***** It was during the special session that Andre Gromyko made his notorious speech reversing the Soviet Union's traditional opposition to a Zionist state. Stalin had concluded that the Arab states were too reactionary to wage a serious struggle against the imperialists, and he decided that the only way to start the process of propelling the British out of the region was to have the Zionists start by pushing them out of Palestine.
The Soviet shift, coming on top of the previous factors, put the Democrats on the spot. The American CP had decided to back Henry Wallace against Truman in the 1948 elections. Not to come out for a Zionist state would now leave them exposed to their "left" flank, while the Republicans were certain to demagogically attack them as well. The administration decided on a sly manoeuvre: they would pretend to be for a UN partition, expecting that the Zionists would be unable to obtain the necessary two-thirds vote, and then Washington and the British would be able to work out a suitable compromise. Loy Henderson, the State Department's Director of Near Eastern Affairs, explained the Department's thinking in a secret memo, dated 22 October 1947:
If we carry the flag we shall inescapably be saddled with the major if not sole responsibility for administration and enforcement which, we gather, neither the Congress nor the American people are willing to undertake ... On the assumption that we are going to follow our present policy of supporting partition without waving the flag, we agree that partition will probably fail of a two-thirds vote ... if partition fails, we do not see that the US or any other country which has supported it would be inhibited from retreating to some compromise plan. [8]
<http://www.marxists.de/middleast/ironwall/12-revolt2.htm> *****
***** DOCUMENTING THE HISTORY OF POSTWAR POLITICS
The following documents are drawn from Chapter 4 of Robert Griffith, Major Problems in American History since 1945 (first edition, 1992), entitled: Truman, Eisenhower, and the Transformation of American Politics, 1945-1960
...Document One:
White House Aide Clark M. Clifford Advises President Harry S Truman, 1947
...4. The independent and progressive voter will hold the balance of power in 194$; he will not actively support President Truman unless a great effort is made. The Democratic and Republican Parties each have a minimum, a residue, of voters whose loyalty almost nothing can shake. The independent voter who shifts on the issues comprises a group which today is probably larger than both....
e. The Jew. The Jewish vote, insofar as it can be thought of as a bloc, is important only in New York. But (except for Wilson in 1916) no candidate since 1876 has lost New York and won the Presidency, and its 47 votes are naturally the first prize in any election. Centered in New York City, that vote is normally Democratic and, if large enough, is sufficient to counteract the upstate vote and deliver the state to President Truman. Today the Jewish bloc is interested primarily in Palestine and will continue to be an uncertain quantity right up to the time of election. Even though there is general approval among the Jewish people regarding the United Nations report on Palestine, the group is still torn with conflicting views and dissension. It will be extremely difficult to decide some of the vexing questions which will arise in the months to come on the basis of political expediency. In the long run, there is likely to be greater gain if the Palestine problem is approached on the basis of reaching decisions founded upon intrinsic merit....
Document Two: President Truman Campaigns for the Presidency, 1948...
New York, October 28: "It is my desire to help build in Palestine a strong, prosperous, free and independent state. It must be large enough, free enough, and strong enough to make its people self-supporting and secure."...
<http://www.american.edu/bgriff/USsince45F2001/PostWarPoliticsDocuments.htm> *****
***** An Introduction to the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Updated: September 2002)
...The left-liberal U.S. presidential candidate in 1948, Henry Wallace, compared the Zionist struggle in Palestine with "the fight the American colonies carried on in 1776. Just as the British stirred up the Iroquois to fight the colonists, so today they are stirring up the Arabs." (17)...
17. Sasson Sofer, Zionism and the Foundations of Israeli Diplomacy (Cambridge: 1998), p. 367 ("social order"). Richard Crossman, Palestine Mission (London: 1947), pp. 33, 152, 167. Kenneth Ray Bain, The March to Zion (London: 1979), p. 35 (Wallace) (cf. pp. 34-6 for Americans' identification of Zionist settlement with American West). For a detailed comparison between Zionist and American conquests, see I&R, pp. 89-98, and esp. Norman Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine (Minn.: 1996), pp.104-21. (hereafter: R&F)
<http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/id128.htm> *****
***** Policy Analysis No. 159 August 16, 1991 "ANCIENT HISTORY": U.S. CONDUCT IN THE MIDDLE EAST SINCE WORLD WAR II AND THE FOLLY OF INTERVENTION by Sheldon L. Richman
...His [Harry S Truman's] position had been strongly influenced by a special congressional election in a heavily Jewish district in the Bronx, New York, on February 17, 1948. The regular Democratic candidate, Karl Propper, was upset by the American Labor party candidate, Leo Isacson, who had taken a militantly pro-Zionist position in the campaign. Even though Propper was also pro-Zionist, former vice president Henry Wallace had campaigned for Isacson by criticizing Truman for not supporting partition, asserting that Truman "still talks Jewish but acts Arab."(64)...
64. Quoted in John Snetsinger, Truman, the Jewish Vote and the Creation of Israel (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1974), pp. 78-81.
<http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-159.html> *****
***** Portrait of a Diarist / Part II In The Price of Vision - The Diary of Henry A. Wallace 1942 - 1946
Wallace's _Century of the Common Man,_ a major address he delivered in May 1942, set forth themes which he repeated and elaborated for the next several years. They grew out of his previous ideas, some partially formed even in his youth, and they foreshadowed the disagreements between him and others in government during his last year in office. Yet his speeches, book, and articles said less about his precise objectives than did his diary, and his written words communicated his purpose only in the context of the actual issues to which he adverted daily. Each theme he associated with the century of the common man had hard correlatives in the questions that occupied wartime Washington....
...In the case of the Jews, he came before 1944 to agree with the Zionists that a prosperous and dignified future for European Jews, particularly after the ghastly experience of Nazi persecution, could materialize only in an independent Jewish state in the area of Palestine, then British-controlled....
Wallace also interpreted as cynical Truman's early approach to the Palestine question. Disinclined to alienate Great Britain, the President yielded to London's anxieties about placating the Arabs and protecting British control in the Middle East. The definition of Palestine's borders and the limits on Jewish immigration on which British and American negotiators first agreed left Palestine too small and weak for economic development or military security, and left thousands of displaced European Jews without access to a permanent home. Wallace, who urged Truman to demand a solution more favorable to the Jews, played on the President's political sensitivities. British convenience and prospects for American oil investments in the Middle East came gradually to count less with Truman than did the Jewish vote. But Wallace had meanwhile concluded that the President had little more humane concern for the Jews of Europe than for the impoverished in Latin America. He also considered the President's original position on Palestine as typifying an unfortunate course of American relations with Great Britain....
<http://www.mnemeion.studien-von-zeitfragen.net/PORTRA_1/portra_11.HTM> *****
***** ...Wallace attracted many Jews: around 30% of his followers were Jews. Among them his fund-raiser, William Gailmore, was an ex-rabbi. He controlled the Bronx thanks to Leo Isaacson who was elected to the congress as a member of the progressive party. Many communists and Jewish communists supported Wallace who always was blamed as a front for Moscow. But Wallace did something else, he never forgot to declare his support of Zionism and a Jewish state. On Dec. 1947, he visited Palestine as a guest of the Labor movement. Wallace also believed in the Judeo-Christian idea and a project to develop the Middle-East for Jews and Arabs alike. Furthermore, he helped the 'Friends of Lehi in the U.S." (the so-called 'Stern Gang.') And Karabell wrote that on July 23, 1948 the Progressive Party's convention hosted "the Stern Gang, the Israeli underground paramilitary organization that had blown up buildings and assassinated British officials in Palestine..." He wrote that the Lehi (Freedom Fighters of Israel) were close to the Irgun's Menachem Begin, but Yitzhak Shamir was the Lehi's commander together with Natan Yellin-Mor and Israel Eldad. Truman was pushed by his pro-Zionist advisors (Mark Cliford) to support Israel in 1948 in order to attract the Jewish vote away from Wallace's camp. Also, Dewey was pro-Zionist.
<http://www.jewishpost.com/jp0701/jpn0701aa.htm> *****
***** New Republic, Dec. 15, 1947: J. Edgar Hoover's Gossip Factory by Jan Hasbrouck Wallace, Henry A., Editor. 1947. New York, NY: Editorial Publications, Inc. Left wing publication. FBI Blacklist Technique. Attorney Gen. Tom Clark published list of "subversive organizations." Palestine: The UN's Great Test by Henry Wallace. J. Edgar Hoover's Gossip MillŠan FCC official speaks out boldly. Clifford J. Durr. 40 pp. 20 x 28 cm. Paper periodical, pencil calculations on cover, very good. (5383) $10.00. History/Cold War
<http://www1.shore.net/~persnav/hist11.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
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