course of action. Epstein handed over a copy of this letter to “Dave” (David Niles), an Administrative Assistant in the White House, to give “his Chief” (Truman).

The next day, accompanied by Epstein, Shertok made his final case to Marshall. Realizing that the Agency was prepared to gamble on a “now or never” basis to declare a Jewish commonwealth on May 15 and on the possibility of an arrangement for partitioning Palestine with Abdullah, the Secretary warned, as a military man, that it was very dangerous to base long-range policy on temporary successes in the field of battle. Should the tide turn against the Jews in the long run, he said bluntly, they had no warrant to expect help from the United States. Thanking Marshall for “his sincerity and wisdom,” Shertok promised to convey this admonition to his associates in Jerusalem.⁷²

Clark Clifford, Truman’s forty-one-year-old Naval Aide and trusted adviser, had by then prepared some penciled notes about the question of American recognition of the anticipated Jewish state. With suggestions from Niles and Max Lowenthal, who had been legal counsel for Senator Truman during the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program in World War II, he had on March 8 drafted a lengthy memo to Truman advising that, uninfluenced by election considerations, endorsing the GA partition recommendation was “in complete conformity with the settled policy” of the United States and “best for America.” Implementing partition, he had stressed then, was crucial to the UN’s future and to the country’s cementing alliances with South America and Western Europe, a position also taken by the American Association for the United Nations. Now, receiving Clifford’s notes that the Jewish state, to be set up shortly, was “inevitable” (“We must recognize inevitably. Why not now?”), Truman telephoned Marshall for his views. Hearing the Secretary’s strong objections, Truman said that he wished to have a meeting the next week on the subject. Telling Clifford that Marshall would likely take a very strong position at the meeting, he wished the young Missourian to make the case for recognition. “You know how I feel,” the President added: “I want you to be as persuasive as you can possibly be.”73

The showdown at the Oval Office on the afternoon of May 12, the same day that both Jewish and Arab UN representatives rejected the plan for establishing a UN Central Commission for Palestine as a temporary interim regime, appeared to end in Marshall’s favor. While Clifford supporters Niles and Truman secretary Mathew J. Connelly sat by quietly, as did McClintock and Fraser Wilkins of State’s Near East division (the latter two replacing Rusk and Henderson because Lovett thought their presence in the same room as Clifford would be “too inflammatory”), Lovett and especially Marshall criticized the Jewish Agency’s hardening attitude, and argued that the United States should continue supporting the UN trusteeship resolutions and defer any decision on recognition. When Clifford responded that partition had taken place, Lovett immediately countered that the Security Council was still discussing a truce, and that premature recognition of a state whose nature would be unknown (“buying a pig in a poke”) would be “highly injurious” to the UN and, as a “very transparent” attempt to win the Jewish vote in the November election, also to the President. Reiterating some of these points, Marshall, his face “reddening with suppressed anger,” interjected that Clifford’s counsel was based on domestic political considerations, while the Palestine problem was international. Should the President follow Clifford’s advice, he would vote against Truman if he cast a vote in the coming elections this November.

Knowing that he had to stop the meeting, the Secretary’s last statement coming very close to an explicit threat to resign, Truman declared that he would deal with both sides of the problem himself. To a very agitated Marshall, he said that he was “inclined to side with you in this matter.” He then initialed the State Department’s resolution, mainly drafted by Rusk and Jessup, for a truce and a UN Commissioner for Palestine. Ninety minutes had passed. When Marshall left the room, Truman suggested that Clifford “let the dust settle a little—then you can get it again and see if we can get this thing turned around. I still want to do it. But be careful. I can’t afford to lose George Marshall.”74

To Clifford’s surprise, Lovett called him shortly after the tense conference had ended, and asked that they meet for drinks that evening to see if a solution could be found to avoid a Truman-Marshall “break over this issue” just in these most difficult months of the Cold War. When Clifford insisted that the President, whose views he had accurately presented, was not going “to give an inch,” Lovett responded, “let’s see what can be done at State.” A pleased Truman advised Clifford the next morning that he keep encouraging Lovett “to work on the General,” while telling Niles “I was sorry to have to decide against you fellows yesterday.” He agreed with Niles that the “western” (US) recognition should precede the Soviet bloc’s recognition, so as to give it “the right slant from the beginning.” That afternoon, Lovett suggested a new approach: recognize the state but delay announcing or implementing it for an unspecific period. Without even consulting Truman, Clifford shot back that the President was “rock solid” in his basic view. Lovett then suggested de facto, rather than full de jure, recognition. Again without consulting Truman, Clifford said that this was an issue on which he felt his group could yield to State.⁷⁵

The next day, Jessup’s proposal for a UN Mediator was forwarded to the Political Committee for voting on May 14. The proposal had first been approved with the British and Canadian delegations after the United States dropped its trusteeship proposal, Bevin approving the selection of Sweden’s Count Folke Bernadotte. This reduced role from the earlier US resolution for a UN Commissioner authorized the Mediator to promote a “peaceful adjustment of the situation.” Just then news arrived of the biggest massacre of Jews in the Palestine armed conflict, two Arab Legion companies—still under the orders of the General Officer Commanding British troops in Palestine, Gordon MacMillan— joining hundreds of Arabs from nearby villages in the assault against Kfar Etzion. Jessup’s step did not stop Niles, Jacobson, former New York Governor Herbert Lehman, influential politicians Jacob Arvey (Chicago) and Edward J. Flynn (New York), and Bartley Crum of the 1946 Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine from pressing Truman to recognize the emerging Jewish state. The Jewish War Veterans of America, under the command of Major-General Julius Klein, kept up its public pressure campaign. Weizmann’s letter to Truman on the 13th, which reached him through Niles, made a personal plea, expressing his thought that the world would regard Truman’s action “as especially appropriate that the greatest living democracy should be the first to welcome the newest into the family of nations.”76

While Ben-Gurion was making preparations to declare the new Jewish commonwealth in Tel Aviv’s Museum of Art on May 14 at 4 p.m. as its Prime Minister and Defense Minister, the Minhelet HaAm (People’s Administrative Council) having decided two days earlier by a close vote of 6 to 4 to reject the US trusteeship proposal, implying a proclamation of sovereignty for the newly named “Israel,” Clifford told Lovett that Truman would be satisfied if Marshall agreed not to oppose the President’s recognition. On his own, he also asked Epstein that afternoon to prepare an official letter to Truman, with a copy to Marshall, requesting that the United States recognize the new state but claiming nothing beyond the borders outlined in the November 29 resolution.

With no time to consult Jerusalem other than cabling Shertok that State insisted upon this “procedural point,” although no evidence was yet available that the request would be “complied with” if submitted, Epstein turned to lawyer David C. Ginsburg for help in drafting the letter for US recognition. Receiving this request with the new name “State of Israel” penciled in by Epstein at the last minute, Clifford, with Niles’s help, replied to Epstein’s letter and prepared a statement for Truman’s use. During lunch he turned down Lovett’s proposed statement that Truman was considering the subject of recognition, and said that speed was essential to preempt the Russians’ likely move to do so. Lovett still sought delay of a day or two, but Clifford said that Truman was under “unbearable pressure” to recognize the Jewish state promptly.⁷⁷

Lovett, to whom Marshall had deputed the entire Palestine dilemma, and his colleagues at State arrived at the language of a White House release one-half hour before the Mandate would come to an end that Friday. (Cunningham had left Government House in Jerusalem that morning for departure at midnight from Haifa aboard the cruiser HMS Euryalus.) Lovett asked that the announcement be delayed until Austin got advance word of it and the GA session would end about 10 p.m., but Clifford, who was with Truman at the time, relayed that the President had decided to issue the statement shortly after 6 p.m. A stunned Rusk pointed out that this would “cut right across a standstill,” for which the US delegation had been working for weeks at the UN, and for which State already had forty votes. Nevertheless, Clifford replied, these were Truman’s instructions. Rusk called Austin, who, disgustedly, slammed down the telephone, and simply left for home without telling his associates.

At 6 p.m. Marshall, who also had been kept in the dark as to the secret Clifford-Lovett talks, informed Bevin and representatives of other capitals of the impending move. The British Foreign Secretary remained certain that a loose central authority such as the one proposed in the Morrison-Grady plan of provisional autonomy would eventually bring all “into a harmonious whole.” Truman’s de facto recognition, penned by Clifford and White House secretary Charles Ross even before Epstein’s letter arrived, came at 6:11 p.m.—only eleven minutes after BenGurion had declared Israel’s independence. (Little notice was paid when Granados then went to the GA podium to announce Guatemala’s de jure recognition of the new Jewish state.) Epstein raised the Israeli flag for the first time on US soil outside the Jewish Agency’s Washington office at 2210 Massachusetts Ave., Mrs. Woodrow Wilson also present “to see the fulfillment of the idea [the Balfour Declaration] supported by her husband in 1917.” A formal acknowledgment from Marshall to the earlier Epstein letter that afternoon, quoting Truman’s statement of recognition, evoked the Jewish Agency representative’s feelings at that time: “Hope had justified itself, had finally vanquished all the doubts and fears that had been assailing me.”78

Truman, thinking of his April pledge to Weizmann, said to an aide: “The old Doctor will believe me now,” convinced, as Truman said years later, that he had done “what I thought was right.” At that same moment, “pandemonium” (Rusk’s description) struck the GA hall. Silver had silenced his audience briefly when announcing the creation of the Jewish State, yet debate had been continuing on the resolution posed by Jessup for the appointment of a UN Mediator. A US delegate had to literally sit on Belt’s lap to keep him from going to the podium to withdraw Cuba from the UN. Four minutes later, Marshall ordered Rusk to fly to New York and “prevent the US delegation from resigning en masse.” Some of the Secretary’s friends advised him to step down from his office, but Marshall replied that “you do not accept a post of this sort and then resign when the man who has the Constitutional authority to make a decision makes one. You may resign at any time for any other reason but not that one.” Fawzi, el-Khouri, and Malik spoke harshly against Truman’s action, while the delegates of Canada, China, and a number of Latin American states felt that they had been “double-crossed.” Eleanor Roosevelt of the US delegation would write to Marshall that Truman’s speedy recognition had created “complete consternation” in the UN, and her associates would have wanted prior knowledge and “a very clear understanding beforehand with such nations as we expected would follow our lead.”79

The US resolution for a UN Mediator was adopted at 8:30 that evening by a vote of 31 votes to 7 (the Arab and Muslim nations) with 16 abstentions (the Soviet bloc), but the proposal for a temporary trusteeship over Jerusalem was defeated by 20 affirmative and 15 negative votes with 19 abstentions (including the British delegation). Jessup hurried back to Manhattan in his car, feeling that “the record of the United States was sullied.” In the Foreign Office’s view, so Beeley reported to Austin, it was “not correct to consider” that the November 29 GA resolution established a legal basis for the creation of a Jewish commonwealth. Marshall later told Truman that State felt the United States “had hit its all-time low before the UN,” while Roosevelt wrote him that seldom had she seen “a more bitter, puzzled, discouraged group of people” than the American delegation, “just non-plussed by the way in which we do things.” “There was not much else to be done,” the President replied to her, given “the vacuum in Palestine” and the Russians “anxious to be the first to do the recognizing.” In his memoirs, Truman added that some of the State Department’s career men should not have been surprised at his decision if they had “faithfully supported my policy.” “They almost put it over on you,” Lovett said to him after Truman’s announcement on recognition.⁸⁰

At 5:00 the next morning, having been awakened a few hours earlier to hear of Truman’s recognition, Ben-Gurion woke again to broadcast from a Hagana transmitter while the bombing by Egyptian spitfires over Tel Aviv, killing one and injuring five, echoed into his microphone. He fully appreciated that, in the words of Eban’s later reminiscence, the US President’s step came to the embattled Jews of Palestine “as an unexpected act of grace”: “They were no longer forsaken and alone.” Ben-Gurion sent a telegram, joined by Myerson, Agency treasurer Eliezer Kaplan, and Va’ad HaLe’umi executive member David Remez, to Weizmann’s hotel suite. Acknowledging that he had “done more than any other living man” towards the creation of the State of Israel, they looked forward to his becoming its first President.81

The Jews could harbor no illusions about their adversaries’ true, venomous intent. Abdullah’s Order of the Day had informed his troops on May 4 that they would shortly have to join the “holy war” (jihad) to save Palestine, and on this war “depends the honour and the glory of the Arab States.” Haj Amin’s spokesman, Ahmed Shukairy, just announced the Arabs’ goal as “the elimination of the Jewish State.” “This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades,” predicted Azzam at a Cairo press conference. As to the attacking armies, “generally reliable” French intelligence in Beirut informed the Agency that five Arab states would invade simultaneously on May 15 with some 30,000 forces, including 5,000 of the heavily armed Arab Legion. Lie, who like many had foreseen the chaos that now came to fruition, described the outcome as a “fiasco.” The inevitable, first Arab-Jewish War had begun.⁸²

Endnotes

1.“Resolutions adopted by the Security Council in 1948,” United Nations Security Council, https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/resolutions-adoptedsecurity-council-1948.

2.Monty Noam Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, 1945–1948, vol. 2, Into the International Arena, 1947–1948 (New York, 2019), 550, 557–563, 568–570, 577–578, 585–589, 593–594, 602–609, 619–624, 628–629. It is possible that Truman, contending at the same time with the Soviet coup d’état in Czechoslovakia, Moscow’s aggressive designs in Germany and elsewhere, and his call to Congress for a US selective service recruitment law, did not realize the full significance of the draft of Austin’s statement when he had approved it on March 8. In addition, as emerged from a meeting which Truman convened the next day, he had assumed that Austin would announce the alternative plan after a Council vote had demonstrated the impossibility of putting over the partition plan.

3.Ibid., 633, 635–636. For Shertok’s April 1 address, see Moshe Sharett, B’Sha’ar HaUmot (Tel Aviv, 1964), 173–191.

4.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 597–598.

5.Ibid., 632.

6.Ibid., 602, 619–620; James Barros, Trygve Lie and the Cold War: The UN Secretary-General Pursues Peace, 1946–1953 (DeKalb, 1989), 189–190; Shertok to Myerson, April 6, 1948, S25/1558, Central Zionist Archives (hereafter CZA), Jerusalem, Israel.

7.Shertok remarks, April 1, 1948, UN Trusteeship Council, S/PV.277; Shertok to Ben-Gurion, April 2, 1948, S25/1704, CZA; Penkower, Palestine to Israel, Mandate to State, vol. 2, 513, 515, 518, 585–586.

8.Ibid., 638; Jewish Telegraphic Agency (hereafter JTA), April 1 and 4, 1948; Eytan report, April 2, 1948, 93.03/125/16, Israel State Archives (hereafter ISA), Jerusalem.

9.Executive to Shertok, April 4, 1948, S25/1704, CZA.

10.JTA, April 5, 1948; Shertok to Ben-Gurion and Myeerson, April 4, 1948, S25/1704; Berman, Eytan, Kohn, and Herzog to Shertok, March 28, 1948, S25/1558; Shertok to Sasson, April 4, 1948; Shertok to Eytan, April 5, 1948; both in S25/1551; all in CZA. That same moment, a lengthy Hagana intelligence report detailed the mandatory government’s obstructive steps against implementing the GA partition decision. “Sekirat Teneh,” April 6, 1948, S25/9671, CZA.

11.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 632–633; Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed (New Haven, 2010), 169. Beeley had admitted on April 1 to a US Embassy official in London that he could not suggest a better plan than that of the United States, the alternative apparently to let the Jews and Arabs “fight it out” until some kind of an arrangement was reached. Jones to Rusk et al., April 1, 1948, File 1, Robert McClintock MSS., State Department records, National Archives (hereafter NA), Suitland, MD. The Hagana, created in 1920 as a response to Arab attacks in Jerusalem and elsewhere, served as the Agency’s defense force.

12.Palestine Post, April 4, 1948; Ben-Zvi to Jewish Agency Executive, April 5, 1948, S40/8/1, CZA.

13.Eytan-Azcárate meeting, April 5, 1948, S25/5634, CZA.

14.General Principles, April 5, 1948, 93.03/95/14, ISA; Shertok to Myerson, April 6, 1948, S25/1704, CZA; Eban to Fischer, April 7, 1948, 93.03/126/6, ISA; Kopper to Marshall, April 5, 1948, File 1, Dean Rusk MSS., State Department records, NA; Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 636–637; Pearson to Wrong, April 6, 1948, RG 25, series A-12, vol. 2093, part 5, Public Archives of Canada (hereafter PAC), Ottawa, Canada.

15.Lawford to Foreign Office, April 5, 1946; Foreign Office to New York, April 7, 1948; both in Foreign Office records (hereafter FO), 371/68541, Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), Kew, England.

16.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 637, 567, 625. For McClintock’s overall views on the Palestine conundrum and its impact on US oil needs, with large-scale fighting between Jews and Arabs “inevitably” to open the way for Soviet penetration of Palestine, see Memo, April 7, 1948, File 1, McClintock MSS.

17.Eban to Fischer, April 7, 1948, 93.03/126/6, ISA.

18.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 637. From April onwards, Magnes had shared his support of a truce and trusteeship with Austin, American Consul in Jerusalem Thomas Wasson, Azcárate, and supporters in the United States, particularly the American Jewish Committee, Judge Jerome Frank, and former Barnard College dean Virginia Gildersleeve, a founder of the anti-partition Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land, who told New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger that he had impressed her “profoundly.” Magnes to Austin, April 4, 1948, file 4-1751, Ernst Simon MSS.; Magnes to Wasson, Ms.Var. 350/7, Martin Buber MSS.; both Jewish National Library, Jerusalem; Azcárate to Bunche, April 20, 1948, DAG-3/3.1.1., box 1, UN Archives, New York City; April 12, 1948 draft, box 73, Jerome Frank MSS., Sterling Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT; Gildersleeve to Sulzberger, May 3, 1948, Palestine and Zionism-2, Arthur Hays Sulzberger MSS., New York Times Archives (now at the New York Public Library). For Magnes’s binationalist views for Palestine, see chap. 6.

19.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 638; Sasson to Shertok, April 8, 1948, S25/5634; Report of Arab League meeting, April 11, 1948, A116/87I; both in CZA.

20.McNaughton to Pearson, April 7, 1948, MG 26, J1, vol. 440, PAC; Shertok to Ben-Gurion, April 6, 1948, S25/1704, CZA; Shertok to Lisicky, April 6, 1948, DAG-13/3.1.0:4, UN Archives; Gass to Epstein, April 7, 1948, 93.01/2180/14; Kohn-Cunningham meeting, April 7, 1948, P563/1; both in ISA; Kohn to Shertok, April 7, 1948, S25/1704, CZA.

21.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 639.

22.Eytan to Shertok, April 8, 1948, P573/1, ISA.

23.López-Husseini meeting, April 7, 1948, 93.03/94/8, ISA. For the refutation by the Agency’s legal advisor of Husseini’s claim regarding the League of Nations Covenant, noting that Palestine was not granted “provisional recognition” as an independent nation by the Covenant or by the Mandate (which gave the Jewish Agency special status to speak for world Jewry in creating a Jewish National Home in Palestine), see Jacob Robinson memo, April 28, 1948, L35/141, CZA.

24.López-Shertok meeting, April 7, 1948, 93.03/95/1, ISA.

25.López-Husseini meeting, April 8, 1948, 95/1—Chet-Tzadi 93, ISA; Husseini statement, April 8, 1948, L35/65, CZA. For the restrictive 1939 White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration during the next five years to 75,000— thereafter with Arab consent—and foresaw a Palestine state within a decade (thus an Arab majority), see Monty Noam Penkower, Palestine in Turmoil: The Struggle for Sovereignty, 1933–1939, vol. 2, Retreat from the Mandate, 1937– 1939 (New York, 2014), chap. 10.

26.López-Shertok meeting (two reports), April 8, 1948, 95/1—Chet-Tzadi 93, ISA; Shertok to Ben-Gurion and Myerson, April 8, 1948, S25/1704, CZA.

27.McNaughton to Pearson, April 7, 1948, MG 26, J1, vol. 440, PAC; New York to Marshall, April 7, 1948, File 2, Rusk MSS.

28.Shertok-Lovett-Rusk meeting, April 9, 1948, 130.2414/22; Shertok to BenGurion, April 11, 1948, 93.2180/14; both in ISA.

29.Shertok-Rusk meetings, April 9, 1948, 93.03/129/6; Shertok to Ben-Gurion, April 11, 1948, 130.9, 2337/4; all in ISA.

30.Fahy to Silver, April 10, 1948, 93.03/126/10, ISA.

31.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 640; Austin to Marshall, April 12, 1948, File 2, Rusk MSS. Two days later, the British informed Bunche that “there was no question” of the proposed military force coming “into being” before May 15. Fletcher-Cooke to Bunche, April 12, 1948, RG 25, vol. 84–85/19, PAC.

32.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 640–641. Gromyko’s presence elicited the same day a worried memo from the director of the State Department’s Office of European Affairs about the danger of a Soviet contingent in a UN security force for Palestine. Hickerson to Lovett, April 12, 1948, File 1, McClintock MSS.

33.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 641; Bunche to Azcárate, April 13, 1948, DAG-3/3.1.1., File 1, UN Archives; Palestine Post, April, 14, 1948; Bunche to Fletcher-Cooke, May 6, 1948, DAG-13/3.1.0.1, box 2, UN Archives.

34.Kohn to Fox-Strangeways, April 9, 1948, P673/1, ISA.

35.Shertok to Ben-Gurion, April 9, 1948; Shertok to Ben-Gurion, April 11, 1948; both in S25/1704, CZA.

36.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 641–642; Weizmann to Marshall, 93.03/67/6, ISA.

37.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 642.

38.Ibid., 642–643. For the official US arms embargo, which discriminated against the Jews, see Amitsur Ilan, The Origin of the Arab-Israeli Arms Race (London, 1996).

39.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 644.

40.Azcárate to Bunche, April 1, 1948, DAG-13.3.1.0.1, File1, UN Archives; Eban to Ross, April 12, 1948, 93.03/95/14; Shertok to Ben-Gurion, April 12, 1948, 130.9, 2337/4; both in ISA; HaAretz, April 13, 1948. Under Article 80, a provision of international law, Jewish rights to Palestine and the Land of Israel were not to be altered in any way unless there had been an intervening trusteeship agreement between the states or parties concerned converting the mandate into a trusteeship or trust territory. Among the most important of these Jewish rights were those contained in Article 6 of the Mandate, which recognized the right of Jews to immigrate freely to the Land of Israel and to establish settlements thereon.

41.Schedule, MC280/238, Freda Kirchwey MSS., Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA; Yearbook of the United Nations (1947–48), 414–415.

42.Rusk to Lovett, April 16, 1948, file 2, Rusk MSS.; Inverchapel to Foreign Office, April 17, 1948, MG 26, J4, vol. 310, PAC.; Bevin to Inverchapel, April 19, 1948, FO800/487, PRO.

43.Schedule, MC280/238, Freda Kirchwey MSS.; New York to Pearson, April 19, 1948, MG 26, N1, vol. 64, PAC. A week later, Beeley thought that the Jews could consolidate a state of restricted size running from Tel Aviv to Haifa “and going inland fifteen or more miles.” Austin to State, April 27, 1948, file 2, McClintock MSS. For the Agency’s modification of the truce draft, see Shertok to López, April 16, 1948, 93.03/94/5, ISA.

44.Fahy-Lovett meeting, April 16, 1948, 93.03/126/10, ISA.

45.Gurney diary, April 6–23, 1948, St. Anthony College, Oxford University, Oxford, England; Condensed survey, February–May 15, 1948, A289/125, CZA. In the introduction to a private “Postscript” in the diary, Gurney would claim that “no evidence existed” to substantiate the statement that 6,000,000 Jews had been killed in Europe, and “whether or not this is true, it was open to Jews there to resume life in their own countries.”

46.Ben-Gurion to Shertok, April 16, 1948,93.03/117/20; Shertok to Ben-Gurion, April 19, 1948, 93.01/2180/14; both in ISA; Shertok to Ben-Gurion, April 19, 1948, S25/1551, CZA.

47.Azcárate to Lie and Bunche, April 19, 1948, DAG 13/3.1.0/box 5-B; Azcárate to Cunningham, DAG 13/3.1.0/box 5-A; both in UN Archives. At this point, Bevin advised the Colonial Secretary to perhaps suggest to Austin that any Palestine settlement should include the responsibility of UN members to accept refugee Jews throughout Europe, and that the best contribution any outside state could make if fighting ensued in Palestine would be to prevent the entry of additional arms or reinforcement for either side—ideally involving “sealing the land and sea frontiers of Palestine.” Bevin to Creech Jones, April 19, 1948, FO371/68543, PRO.

48.Schedule, MC 280/238, Kirchwey MSS.

49.Reports, April 20–21, 1948, Anne Robison MSS., New Jersey (courtesy of Anne Robison); McClintock to Lovett, April 20, 1948, file 1, Rusk MSS.; JTA, April 21–22, 1948, Schultz diary, April 22, 1948, MC280/238, Kirchwey MSS.

50.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 649–651.

51.Schedule, MC 280/238, Kirchwey MSS.; New York Times, April 21, 1948; Secretariat meeting, April 22, 1948, DAG 1/1.1.3, box 1, UN Archives.

52.Interim Government plan, April 22, 1948; Listowel to Bevin, April 23, 1948; both in FO371/68548, PRO; Douglas to Marshall, April 22, 1948, 501.BB/Palestine/4–1548, State Department records, NA.

53.Truce Commission resolution, April 23, 1948, M. Medzini, Israel’s Foreign Relations, Selected Documents, 1947–1974 (Jerusalem, 1976), 134–135; Schedule, MC 280/238, Kirchwey MSS.; Report, April 23, 1948, Robison MSS.

54.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 652–653.

55.Shertok to Zaslani, April 22, 1948, 130.09/2337/4, ISA; Sasson to Shertok, April 23, 1948, S25/8182, CZA; Sharett, B’Sha’ar HaUmot, 202–208; Tuck to Marshall, April 25, 1948, file 3, Rusk MSS.

56.McClintock draft, April 11, 1948, File 3, Rusk MSS.; Proskauer letter to the New York Times, April 12, 1948; Rusk draft, April 22, 1948; Proskauer-LovettRusk negotiations, April 19, 1948; both in 93.03/85/16; all in ISA; Austin to Marshall, April 24, 1948, file 3, Rusk MSS.; Kopper memo, April 6, 1948, File 1, McClintock MSS. Privately, Rusk told Beeley that in pressing the Security Council to follow up its previous resolution in favor of a truce, the US delegation hoped to make it quite clear” to public opinion that it was “impossible” to stop the conflict in Palestine. Beeley to Burrows, April 24, 1948, FO371/68546, PRO.

57.Robinson-Epstein memo, April 26, 1948, 93.03/95/1, ISA; Jewish Agency Executive, American Section, April 1948 minutes, Z5/2387, CZA; McClintok to Lovett, April 26, 1948, file 3, Rusk MSS.; Proskauer to Shertok, April 27, 1948, box 8, Joseph M. Proskauer MSS., American Jewish Committee archives, New York City. Earlier that month, Proskauer had pressed the pro-Zionist James G. McDonald, one of the US members of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, to intercede with the Pope for the internationalization of Jerusalem. Proskauer to McDonald, April 1, 1948, box 8, Proskauer MSS. For Robinson’s vital contribution to the Agency ever since the British turned to the UN in April 1947 for recommendations regarding Palestine’s future, see chap. 2.

58.New York to Foreign Office, April 27, 1948, FO371/68649, PRO; Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 658–659; Report, April 26, 1948, Robison MSS.; JTA, April 27, 1948; Shertok to Ben-Gurion, April 28, 1948, S25/1558, CZA; Bancroft to Rusk, May 5, 1948, file 3, Rusk MSS.; Lillie Shultz, “Britain’s Stake in an Arab Victory,” The Nation, May 29, 1948, 595–598. Years later, Rusk denied that any such threat had been made, declaring that “if there’s one thing that an Assistant Secretary of State cannot do it’s to affect a transfer of funds for philanthropic purposes anywhere.” Yigal Lossin, Pillar of Fire: The Rebirth of Israel – A Visual History, trans. Z. Ofer (Jerusalem, 1983), 537.

59.Record of Conversation, April 28, 1948, FO800/487; Bevin-Douglas talk, April 29, 1948, FO371/68546; both in PRO.

60.French resolution, April 26, 1948, file 3, Rusk MSS.; JTA, April 29, 1948; Nieuwenhuys to Abdullah, April 28, 1948, 93/125/15, ISA; Shertok to BenGurion, April 28, 1948, 93.03/95/1, ISA; Shertok to Marshall, April 29, 1948, File 13, Clark Clifford MSS., Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MO; McClintock to Rusk, April 28, 1948, file 3, Rusk MSS; Sharett, B’Sha’ar HaUmot, 208–223; Shertok to Proskauer, April 29, 1948, box 8, Proskauer MSS. For Abdullah’s reply to the Truce Commission’s warning, Kirkbride to Foreign Office, April 30, 1948, FO371/68646, PRO. At this point, Weizmann’s views were “closely in accord” with those expressed by the Jewish Agency. New York to Pearson, April 27, 1948, MG 26, J1, vol. 440, PAC; Report, April 28, 1948, Robison MSS.

61.Shertok to Ben-Gurion, April 27 and 28, 1948; both in S25/5176, CZA; Lourie to Eytan, April 30, 1948, 93.03/126/9, ISA; New York to Pearson, April 28, 1948, MG 26, J 1, vol. 440, PAC; Memo, April 27, 1948, box 20, Frank Corrigan MSS., Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York; Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 659; Cunningham report, April 25, 1948, FO37168545, PRO; Austin to State, April 29, 1948, file 3, Rusk MSS.; Creech Jones to Cunningham, April 29, 1947, FO371/68546, PRO.

62.Proskauer to Ben-Gurion, April 30, 1948, S25/1558, CZA; Palestine Post, April 26, 1948; Eban to Fischer, April 29, 1948, 93.03/126/6, ISA. For Goldmann’s views immediately after the Security Council had adopted the US proposal for a truce and trusteeship in Palestine, see Lichtheim to Agronsky, April 1, 1948, A209/29, CZA. Goldmann’s views remained unchanged when addressing the US Jewish organization’s Political Advisory Committee one month later. Meetings, May 3–4, 1948, file 32, Religious Zionist Archives, Mosad HaRav Kook, Jerusalem.

63.Schedule, MC 280/238, Kirchwey MSS.; Memo, April 29, 1948, file 3, Rusk MSS.; Shertok to Ben-Gurion, April 29 and 30, 1948; both in S25/1588; Shertok to Ben-Gurion, April 30, 1948, S25/5176; all in CZA. As early as April 9, Azcárate had advised that if no agreement had been reached by April 25 about the whole of Palestine, “all efforts must be concentrated on Jerusalem.” Azcárate memo, April 9, 1948, DAG-13/3.1.0.5, UN Archives. Also see R.M. Graves, Experiment in Anarchy (London, 1949).

64.Chronological Account, April 25, 1948, 93-125/15, ISA; Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 660–662; Memo, April 21, 1948, file 2, Rusk MSS.; David Horowiz, State in the Making (New York, 1953), 234–235. In reply to Feisal’s expressed concerns, Rusk suggested to the Saudi prince that the Truce Commission deal with such questions as immigration and repatriation during the period of the truce itself, permitting on “compassionate grounds” up to 4,000 Jewish displaced persons per month, immigration not to be used to alter the military position of either community in Palestine. Rusk to Feisal, April 29, 1948, file 3, Rusk MSS.

65.UK Delegation UN to Foreign Office, May 1, 1948, FO371/68546, PRO; Meeting, May 2, 1948, file 32, Religious Zionist Archives; Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 662. Truman also appointed John Hilldring, without consulting State, as his special representative to the US delegation at the UN. This delighted the Zionists, who knew of his key support for Holocaust survivors and then for partition as part of the US delegation last autumn at the GA. Forrestal threatened to resign in protest, but Marshall assured him that the appointment was not going to “neutralize” Loy Henderson, whom Forrestal greatly liked and respected. Hadow to Mason, May 2, 1948, FO371/64849, PRO. For Hilldring’s earlier hand in keeping Europe’s borders open to the survivors seeking entry to American DP camps, see Monty Noam Penkower, After the Holocaust (forthcoming, Boston, 2021), chap. 3.

66.Bevin to Creech Jones, April 30, 1948, FO371/68546, PRO.

67.Shertok to Parodi, May 5, 1948, 93.03/94/5, ISA; Eban address, May 1, 1948, Jewish Agency files, ZA; Abba Eban, Personal Witness: Israel Through My Eyes (New York 1992), 142–143; Linton to Brodetsky, May 2, 1948, Z4/20029B, CZA.

68.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 664–665; Creech Jones to Bevin, May 2, 1948, FO371/68648; Creech Jones to Bevin, May 8, 1948, FO371/68650; both in PRO. Henderson confided to Beeley that he thought the trusteeship plan was “probably dead,” but at least it had served the purpose for “enabling them to avoid attempting to implement partition.” Beeley to Burrows, May 3, 1948, FO371/68565, PRO.

69.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 665. At this point, the Agency’s American Section split in favor of considering a deferment of sovereignty in favor of a truce on certain conditions, the vote 9 to 7. Jewish Agency NY to Jewish Agency Jerusalem, May 7, 1948, 93.01/2180/15, ISA. Discussion on May 11 in the GA Political Committee for a new subcommittee to recommend measures for the protection of Jerusalem, the United States’ Francis Sayre again championing the American trusteeship plan of April 16, was inconclusive. UK to Foreign Office, May 11, 1948, FO371/68551; Report, May 11, 1948, Robison MSS.

70.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 666; Rusk proposal, May 4, 1948, S25/5176, CZA. It had always been HMG’s hope, Bevin told the US Ambassador, that the Jews would “act sensibly” and keep within their own zones, that Jerusalem would be put under a truce, and that Abdullah “might use his forces temporarily to maintain order in the Arab areas,” this allowing time for discussion and possibly for a settlement to be found. Bevin-Douglas talk, May 10, 1948, FO800/487, PRO. Ben-Gurion objected to any prolongation “even for ten days” of the mandatory regime, which “is responsible for bloodshed in Palestine, armed invasion of country and wrecking U.N. decisions.” Ben-Gurion to Shertok, May 4, 1948, S25/1553, CZA. Ben-Gurion made the same point at the first meeting of the Provisional National Administration. Palcor, May 5, 1948. Privately, Bevin urged the Arab states to accept the truce, as, militarily, economically and politically they were “in no position” to take their “intransigent line.” Foreign Office to Arab capitals and Jerusalem, May 6, 1948, FO371/68548, PRO.

71.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 667, 703; Magnes memo, May 2, 1948, file P3/162, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem; Truman-Sulzberger interview, May 8, 1948, box 58, Arthur Krock MSS., Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey. For the publisher’s insecurities as a Jew and its impact on his newspaper’s reporting of the Holocaust and of Zionism, see Monty Noam Penkower, Twentieth-Century Jews: Forging Identity in the Land of Promise and in the Promised Land (Brighton, 2010), chap. 5.

72.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 668–670; Epstein to Jewish Agency NY, May 7, 1948, 93.03/126/7, ISA. Worried that the establishment of a Jewish state would give the Arabs no “way out” but to attack, Azcárate advised the Agency’s Vivian (Chaim) Herzog to “lessen the tempo and give the Arabs a chance to recover some form of prestige,” go ahead to create the state de facto with a view to having it recognized after some six to eight months. Herzog meetings, May 11, 1948; Eytan meetings, May 12, 1948; both in S25/5634, CZA.

73.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 603, 669; Lowenthal Diary, May 5-15, 1948, 1885/4-P, ISA; Lowenthal to Clifford, n.d., box 13, Clifford MSS.; Lourie to Shertok, May 11, 1948, S25/1553, CZA. Fahy reported that Rusk told him the US delegation would not press further the truce or other proposals, reconciled as they were to an “inevitable” Jewish statehood proclamation. Rusk added a warning to Fahy that if the Arab Legion attacked the new Jewish state, it would be difficult for the United States to intervene on behalf of the embattled Jews. Lourie to Shertok, May 11, 1948,93.03/2180/15, ISA.

74.JTA, May 13, 1948; Clark Clifford with Richard Holbrook, Counsel to the President, A Memoir (New York, 1991), 9–14; Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 673–674. At this point, former Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles warned the Jewish Agency not to postpone the mandate’s termination date and to establish a provisional government regime. He had reliable information that postponement was intended for the establishment of an Anglo-American condominium along the lines of the Anglo-American Morrison-Grady plan, which in July 1946 had proposed a division of Palestine into four zones under British administration, with autonomy accorded to the Jewish and Arab areas. Both the Jews and the Arabs opposed that plan, and Truman’s lack of support ended its chances for adoption. Monty Noam Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, 1945–1948, vol. 1, Rebellion Launched, 1945–1946 (New York, 2019), chap. 4.

75.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 674–675; Lowenthal diary, May 13, 1948.

76.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 675–676; UK NY to Foreign Office, May 13, 1948, FO 371/68552; Bevin to UK Delegation, May 12, 1948, FO371/68551; both in PRO; Ginsburg to Silver, May 11, 1948, 93.03/69/5, ISA; JTA, May 14, 1948; Report, May 14, 1948, Palestine 1948 file, Jewish War Veterans Archives, Washington, DC. The Arabs killed 24 badly outgunned Kfar Etzion defenders on April 12, murdering the next day 106 men and 27 women, including some after they had surrendered. Only four survived the attack. For the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine, see Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 1, Chap. 3.

77.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 677–679; English translation of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, released at 4 p.m. Palestine time, S44/567; Epstein to Shertok, May 14, 1948, L35/120; both in CZA; Diary, May 12–14, 1948, Eben A. Ayers MSS., Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. Epstein turned to Ginsburg a day or two earlier to prepare a memo on the international law of recognizing states, and the Washington, DC lawyer came up with the fact that the United States had recognized Panama before it was created out of Colombia in the days of President Theodore Roosevelt.

78.Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 679–680, 701; Wilkins interview with Jessup, July 21, 1988, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Eliyahu Elath, “That Year in Jerusalem,” New York Times, May 4, 1973.

79.Truman speech, December 3, 1961, file SC-12465, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH; Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 680–681.

80.Ibid, 681; UK NY to Foreign Office, May 14, 1948, FO371/68552, PRO; McNaughton to Pearson, May 15, 1948, MG26, J4, vol. 397, PAC; George M. Elsey, at the time an assistant to Clifford and later Administrative Assistant to Truman, later claimed that Truman’s recognition of Israel’s sovereignty was, like his instruction to Secretary of Defense Forrestal on February 2, 1948, to desegregate the US armed forces “as rapidly as possible,” taken from his personal belief that this was “the right thing for the nation, for the American people.” Elsey interview with Michael T. Benson, December 4, 1997, in “Harry S. Truman and the Recognition of Israel,” Harry S. Truman Library Institute for National and International Affairs (1998).

81.Abba Eban, “Tragedy and Triumph,” in Chaim Weizmann, A Biography by Several Hands, ed. M. W. Weisgal and J. Carmichael (London, 1962), 312.

82.Palestine Post, May 5, 1948; Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, vol. 2, 682; Barros, Trygve Lie, 191. Three days later, the UN Palestine Commission, after holding seventy-six meetings, adjourned sine die.