Seeds of Doubt: Was Harry Truman a Zionist? By John B. Judis. The New Republic, January 15, 2014.
Judis:
Harry
Truman’s concerns about Israel and Palestine were prescient—and forgotten.
As
president, Truman initially opposed the creation of a Jewish state. Instead, he
tried to promote an Arab-Jewish federation or binational state. He finally gave
up in 1947 and endorsed the partition of Palestine into separate states, but he
continued to express regret in private that he had not achieved his original
objective, which he blamed most often on the “unwarranted interference” of
American Zionists. After he had recognized the new state, he pressed the
Israeli government to negotiate with the Arabs over borders and refugees; and
expressed his disgust with “the manner in which the Jews are handling the
refugee problem.”
Of
course, there were good reasons why Truman failed to achieve a federated or
binational Palestine, and I don’t intend by recounting Truman’s qualms to
suggest that he was wrong to recognize Israel. But Truman’s misgivings about a
Jewish state and later about the Israeli stance on borders and refugees were
not baseless. Truman was guided by moral
precepts and political principles and concerns about America’s role in the
Middle East that remain highly relevant today. Understanding his qualms is not
just a matter of setting the historical record straight. It’s also about
understanding why resolving the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians
needs to be high on America’s diplomatic agenda.
Some of
the same people who portray Truman as a dependable supporter of a Jewish state
also describe him as having been a proto-Zionist or a Christian Zionist along
the lines of Britain’s Arthur Balfour or David Lloyd George, who in 1917 got
the British government to champion a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Truman
biography Michael T. Benson says that Truman’s support for Israel was an
“outgrowth of the president’s religious upbringing and his familiarity with the
Bible.” But Truman’s love for the Bible was partly based on his flawed
eyesight. The family Bible, with its extra large print, was one of the few
books at home the young Truman could read. By his teens, Truman’s favorite
author was the irreverent Mark Twain, and like Twain, he would come to have no
patience with religious piety.
Truman
was not a philo-Semite like Balfour or Lloyd George. He was skeptical of the
idea that Jews were a chosen people. (“I never thought God picked any
favorites,” he wrote in his diary in 1945.) He had the ethnic prejudices of a
small town Protestant Midwesterner from Independence, Missouri. He referred to
New York City as “kike town” and complained about Jews being “very very`
selfish.” But Truman’s prejudice was not exclusive to Jews (he contrasted
“wops” as well as “Jews” with “white people”) and did not infect his political
views or his friendships with people like Eddie Jacobson, his original business
partner in Kansas City. He was, his biographer Alonzo Hamby has written, “the
American democrat, insistent on social equality, but suspicious of those who
were unlike him.”
There
were two aspects of Truman’s upbringing and early political outlook that shaped
his view of a Jewish state. Truman grew up in a border state community that had
been torn apart by the Civil War. That, undoubtedly, contributed to his
skepticism about any arrangement that he thought could lead to civil war. And
Truman, like his father, was an old-fashioned Democrat. His political heroes
were Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, and he shared Jefferson’s insistence
on the separation of church and state. He blamed Europe’s centuries of war on
religious disputes, which, he said, “have caused more wars and feuds than
money.” That, too, contributed to his skepticism about a Jewish state.
. . . .
Was
Truman right that Morrison-Grady was the “best possible solution” all along?
Certainly, as an American, one has to believe that the best possible solution
is one where peoples of different religions and nationalities get along in one
country. And it remains, perhaps, an ideal solution, but it was not going to
happen in those years after World War II. Even if one sets aside the fierce
political opposition in the United States to the proposal, there were ample
reasons why the plan for a federated or bi-national Palestine was not feasible.
The
Arabs and Jews in Palestine both rejected the plan. The Arabs, who, in Rashid
Khalidi’s words, had been “envenomed” by their failed rebellion against Zionism
and the British, saw the arrival of more Jewish immigrants as a harbinger to a
Jewish-controlled Palestine, while the Jews saw any restriction on their
sovereignty (or the size of their state within Palestine) as a threat to their
survival in the wake of the Holocaust. Still, in the year before Britain gave
up trying to mediate between the contending forces, there were hints of
compromise from the Arabs and the Jews. What was finally lacking, however, was
an outside power capable of imposing and then enforcing a compromise.
Britain
was crippled by its war debts after World War II. It could no longer support an
overseas military, and in February 1947 announced the withdrawal of its troops
from Greece and Turkey. It threw the future of Palestine into the lap of the
U.N. in the hope of being able to remove its troops from there, where it was in
the midst of war with Zionist forces. The British believed they could only
oversee Palestine if the United States contributed money and troops. They could
have believed, with some justification, that they could intimidate the Arabs
and that the Americans could intimidate the Jews into co-existing with each
other. Truman, however, was willing to contribute money but not troops. The
United States had undergone rapid demobilization after World War II, but the
Cold War had begun. By 1947, Truman and the State Department were preoccupied
with having enough troops to defend Europe against Soviet communism. As the
final debate over partition was occurring in the United Nations, the U.S. was
in the midst of the Berlin crisis with the Soviet Union. There was no support
in the American government, or in the public, for sending troops to Palestine.
Truman
rejected sending troops to enforce Morrison-Grady and later to enforce the
original U.N. partition plan. Without American troops, the British and then the
U.N. were powerless to prevent a civil war and to alter the final results,
which left the Jews with almost 80 percent of Palestine, and the Palestinian
Arabs stateless and dispersed as refugees throughout the region. Even with an American-led
intervention force, the U.N. might still have been unable to prevent a civil
war from breaking out or the subsequent war between Israel and the Arab states,
but without such a force, there was simply no chance of realizing the
Morrison-Grady plan or the original U.N. plan of November 1947. Truman’s
nostalgia for the Morrison-Grady plan was based on a fantasy.
 |
| Proposed partition of Israel/Palestine in 1947 |
But the
considerations that led Truman to favor a bi-national or federated Palestine
were not fantastic, and remain relevant today. There was always a strong moral
streak in Truman’s foreign policy. He thought of the world divided between
underdogs and bullies and good and evil. He genuinely hated Nazis and
sympathized with Jews as their victims. His support for the right of the
refugees to emigrate to Palestine reflected his moral conviction rather than
any concern about electoral support. And in Palestine, he wanted a solution
that was fair to the Arabs as well as to the Jews.
Truman
didn’t know all the details of the history of Palestine, but he knew that the
Jews had come to Palestine a half century before to establish a Jewish state
where another people had lived, and had made up the overwhelming majority for
the prior 1,400 years. He was offended by the proposal, pressed by Silver and
American Zionists, that a minority should be allowed to rule a majority. He
wanted an arrangement that would respect the just claims of both Jews and the
Arabs.
After
he dropped his public opposition to a Jewish state, and supported some form of
partition, Truman continued to be guided by moral considerations. In October
1947, he had endorsed a partition that would more accurately reflect the size
of the existing populations. After Israel was established, and had defeated the
Arabs, he supported a peace agreement that would allow some of the 700,000 Arab
refugees from the war to return to their homes. (The Israeli ambassador to the
United States complained that Truman was “sentimentally sympathetic” to the
refugees.) In each case, however, Truman backed down under pressure from the
Zionist lobby. In August 1949, Truman and the State Department finally gave up
trying to influence the Israelis.
Today,
of course, the Arab-Israeli conflict remains a moral issue. The Jews got their
state in 1948, but the Palestinians did not. After the 1948 war, Jordan annexed
the West Bank and Egypt Gaza, and the term “Palestine” was banned from
Jordanian textbooks. After the Six Day War, Israel annexed East Jerusalem and
took over the West Bank and Gaza. It evacuated its settlers from Gaza after
2006, but continues to control its outer access and air space. The Israeli
government has allowed over 500,000 Jews to settle in Palestinian areas of
Jerusalem and in the West Bank. The “underdogs,” as Truman once put it in a
letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, are now acting like the “top dogs.”
Truman
and the State Department were also worried that the attempt to create a Jewish
state in an Arab-dominated region would lead to war and continued strife. Many
of their concerns have become outdated. They were worried originally that the
Arabs would slaughter the Jews and that the United States would have to prevent
a second Holocaust. They worried for decades that American support for Israel
would drive the Arabs into the arms of the Soviet Union. But their underlying
concern—that a Jewish state, established against the opposition of its
neighbors, would prove destabilizing and a threat to America’s standing in the
region—has been proven correct.
That’s
been even more the case in the wake of Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem, a
Muslim holy site, and its occupation of the West Bank. Opposition to the
Israeli occupation was central to the growth of Islamic nationalism in the
Middle East in the 1970s and to the rise of international terrorist groups.
Osama bin Laden’s 1996 Fatwa was directed at the “Zionist-Crusader alliance.”
America’s continued support for Israel—measured in military aid and in its tilt
to Israel in negotiations with the Palestinians—has fueled anti-Americanism. In
his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2010, General
David Petraeus, then in charge of operations in Afghanistan said publicly what
many American officials privately believe:
The
enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct
challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR [Area of
Operations]. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and
large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment,
due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the
Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with
governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate
regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups
exploit that anger to mobilize support.
Resolving
the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians would not necessarily
calm the turbulent Middle East, but at a time when Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and
even Lebanon are in chaos and could become havens for international terrorism,
it would remove an important source of unrest and allow the United States to
act as an honest broker rather than a partisan in the region.
Truman’s
solution to the conflict was, of course, a federated or binational Palestine.
If that was out of the question in 1946, it is even more so almost 70 years
later. If there is a “one-state solution” in Israel/Palestine, it is likely to
be an authoritarian Jewish state compromising all of British Palestine. What
remains possible, although enormously difficult to achieve, is the creation of
a Palestinian state alongside Israel. That is what the last three American
Presidents, sometimes facing opposition from Israel’s lobby in Washington as
well as from the Israeli government and the Palestinian Hamas organization,
have tried unsuccessfully to promote, and what Secretary of State John Kerry is
currently trying to negotiate.
If
Truman were still around, he would wish Kerry well. The same moral and
strategic imperatives that led Truman to favor the Morrison-Grady plan for
Palestine now argue in favor of creating a geographically and economically
viable Palestinian state. And if it is going to happen, America, the leading
outside power in the region, has to play a major role. It has to be “Cyrus”—not
just for the Israelis, but for the Palestinians.
