12
For anyone trying to make sense out of the historical record, one of the most persistent difficulties involves reconstructing what people at the time believed would happen next. From our privileged perspective in the future, we know how things came out. We know now, for example, that the Jews of Palestine would defeat both the Palestinian Arabs and the subsequent invasion by neighboring states. None of that was obvious to people at the time; indeed, forecasting who will win a particular war, how long a given conflict will last, or how extensive and intensive it will be are tasks at which even the best informed of contemporary observers often fail. Yet forecasts about the course of a particular war, however fallible these prove, are one of the most important pieces of information that policymakers use to analyze their situation and chart their course. Students of history, especially those looking for insights that will make them better foreign policy strategists in their own time, must constantly work to reconstruct the mental pictures and assessments that guided their predecessors.
In the case of Harry Truman and his colleagues, we cannot follow their thought processes in the difficult spring of 1948 without taking the course of events on the ground in Palestine into account. Beginning almost immediately after the results of the U.N. vote on partition were announced, rioting broke out in parts of Palestine as Arabs protested the decision. Over the following days and weeks, the violence continued and intensified. It soon began to look as if the Jews were losing the war.[1]
From December to March, the Jews lost ground. Many of the Jewish settlements were isolated villages, and the roads that connected areas of concentrated Jewish population often ran through territory largely inhabited by Arabs. For political reasons, the Jewish leadership could not follow the advice given by its military commanders to withdraw Jews from scattered outposts and concentrate on the defense of key blocs of territory. As a result, the Jewish forces were spread out across large areas, and much of the Jewish military was tied down by the need to protect communications. Worst of all, the large concentration of Jews in the Jerusalem area was soon cut off and besieged by the Arabs, and the fear that the community would be forced to surrender haunted the Jewish leadership in Palestine and its friends and supporters abroad. In the middle of February, as the situation across Palestine worsened, Ben-Gurion asked the New York representatives of the Jewish Agency to press for the intervention of American or U.N. troops or, at the least, supplies.[2]
The revelation of Jewish weakness highlighted one of Truman’s decisions that was controversial at the time but has often been forgotten in retrospect. Immediately after the U.N. vote on partition, the State Department had proposed, and Truman accepted, an embargo on all American arms sales to either side. The arms embargo had been announced on December 5, six days after the vote and five days after fighting started.[3] As many Zionists bitterly pointed out, this amounted to a de facto intervention on the side of the Arabs. The Arabs were well supplied with arms from Great Britain; the Jews had nowhere to turn. Meanwhile American arsenals were bursting with surplus materiel from World War II.
Zionists compared this to events in Spain during its civil war, when the western embargo on arms sales to both sides hurt the Republican side only, as the Fascists were well supplied by Hitler and Mussolini. Even as Jewish outposts fell to Arab attacks, and as the civilian population of Jerusalem endured siege conditions, Truman sided with the State Department; the arms embargo would remain in place until the end of Israel’s War of Independence.[4]
For those who believe that “the Jews” were in control of American policy during these critical months, Truman’s support for an arms embargo that benefited the Arabs and threatened such dire consequences for Palestinian Jews is hard to explain, especially as the military crisis grew. But Zionist outrage was not the problem that worried Truman most. It was the liberal internationalists that Truman was primarily worried about, and they wanted something much harder to deliver. Eleanor Roosevelt and her allies believed that the United Nations was humanity’s only hope to avoid World War III, that Resolution 181 calling for the partition of Palestine was its most important decision to date, and that it was now the job of President Truman to ensure that the U.N. resolution was obeyed. The helplessness of the international community in the face of escalating violence across Palestine threatened to break the credibility of the United Nations. As one observer wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in late February,
The United Nations Security Council is scheduled to take up the Palestine question, and it appears to be the majority view at Lake Success [the early headquarters of the U.N.] that this will mark a turning point in U.N. history. If the Security Council is not able to produce an international force to guarantee Palestine partition, or is not able to take any other action to guarantee partition and at least partially head off the bloody Arab-Jewish war that seems imminent for the Holy Land, then the U.N. will suffer a blow in lost prestige and authority that may mark the beginning of its end.[5]
Meanwhile, the British continued to train and equip Arab armies outside Palestine. With the Palestinian Arabs already gaining the upper hand against the Jews, and the Arab League promising to enter Palestine once the mandate expired, the situation of the Jews—and of the partition plan itself—appeared bleak. Truman’s choices looked equally bad. If, as many expected, the Arabs prevailed on the ground, what would happen to the Palestinian Jews? Everyone at this point understood that wars of peoples tended to involve massacres and ethnic cleansing. Where would the Jews go when the time came to flee? To the displaced persons camps in Europe, already teeming with desperate Jews? To the United States, determined to avoid another refugee surge? As the State Department mandarins warning Truman against committing the United States to the implementation of the partition plan argued: if the partition plan meant war, and the Jews lost, the United States and its president would have a political disaster and a humanitarian crisis on their hands.
Unilateral American intervention was militarily and politically impossible. Tensions with the Soviet Union were rising to explosive levels in early 1948. The February coup in Czechoslovakia ended the last hope for some kind of accommodation between Stalin and the West, communist parties in Italy and France were making their most determined bids for power, and in the spring of 1948 Stalin began to harass Allied military traffic heading through Soviet-occupied Germany to the divided city of Berlin.[6]
American forces worldwide were overstretched, and on March 17, Truman would make one of the most difficult and controversial speeches of his career, calling on Congress to introduce military conscription.[7] By summer, when the fighting in Palestine intensified into the Israeli War of Independence, all available American airpower would be fully engaged in airlifting supplies to Soviet-blockaded West Berlin. As the military chiefs made clear to Truman in the spring of 1948, the United States was seriously overextended and had no military options in Palestine.
What Mrs. Roosevelt and her allies really wanted was the dispatch of what today we would call U.N. peacekeepers to Palestine, charged with maintaining order and carrying out the U.N.-mandated partition in an orderly fashion. Secretary of State George Marshall explained why his department thought this impossible in closed session testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March. Large military forces would be required, possibly for a considerable period, to implement the resolution and maintain peace in Palestine, Marshall told the committee. Thanks to the Soviet position on the Security Council, any UN involvement “would make substantially certain the use in and around the Holy Land of large bodies of Russian troops. In the case of Palestine, the maintenance of such a Soviet force would press down ponderously on Greece and Turkey, as well as upon the Arabian oil fields, which are officially held essential to the United States and to the entire European Recovery Program as well.”[8]
In March of 1948, with the Jews of Jerusalem under siege and isolated settlements cut off around the country even as Arab armies prepared for war, the internal fighting over Palestine policy in the administration reached a peak. To many of the career officials, Truman’s policy looked like madness. He had pressed for the impossible U.N. partition resolution to pass, when simple inaction would have ensured its defeat. He doubled down on his commitment to the resolution even when it became clear that, between British and Arab opposition, the resolution could not be implemented on the ground. He now seemed bent on pursuing a feckless, disastrous course at a moment of grave national peril, presumably because he was pandering to the Jewish vote, that would leave the United States to face infinitely worse choices in the near future: it could either jeopardize its position in Central Europe by diverting scarce military resources to a military operation in Palestine that would permanently tie the United States down while infuriating the entire Arab world, or the United States could stand by wringing its hands while the Arabs drove the Palestinian Jews into the sea. “Mutinous” is an inadequate word to describe the rage, the sorrow, the horror with which much of the State Department viewed their president’s course.
It was against this background that a series of clashes inside the Truman administration took place. The State Department had always believed that the only safe course was to wriggle free from support for the unworkable partition resolution. As May 15, the fateful day on which the British would evacuate their last military force and remove the last obstacle to a major regional conflict, drew near, Foggy Bottom scrambled desperately to separate American policy from the doomed resolution. Officials presented Truman with a draft speech that the chief of the American delegation at the United Nations, Warren Austin, would deliver to the General Assembly, declaring that in view of changing circumstances and the failure to implement the preconditions for a peaceful transfer of power to the two new states, the United States was abandoning the policy of partition, and proposed a United Nations trusteeship while new efforts were made to achieve a solution that both sides could accept.[9]
Truman had very little room to maneuver, and, it appeared, very little time left. He could not fight the substance of the State Department position; if events unfolded as expected, for the sake of the Palestinian Jews some kind of alternative peacekeeping arrangement might well be needed by May. Yet there was one red line Truman did not want to cross. Once again, it was not a Zionist red line; it was a liberal internationalist one. Specifically, it was a line of Eleanor Roosevelt’s. Truman could not take the responsibility of abandoning the U.N. resolution as a unilateral American move. That, to Mrs. Roosevelt and to all the Americans who clung tenaciously to their faith in the role of the U.N., would be the unpardonable sin: it would be killing the U.N. and all the hopes it represented.
Between Truman’s fury, State Department defensiveness, and a general disposition by everyone involved to avoid taking responsibility for a major policy snafu, what happened next is difficult to assess. Truman and the State Department blamed one another for the chaos, but it appears that Truman gave the department a limited, hedged permission to introduce a trusteeship plan, the U.N. equivalent of the old League of Nations mandate system, so long as the U.N. itself had in some way acknowledged the failure of its partition plan.
For Truman, this approach was the best available option. As long as the U.N. concluded that the partition plan was unworkable first, and called on member states for help in developing a new approach, Truman could claim to be assisting rather than obstructing its work. He could prepare a lifeboat without being accused of wanting to jump ship.
This isn’t how it worked out. The State Department either failed to recognize or chose to ignore the importance of Truman’s precondition, and while the Security Council had called for a report on the deteriorating situation in Palestine, the U.N. had not yet abandoned the partition plan when Austin announced the change in the American position. It looked to the world, and to American liberals, as if Truman was unilaterally undercutting the United Nations at its hour of greatest need.
Austin’s statement set off a firestorm in public opinion, putting liberal internationalists and Zionists on the same page just as the country was digesting Truman’s bleak call for a peacetime draft. Truman was furious. Writing to his sister, Mary Jane Truman, on March 21, the president called the State Department officials “striped pants conspirators” who had “completely balled up the Palestine situation.”[10]
Then things got even worse: Eleanor Roosevelt wrote Truman to resign her position on the American delegation to the United Nations (her sons, meanwhile, had joined a group of nervous Democrats looking to dump Truman and draft Eisenhower for the 1948 presidential nomination).[11] Mrs. Roosevelt also took to her column to express her bitter disappointment on March 26, 1948, clearly blaming Truman for the crisis at the United Nations:
I feel that our evident reluctance to accept responsibility and carry out whatever requests the U.N. might make of us, whether of a military or an economic nature, led to increased resistance by the Arabs. They were sure they could have their own way without any consideration of the wishes of the U.N.
The U.N. would have no force unless it was provided by a call on the great nations. And Great Britain was pulling out. This probably meant that we and Russia would be called upon. And our difficulties in Europe made us feel that added difficulties in the Near East would be inevitable if we and the USSR had soldiers and shared responsibility in that region. It might have created an impossible situation.
It looks to me, therefore, as though we have taken the weak course of sacrificing the word we pledged and, in so doing, have weakened the U.N. and prevented it from becoming an instrument to keep peace in the world.[12]
This is the outcome Truman had been struggling for months to avoid: Eleanor Roosevelt was accusing him in public of turning his back on the United Nations. Making things even worse, the day before Austin’s statement, at the request of an old friend from St. Louis, Eddie Jacobson, Truman had met with Chaim Weizmann and reassured Weizmann that he remained committed to partition and Jewish independence.
Now, thanks to the State Department’s misreading, as he saw it, of his instructions—a misreading that might well have been deliberate sabotage—Truman was taking the kind of political damage that he had struggled for years to avoid. He wrote of his frustration to his brother on March 22: “I think the proper thing to do, and the thing I have been doing, is to do what I think is right and let them all go to hell.”[13]
Truman could hardly repudiate Austin in public. For one thing, the trusteeship idea was and remained Truman’s policy. Given the vulnerability of Jewish forces on the ground, some form of trusteeship might be the only option that could prevent a ruinous defeat and catastrophe. Truman had been outmaneuvered by his own officials, and both Truman’s personal political standing and the administration’s prestige at home and abroad were significantly undercut.
In those last two weeks of March, Harry Truman’s Palestine policy and his strategy for gaining the Democratic presidential nomination both lay in ruins. Over Europe, over Palestine, over his reelection prospects, dark clouds were gathering. He did not know it then, but the nadir had been reached. Deliverance would come, and from an unexpected quarter. In the spring of 1948, it wasn’t Harry Truman who saved the Jews; it was the Jews of Palestine, with an assist from Stalin, who saved Harry Truman.
Stalin to the Rescue
By late March, the future of Palestine was a military rather than a political issue. With Jerusalem under siege, the Jews of Palestine desperately needed to change the momentum on the battlefield. More than anything, this was a question of arms. In November 1947, the Yishuv, as the Palestinian Jews were widely known, counted roughly 17,000 rifles, 3,700 submachine guns, 205 machine guns, 775 light machine guns, scarcely over a dozen antitank guns, 750 mortars, and no antiaircraft guns, field guns, communications equipment, or tanks in its arsenals. There were no ships or planes. The Arab armies, on the other hand, had all of these weapons and more.[14] Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq had armies that had been trained and equipped by Great Britain; the Jordanian Arab Legion was staffed by British officers and trained to a high professional standard.
As the various international committees ground out their reports on the question of Palestine, agents of the Haganah, the underground army of the Jewish Agency, scoured the world for weapons, but had met with scant success. (The FBI arrested Haganah agents in the United States who were hoping to make illegal purchases.)[15] Then, on November 30, the day after the U.N. partition vote and the first day of widespread violence between Arabs and Jews across Palestine, a mysterious, well-dressed man knocked on the door of the Paris hotel room occupied by Ehud Avriel, tasked by Ben-Gurion to buy weapons for the Palestinian Jews. As Arnold Krammer tells the story in The Forgotten Friendship: Israel and the Soviet Bloc, 1947–53, the well-dressed man came into Avriel’s room and
quickly explained that there was nothing easier than purchasing arms. He produced a factory catalogue and a variety of descriptive folders and, without waiting for comments or questions from the stunned Haganah officials, proceeded through the lists giving explanations and price quotations….He was Robert Adam Abramovici, Jewish, from Romania. Before the war he had been the Bucharest representative of Ceskoslovenska Zbrojovka Brno, the massive Skoda arms works in Czechoslovakia. He explained to Avriel, who was still awe-struck, that he would accompany him to the Skoda factory the following morning, and that they were already expected. He produced two plane tickets from his pocket which he had taken the liberty of buying on his way to the hotel, shook hands all around, and cordially took his departure….
The Czechs, Avriel soon discovered, were prepared to sell weapons and equipment ordered by the Wehrmacht during the war, but never delivered. The initial contract included 10,000 Mauser P. 18 rifles, 4,500 heavy machine guns and 3 million rounds of ammunition. The Czechs indicated that they were ready and willing to sell other weapons and equipment up to and including Messerschmitt fighters, and even a few Spitfires and Mosquitoes that they had on hand. Communist governments elsewhere in the bloc were willing to allow the Haganah to smuggle the weapons to Palestine using transit routes across Soviet controlled Eastern Europe.[16]
The first shipment of Czech arms, shipped in disguised crates aboard a steamship and hidden under piles of onions, landed in Palestine on April 3, just in time for the launch of Operation Nachson to open a supply line to the besieged Jewish community in Jerusalem. Named for the ancient Hebrew traditionally credited with being the first to step into the Red Sea when Moses parted the waters, the offensive relieved the pressure on Jerusalem and marked a turning point in the war.
By May 15, when the British mandate officially ended, the Jews of Palestine were receiving regular arms deliveries from Czechoslovakia. When Ben-Gurion and his colleagues debated on whether or not to proclaim the Jewish state, they had already received 15,000 rifles, roughly 1,600 machine guns, and 21 million rounds of ammunition. The arms relationship with the Czechs survived the February 1948 communist coup that stripped away the last pretenses of Czech independence, and by May of that year the Israelis, as they would be called after independence was declared, were confident that further shipments were in the pipeline. An air corridor was planned for future arms shipments, and ultimately fighter aircraft (including recognizably German Messerschmitts) would be flown directly to Israeli airfields. With assurances that came from Stalin’s closest aides and confidants, and a promise to allow Jewish volunteers to train in Soviet-controlled Europe, the leaders of the Jewish Agency were ready to proclaim the independence of the first Jewish state in Palestine in almost two thousand years.[17]
The first fighter planes from the Czechs arrived within days after Israeli independence was declared.[18] The American response was swift, as the United States persuaded the United Nations Security Council to impose a blanket arms embargo on all the combatant forces on May 29. (Again, the supposedly pliant Truman defied Zionist lobbyists on this point.) Stalin ignored the embargo with his customary ruthlessness, and during the next nine months continuing arms deliveries enabled the Israeli forces to achieve a progressively greater margin of superiority over their Arab opponents—even as Britain’s adherence to the U.N. arms embargo left its Arab allies unable to resupply depleted stockpiles of ammunition.[19]
Historians ever since have puzzled over this unique episode in Soviet and Israeli history. After decades of hostility between communists and Zionists, Stalin tilted and tilted hard toward the Zionists just long enough for Israel to win its war of independence. Shortly thereafter, relations between Israel and the Soviet Union returned to the deep freeze, and up until the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies were among the Jewish state’s most resourceful and redoubtable opponents. The Soviets and their East German allies trained and armed terrorist groups who attacked Israeli citizens and territory; supported the intelligence agencies and the military forces of Israel’s most radical Arab opponents; and engaged in nonstop disinformation and propaganda against the Jewish state throughout the world.[20]
We’ve seen that Stalin’s hopes of driving a wedge between the United States and Great Britain combined with his interest in using support for the Jews to win friends among non-communist-left parties encouraged him to support the Zionists at the United Nations in 1947. In any case, from Stalin’s perspective, the more deeply the United Nations, a forum in which it had a veto on the Security Council and a fair number of votes in the General Assembly, involved itself in Middle East questions, the more influence the Soviet Union could hope to gain in an important part of the world.
There were additional advantages in selling arms. To begin with, the Eastern Bloc countries were in desperate need of hard (western) currency as they struggled to recover from the devastation of the war and to finance a shift from capitalism to Soviet-style socialism. As noted earlier, Soviet satellites had been acquiring foreign currency by allowing Jews to emigrate in exchange for substantial hard currency payments from the Jewish Agency. Shipping this turbulent minority overseas at Jewish expense was an excellent way to subsidize Soviet power while both pacifying the Eastern Bloc and making trouble for the West. By the winter of 1947–48, Stalin was more eager than ever to find money for the satellites. With Western Europe about to benefit from Marshall Plan aid, and with the competition over the future of Europe heating up, Stalin needed to scrounge every dime of hard currency he could get to shore up the socialist economic bloc he was trying to build.
The American offer of Marshall Plan aid to Soviet-controlled countries had, as Truman hoped, done more than turn Eleanor Roosevelt and her allies into supporters of the Marshall Plan. It had also caused problems for Stalin and his allies in Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia in particular was facing economic troubles as the communists tightened their grip in 1947–48. Access to American dollar credits struck even some Czech communists as an idea to be pursued, and the Soviets had to forbid the Czechs from entering conversations with the West about participating in the plan.
Allowing the Czechs to sell otherwise worthless Nazi surplus weapons to the Jews neatly solved this problem. When the Czechs complained about losing Marshall Plan funding, Stalin’s ambassador replied, “You claim that Stalin did not let you join the Marshall Program, but you neglect to mention that he made it possible for you to obtain good dollars from the Israelis, by selling arms which did not even belong to you—for arms that you had already been paid by the Germans—isn’t that enough compensation?”[21] The hard-pressed communist government would receive tens of millions of dollars as Israel, often using funds collected by American Jews in the United States, purchased as many weapons as the Czechs were willing to sell.[22]
It seems clear that one of Stalin’s goals in making weapons available to the Jews was to further harass and embarrass Great Britain while driving a wedge into its alliance with the United States. Britain, it was clear, still had ambitions in the Middle East, and those ambitions still depended on the weak dynastic regimes aligned with the imperial power. Britain needed to avoid any kind of nationalist awakening in the Arab world. The shock of a long and even a losing war with the Jews would likely undermine the royal and feudal regimes clinging to power under British patronage in Egypt, Iraq, and possibly elsewhere. Any victories the Jews could win against Britain’s puppet regimes would weaken those regimes and frustrate Britain’s Middle East strategy. It was clear that in a war between Arabs and Jews, Britain would support the Arabs while American public opinion would rally to the Jews. Helping make that war longer and more costly would have struck Stalin as an obvious policy step. To the extent that this was his aim, Stalin’s Middle East intervention succeeded. The shock of Arab defeat in the 1948–49 war was the beginning of a crisis that would ultimately sweep the old, pro-British order away. An awakening Arab nationalism turned against the kings who led the Arabs into a humiliating defeat, and against the perfidious foreign master whom they served. Stalin’s successors would, as he hoped, find friends and allies among the new wave of nationalistic Arab regimes that spread across much of the region over the next ten years.
Stalin may well have hoped that the war could help the Soviet cause in other, more dramatic ways. Between 1945 and 1948, as Soviet-aligned governments in Eastern Europe had facilitated the movement of Jews to Palestine in defiance of the British immigration controls, a number of communists and Soviet agents had been included. More intriguing still, many senior leaders within the most elite of the Jewish fighting units, the Palmach, which left-wing Israeli historian Tom Segev refers to as “the Haganah’s crack military force,” were closely associated with the most pro-Soviet of the major Jewish political parties.[23]
During the Spanish Civil War, Moscow-aligned communists had come to dominate the originally noncommunist Republican side, in large part because the Soviet Union was the republic’s most significant arms supplier and ensured that groups favorable to the Soviet cause got the best equipment. Something similar might happen in Palestine.
What Stalin did not expect was that the shipments of weapons would turn the military tide at just the moment when Jewish weakness threatened the Truman administration with the complete collapse of its Middle East policy. But that is how things turned out. Thanks to Stalin’s intervention, by May, Truman was able to slither out of the cul-de-sac in which he seemed trapped in late March. The contentious White House meeting where Clark Clifford crossed swords with George Marshall was not, as so many pro- and anti-Zionist writers have thought, the moment when Truman put the wishes of the American Jewish community ahead of conventional foreign policy goals. It was the moment when he seized an opportunity to achieve his political and policy objectives at a far lower cost than he had any reason to expect.
The Fight for Recognition
In Washington, neither the State Department, the Pentagon, nor the CIA understood Soviet arms shipments were changing the balance of power in Palestine before May 14. Classified CIA briefings continued to predict defeat for the Jews. Seeing no alternative, President Truman spent the two months from mid-March to mid-May following the Palestine policy that the State Department so artfully had foisted on him. The official United States position remained what Warren Austin had announced to the U.N. The partition plan approved by the United Nations the previous November was not working, and that while partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states remained an American goal, it was necessary at least in the short term to seek a delay between the British withdrawal and the final resolution of the issue. This delay would take the form of a United Nations trusteeship; if possible, Britain would be persuaded to carry on a while longer; otherwise some other non-Soviet trustee would need to be found, and some sort of peacekeeping police force would have to be assembled. While the trustee maintained the peace, the United Nations would pursue new negotiations between Arabs and Jews to find a partition program or possibly some other solution that both sides could accept.[24]
This was a policy that had very few friends outside the departments of State and Defense. Liberals attacked the retreat from the partition resolution and what they saw as the cavalier treatment afforded to the U.N. American Zionists grimly followed the military news from Palestine and saw the glittering prize of independence slipping away from their grasp, perhaps never to return. Other observers feared that Truman’s waffling and inconsistent approach to the issue would end with the United States trapped into maintaining some kind of military presence in Palestine, perhaps to be shot at by both sides.
The American diplomats found little support at the United Nations, where they had called the General Assembly into special session to review the situation in Palestine. The Soviets mocked the Americans for going back on their earlier support for partition, posed as the true friends of the U.N., and stood ready to veto any resolution that would allow the Americans to escape from their embarrassment. The British, enjoying the American discomfiture almost as much as the Soviets, wanted nothing to do with a trusteeship, and in any case now hoped and expected that their client Abdullah of Jordan would annex the portions of Palestine assigned to the Arabs by the partition plan. They also hoped he would conquer the Negev, strengthening his position and theirs.
No country really wanted to be part of a multinational police force in Palestine. Vociferous opposition from both Arabs and Jews meant that the friends of neither side were eager to support the American plan. Many countries, including those who still resented American pressure to vote in favor of the original resolution, felt that a retreat from the partition resolution would be a humiliation for the United Nations. Truman’s political support was splintering at home, and the United States was losing prestige at the United Nations with every day the crisis dragged on.
As the end of the mandate approached, American diplomacy grew increasingly desperate. True, the Jews had won some victories since early April, and the military picture was no longer as bleak. But those victories had mostly been won against lightly armed, poorly trained, and badly supplied militias of Palestinian Arabs. With the end of the mandate, the wider war would begin. Already fighters from Jordan’s Arab Legion were beginning to intervene in the fighting between Arabs and Jews. Military analysts in both Britain and the United States believed that as professional Arab troops joined the fighting, the overstretched Jewish forces would yield up their recent gains and retreat. A humanitarian crisis would loom, Truman would be blamed for it, and the United States would lack the military forces to stabilize the situation. In a last-minute gesture to get some kind of cease-fire, Truman offered the use of his personal plane for negotiators to travel to the region; nobody wanted to go.[25]
As the clock ran down on the British mandate, Truman’s faith in his diplomats was justifiably low. He had taken the advice of the professionals and the experts at the State Department. They told him that they had a practical alternative to the looming disaster of partition. They were wrong; trusteeship was neither practical nor politic. The warring peoples didn’t want it; no country would claim it; neither the Security Council nor the General Assembly would endorse it. Truman had let the experts take the wheel, and they had driven the car into a ditch.
What, under these unpromising circumstances, should the United States do? That was the question that the May 12 meeting in the White House with which our account of Truman’s Palestine policy began was intended to address. The conventional idea, whether in the pro-Zionist version that a gutsy American president defied the bureaucrats to extend a hand of friendship to our plucky democratic friends in Palestine, or in the anti-Zionist version that a weak president well out of his depth chose political expediency over foreign policy, would shape the way many diplomats and scholars would understand the politics of American Middle East policy for years to come. Yet neither version does justice to Truman or to Marshall, to the situation as they understood it, or to the choices they made.
Marshall is often cast as a determined opponent of the Jewish drive for statehood, but his attitude was ultimately determined by his military judgment. It was not only the CIA that prophesied inevitable defeat for the Jewish forces. Marshall’s wartime colleagues in the British military were adamant in their belief that the Jewish cause was hopeless. Four days before the famous meeting with Truman, Marshall met with Moshe Shertok, the foreign representative of the Yishuv. Marshall recalled saying:
It was extremely dangerous to base long-range policy on temporary military success. There was no doubt but that the Jewish army had gained such temporary success but there was no assurance whatever that in the long-range the tide might not turn against them. I told Mr. Shertok that they were taking a gamble. If the tide did turn adversely and they came running to us for help they should be placed clearly on notice now that there was no warrant to expect help from the United States, which had warned them of the grave risk which they were running.[26]
Marshall, like other observers, had noticed the change in Jewish battlefield performance since early April. But, especially without knowing the causes, how confident could anyone be that this would last? As it happened, on May 13 Kfar Etzion, the most important Jewish outpost on the road south from Jerusalem, fell to an assault involving Jordanian troops after withstanding a siege for four months.[27] Marshall ended the conference by warning Shertok about the likely consequences of the full-scale Arab invasion that would follow a declaration of independence: “What will happen if there’s a prolonged invasion? It will weaken you. I have had experience in China. At first there was an easy victory. Now they’ve been fighting two years and they’ve lost Manchuria. However, if it turns out that you’re right and you will establish the Jewish State, I’ll be happy. But you are undertaking a grave responsibility.” Shertok was shaken enough by this unsparing analysis by one of the most famous military leaders of the day that he considered advising Ben-Gurion to delay proclaiming the state.[28]
CIA documents make it clear that Marshall and his aides remained uninformed about Stalin’s arms shipments, news that presumably Israelis were not eager to share with Americans as Cold War tensions ratcheted up in Europe. By the end of the summer, Israeli forces would have better arms, more ammunition, and a stronger air force than their opponents. The early victories against the Palestinian Arabs were no flash in the pan, as Marshall feared. They were the harbinger of a series of military victories that would leave Israel in control of more territory than the UNSCOP report had assigned to it. With the rapid influx of refugees from Europe (British forces stopped interfering with immigration when the mandate expired), Israel’s reservoir of military manpower also grew.
The other factor that the diplomats overlooked was the lack of unity and commitment among the Arab states to a common battle against Israel. Here a kind of orientalism seems to have clouded the otherwise acute analytical powers of State’s regional observers. They were so impressed by the unanimity and strength of Arab opposition to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine that they overlooked the deep differences in the interests of the Arab states that made their cooperation ineffective. Some Egyptians for example saw Transjordan as a British puppet rather than as an ally against the Jewish interlopers.[29] In Cairo, it seemed absolutely clear that Abdullah was using the war (and the famous Arab Legion, trained and led by British officers and equipped with advanced British military equipment) to seize Palestinian land for himself, and also to advance across the Negev. This meant that the British would have the ability to station forces on the border of the Sinai Desert, posing a long-term threat to the security of a Suez Canal that Egyptian nationalists were already thinking about seizing for themselves. Although no Egyptian would ever say so, an Israeli buffer in the Negev against Britain might suit Egypt’s interests better than a Jordanian win.[30]
Other rivalries undercut the power of the Arab “united front” against Israel. Syria feared (correctly) that its Arab allies dreamed of conquering Damascus as well as Jerusalem. Faisal II’s grandfather had, before being expelled by the French, once claimed the throne of Syria. Now the French were gone and the new Syrian government, torn between squabbling ethnic and religious groups, was weak.[31] Why not return? During World War II some British officials hinted at supporting Faisal in a bid to take over Vichy-occupied Syria. Might not that dream be revived in the chaos of a war against the Jews? Faisal’s brother Abdullah, the emir of Transjordan, was an even nearer and greater worry. And finally, with the partial exception of Jordan, none of the Arab states had the financial strength—or the political and institutional structures—to fight a long war.
All this meant that the Arab opposition to the new state of Israel was much less formidable than Marshall and his aides believed. All along, the State Department “realists” had misread the realities of the Middle East. Partition did mean war (State was right about this and many American Zionists and naive liberals were wrong), but war did not lead to Jewish defeat.
Given that Marshall believed that the push for statehood would lead to a military defeat, it seemed incomprehensible to him that the United States should alienate Arab opinion, further stress its relationship with Great Britain, and distract itself and the world from the looming confrontation with the Soviets in Berlin. His contempt for White House aide Clark Clifford (apparently, he never spoke to him again)[32] and his fury at Truman was less the rage of the frustrated Arabist than the reaction of a man who believed that Truman, at Clifford’s prompting, was willing to encourage the Jews into a war that they could not win for the sake of a few headlines and a temporary lift in the polls.
Clifford’s argument was, in fact, political, but he was not talking simply about the Jews. As the meeting notes stated, he spoke “to urge the President to give prompt recognition to the Jewish State after the termination of the mandate on May 15. He said such a move should be taken quickly before the Soviet Union recognized the Jewish State. It would have distinct value in restoring the President’s position for support of the partition of Palestine.” By urging recognition as “restoring the President’s position for support of the partition of Palestine,” Clifford meant something much more consequential than restoring the president’s position among Jews. He meant that this was an opportunity for Truman to regain some of the ground he had lost as a supporter of the U.N. process. What Marshall resented as a narrow political strategy based on cynical ethnic pandering was in fact a political strategy, one aimed at sustaining exactly the foreign policy that, overall, George Marshall and his State Department colleagues believed was essential for the United States.[33]
What Truman and for that matter Clark Clifford understood on May 12 that George Marshall did not was that foreign policy is always a matter of politics. Truman needed authority and power to chart America’s course in the Cold War. He could not retain that authority without the support of his own party. The decisive wing of that party, the liberal internationalists and progressives who revered Eleanor Roosevelt and shared her worldview, still believed that helping the United Nations grow into the most important institution in international relations was the key to world peace. George Marshall, Robert Lovett, George Kennan, and for that matter Harry Truman and Clark Clifford, might view this shining faith as akin to a small child’s belief in Santa Claus, and they might be correct in doing so, but that was not the point. Without Mrs. Roosevelt and her supporters, there was no future for the Truman administration, no future for George Marshall as secretary of state, and no guarantee that the far-reaching plans for containing the Soviet Union being crafted in George Kennan’s Policy Planning office in the State Department would ever be put into play.
Foreign policy is and must be grounded in domestic politics. There may be moments when a national leader must sacrifice his or her own personal political interest to achieve some great national goal, but as a general rule, for a foreign policy to succeed overseas, it must also succeed politically at home. Marshall’s job as he understood it was to present the professional views of his department to the president of the United States. Truman’s job as he understood it was to reconcile the demands of domestic politics to the requirements of effective foreign policy when that was possible, and to adjudicate between them when it was not.
Clifford’s point to Truman was that whatever the United States did, the Palestinian Jews were going to declare their independence in just a few days. The Soviet Union, which had been providing them with continuing support at the United Nations, including opposing the State Department’s effort to delay their independence by establishing a new U.N. trusteeship to replace the expiring British mandate, would surely recognize the new state very quickly. That would allow the Soviet Union to claim the credit for supporting U.N. Resolution 181 while the Soviets and all their allies would paint Truman as the man who betrayed it.
If, however, Truman moved faster than the Soviet Union, and recognized the Jewish state before Moscow did, he would be the leader who stood up for 181, the upholder of the United Nations and the international process. American recognition made no difference to what happened or didn’t happen in Tel Aviv on May 15; the Jews were going to declare a state. But American recognition made all the difference in how Truman’s leadership would be perceived by the American people and by his own party.[34]
Clifford was also right when he said that the State Department did not have a real alternative to propose. The British were leaving and no one else was going to take their place. Jewish independence might be a mistake and might ultimately lead to a humanitarian catastrophe that would create a terrible policy dilemma for the United States, but statehood was going to happen now regardless of what Truman did or didn’t do.
Thanks to the State Department, Truman had been left with the political costs of opposing the implementation of 181 without any offsetting benefits. This damage was not just to Truman’s domestic political standing. The hasty and undignified American reversal on Palestine had offended many American allies, either because they themselves continued to view the success of the U.N. as an important national interest or because they had only voted for Resolution 181 at American prompting, and were now left looking foolish by the American change of course. The failure of the State Department’s diplomacy at the U.N. since March had damaged the prestige of both the United States of America and Truman. Now the State Department had nothing to recommend beyond urging him to look weak and indecisive as events took their course.
There may have been one other factor at work. Truman, it will be remembered, had refused to meet with any Zionist leaders or delegations in March when the policy crisis was at its height. Desperate to arrange a meeting between Chaim Weizmann, the Israeli Zionist leader then visiting the United States, and Truman, American Jewish leaders reached out to Eddie Jacobson to see if he could prevail on his old friend to get Weizmann in to see Truman. Reluctantly, Truman agreed, and Weizmann (ushered into a side entrance to avoid publicity) stopped by the White House the day before Warren Austin announced that the United States no longer supported Resolution 181 at the United Nations.[35] No official record of their meeting exists, and neither Weizmann nor Truman ever gave a full account of what was said.[36] Since after their previous meeting in November of 1947, Truman had instructed the State Department to support the addition of the Negev Desert to the territory to be awarded the Jews at partition,[37] many writers, both pro- and anti-Zionist, have seen the March meeting between the two leaders as equally consequential.
That seems unlikely. As we’ve noted, Truman’s policy did not change after meeting with Weizmann. Following Austin’s U.N. speech, the United States continued to oppose partition and support alternatives right up until May 14. Much to their chagrin and embarrassment, the American diplomats at the United Nations would be working the floor in support of a last-ditch mediation proposal right up until the moment when the news that Truman had recognized the state of Israel reached the General Assembly. But there is a case to be made that the meeting with Weizmann affected Truman’s, and perhaps also Clark Clifford’s, approach to the meeting on May 12.
Weizmann, who had helped usher the Balfour Declaration through the British government in World War I and would serve as the first president of Israel until his death in 1952, had long been associated with the more moderate and conciliatory side of the Zionist movement, believing that good relations with the British and American governments offered the best path to achieving Zionist goals. During World War II his star faded among militant Zionists; a new generation of more radical leaders was ready to pursue more confrontational stances than Weizmann thought were wise. In the first World Zionist Congress held after the Holocaust, Weizmann memorably cautioned his fellow delegates against too rash an approach: “Masada, for all its heroism, was a disaster in our history. It is not our purpose or our right to plunge to destruction in order to bequeath a legend of martyrdom to posterity. Zionism was to mark the end of our glorious deaths and the beginning of a new path leading to life.” George Marshall could not have put the risks of independence more cogently, but in the spring of 1948, Weizmann took a different tack.
In that critical time, Weizmann was one of the strongest voices urging Jews to declare their state. While Ben-Gurion had frozen Weizmann out of policymaking in Jewish affairs, he was very much aware of Weizmann’s value as a spokesman for the Zionist cause to Anglo-Americans. In March, with Truman and the State Department both adamantly refusing to meet with representatives of the Zionist movement, Weizmann was the only leading Zionist that Truman, reluctantly, agreed to see. There is no doubt that the Zionist leadership wanted Weizmann well prepared for this meeting. It is not clear how much Weizmann knew about the Soviet arms shipments or about the military calculations of the Jewish defense forces, but it seems likely that Ben-Gurion and his associates would have done everything in their power to ensure that Weizmann’s message to Truman would strike the right notes. In particular, one expects that Weizmann’s message would have stressed that the Jews understood the odds against them, knew that they could not call on the United States for military help, and would not declare independence without believing that they could defend themselves. Truman’s confidence in Weizmann’s long track record of moderation and sober judgment would have encouraged Truman to believe that the Jewish cause was in better shape than the State Department and Pentagon experts believed. Thanks to Weizmann and, yes, to Eddie Jacobson, Truman seems to have had more confidence than Marshall in the military outlook for the Palestinian Jews during those critical days in May.
At midnight by Tel Aviv time, Israel proclaimed its independence. Eleven minutes later, at 6:11 p.m. Eastern time, Truman extended de facto recognition to the first Jewish state in Palestine since the time of the Maccabees.[38] In a concession to the State Department, protocol was observed. Truman waited to receive a formal request for recognition from the Washington representative of the new government in Tel Aviv, and recognition was de facto, rather than de jure.[39]
It was not Truman’s fault that the American delegation at the U.N. was caught unaware by the policy shift. Dean Rusk in the State Department had called Warren Austin a few minutes before the announcement. Austin was so angry at the sudden reversal of policy that he went home without informing his colleagues. The rest of the American delegation only learned about Truman’s new policy when the news swept through other delegations.[40]
In a letter written in 1974, Dean Rusk recalled that the General Assembly was in complete pandemonium upon hearing the news. “When I use the word pandemonium,” he wrote, “I think I am not exaggerating. I was later told that one of our U.S. Mission staff men literally sat on the lap of the Cuban Delegate to keep him from going to the podium to withdraw Cuba from the United Nations. In any event, about 6:15 I got a call from Secretary Marshall who said, ‘Rusk, get up to New York and prevent the U.S. Delegation from resigning en masse.’ ” He recounted: “There was a story later that some of Secretary Marshall’s friends had told him that he ought to resign because of this incident. He was reported to have replied, ‘No, gentlemen, 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.’ ”[41]
Eleanor Roosevelt, who at Truman’s patient urging had withdrawn her March resignation, was still an official member of the American delegation to the U.N. As unaware of the shift as any of her colleagues, she was also enraged by the way the announcement was made. Switching policy this quickly, with no notice to the General Assembly or to the American representatives, struck her as lacking in respect to the institution and to the delegation, herself very much included. Nevertheless, she could not but observe that, awkward as he was, Truman had let the U.N. process take its course and demonstrated his respect for its outcome. She never warmed to him, but she did not join her sons in the “Draft Eisenhower” movement, and though her endorsement of Truman for reelection in 1948 was late, cold, and hedged, it did come.[42]
After so many months of treading carefully, Truman enjoyed the discomfiture of his diplomats. “I was told that to some of the career men of the State Department this announcement came as a surprise. It should not have been if these men had faithfully supported my policy….I wanted to make it plain that the President of the United States, and not the second or third echelon in the State Department, is responsible for making foreign policy.”[43]
Truman, despite the obstacles and political headwinds, stuck to his principles and, as he saw it, brought thirty years of bipartisan American foreign policy to a successful conclusion. The Jewish national home was a fact, providing a refuge for persecuted Jews and allowing the United States to see refugees helped without opening its doors to a flood of immigrants. The United States had played its part in the drama through diplomatic means and international institutions only and without sending in troops. Zionist lobbying had not persuaded Truman to advance beyond the Blackstone approach; anti-Zionist lobbying in the State and Defense departments had not persuaded him to abandon it.
The question of Palestine was never the most important issue that Truman faced, and the Zionist lobby was never the most important political force that he took into account. For Truman, Palestine policy was more a means to an end than an end in itself. Keeping the Democratic Party united as he led the country into a Cold War with the Soviet Union was the big goal Truman never lost sight of. Aligning his Palestine policy as far as possible with the liberals who wanted the issue resolved by the United Nations was one of the ways in which he achieved it.