On 2010-08-11, at 11:16 AM, SA wrote:
> Marv Gandall wrote:
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>> Admittedly without consulting the literature, I would still expect to find that the divisions in State and Defence turned less on humanitarian concerns than on strategic considerations having to do with the Soviets acquiring influence with the Arab states. The pro-Zionist side, which Truman was part of, probably countered that a failure to support partition would increase Soviet influence within the Hebrew-speaking settler colony if the Soviet bloc were the sole source of diplmatic and military support for the nascent Jewish state.
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> There was no pro-Zionist faction in the State and Defense departments. The division was between the State and Defense Departments on one side and the White House and its political advisers on the other side. The main influence on Truman's decision was a Jewish political aide named David Niles.
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> If you search "Truman and Israel" on Amazon.com, something like a dozen books on this question will come up. I don't think a single one of them - and certainly no scholarly account - argues anything like what you're saying. If there is any debate about Truman's motives it's between those who stress his own personal sympathy for Zionism and those who emphasize his political calculations for the 1948 election. There is no serious third position about Cold War interests. It's just not a feasible argument given the record.
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> I know some things are axiomatically true, but some axioms are wrong.
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I don't know how reliable the following information is from a liberal Zionist Israeli academic, Ami Isseroff, and if I had the time and sufficient interest, I would track down his primary sources and other studies to verify his account of "President Harry S. Truman and US Support for Israeli Statehood" but it does appear from even a cursory reading to contradict your's and Michael's suggestion that Truman was almost exclusively driven by an humanitarian concern for the Jews to the detriment of any White House strategic thinking about US interests, and that Cold War concerns about communism did not enter into the internal administration debate over partition and statehood.
The article asserts that, notwithstanding Truman's sympathy for Jews displaced by the Holocaust and support for their emigration to Palestine, Britain, and the US, he was initially averse to the creation of a Jewish state "mostly out of concern that it would require excessive US resources to defend it."
"He wrote to Senator Joseph Ball of Minnesota on November 24, 1945: 'I told the Jews that if they were willing to furnish me with five hundred thousand men to carry on a war with the Arabs, we could do what they are suggesting in the Resolution' [favoring a state]. It is a very explosive situation we are facing, and naturally I regret it very much, but I don't think that you, or any of the other Senators, would be inclined to send half a dozen Divisions to Palestine to maintain a Jewish State"
"Apparently, Truman had been convinced by the State Department that Saudi Arabia would go to war if Palestine were given to the Jews, and that the Saudis had vast armies at their command. The US State Department was also, in the main, strongly opposed to a Jewish state, citing somewhat imaginary concerns that the Zionists were all communists who would put the new state in the Soviet orbit as well as the need to ensure Arab friendship and the flow of petroleum."
Further on, Isseroff writes that "the State Department and Defense Department were working hard to dissuade Truman from the partition plan. Loy Henderson, director the State Department's Near East Agency, Secretary of State George Marshall and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal cited the importance of Arab petroleum to US interests and intelligence reports indicating that Zionists were communists. Loy Henderson warned in October of 1946 that the immigration of Jewish communists into Palestine will increase Soviet influence there, and Marshall later cited evidence presented by the British that Zionists in the Balkans included many communists.
Even within the White House, Cold War concerns were not absent: "Special Adviser Clark Clifford had warned Truman that the Soviets would use Palestine as a lever to gain influence to the Middle East, on the one hand supporting Jewish immigration, and on the other inflaming the Arabs against the US."
By 1947, Truman had expressed "cautious and conditional support" for a tiny Jewish enclave in Palestine which was rejected out of hand by both the Arabs and Zionists. Public opinion had shifted decisively in favour of a Jewish homeland, particularly following the widely-reported saga of the Exodus immigrant ship in July of that year. "When the passengers were ultimately returned to Hamburg Germany...A vast wave of public sentiment for partition and a Jewish state was generated. Support for Israel in the United States was not a function of the Jewish vote alone; 65% of Americans supported partition according to a poll taken in late 1947."
Against this backdrop, Isseroff frames US support for partition thus: "...as the Soviet Union had now come out in favor of partition, Truman, having previously supported it, could certainly do no less. On October 11, Herschel Johnson, United States deputy representative to the United Nations Security Council, announced United States support for the partition plan."
As for Truman's purported "personal sympathy" for the Jews, Truman's diary entry for July 21, 1947, cited in the article, is indicative of a a much more equivocal posture than you suggest above:
'Had ten minutes conversation with Henry Morgenthau about Jewish ship in Palistine [sic]. Told him I would talk to Gen[eral] Marshall about it. He'd no business, whatever to call me. The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs...The Jews, I find are very, very selfish."
He was also evidently uncowed by the Israel Lobby of that day and at times openly contemptuous of it:
Isseroff notes that that Truman was "especially irritated by the torrent of support for a Jewish state from Zionists, and became more so as time went on. On October 17, 1947, Truman wrote to Senator Claude Pepper regarding mail he received during the deliberations of UNSCOP: 'I received about 35,000 pieces of mail and propaganda from the Jews in this country while this matter was pending...'I put it all in a pile and struck a match to it'. (According to Isseroff, "nobody else recalls any such documents being burned…")
Further on, Isseroff records a meeting with an American Zionist delegation in January 1948 at the White House, where the delegation "demanded immediate help for the thousands of homeless Holocaust victims seeking refuge in soon-to-be-declared Jewish state. Truman's response was not satisfactory, and the visitors became adamant. Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland, Ohio pounded on the President's desk. Truman was outraged. 'No one, but no one, comes into the office of the President of the United States and shouts at him, or pounds on his desk. If anyone is going to do any shouting or pounding in here, it will be me.' Truman had them ushered out of the Oval Office, and said to his staff. 'I've had it with those hotheads. Don't ever admit them again, and what's more, I also never want to hear the word Palestine mentioned again'."
Finally, it does seem as though the US decision to recognize Israeli statehood was very much coloured by a shift in US strategic thinking in the State and Defence departments based on the unexpected strength of the Zionist military forces and heightened fears that the USSR would gain a Mideast foothold in the new Jewish state, as I had tentatively suggested above.
Isseroff writes: "On the strength of recent military victories in Operation Nahshon, which had opened the Jerusalem corridor, and in order to head off the trusteeship plan, the Zionist General Council declared on April 12 that on termination of the mandate, it would establish a Jewish state in the portion of Palestine allotted to the Jews. On May 4, Dr Jessup of the US delegation to the UN, cabled Dean Rusk that the USSR would recognize such a state, and that it could invoke Article 51 of UN charter to come to the aid of the Jewish state, thereby gaining a foothold for the USSR in the Middle East. Thus, the anti-communism issue that had been invoked by Henderson and Marshall against the Jewish state was now heavily in favor of the state."
I largely find Isheroff's conclusions, whatever his political leanings, persuasive, although I would add the words "from a ruling class perspective (or "elite perspective" if you prefer) his statement that "the US supported partition because there was no real alternative".
"Truman's support for a Jewish state had evolved over time, shaped by a number of factors. Though Loy Henderson and others in the State Department had insisted that a Jewish state would compromise the position of the US in the Middle East, the opposite position was equally tenable. The notion that Henderson and Marshall advocated, that the Zionists were communists and would therefore side with the USSR was founded on personal prejudice rather than fact, and backfired when the possibility was raised that the USSR would intervene on behalf of Israel, absent US support. The idea that Truman had initially entertained, and that the State Department encouraged, that a Jewish state could only be defended by hundreds of thousands of US troops, proved to be groundless. It is probably this realization more than any that turned the tide, and overcame the single greatest objection.
The policy was undoubtedly influenced by electoral considerations. Loy Henderson admitted, "Many of the leaders of the Republican Party, including Dewey...were almost constantly criticizing Truman for failure to give full support to the Zionists. If Truman had taken positions that would have resulted in a failure to establish the Jewish State, he would almost certainly have been defeated in the November [1948] elections since the Zionists had almost the full support of the Congress, the United States media, and most of the American people. The new Republican Administration would then have gone along with the Zionists."
"From the point of view of the Americans, and world opinion, the creation of Israel was a more or less conscious and willful act that was meant to compensate for the Holocaust. This view has been accepted by the Arabs, who protest that the Palestinians should not have been made to pay for the Holocaust. For his part in the drama, Harry S Truman is revered by Zionists and hated by Arab partisans.
"This view ignores some pertinent facts. After the British Mandate was established, the Jewish Agency came into being as the expression of the administrative arm of the Zionist organization in Palestine. The state had begun to become a reality in the 30s, with its own government institutions, tax system, economic policy, labor unions, embryonic armies, school system and health facilities. The dissolution of the British mandate, like all colonial holdings, was only a matter of time. While the Jews were still a minority in population and land ownership, they already had the major part of the economy of Palestine in their hands, and they were the only well organized national force, and in fact, probably only the Jews had the potential to control the destiny of Palestine, as was shown decisively by the Israeli War of Independence.
"In the final analysis, it seems the US supported partition because there was no real alternative. The British were unwilling and unable to continue the mandate. They could not admit Jewish immigrants in keeping with the terms of the mandate owing to Arab pressure. They could not continue to bar immigration in the face of Jewish pressure and underground resistance. No country, certainly not the US, was willing to send troops to enforce a trusteeship, which would have met the same problems as the mandate, a point that was never raised apparently, but which must've come into consideration. The binational state was opposed by both the Arabs and the Jews, and would've come apart at the seams as soon as it was established. The "single state for all" proposed by the Arabs, led by Nazi collaborator Haj Amin el Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was not likely to be a state where Jews would survive in peace, given that Husseini had told the British that his plan for solving the 'Jewish Problem' in Palestine was the same as the one adopted by Nazis in Europe. Certainly, such a state would not allow immigration of Jews from Europe, and therefore, a civil war would have ensured whatever decision the UN made, as soon as the British had left. The UN was unwilling and unable to enforce even its decision to partition Jerusalem. No country outside the Middle East was willing to send troops to Palestine after Britain left, so no trusteeship schemes or other alternatives could have been enforced. The Arabs wanted to establish a single state in all Palestine, but they had not the wherewithal even to establish a state in the half granted to the Palestinians. The Jews would certainly have risen against such a state, with effects little different than those that resulted."
Full: http://www.mideastweb.org/us_supportforstate.htm