The defeat of the Arab proposal is important to an understanding of subsequent events.
In the aftermath of World War I, Great Britain was granted a mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations. By
1947, however, the violence directed at British officers by Jews and Arabs, and the financial drain on the declining imperial power after World War II, moved Great Britain to turn to the United Nations for help. In April 1947 the Arab nations proposed at the United Nations that Palestine be declared an independent state, but that measure was defeated and instead, at Washington’s suggestion, a UN commission was set up to study the problem.
The defeat of the Arab proposal is important to an understanding of subsequent events. During World War I the British sought Arab support against the Ottoman Turks, who ruled much of the Arab world. In return for their support, the British promised the Arabs their long-sought independence. The British, however, also made promises about the same territory to the Zionists who sought to establish a Jewish state on the site of Biblical Israel. The Balfour Declaration, issued on November 2, 1917, stated that “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object. . . .” Significantly, however, the sentence ended with the words, “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” (The U.S. Congress endorsed the Balfour Declaration, using similar language, in 1922.)[44] Toward the end of World War I, however, the Bolsheviks exposed a secret Anglo- French agreement to divide the Ottoman Empire between Great Britain and France. Arab independence had never been seriously intended. Meanwhile, Great Britain was preparing to allow Jewish immigration into Palestine.[45]
Violence among Jews, Arabs, and British officials in Palestine before and after World War II led London to ask the United Nations in 1947 for a recommendation on how to deal with the problem.[46] The murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis and the deplorable state of the Holocaust survivors had stimulated the international effort to establish a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine, and American Zionists had declared in 1942 (in the Biltmore Program) “that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.”[47]
In November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to recommend partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. The two states were to be joined in an economic union, and Jerusalem would be administered by the United Nations. The Arabs would get 43 percent of the land, the Jews 57 percent. The proposed apportionment should be assessed in light of the following facts: The Jewish portion was better land; by the end of 1947 the percentage of Palestine purchased by Jews was less than 7 percent; Jewish land purchases accounted for only 10 percent of the proposed Jewish state; and Jews made up less than one-third of the population of Palestine.[48] Moreover, the Jewish state was to include 497,000 Arabs, who would constitute just under 50 percent of the new state’s population.
The United States not only accepted the UN plan, it aggressively promoted it among the other members of the United Nations. Truman had been personally moved by the tragedy of the Jews and by the condition of the refugees. That response and his earlier studies of the Bible made him open to the argument that emigration to Palestine was the proper remedy for the surviving Jews of Europe. Yet he acknowledged later, in his memoirs, that he was “fully aware of the Arabs’ hostility to Jewish settlement in Palestine.”[49] He, like his predecessor, had promised he would take no action without fully consulting the Arabs, and he reneged.
Truman’s decision to support establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was made against the advice of most of the State Department and other foreign policy experts, who were concerned about U.S. relations with the Arabs and possible Soviet penetration of the region. Secretary James Forrestal of the Defense Department and Loy Henderson, at that time the State Department’s chief of Near Eastern affairs, pressed those points most vigorously. Henderson warned that partition would not only create anti-Americanism but would also require U.S. troops to enforce it, and he stated his belief that partition violated both U.S. and UN principles of self-determination.[50]
But Truman was concerned about the domestic political implications as well as the foreign policy implications of the partition issue. As he himself put it during a meeting with U.S. ambassadors to the Middle East, according to William
A. Eddy, the ambassador to Saudi Arabia, “I’m sorry gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”[51] Later, in a 1953 article in the American Zionist, Emmanuel Neumann, president of the Zionist Organization of America, conceded that Truman would not have worked so hard for the creation of Israel but for “the prospect of wholesale defections from the Democratic Party.”[52] Truman’s decision to support the Zionist cause was also influenced by Samuel I. Rosenman, David K. Niles, and Clark Clifford, all members of his staff, and Eddie Jacobson,
his close friend and former business partner. Truman later wrote:
The White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders–actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats–disturbed and annoyed me.[53]
Pressure on Truman also came from non-Jewish fundamentalists and politicians.
In some cases, support for Jewish admission to and statehood in Palestine may have had another domestic political angle. That support sidestepped the sensitive issue of U.S. immigration quotas, which had kept European Jews out of the United States since the 1920s and had left them at the mercy of the Nazis. In other words, support for Zionism may have been a convenient way for people who did not want Jews to come to the United States to avoid appearing anti- Semitic. American classical liberals and others, including the American Council for Judaism, opposed the quotas, and it is probable that many of the refugees, given the option, would have preferred to come to the United States.[54]
By mid-November 1947 the Truman administration was firmly in the Zionist camp. When the State Department and the U.S. mission to the United Nations agreed that the partition resolution should be changed to shift the Negev from the Jewish to the Palestinian state, Truman sided with the Jewish Agency, the main Zionist organization, against them.[55] The United States also voted against a UN resolution calling on member states to accept Jewish refugees who could not be repatriated.[56]
As the partition plan headed toward a vote in the UN General Assembly, U.S. officials applied pressure to–and even threatened to withhold promised aid from–countries inclined to vote against the resolution. As former under-secretary of state Sumner Welles put it:
By direct order of the White House every form of pressure, direct and indirect, was brought to bear by American officials upon those co
untries outside of the Moslem world that were known to be either uncertain or opposed to partition. Representatives or intermediaries were employed by the White House to make sure that the necessary majority would at length be secured.[57]
Eddie Jacobson recorded in his diary that Truman told him that “he [Truman] and he alone, was responsible for swinging the vote of several delegations.”[58]
While the plan was being debated, the Arabs desperately tried to find an alternative solution. Syria proposed that the matter be turned over to the International Court of Justice in The Hague; the proposal was defeated. The Arab League asked that all countries accept Jewish refugees “in proportion to their area and economic resources and other relevant factors”; the league’s request was denied in a 16-16 tie, with 25 abstentions.[59]
On November 29 the General Assembly recommended the partition plan by a vote of 33 to 13. The Soviet Union voted in favor of the resolution, reversing its earlier position on Zionism; many interpreted the vote as a move to perpetuate unrest and give Moscow opportunities for influence in the neighboring region.
The period after the UN partition vote was critical. The Zionists accepted the partition reluctantly, hoping to someday expand the Jewish state to the whole of Palestine, but the Arabs did not.[60] Violence between Jews and Arabs escalated. The obvious difficulties in carrying out the partition created second thoughts among U.S. policymakers as early as December 1947. The State Department’s policy planning staff issued a paper in January 1948 suggesting that the United States propose that the entire matter be returned to the General Assembly for more study. Secretary Forrestal argued that the United States might have to enforce the partition with troops. (The United States had an arms embargo on the region at the time, although arms were being sent illegally by American Zionists, giving the Jews in Palestine military superiority, at least in some respects, over the Arabs.)[61]
On February 24, 1948, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Warren Austin, made a speech to the Security Council hinting at such second thoughts. His proposal to have the five permanent council members discuss what should be done was approved, but they could not agree on a new strategy. The United States, China, and France reported to the full council that partition would not occur peacefully. The apparent weakening of U.S. support for
partition prompted the Zionist organizations to place enormous pressure on Truman, who said he still favored partition. However, the next day at the United Nations, Austin called for a special session of the General Assembly to consider a temporary UN trusteeship for Palestine.
On April 16 the United States formally proposed the temporary trusteeship. The Arabs accepted it conditionally; the Jews rejected it. The General Assembly was unenthusiastic. Meanwhile, the Zionists proceeded with their plans to set up a state. Civil order in Palestine had almost totally broken down. For example, in mid-April, the Irgun and LEHI (the Stern Gang), two Zionist terrorist organizations, attacked the poorly armed Arab village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, and killed 250 men, women, and children. The Arabs retaliated by killing many Jews the next day.[62] Before the British left in May, the Jews had occupied much additional land, including cities that were to be in the Palestinian state.
Something else was working in favor of continued support for the emerging Jewish state: U.S. domestic politics. The year 1948 was an election year and, according to memoranda in the Harry S Truman Library and Museum, Jacobson, Clifford, and Niles expressed fear that the Republicans were making an issue of their support for the Jewish state and that the Democrats risked losing Jewish support. Clifford proposed early recognition of the Jewish state.[63]
His position had been strongly influenced by a special congres-sional election in a heavily Jewish district in the Bronx, New York, on February 17, 1948. The regular Democratic candidate, Karl Propper, was upset by the American Labor party candidate, Leo Isacson, who had taken a militantly pro-Zionist position in the campaign. Even though Propper was also pro-Zionist, former vice president Henry Wallace had campaigned for Isacson by criticizing Truman for not supporting partition, asserting that Truman “still talks Jewish but acts Arab.”[64] The loss meant that New York’s 47 electoral votes would be at risk in the November presidential election, and the Democrats of the state appealed to Truman to propose a UN police force to implement the partition, as Isacson and Wallace had advocated.
The administration’s trusteeship idea soon became academic. On May 14 the last British officials left Palestine, and that evening the Jewish state was proclaimed. Eleven minutes later, to the surprise of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, the United States announced its de facto recognition.[65]
The significance to the Arabs of the U.S. role in constructing what they regard as another Western colonial obstacle to self-determination cannot be overstated. Dean Rusk, who at the time was a State Department official and would later become secretary of state, admitted that Washington’s role permitted the partition to be “construed as an American plan,” depriving it of moral force.[66] As Evan M. Wilson, then assistant chief of the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, later summarized matters, Truman, motivated largely by domestic political concerns, solved one refugee problem by creating another. Wilson wrote:
It is no exaggeration to say that our relations with the entire Arab world have never recovered from the events of 1947- 48 when we sided with the Jews against the Arabs and advocated a solution in Palestine which went contrary to self- determination as far as the majority population of the country was concerned.[67]
The defeat of the Arab proposal is important to an understanding of subsequent events
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