Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (51 page)

At some point in the conversation Truman agreed to receive Weizmann. With the decision taken, the President said: “Eddie, you son of a bitch, I ought to have thrown you out of here for breaking your promise; you knew damn good and well I couldn’t stand seeing you cry.”

Weizmann was smuggled into the White House through the East Gate on 18 March. Eddie Jacobson did not accompany him. In his subsequent memorandum recalling the events, Jacobson quoted the Zionists as saying that he had to be “saved” in case he was needed for another “emergency”. And he quoted Weizmann himself as telling him, “You have a job to do.” It was “to keep the White House doors open.”
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The secret meeting between Truman and Weizmann lasted for 45 minutes. Truman was deeply moved by the experience and the two men developed an instant and warm friendship that would survive a quick and very hard knock and, in the critical weeks to come, would serve Zionism well.

Truman could have told Weizmann the truth. It was, broadly speaking, in two related parts. The first was that because of the strategic importance of the Middle East to the U.S. (and the West as a whole), it was not in America’s interest that the partition plan be implemented against the will of the Arabs. The second was that it could only be implemented by force and that would require a commitment of troops the U.S. was unable to make, not least because of the possibility of a developing confrontation with the Soviet Union in Europe.

In place of the truth Truman told Weizmann that the U.S. was staunchly supporting partition and would stick to that position.

The Zionists could have been forgiven for thinking they had outflanked Marshall and that he was about to be ordered by the President to abandon the idea of shelving the partition plan and reversing U.S. policy. But... The next day, 19 March, Ambassador Austin delivered his statement calling for the shelving of the partition resolution and the convening of another Special Session of the General Assembly to work out a new solution to the Palestine problem. The one the U.S. would propose, Austin indicated, was temporary UN trusteeship.

The Zionists denounced Austin’s statement as a “shocking reversal of the United States position.”

Initially Weizmann must have felt that he had been betrayed by Truman; but almost immediately the story was put about that partition was not a lost cause
because the policy reversal was an unauthorised initiative by pro-Arab officials in a “malevolent” State Department who had been disloyal to the President.

The inspiration for this completely untrue story, and the Zionist strategy it gave rise to, was a note Truman himself wrote in his calendar diary for 19 March. Though the existence of the note was unknown to all but a few White House insiders until the publication in 1973 of Margaret Truman’s book about her father, the note was an important indication of the President’s state of mind at the time.

In her book, citing the calendar diary note as evidence, Margaret Truman claimed that Austin’s statement had constituted a gross betrayal of her father. The State Department had reversed his Palestine policy behind his back. Margaret had no knowledge of the fact that her father had approved the policy reversal because the documents relating to the decision-making of the period were still, then, classified. Only when they were subsequently de-classified could the ghost of the Zionist lie about the State Department’s disloyalty to the President be laid to rest. And then only by those who were aware of the contents of the declassified documents.

Appreciation of the game some people were playing in March 1948 requires knowledge of the fact that on the day Austin announced the reversal of American policy, the State Department’s two top people, Marshall and Lovett, were not in Washington.

Truman’s calendar note said:

The State Department pulled the rug from under me today. I did not expect that would happen. In Key West or en route there from St. Croix, I approved the speech and statement of policy by Senator Austin to the UN. This morning I find that the State Department has reversed my Palestine policy. The first I know about it is what I see in the paper. Isn’t that hell? I am now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I never felt so in all my life. There are people on the third and fourth levels of the State Department who always wanted to cut my throat.
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What on earth was happening? Who was playing what game?

The men most responsible for spreading the completely untrue story that State Department officers had “disobeyed White House instructions”
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were Niles behind the scenes and, in public, Clark Clifford, the Special Counsel to the President (who was to play a bigger and bigger hand in the End Game). Their case, essentially, was that with Marshall and Lovett out of town, and by insinuation not in control of events in their Department, disloyal junior officials had taken a policy initiative of their own. Those who spread the story knew it was not true but it served a purpose. It was to create confusion and division, and also to rattle Marshall’s cage, to give the Zionists scope and time to put more pressure on Truman to reverse the policy reversal.

Marshall understood the game the Zionists and their supporters were playing and moved quickly to deny them room for manoeuvre.

The day after Austin dropped what Clifford called the “bombshell”, the Secretary of State, Mr. Integrity to all but the Zionists and their supporters, went on the record to a Los Angeles press conference with this statement: “The course of action with respect to the Palestine question which was proposed on 19 March by Ambassador Austin appeared to me, after the most careful consideration, to be the wisest course to follow. I recommended it to the President, and he approved my recommendation.”
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What does the incident tell us about Truman?

Lilienthal wrote that the President “apparently had overlooked, or forgotten, the vital details” (starting with his approval of Marshall’s detailed cable of 21 February).
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I think the trouble Truman found himself in, and which the Zionists thought they could exploit to keep the partition plan alive, was of his own making. His gut instincts had told him that he should put himself beyond Zionist influence and pressures until the reversal of the Palestine policy was announced. That was why he had closed the White House doors to the Zionists and was refusing to take their telephone calls. The national and wider Western interest had to be put first. Then, emotionally disturbed by his conversation with Eddie Jacobson, he agreed to meet with Weizmann. Then, face-to-face with the physically frail Zionist leader, the President simply could not bring himself, emotionally, to tell the truth. Truman’s first response thereafter was to blame somebody else—the people “on the third and fourth levels of the State Department who always wanted to cut my throat.” (A decade later Truman told readers of his
Memoirs
that “the suggestion that the mandate be continued as a trusteeship was not a bad idea.”)
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To the extent that Truman had cause for irritation, it was because he had not been told precisely when Austin would make the policy reversal statement. Having got the President’s various approvals, Marshall did not believe that to be necessary: and Marshall himself was not aware of the precise timing of the statement. He had left that to Austin’s in-situ judgement of when it was most appropriate and convenient for the General Assembly. There may also have been another consideration in Marshall’s mind. The White House was not secure. When you played chess with the Zionists, you did not signal your next move in advance, if you could avoid doing so.

On 22 March, after talking with Truman, Marshall sent a memorandum to Charles E. Bholen, the State Department’s Counsellor. It said the President had been “exercised” (irritated) because, if he had known when the Austin statement was to be made, “he could have taken measures to have avoided the political blast of the [pro-Zionist] press.”
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(Did that mean Truman would have told Weizmann the truth or would not have received him?) Marshall’s memorandum to Bholen was obviously for the honest record that would one day be made public.

A few days after Austin’s statement, Truman’s support for the reversed U.S. policy on Palestine seemed to be rock solid. And he went public with it. At a press conference on 25 March the President said: “Our policy is to back up the UN in trusteeship by every means possible.”
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That did not necessarily mean American troops would be used, the President said; and the trusteeship proposed was “not a substitute for the partition plan, but an effort to fill a vacuum soon to be created by the termination of the Mandate on 15 May”; and it did “not prejudge the character of the final political settlement.”
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There was also a strong indication that Truman had taken Marshall’s advice to rebut charges that the State Department had been disloyal to the President and had undermined his resolve to support partition. It may have been that Marshall insisted on the President rebutting the charges against the State Department. The rebuttal was, effectively, in the following section of Truman’s statement to reporters:

This country vigorously supported the plan for partition with economic union recommended by UNSCOP and by the General Assembly. We have explored every possibility consistent with basic principles of the (UN) Charter for giving effect to that solution. Unfortunately, it has become clear that the partition plan cannot be carried out at this time by peaceful means. We could not undertake to impose this solution on the people of Palestine by use of American troops, both on Charter grounds and as a matter of national policy.
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That was the truth the President could have told Weizmann eight days earlier.

Truman concluded his press conference of 25 March with these words: “If the UN agrees to trusteeship, peaceful settlement is yet possible; without it, open warfare is just over the horizon.”
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As we shall now see, a prime factor influencing Truman’s decision- making in the climax to the End Game—no prizes to readers for guessing correctly—was the need to prevent Zionism denying Jewish campaign funds and votes to Democratic Party candidates, including the President himself, for the elections of November 1948.

It was a state of affairs that led Defence Secretary Forrestal to say in private, and to write in his diary, the following: “I said I thought it was a most disastrous and regrettable fact that the foreign policy of this country was determined by the contributions a particular block of special interests might make to the party funds.”
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On 30 March, Ambassador Austin formally presented the Security Council with a resolution for the convening of another Special Session of the General Assembly “to consider further the question of the future government of Palestine.” In line with Marshall’s cable to the President on 21 February, the intention of the Truman administration at Executive level was to seek and hopefully secure the General Assembly’s approval of the U.S. proposal to have Palestine governed as a UN trusteeship.

In six weeks the British Mandate would come to its inglorious end. The time for the world body to find a solution to the Palestine problem to protect the best interests of all concerned was nearly up.

American Zionist leaders had not yet abandoned all hope that they could exert enough pressure on President Truman to oblige him to drop the idea of UN trusteeship and return to partition as the only game in town.

On 9 April they played the Weizmann card again. This time it was in the form of a very emotional letter from the master persuader to Truman. It was a plea for the President’s understanding of the consequences for the Jews of not implementing the partition plan. “The choice for our people”, the Weizmann letter asserted, “is between statehood and extermination.”
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It was the fundamental essence of Zionism’s philosophy of doom—the notion of the Jewish state as an insurance policy, the refuge of last resort for Jews anywhere and everywhere in the event of the monster of anti-Semitism going on the rampage again. In the immediate aftermath of the Nazi holocaust, it was reasonable for Zionism’s leaders to assume that a man as vulnerable to his emotions as President Truman would not be unmoved by such an appeal.

On the same day Zionist terrorists in Palestine were slaughtering the Arabs of Deir Yassin. (By this time it was clear to those aware of the facts of what was happening on the ground in the Holy Land that Zionist military forces were gaining the upper hand in the escalating conflict with the indigenous Arabs).

As a means of putting pressure on President Truman the Weizmann letter was only the tip of an iceberg.

Zionist and other Jewish organisations across the big country were mobilised to protest against the Truman administration’s “sell-out” and to demand that the partition plan be implemented to create a Jewish state. At some big rallies speakers denounced the “politics of oil”. The President himself was personally bombarded with appeals to implement the partition plan. And, not surprisingly with elections coming, the Republican Party jumped onto the Zionist bandwagon. Republicans, especially those soon to run for office, attacked the Truman administration for its “vacillation and inadequacy” with regard to Palestine. At the time the press was preponderantly Republican, so Zionism’s messengers had an easy ride. The media was anyway full of stories of the courage of the fighting Jews in Palestine. The Arab case was not for consideration and the violation of Arab rights was not an issue. All in all these were most uncomfortable days for the Truman administration.