CounterPunch
June 3, 2006
Truman and Israel: How It All
Began
By Harry Clark
Truman's support for the creation of a Jewish state was due entirely to the
U.S. Jewish community, without whose influence Zionist achievements in Palestine
would have been for nought. Long before any strategic argument was made, indeed,
while a Jewish state was considered a strategic liability, long before Israel's
fundamentalist Christian supporters of today were on the map, the nascent Israel
lobby deployed its manifold resources with consummate skill and
ruthlessness.
Rabbi Abba Silver, a Cleveland Zionist with Republican contacts, and
Zionist official Emmanuel Neumann, initiated "Democratic and Republican
competition for the Jewish vote". In 1944 they "wrung support from the
conventions of both parties for the Taft-Wagner Senate resolution" supporting
abrogation of the Palestine immigration limits in the 1939 British white paper,
and the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish commonwealth. Ensuring the
traditional loyalty of Jewish voters was a paramount concern of Democratic
politicians, up to the president himself, in the New York mayoral election of
1945, the 1946 congressional elections, and the 1948 presidential
election.
Gentile opinion was also courted in non-electoral ways, through the
American Palestine Committee of notables, constituted in 1941 by Emmanuel
Neumann of the American Zionist Emergency Committee. By 1946 it included
"sixty-eight senators, two hundred congressmen and several state governors" with
"seventy-five local chapters". It became " 'the preeminent symbol of pro-Zionist
sentiment among the non-Jewish American public' ". It was entirely a Zionist
front.
Zionist control was discreet but tight. The
Committee's correspondence was drafted in the AZEC headquarters and sent to
[chairman New York Senator Robert] Wagner for his signature. Mail addressed to
Wagner as head of the American Palestine Committee, even if it came from the
White House or the State Department, was opened and kept in Zionist
headquarters; Wagner received a copy. The AZEC placed ads in the press under the
committee's name without bothering to consult or advise it in advance, until one
of its members meekly requested advance notice.
Dewey Stone, a Zionist businessman, had financed Truman's
vice-presidential campaign in 1944, and businessman Abraham Feinberg, with
jewelry magnate Edmund Kauffman, led fundraising for the otherwise penniless
1948 presidential campaign. "If not for my friend Abe, I couldn't have made the
[whistle-stop train] trip and I wouldn't have been elected", Truman stated.
"Feinberg's activities began a process that made the Jews into 'the most
conspicuous fundraisers and contributors to the Democratic Party' ".
Key White House advisors ensured the domination of Zionist viewpoints
in the highest circles of the Truman Administration. Jewish aides David Niles,
administrative assistant to Truman, and Max Lowenthal, special assistant on
Palestine to Clark Clifford, himself "Truman's key advisor on Palestine at the
White House", were especially crucial. Niles was one of two presidential aides
retained from the Roosevelt Administration, the other being Samuel Rosenman.
Niles was Truman's chief political liaison with the Jewish community.
Lowenthal was the Harvard-trained former counsel to the Senate Interstate
Commerce Committee on which Truman had served, who specialized in drafting
Zionist memoranda. In 1952 Truman stated in a letter to Lowenthal, "I don't know
who has done more for Israel than you have".
Clark Clifford, an ambitious Missouri lawyer, like so many non-Jewish
Democrats saw the manifest political advantages of Zionism; Truman's 1948
victory launched Clifford's career as consummate Washington insider. The "White
House through its busy and assorted 'aides' never wanted for advice on the
Palestine question. All together the quantity of well-argued advice coming in
through various unofficial channels was enormous and would provide an efficient
counter to that coming from the president's official foreign policy-making body,
the State Department".
This formidable apparatus was deployed at every twist and turn on the
sinous path of events that culminated in Israel's creation. In 1945 the Zionist
lobby linked concern for the Jewish displaced persons languishing in European
camps to the Palestine question, and pressured Truman to endorse a Jewish Agency
proposal for the British to admit 100,000 Jewish immigrants to Palestine.
In April, 1946, a joint Anglo-American commission, with U.S. Zionist
members, duly endorsed the immigration proposal, among others, and talks about a
comprehensive political settlement continued, resulting in the Morrison-Grady
plan for a federal state with autonomy for Arab and Jewish provinces. Truman
thought this then and later "the best of all solutions proposed for Palestine".
The plan fell short of Zionist aspirations toward partition, and under intense
pressure, with the fall elections looming, Truman reluctantly declined to
endorse it.
The Jewish Agency Executive, the governing body of the Zionist
settlement in Palestine, proposed partition in early August. On October 4, 1946,
the eve of Yom Kippur, Truman delivered his famous statement noting the
Morrison-Grady plan, and the Jewish Agency partition proposal, calling the
latter a solution which "would command the support of public opinion in the
United States".
Despite Truman's further observations that "the gap between the proposals"
could be bridged, and that the U.S. government could support such a compromise,
the statement was intepreted as support for partition and a Jewish state, as
Niles predicted to the author, the Jewish Agency representative in Washington,
whose original draft had been modified by the State Department.
The Yom Kippur statement marked a watershed in
the political and diplomatic struggle for the Jewish state. The British saw in
the statement a demonstration of Jewish political power and gave up their quest
for an Anglo-American consensus on Palestine. British Foreign Secretary Bevin
began issuing threats that the British would evacuate Palestine, and in February
1947 they did indeed refer the question with no recommendation to the United
Nations.
The United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) was formed
after the British announcement. Truman, "undoubtedly embarrassed by
accusationsthat he had exploited the Palestine question for domestic political
gain" with his Yom Kippur statement, thereafter remained silent. Before the
UNSCOP decision, Truman still retained hope for the 1946 Morrison-Grady
plan.
When on August 31, 1947, UNSCOP announced its majority decision
recommending partition, the administration came under overwhelming pressure to
endorse it.
The State Department, like the War Department and most of the
government, and elite opinion generally, viewed good relations with the Arab
states and people as the basis of U.S. interests in the region's oil, in trade
and investment, military basing rights, and excluding the rising bogey of Soviet
influence.
But the Zionist machine was at full throttle, Democratic politicians from
Congress to the Cabinet protested vehemently to Truman about the political
consequences, and a statement endorsing partition was made at the UN on October
11.
Truman did fear that if partition became a U.S. plan, it would require U.S.
military forces to implement. Neither the U.S. nor the USSR, which endorsed
partiton two days after the U.S., lobbied for votes among member states, and on
Wednesday, November 26, the General Assembly approved the final draft partition
resolution by one vote less than the required two-thirds majority. The partition
forces postponed the final vote, and over the Thanksgiving holiday the
president, his aides and U.S. diplomats went to work. That Saturday, November
29, partition passed by 33 to 13, with ten abstentions. Truman took personal
credit for changing several votes.
The Zionists had been waging war against the British to drive them out
of Palestine, and after the UN partition vote, civil war broke out with the
Palestinian Arabs, who rejected partition. In February the State Department
prepared plans for a UN trusteeship, with White House knowledge and approval. On
March 18, a UN commission to monitor events in Palestine, which had predicted
further chaos and bloodshed after the British withdrawal on May 14, reported its
failure to arrange any agreement between Jews and Arabs. The following day the
U.S. ambassador to the UN announced the trusteeship proposal, which brought a
political firestorm down on Truman, and on March 25, at a press conference he
explained that trusteeship was only a means of eventually implementing the UN
resolution for partition. The Arabs rejected it, as did the Zionists.
Yet Truman's political fortunes continued to plummet; the Democratic
Party revolted against his presidential candidacy. As Zionist forces achieved
partition (and more) in battle, pressure built for recognition of the Jewish
state, expected to be proclaimed on the final day of British withdrawal, May 14.
The State Department was opposed; Secretary Marshall feared Jewish military
successes would be temporary, that the Zionists would partition Palestine with
King Abdullah of Transjordan without reaching a settlement with the Palestinian
Arabs (which did happen), and that recognition would prejudice efforts to
arrange a truce under UN auspices after May 14.
Zionist pressure was ferocious; the White House "aides" were very busy;
Clifford essentially commissioned the request for recognition from the Jewish
Agency representative in Washington, which was duly delivered to the White
House, and at 6:11 PM on May 14 Truman announced de facto recognition of the
State of Israel, flummoxing the U.S. delegation at the UN, and U.S. allies.
Marshall stated that, during a May 17 discussion, Truman "treated it somewhat as
a joke as I had done but I think we both thought privately it was a hell of a
mess", and felt that the U.S. "had hit its all-time low before the UN".
US diplomacy in the ensuing Arab-Israeli war was conducted along
similar lines. For all his accommodation of Zionism, Truman received only 75% of
the Jewish vote, compared to Roosevelt's typical 90%. Truman lost New York,
Dewey's home state, where there was also a large vote for Wallace. Truman did
narrowly win Ohio, Illinois and California, helped by Jewish voters. After
describing this tour de force of domestic power politics, Michael Cohen, whose
work is mainly quoted here, argues that Israel's military prowess changed the
views of the British and U.S. diplomatic and military establishments. "The White
House and State Department, if only ephemerally, came to a consensus on Israel's
vital importance to the West as a 'strategic asset' ". The qualification
"ephemerally" acknowledges the Eisenhower presidency, during which Israel was
largely not regarded as a strategic asset.
Cohen attributes Truman's susceptibility to Zionist influence to a
"unique set of circumstances that converged to determine the fate of Palestine,"
including Jewish friends, White House advisors, key Jewish Democratic Party
fundraisers, and Zionist military prowess, which "should not be expected ever to
repeat themselves". The circumstances were not at all unique, but have been
practically a recipe for quasi-sovereign Jewish influence on foreign policy in
Democratic administrations. By institutionalization throughout the political
culture, this influence extends to Republican administrations as well;
Eisenhower was an exception. Such influence is not sinister or conspiratorial,
but the overt working of US-style capitalist democracy, albeit on behalf of
racism, war and genocide, and with a paralyzing effect, in this case, on the
liberal circles which usually oppose such matters.
The chauvinism of U.S. organized Jewry is a distinctive feature of U.S.
society and history, comparable in importance to classic U.S. singularities like
slavery, and the absence of a socialist left, and their crippling
legacies.
Jewish influence in the Democratic Party, and its impact on foreign policy,
notably on the inability of Democrats to mount a critique of the Iraq war and
Middle East policy, is comparable to the influence of the Dixiecrats, the
segregationist Southern Democrats, on civil rights, labor law and other
issues.
The moral antipode to organized Jewish power is not an orthodoxy which
misattributes Jewish influence to "strategic interest," but anti-Zionism. Left
internationalism, in which Jews were prominent, and classical Reform Judaism,
once the dominant Jewish creed, emphatically rejected Zionism as a reactionary
ideology, rejected modern Jewish nationality, and affirmed the Jewish place as a
minority in liberal or revolutionary society. Anti-Zionism need not mean,
immediately, a secular democratic state in Palestine, but the moral and
intellectual framework which rejects Zionist claims on Jewish identity and
gentile conscience, and asserts liberal and revolutionary values against radical
nationalism.
* Harry Clark grew up in the Illinois congressional
district represented for twenty-two years by Paul Findley, a centrist
Republican. Findley's support for the Palestinians aroused the ire of the
American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, which eventually drove him from
office. Studying Zionism is an avocation.
A pdf of this article with
footnotes can be found on Clark's website:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hfc/mideast/trumanisrael.PDF