11
Britain’s decision to abandon its Palestine mandate was a decisive event in the emergence of a Jewish state. For American foreign policy, and for Harry Truman, however, Britain’s simultaneous decision to reduce its commitments to Turkey and Greece was much more consequential for both American politics and world history than anything that happened or could happen in Palestine. The British pullbacks announced in February and March of 1947 launched the most creative and significant period in foreign policy of the Truman administration, and perhaps the most important such era in the history of the United States.
Politically, the news of Britain’s intention to reduce its commitments in the Middle East and southeastern Europe helped crystallize a new perception in the United States about the Soviet threat. Signs of Soviet expansionism in the Middle East that both isolationists and liberal internationalists could dismiss as long as they could be perceived as conflicts between Britain and the Soviet Union took on a more threatening complexion if British power was removed from the equation. Was the United States prepared to allow the Soviet Union to impose a communist regime in Greece, cede control of the Dardanelles and the Bosporus to the Soviet navy, and leave Iran exposed to Soviet machinations? It did not take much reflection for many to decide that the time had come for the United States to look to its interests in what suddenly began to look like a very strategic part of the world.
In March, the administration announced that it would come to the aid of Turkey and Greece under the Truman Doctrine, a new principle in American foreign policy under which the United States would support any government against Soviet aggression. The United States for the first time was stepping up to play the great power role that Britain could no longer sustain. Ultimately, the consequences of Britain’s withdrawal would lead to the formation of the NATO alliance and the formal adoption of global containment as American foreign policy. In the meantime, the realization that Britain and the other European economies were failing to recover from the war galvanized a new kind of foreign policy initiative from the United States. The State Department’s new Policy Planning Staff got to work on the program for European reconstruction and development that would become known as the Marshall Plan; at the Harvard commencement in June, Secretary of State George Marshall would call for the establishment of a massive, American-led project for European reconstruction.
Referring the Palestine problem to the United Nations helped Britain burnish its image in the United States and around the world. Returning its mandate to the United Nations demonstrated what liberal opinion considered a heartening regard for international institutions and the rule of law. This was giving Britain more credit than it deserved. From a British point of view, the decision involved a change of tactics rather than of strategy in the Middle East. Britain’s goals of basing its global position on Middle East oil and control of the Suez Canal had not changed, but it now looked to further those goals at a lower cost.
With Britain gaining points from American liberals for the inspired if perhaps slightly cynical decision to give the Palestine issue to the United Nations, even as more people in Washington came to share Britain’s concerns about the Soviet threat, the overall entente between Washington and London deepened rapidly in 1947. The announcement of the Marshall Plan also bolstered support for Truman’s foreign policy among American liberals. The Marshall Plan separated the increasingly radicalized and erratic Henry Wallace from the more mainstream Eleanor Roosevelt. Wallace, after initially supporting the Marshall Plan, would come to denounce it as an imperialist and even fascist program for the subjugation of Europe.[1] Mrs. Roosevelt hailed it as an act of enlightened statesmanship, in part because the administration blandly and disingenuously declared that nations under communist rule could participate in the plan.[2] This inspired move soothed the delicate consciences of internationalist liberals by making the Marshall Plan look less like a piece of Cold War strategy even as it discomfited Stalin by forcing him to pay the political price of forbidding his European satellite regimes to accept desperately needed credits from the United States.
Thanks in part to the growing evidence of Stalin’s ruthlessness and hostility, and thanks in part to Truman’s own careful management, during the first half of 1947 he was slowly consolidating his support among moderate liberals even as he continued to strengthen America’s anti-Soviet stance—and to deepen its strategic cooperation with Britain. At the same time, the growing perception of a Soviet threat helped the administration to gain support from the Republican-controlled Congress. Managing Mrs. Roosevelt while reaching out to congressional Jacksonians was a difficult balancing act that Truman managed superbly; his success at building a consensus for a more robust foreign policy would restore much of the political authority he lost after the 1946 midterm election, boost his approval ratings throughout 1947, save his endangered nomination for the presidency in 1948, and contribute to his surprise election victory over Thomas Dewey later that year.
As Truman led the most consequential peacetime transformation of American foreign policy in history, he did not need the distraction of more controversy over Palestine. Fortunately, just when his administration most needed a holiday from Palestine, the British decision to refer the issue to the United Nations gave him one. Liberals desperately wanted the U.N. to emerge as the center of international life, and fervently believed that Truman’s foreign policy should make support of the United Nations its highest priority. Ethnic and national disputes like the Arab-Jewish dispute in Palestine had been the curse of international life for more than a hundred years and the cause of countless wars. If the United Nations was going to be effective, people reasoned, one of its most important tasks would be to find methods to resolve such disputes peacefully.
Britain’s decision to turn the question over to the United Nations gave Truman an excuse to step away from the battle for visas, and he took full advantage of the freedom he had so unexpectedly gained. Between March and October of 1947, Truman could put Palestine on the back burner while the machinery of the United Nations slowly processed the question of the territory’s future. During those months, the Truman administration laid the foundation for the Marshall Plan, built a cross-party coalition in favor of a new global role for the United States, and began the reconstruction of American military strength following the postwar demobilization, while devoting less high-level attention to Palestinian matters than at any time until the outbreak of the Korean War. This respite came with a price. Between November 1947 and May 1948, Palestinian issues would erupt once again and plunge American foreign policy into a dangerous crisis, but until that time the administration was happy to set Palestine to one side.
Zionists and their allies hoped that with the Palestine issue going to the United Nations, the United States would lead the global body’s deliberations on the matter. That was a challenge Truman badly wanted to avoid; fortunately, liberal ideas about the United Nations offered an escape route. It would be wrong, the administration piously declared, for the United States to prejudge the United Nations process on Palestine by seeking to impose its own vision on the General Assembly. Great powers should not try to dominate the U.N.; the members as a whole must take up the case. The Zionist lobby in the United States seethed, but without broader liberal support Zionist protests carried little weight.
When the United Nations formed yet another committee to study the Palestine issue (UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine), the United States did not seek to chair it. The U.N. secretary-general, the former Norwegian foreign minister Trygve Lie, appointed the Black American diplomat Ralph Bunche, who left the State Department to join the staff of the fledgling U.N., as special assistant to Victor Hoo, head of the U.N. department charged with trusteeships. Hoo designated Bunche to head an UNSCOP subcommittee charged with drafting its reports.[3] Bunche would go on to win the respect of all sides for his professional skills and impartiality and would later become the first person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize when he was awarded the Peace Prize in 1950 for his work in mediating the cease-fire between Israel and Egypt. Bunche, however, having left the State Department and joined the U.N. civil service, did not represent the Truman administration to the committee, and his independence was one of the qualities for which he was admired worldwide.
Other than Bunche’s presence, the United States stayed off the committee completely. The Truman administration was happy to dodge all responsibility for the issue, and, as liberals praised the administration’s edifying devotion to the high principles of the U.N. Charter, the Zionist lobby raged in vain.
Stalin and the Jews
Nineteen forty-seven was an important year in Middle East history for many reasons. Perhaps the most significant was that this was the year in which the Soviet Union managed to insert itself as a major factor in the Palestine question. Stalin would play a much more important role in the process that led the Jews to declare and defend their independence than anything Harry Truman did. While neither the Americans, the British, the Arabs, nor the Jews quite understood what was happening, the outlines of the new Soviet initiative began to appear in the spring.
Stalin was an unlikely person to come to the defense of the Zionist movement. The Soviet Union and the Zionists had not had a happy history. Inside the Russian Empire, Zionists and Bolsheviks had been ideological competitors among the empire’s Jewish population long before the October Revolution brought Lenin to power. Many Zionists were socialists, and some (though not David Ben-Gurion) sympathized with the Bolshevik movement. The feelings were not reciprocated. Under Moscow’s instructions the Communist Party of Palestine was resolutely anti-Zionist in the 1920s and 1930s. After an early thaw, Zionist political activity was ruthlessly suppressed in the Soviet Union.
Beyond that, in the internal political struggles around Stalin’s seizure of supreme power in the Soviet Union, many of his enemies were so-called Old Bolsheviks who had been close to Lenin. From Leon Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein) on down, many of these early communist leaders were of Jewish origin. Stalin’s purges in the 1930s included a disproportionate number of Jews among their millions of victims. Soon after his short-lived romance with the Jewish state, Stalin would open what, if not cut short by his death, looked to be growing into a full-scale purge aimed principally at Soviet Jews. Yet at the critical time, Joseph Stalin would offer the Jews of Palestine the indispensable support without which they could never have gained the backing of the United Nations or won their war with the Arabs.
The master of the Soviet Union for thirty years, Stalin held his cards close to his chest. Not even his intimates were ever taken fully into his confidence. Nevertheless, Stalin’s calculations were usually shrewd if not always well informed, and the circumstances of the Soviet Union in 1947 and 1948 made an alliance, however temporary, with the Zionist movement look attractive. Stalin saw an opportunity to advance several of his foreign policy objectives and, characteristically, he moved rapidly and decisively to take the chance. Later, when a pro-Israel policy no longer served his interests, he washed his hands of the Jewish state with equal determination and ease, throwing many of those who worked with it into the gulags.
The eventful years of 1945–47 brought as much change to Stalin’s world and his outlook as they did to the perceptions of policymakers in Washington and London. From Stalin’s point of view, the three most important questions about the international system as World War II came to a close were these: Would Washington remain militarily engaged in Europe or, as in 1919, retreat to its hemispheric fortress? Would the United States and Britain remain allied or, as Marxist doctrine seemed to suggest, would the two surviving capitalist powers quarrel over the spoils of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East? Finally, would the continuing economic and political turmoil in Western Europe lead to communist revolutions in western Germany, Italy, and France?
In 1945 and 1946, it looked in the Kremlin as if all three of those questions might be resolved in a positive way. The Americans seemed to be determined to limit their European commitments. U.S. forces demobilized rapidly, and U.S. troop strength in Europe quickly declined. The U.S. Army dropped from eight million on V-J Day to roughly half a million by mid-1948.[4] The election of a Republican Congress in 1946, hostile to Truman and with many anti-interventionist voices, promised an even weaker and less focused American policy. The United States and Great Britain appeared to be quarreling. Additionally, economic conditions continued to worsen across Western Europe. The communist parties of Italy and France, emerging from their roles in the wartime resistance with great prestige, were gaining strength from month to month.
Nineteen forty-seven was a more difficult year. When Washington stepped into the gap left by Britain’s withdrawal in Turkey and Greece, proclaimed the Truman Doctrine, and began to develop the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, Stalin confronted a new and much less favorable environment. The United States was no longer bent on withdrawal in Europe, and was prepared to make much larger military and economic commitments than Stalin had expected. The promise of large-scale American aid was enticing; even Stalin’s puppet governments in Eastern Europe, who between war damage and the problems of socialism were in serious economic trouble, wanted to take part. The new American initiative strengthened the noncommunist parties in Italy and France, and, for the first time since V-E Day, by the fall of 1947 Stalin felt that he was on the defensive in Europe. Late 1947 and 1948 would see Stalin push back, tightening his control over the satellites, pushing political offensives in the West by communist and “popular front” parties, challenging the western allies over the status of Berlin, and stirring up trouble wherever he thought he could distract or divide the adversaries who threatened his position in Europe.
There were, from Stalin’s standpoint, some compelling reasons to help the Jews in 1947–48. First, his primary goal in international politics was to prevent the renewal of the Anglo-American alliance that could complicate his plans in Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. During the war, Stalin took every opportunity to drive wedges between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. Given the tensions between the United States and Britain over the future of Palestine, it made sense to sharpen the contradictions between the English-speaking powers by raising the temperature in the Jewish-Arab dispute.
Second, 1946 and 1947 had been years of setbacks and retreat for the Soviet Union in the Middle East. Soviet attempts to break through the “northern tier” (Greece, Turkey, Iran) to reach the oil-rich Arab countries had failed. However, Great Britain’s hold on the Middle East looked like the weakest link in the chain that the United States and its allies were beginning to forge to contain Stalin’s ambitions in Europe and the Mediterranean. Engineering a defeat for Britain and the gaggle of feudal monarchs who supported it might still weaken the West’s grip on a region that had fascinated Russian power brokers since the time of Peter the Great. Stalin had no trouble following the train of thought that shaped British strategy in the Middle East: a victory for the Jews in Palestine might alienate the Arabs from Britain and stimulate waves of radical Arab nationalism that the fragile pro-British governments could not contain. If helping the Jews of Palestine could shake or even overturn British power from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, then help the Jews Stalin would.
Third, at a time when world opinion was strongly anti-fascist and anti-Nazi, Jews were much more popular on the left than they have since become. The Jews after all were Hitler’s ultimate victims. That popularity began to look like a useful asset as signs of greater American engagement with Europe started to appear in early 1947. Many non-Jewish socialists were deeply concerned about the plight of the Jews. As the British, in pursuit of their imperial ambitions in the Middle East, sought to block Jewish migration to Palestine, communists found a useful way to underline a key point in their propaganda: that capitalist imperialism wasn’t all that different from fascism, and that only the communists had the vision and strategy to fight them both. In the special circumstances of 1947 and 1948, support for Zionism could help Stalin’s core strategy in Western Europe—to build popular support for communist parties determined to resist their countries’ participation in the Marshall Plan and the nascent western alliance.
Finally, there was the potential impact on American politics. Stalin was not pleased by the Truman administration’s increasingly energetic and full-throated conduct of what was rapidly becoming the Cold War. We do not know how well Stalin understood American politics, but the efforts of the American Communist Party to put together a left-wing party that would run against Truman were well-known to him.[5] Henry Wallace’s decision to run at the head of a party that depended significantly on communist support turned the Progressive Party into a potentially beneficial force from the Kremlin’s perspective. As the Democratic Party split into three factions in 1948, Truman’s defeat appeared increasingly likely. At this time, many American Jews had strong left-wing sympathies; a solid pro-Zionist stance by Stalin and the American Communist Party would help build support for the Progressive Party among Jews and among other American liberals. Just as support for Zionism could help Stalin build popular front movements in Europe, supporting the Palestinian Jews might help consolidate a left-wing party open to coalitions with communists in the United States, while undermining Truman’s hopes for reelection.
Stalin didn’t keep a diary, and so we have no way of knowing how each of these factors influenced his thinking in 1947–48. But we do know what he did. On May 14, 1947, as the General Assembly debated the future of Palestine, Stalin’s deputy foreign minister Andrei Gromyko stated that, if all efforts to create a joint Arab-Jewish state failed, the Soviet Union would accept partition and an independent Jewish state.[6] This was a bombshell; in the past the Soviets had always denounced the idea of a two-state solution. The next day, the Soviet Union and its satellites voted in favor of the resolution establishing the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). Czechoslovakia would be the bloc’s representative on the fifteen-member committee charged with determining the future of Palestine.
Two Committees, Three Subcommittees, and a Resolution
UNSCOP, the third high-profile international committee tasked with finding a solution to the Palestine issue in eighteen months, came into existence on May 15, the day following Gromyko’s surprise. Eleven nations were represented: Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia. For those who believed that the United Nations was the first step to an effective world government, this was a breathtaking accomplishment.[7] Although the great powers had proxies on the committee (both Australia and Canada were members of the British Commonwealth, Yugoslavia was still aligned with the Soviet Union and was unlikely to vote in a way that displeased Stalin, and neither Guatemala nor Uruguay was renowned for defiance of Washington), the membership was broadly representative of the makeup of the world body at the time. By much of the world, and certainly by Mrs. Roosevelt and her wing of the Democratic Party, UNSCOP was seen as the first great test of the ability of the United Nations to function as the supreme arbiter of international disputes. As UNSCOP visited cities in Palestine including Jerusalem, Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Acre, and Tulkaram, the world press followed its progress closely.
The Palestinian Arab leadership doubled down on its tactics of resistance and boycott. Official Arab representatives refused to meet with the UNSCOP delegation in Palestine. In their view, the entire process was illegitimate. The Arab majority had a right to independence; the United Nations had no right to stand between a people and its freedom. The Jews were wiser, and took advantage of every opportunity to win delegates over to their side.
By chance, the visit of the committee coincided with the arrival in Palestinian waters on July 18 of the Exodus 1947, a ship carrying more than 4,500 Holocaust survivors hoping to enter Palestine illegally. The British had boarded the ship while it was still in international waters. When the crew and passengers resisted, three people were killed, including an American citizen in the crew who was clubbed to death. Zionist representatives were on board and broadcast live radio accounts of the battle for the ship.[8] The global coverage surrounding the ship’s capture was a major publicity victory for the Zionists; the story would become the basis for a best-selling novel by Leon Uris and an Oscar-winning 1960 movie starring Paul Newman. The UNSCOP representatives were in the harbor as British soldiers forcibly placed the unwilling passengers on ships bound back for Europe (in the end, they would be disembarked, again by force, in Germany, in another major publicity disaster for the British). John Stanley Grauel, a Methodist minister and American Christian Zionist, was on board the ship. The horrified UNSCOP members listened to his account of the voyage and were visibly moved. Golda Meir, the future Israeli prime minister, credited Grauel’s testimony for persuading the committee to support partition and Jewish statehood. Like William Hechler and William Blackstone, the Reverend John Stanley Grauel gave the Zionist movement a critical boost.[9]
UNSCOP went on to meet with Lebanese and other Arab leaders, including King Abdullah of Transjordan (renamed Jordan in 1949). Convinced, apparently, by Grauel’s testimony that the desperation of Jews in Europe should be studied as UNSCOP reviewed the situation in Palestine, a subcommittee visited refugee camps in Europe and interviewed Jewish DPs.[10]
The committee issued its report—or rather its reports—in early September. The eleven members voted unanimously that the mandate over the territory should be terminated. The mandatory system had been originally intended for territories whose populations were deemed not yet “ready” for full independence; there was little question that both the Jewish and the Arab populations of Palestine were ready and eager to govern themselves.
The question that divided the committee was whether the populations could best govern themselves together in one state or separately in two. Given the small size of the territory in question, it seemed clear to all members that some form of cooperation between the two populations was needed. Equally clearly, the bitterness of the struggle between them required a certain degree of separation and autonomy. Three members of the committee (India, Iran, and Yugoslavia) proposed reconciling these two requirements by establishing a binational federal state of Palestine similar in some ways to the Morrison-Grady proposal. Seven committee members (Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, and Uruguay) supported a proposal to partition the territory into two independent states in an economic union with Jerusalem under international trusteeship. The eleventh member of the committee, Australia, abstained.[11]
Clearly, it was time for another committee. On September 23, the fourth international Palestine committee was formed: the Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question. The establishment of this second U.N. committee was a political victory for the Zionists; the Arab states at the U.N. wanted to refer the UNSCOP report to an existing U.N. committee where, they believed, supporters of the majority UNSCOP report would have a harder time moving toward a final decision in favor of partition. The Ad Hoc Committee was charged with assessing the UNSCOP majority and minority reports to develop a practical way forward to implement their recommendations, providing a resolution that the General Assembly could review. The lopsided vote to establish the Ad Hoc Committee (29 in favor, 11 opposed, 16 abstentions) demonstrated that the majority UNSCOP report reflected the views of a majority in the General Assembly. The Ad Hoc Committee in true bureaucratic fashion immediately established three subcommittees: one each to look at how the majority and minority UNSCOP reports could be implemented, and a “conciliation committee” that would try to bring the two sides together. Attention centered on the subcommittee tasked with developing a plan to implement the partition of Palestine into two independent states.[12] That report was completed in November and forwarded to the General Assembly, where the partition resolution would need a two thirds supermajority of all those voting to pass. There were fifty-seven voting members of the United Nations at the time; if every state voted, the resolution would need thirty-eight votes.
For the Truman administration, all this was both good and bad news. It was good news because the liberal internationalists and pro-Zionists (who between them continued to constitute large majorities in national politics generally and especially in the Democratic Party) were generally happy with the results of Truman’s passive approach to the Palestine issue. The steady progress toward a positive U.N. decision on the creation of an independent Jewish state thrilled liberals who desperately wanted the United Nations to fulfill its potential as the foundation of a new era of world peace. It was also deeply satisfying to the many Americans who continued to see the Blackstone approach to the Jewish question as reflecting American values and American interests. The United States was employing Blackstone methods to achieve a Blackstone goal; particularly after the Holocaust, millions of Americans approved of the progress being made.
But there was also bad news. In the short term, liberal internationalists, Blackstone believers, and active Zionists rejoiced that a partition resolution was moving through the U.N. But they would judge Truman and his policy based on results. If the resolution failed to pass or, once passed, failed to be implemented on the ground, Truman would have to explain why the most powerful nation on earth was unable to achieve such a small, simple, and, these interlocutors would insist, morally important goal. Worse, from Truman’s point of view, was the knowledge that it would not be simply the pro-Zionist lobby whose wrath he needed to fear. The larger and much more influential United Nations lobby, headed by the redoubtable dowager of Dutchess County, now believed that the passage and implementation of the partition resolution would be the acid test of the United Nations’ power and relevance. The historicization of the eschaton had reached a dramatic new stage: for American liberals, the establishment of a Jewish state had become identified with humanity’s ability to end the cycle of recurring and ever more destructive wars. The cause of Zion fused with the cause of peace, and the cause of peace was the cause of survival.
In early September, the conventional wisdom was that the two thirds supermajority of voting states needed to pass the recommendation was out of reach. The Arab bloc of five states was, of course, opposed, as were non-Arab Muslim states like the newly independent Pakistan. Most observers believed that the USSR, busily building support networks among Arab countries to counter British power in the Middle East, would cast its own three votes (at Stalin’s insistence, Belarus and Ukraine had been given votes in the General Assembly) plus that of its Polish satellite against the resolution. (Czechoslovakia was, until the communist coup of February 1948, still seen as at least partially independent of the Soviet Union, and its vote in favor of the majority report was not seen as reflecting Stalin’s views.) Britain’s hostility to partition was well-known; Australia’s abstention on the UNSCOP report suggested that it would follow Britain on the final vote. Given France’s concerns about unrest in Muslim Algeria, Paris, too, seemed unlikely to support the UNSCOP report.
Truman was in a difficult position. If a two thirds majority was out of reach, a failed lobbying effort would damage American prestige and American relations with the Arab world to no real purpose. There was also strong opposition inside the government to the majority report, with many officials convinced, correctly as would soon be seen, that the complicated partition resolution could not in fact be implemented as it stood. But to abandon UNSCOP would mean an irrevocable loss of support that would torpedo Truman’s reelection hopes. He therefore did what presidents often do in such circumstances, delaying his response as long as possible and splitting the difference as much as he could. On October 11, he announced that the United States would support the UNSCOP majority report in the General Assembly. He made no preparations to round up supporting votes.[13]
Two days later, the situation changed: the Soviet Union announced that it, too, would support the majority report. The conventional wisdom, as it often does, flipped overnight. It was well-known that a number of U.N. members would routinely follow the lead of either the United States or the Soviet Union. Greece, for example, was still fighting a civil war against communist insurgents; it was seen as too dependent on the United States to risk its wrath over a vote in the U.N. Similarly, it would be a very rash or foolhardy Central American republic, or Eastern European Soviet client state, that took an independent course at the United Nations once the superpowers had made their wishes known.
The news that the United States and the Soviet Union agreed on a Palestine policy electrified both Zionists and liberal internationalists across the United States. Zionists rejoiced to see the approach of a Jewish state; liberal internationalists saw, or thought they saw, exactly the future they so desperately wanted as the work of the U.N. brought the great powers together to develop a consensus solution to the kind of problem that, in the past, had frequently led to war. If the United States and the Soviet Union, working through the mechanisms of the U.N., could reach a consensus on an issue as contentious as Palestine, surely they could find other solutions as well.
News of the Soviet switch also came as a relief to Truman. If the partition resolution was going to sail through the General Assembly, Truman could put the Palestine issue back on the back burner where he wanted it. In mid-November, that changed. In the absence of any pressure from the Americans, and quite possibly after conversations with the career State Department representatives in the U.S. delegation at the U.N. who hoped the resolution would fail, a number of countries that usually followed Washington’s line in foreign affairs began to speak out against the resolution. Haiti, Liberia, Cuba, Greece, and the Philippines announced their opposition to partition.[14] It now looked as if the resolution would fail, and that the reason for its failure was the Truman administration’s inability to round up enough votes from American allies. This was not a result Truman could live with, and the word from the White House went out to the American delegation at the United Nations telling the diplomats to pull out all the stops to ensure a victory for the resolution. The pressure had its effect, as Time magazine dryly reported in its December 8 issue:
One day Haitian Delegate Antonio Vieux spoke heatedly against partition; two days later he announced shamefacedly that his government had ordered him to switch to yes. Filipino Delegate General Carlos Romulo, on Wednesday, orated against partition and sailed away on the Queen Mary. Saturday a new Filipino delegate flew in from Washington, voted yes. Liberia, which voted no in committee, said yes in the final roll call.[15]
Encouraged by the Zionist leadership in Palestine, Jews around the world reached out to their contacts, though it is not clear how much impact they had. France is said to have made up its mind to vote yes after Chaim Weizmann telephoned former prime minister Leon Blum; others attribute the French vote to threats made by the American financier Bernard Baruch.[16] Both theories seem unlikely. France had enjoyed close relations with the Palestinian Jews dating back to World War II when French authorities in Syria sheltered Jewish terrorists wanted by the British authorities. During the war, Britain was openly scheming to end French rule in Lebanon and Syria. At best, that could lead to a northern Arab federation under pro-British Hashemite rule incorporating Iraq, Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Lord Moyne, the British diplomat who was assassinated by Jewish radicals in Cairo in 1944, seems to have hoped that this confederation would be large enough, and the Arabs would be grateful enough to the British for establishing it, that a Jewish homeland could be incorporated as one of its component parts. In any case, Britain tried, and in 1946 it succeeded, in forcing France out of Syria as it sought to gain favor in the Arab world. Revenge, domestic politics, and humanitarian instincts all pointed Paris toward a pro-Zionist policy, and the French government took every opportunity to punish Britain for its betrayal. It had, for example, allowed the 4,500 Holocaust refugees to board the SS Exodus 1947 in a French port, and icily refused to allow them to be off-loaded against their will when the British sought to return them to French soil.[17] After Israel achieved its independence, France would become its most important ally, arming Israel, providing it with diplomatic support, and even helping it develop nuclear weapons in defiance of American pressure. The theory that hidden Jewish pressure forced France’s partition vote looks Vulcanesque; neither a call from one old friend to another nor a threat from a Jewish American financier seems the best explanation of a policy choice that was entirely consistent with French interests and aligned with settled French policy through many years.[18]
For some it would become an article of faith that the secretive, all-powerful Jewish lobby engineered the vote at the United Nations. Certainly many Jews around the world did their best to promote an outcome that, by this time, most Jews strongly supported. Nevertheless, one wonders how the world’s Jews, powerless a decade before to stop the rise of Hitler in Germany, powerless to get the world’s countries to oppose Nazi Germany while it was still weak, powerless to stop the Holocaust, powerless to force a war-weakened Great Britain to toe the Zionist line, had suddenly gained the awesome power to manipulate the United Nations behind the scenes. If the world’s Jews had this kind of power, why hadn’t they used it before? Why even let the question get to the United Nations? Couldn’t the all-powerful elders of Zion just call Clement Attlee and read him the riot act? And if the world’s Jews hadn’t had this power in the past, how had they suddenly become invincible? Who died to make Rothschild king? That such questions have no sensible answer has never bothered Vulcan enthusiasts; reason and evidence are not the wings on which prejudice storms the abyss.
But whatever pressures were applied, and by whom, the General Assembly voted by the necessary two thirds margin to endorse the report of the Ad Hoc Committee, and the partition of Palestine was the official policy of the international community. The outcome was close: 33 nations voted in favor, 13 against, 10 abstained, and one was absent. If Stalin, a man not noted for yielding to outside pressure, Jewish or otherwise, had cast the four votes he controlled against partition, the resolution would have fallen two votes short of the two thirds majority needed.
Trapped by Success
The United Nations resolution opened a legal path for the establishment of a Jewish state, but the passage of the resolution plunged Truman into one of the most difficult crises of his presidency. On November 29, when the vote was announced, the Arab representatives stormed out of the General Assembly unanimous and unambiguous in their response: the Arab states did not accept the authority of the U.N. to decide the fate of Palestine and they rejected the decision that was taken. Great Britain, still intent on retaining Arab support, announced that while it would evacuate Palestine on schedule and give up its mandate, it would not cooperate with the U.N. on any administrative or security matters pertaining to the partition that did not enjoy the support of both of the communities in Palestine.
This put Truman in an impossible position. With Arab resistance and British noncooperation, the resolution was unworkable, but the liberal internationalists in the United States believed that it was the clear duty of the president of the United States to make the resolution work. They did not know how that could happen, but they knew it was the president’s job to make the United Nations effective. Perhaps this meant setting up a U.N. peacekeeping force with Soviet troops; that struck many Democrats as an admirable idea that could advance the cause of peace. Eleanor Roosevelt, for one, saw no problem with a Soviet presence in the Middle East. As she wrote to Truman, “To say that just because Russia might have some soldiers in Palestine on an equal basis with us and all the other nations involved [contributing to a U.N. International Police Force], we would have to mobilize fifty percent for war seems to me complete nonsense and I think it would seem so to most of the people of the United States.”[19]
To the officials in the executive branch, this all looked like madness. The State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA were united in the belief that nothing short of mass American troop deployments could make the resolution work, and that even then the United States could face years of war in the Middle East that would alienate the Arabs, infuriate the American people, interrupt the supply of oil to Europe, and offer a range of enticing opportunities to the Soviet Union.
The State Department turned to George Kennan, then at the height of his power both inside and outside the administration, to review the new situation in the Middle East and develop options for American policy. In preparing his report, Kennan leaned on the advice of Henry Serrano Villard, a career foreign service officer who began his illustrious procession through the ranks of the department as vice-consul in Tehran. In conversations with Kennan, Villard was fearful of Soviet intrusion in Arab states, and also about the possibility of “a Communist dominated Jewish state in Palestine within the next year or two.”[20]
The idea of a pro-Soviet Jewish state resonated in the national security bureaucracies in the hothouse atmosphere of 1947–48. Jews in the United States and abroad had long been associated with left-wing and, in enough cases to be noticeable, communist politics. The Palestinian Zionist movement was well to the left of mainstream American or even European politics at this time, and a far-left faction of the movement was pro-Soviet. Cooperation between the Eastern Bloc and the Jewish authorities in promoting a steady stream of illegal immigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine in defiance of British controls had established close links between Jewish officials and the Soviet bloc. American intelligence had evidence, and beyond that common sense suggested, that some number of the Jews arriving in Palestine through this route were Soviet agents.
And there was the case of Shmuel Mikunis, secretary of the Israeli Communist Party. After the war, Mikunis toured all around Eastern Europe, ingratiating himself with various officials including Deputy Premier Joseph Chisinevschi in Romania, leading communists like Władysław Gomułka in Poland, and Milovan Djilas and Marko Ranković in Yugoslavia. Mikunis would remain in Czechoslovakia throughout the spring of 1948, making plans to mobilize and train Eastern European Jewish volunteers. Receiving a telephone call from Georgi Malenkov, Stalin’s eventual successor, Mikunis asked if it was within the current international communist policy for him to call a press conference to organize and mobilize Eastern European Jewish youth to fight for Israel. Without hesitating, Malenkov uttered one Russian word Zakonno (“It is legal”) and the phone went dead.[21]
American officials knew something significant was happening in the field of Soviet-Zionist relations, but did not have all the details. They had reason to worry about the allegiance of some of the Jewish military forces; many in the military leadership of the Palmach, a quasi-independent elite Jewish militia, were sympathetic to Moscow. David Ben-Gurion recognized the danger as well and would fight one of his most difficult political battles to bring the Palmach leadership under state control.[22]
By December 17, Kennan completed a draft paper that began with the consensus view that the U.N. partition resolution was unworkable and outlined two alternative recommendations. The first was that:
The United States should immediately announce that we have become convinced that the partition of Palestine is impossible of implementation and that the Palestine problem should therefore be referred back to a special session of the General Assembly to meet in a neutral country such as Switzerland. At this session we should propose that a “middle-of-the-road” solution be attempted for which we would endeavor to obtain support from the Arab and Jewish communities of Palestine. If this proved impossible, we should propose a UN trusteeship for Palestine, pending agreement by the Arab and Jewish communities.
The second alternative was more passive:
The US should take the position that, in view of the manifest impossibility of implementing the partition of Palestine, no steps should be taken to that end. We should oppose sending UN troops to Palestine to enforce partition. We should maintain and enforce our embargo on arms to Palestine and neighboring countries.[23]
Both of these approaches would infuriate both Zionists and pro–United Nations liberals. Kennan, with very little knowledge of, or interest in, the domestic political problems the president faced, was more worried about the potential problems on the ground in the Middle East. On January 20, 1948, Kennan shared his views on Palestine in a top secret report with the wider administration, including Secretary of State Marshall and Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett. The paper set forward the department’s view of American interests that were affected by the problem of Palestine: control of the eastern Mediterranean and the Suez Canal; securing Middle Eastern oil supplies, which were necessary to bankroll the Marshall Plan for Europe; and maintenance of stable and friendly relations with the Arab countries, seen as essential in limiting Soviet penetration into the region.
The report dwelt at length on probable Arab reactions to partition:
The Arabs of Palestine have indicated their determination not to establish a separate government in the Arab area of Palestine designated by the UN, and to boycott all activities of the UN Commission charged with the transfer of authority from the British to the new Arab and Jewish states. Even if partition were economically feasible, the Arab attitude alone renders it improbable that any economic union could be effected between the two new states.
Kennan also feared increasing unrest:
Strong nationalistic and religious feelings were aroused throughout the Arab world as a result of the UN recommendation on Palestine….A “jihad” (holy war) against the Jews of Palestine has been proclaimed by Moslem leaders in most of the Arab states and has been joined by Christian leaders in Syria….Organized large scale opposition by the Arabs is to be expected. Irregular military units are now being organized in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Transjordan and Saudi Arabia to fight in Palestine.
On the Soviet dimension, Kennan, was adamant:
The UN decision is favorable to Soviet objectives of sowing dissention and discord in non-communist countries. The partition of Palestine might afford the USSR a pretext on the basis of “self-determination of minorities” to encourage the partition of areas in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Greece, with a view to setting up separate [Kurdish?] Azerbaijani, Armenian and Macedonian states enjoying the support of the USSR. All in all, there is no way of telling in exactly what manner the USSR will attempt to turn partition to its advantage. It must be assumed, however, that Moscow will actively endeavor to find some means of exploiting the opportunity.
In conclusion, an alarming portrait is painted:
So numerous would be the ramifications of mounting Arab ill will, of opening the door to Soviet political or military penetration, and of generally chaotic conditions in Palestine and neighboring countries that the whole structure of peace and security in the Near East and Mediterranean would be directly or indirectly affected with results impossible to predict at this stage in detail but certainly injurious to U.S. interests.
Kennan then makes an argument grounded in domestic politics: “In the U.S., the position of Jews would be gravely undermined as it becomes evident to the public that in supporting a Jewish state in Palestine we were in fact supporting the extreme objectives of political Zionism, to the detriment of overall U.S. security interests.”
Given the likelihood of a disastrous outcome in Palestine, Kennan advised the administration to distance itself from the problem: “We should endeavor as far as possible to spread responsibility for the future handling of this question, and to divest ourselves of the imputation of international leadership in the search for a solution to this problem.”[24]
When Dean Rusk, acting as director of the recently established Office of United Nations Affairs, criticized the paper’s pessimism, Kennan doubled down. Unless the United States somehow dodged responsibility for Palestine, Washington might find itself with a long-term military commitment: “We would finally hold major military and economic responsibility for the indefinite maintenance by armed force of a status quo in Palestine fiercely resented by the bulk of the Arab world. I do not believe that the U.S. public would ever tolerate such a situation.”[25] The head of the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA), Loy Henderson, agreed, writing to Rusk on February 6 that “the Palestine Partition Plan is manifestly unworkable. I think that with each passing day our task will be rendered more difficult and that by mid April general chaos will reign in Palestine.”[26]
Defense Secretary James Forrestal, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the analysts at the CIA all shared deep reservations about the partition plan. As Forrestal wrote in his diary: “The strategic planning of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been substantially altered by the Palestine decision. That it had pretty well ‘spiked’ any consideration of any military operations in the Middle East and had pretty well disposed of the idea that the United States would continue to have access to the Middle East Oil.”[27]
The CIA described its misgivings in a report entitled “Possible Developments in Palestine” on February 28:
It is apparent that the partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states (and an international zone), with economic union between the two states, as recommended by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on 29 November 1947, cannot be implemented. The Arab reaction to the recommendation has been violent, and the Arab refusal to cooperate in any way with the five-nation United Nations Commission will prevent the formation of an Arab state and the organization of economic union. The Arabs will use force to oppose the establishment of a Jewish state and to this end are training troops in Palestine and other Arab [states]. Moreover, the United Kingdom has stated repeatedly that it will take no part in implementing a UN decision not acceptable to both Jews and Arabs. The British have also declared that when the mandate terminates on 15 May, they will not transfer authority to the UN Commission but will merely relinquish that authority, which would then be assumed by the UN. Thus, without Arab and British cooperation, the Commission will be unable to carry out the task assigned to it.[28]
Given these problems, Lovett requested that Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff submit a new range of alternative actions that the United States might pursue and their predicted consequences. Three options emerged: a) full support of partition, including the use of arms to enforce it; b) a passive approach, with no further steps either to aid or hinder partition; and c) a reversal of support for partition, instead seeking an Arab-Jewish federated state, perhaps under U.N. trusteeship.
The first option ran counter to the State Department vision of national strategy and there was little public support for sending American troops to Palestine; the second seemed impractical in the light of the intense American domestic interest in the question. Kennan and staff believed that the third option was the only practical choice:
This course of action would encounter strong opposition from the Zionists. It would, however, probably have the support of the Arab States and of world opinion in general. Our prestige in the Middle East would immediately rise and we would regain in large measure our strategically important position in the area. Our national interests would thus be served and our national security strengthened, notwithstanding the disfavor with which such a procedure would be viewed by Zionists [sic] elements.[29]
Truman’s position was not an enviable one in early 1948. The political world was largely in favor of partition and looked forward to the rise of a Jewish state under the auspices of the United Nations. The “civil war” in Mandatory Palestine that had broken out on November 30 after the U.N. vote had by January escalated to a full-fledged conflict.[30] And the national security establishment was increasingly and deeply opposed to any American participation in what it saw as a doomed enterprise. Foreign policy professionals denounced Truman as a political panderer, shamelessly mortgaging the American interest to his need for the Jewish vote. Zionists attacked him for doing almost nothing to help the Jewish people in their hour of need. Liberals saw the prestige of the United Nations as being at stake in the crisis, and criticized Truman for inadequate leadership at a historic turning point.
In principle, Truman sympathized with the Zionists and the Jews on humanitarian grounds. In practice, he felt the weight of the arguments emanating from the bureaucracy. With upheavals in Europe and the Soviet pushback against the Marshall Plan raising tensions everywhere and threatening to provoke a real crisis over Berlin, Truman agreed with the bureaucracy’s argument that Palestine was a distraction from more critical problems. He also understood that Eleanor Roosevelt’s demand that the United States take on the responsibility for carrying out the U.N. resolution entailed unacceptable risks. Yet Truman understood American politics much better than State Department mandarins like George Kennan, and he knew that the policy recommendations emanating from Foggy Bottom were less politically sustainable than the bureaucrats believed.
To make matters worse, 1948 was a presidential election year and Truman’s chances for winning the Democratic nomination, much less the November election, hung by a thread. Henry Wallace had already announced a third-party run, threatening to split the Democrats and throw the election to the Republicans. Truman’s alleged failure to support the United Nations and the embattled Jews of Palestine figured heavily in his campaign rhetoric.
The steady stream of bad news from Palestine did not help. Not only had fighting between Arabs and Jews broken out almost immediately following the passage of the U.N. resolution, but as the grim winter of 1948 unfolded, the Jews in Palestine were losing the war. Instead of presiding over the birth of a Jewish state, it began to look as if Truman could face a massive humanitarian disaster as hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Jews were driven from their homes.
The winter of 1948 was grim; the spring would be worse.