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