Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (54 page)

According to Lovett’s memorandum of the conversation, Clifford said, “The President is under unbearable pressure to recognise the Jewish state promptly.” Then he asked Lovett to “draft appropriate language to put into effect recognition in the event that the President decided upon it.”
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Lovett cautioned against “indecent haste” and said they ought to wait until they had confirmation of the details of the Jewish state’s proclamation of independence.
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He was also concerned that there should be proper notification of America’s intentions to other governments—the British and French governments in particular, and to Ambassador Austin at the UN. (As Clifford and Lovett were speaking the General Assembly was still in session at the request of the U.S., and Austin and his team were still doing their best to secure support for the American proposal that Palestine should become a UN trusteeship.) Clifford brushed aside Lovett’s caution and concern with the comment that the President could not afford “to have any such action leak.”
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Clifford did not tell Lovett the truth about the President’s intentions because he feared the Undersecretary of State might prevail upon Marshall to prevail upon Truman to at least delay recognition of the Jewish state. In fact Clifford’s fears on that account were unfounded. Like all of his predecessors as Secretary of State, and in common cause with Forrestal, Marshall had not favoured the creation of a Jewish state in the face of total Arab opposition; but once the President had made his decision to give immediate recognition to the new state, that would be that. Apart from the fact that he was unswervingly loyal to President Truman, Marshall had a healthy respect for the Presidential prerogative, according to the Constitution, to make foreign policy decisions. In other words, Marshall accepted that any president was free to make mistakes. That this one might have catastrophic consequences for Arabs and Jews, for the American and wider Western interest and perhaps ultimately humankind, was not the issue. There was nothing anybody could do about it once the President had made up his mind.

At 5.40 p.m. Washington time, twenty minutes before midnight in Palestine, Lovett was informed (presumably by Marshall) that the recognition announcement was going to be made shortly after 6.00 p.m., and that he should now notify Ambassador Austin at the UN.

Lovett’s memorandum for the record, secret for many years, included this: “My protests against the precipitate action and warnings as to consequences with the Arab world appear to have been outweighed by considerations unknown to me. [He knew well what the considerations were but did not believe it was his place to talk about them in an official memorandum for the record that would one day be made public.] I can only conclude that
the President’s political advisers, having failed last Wednesday afternoon to make the President the father of the new state, have determined at least to make him the midwife
.”
⁸⁴
(Emphasis added).

At 6.00 p.m. Washington time, the British Mandate for Palestine expired and Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence became effective. And at 6.11 p.m the U.S. accorded the new state de facto recognition—in response to Epstein’s fabricated request. The Washington announcement could not have been more low-key. Charles Ross, the presidential press secretary, read a two-paragraph statement to reporters. The message Ben- Gurion received, sent on its way by Lovett, was “The American Government recognizes the Provisional Government of the State of Israel as the
de facto
authority in the new State.” (Because of the Gross memorandum, Truman did not give Israel
de jure
recognition until its provisional government was replaced by an elected one, on 31 January 1949).

And so the deed was done. Whatever else happened, Truman could now be certain that he would be re-elected for a second term and that his Democrats would not take a hammering at the polls.

For Ambassador Austin (and all of his team at the UN) it was a public humiliation the like of which no American diplomat had experienced before or has experienced since. Austin himself was so disgusted that he shut himself up in his Waldorf Astoria Towers apartment; and the statement of recognition was read to the General Assembly by a junior member of his mission, with the text of the announcement quoted from a news agency report. Many years later the declassified documentation revealed that Marshall had despatched Rusk to the UN “to prevent the US delegation from resigning en masse.”
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On the floor of the General Assembly delegates were stunned by this latest and abrupt reversal of American policy. Here they were, at the request of the U.S., still debating UN trusteeship for Palestine (and the internationalisation of Jerusalem) because partition was unjust and unworkable, and bound to be the cause of catastrophe. Now, unilaterally, the U.S. was sanctioning partition. One delegate asked George Barrett of
The New York Times
if he knew exactly what the U.S. position was. Barrett reported himself as replying, “I don’t know because I haven’t seen an announcement for 20 minutes.”
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Cuba’s Ambassador, Guillermo Belt, had to be restrained from going to the podium to announce his country’s withdrawal from the UN. In principle probably none of the major powers would have been too concerned if Cuba had withdrawn from the world body. But if Belt had walked out, and if other delegates had followed him, the very existence of the UN might have been called into question.

The damage that was done to U.S. standing at the UN, and from which it has not yet recovered, was of concern to some thoughtful Americans. Among them was FDR’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. Unlike her husband she was, or rather became, a supporter of the Zionist cause and had favoured recognising the Jewish State; but she was also a champion of the UN. On 16 May she wrote to Marshall complaining about the way the Truman administration had handled the recognition problem because it had “created consternation in the United Nations.”
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Marshall’s reply two days later included this (my emphasis added): “We were aware of the unfortunate effect on our situation at the UN, which is much to be regretted.
More than this I am not free to say
.”
⁸⁸

The idea of Palestine as a UN trusteeship was not merely abandoned in haste, it was dead and quickly buried without ceremony.

Before it ended on that most dramatic day, the Special Session of the General Assembly approved a resolution appointing a Mediator “to promote a peaceful adjustment of the future of Palestine.” (As we shall see, he was prevented from doing his job by an assassin’s bullets).

The recriminations became a matter of public record. In 1961, in
A Prime Minister Remembers
, Clement Attlee, then an Earl in the House of Lords, wrote that “U.S. policy in Palestine was moulded by the Jewish vote and by party contributions of several big Jewish firms.”
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Truman responded: “The British were highly successful in muddling the situation as completely as it could possibly be muddled.”
⁹⁰

If Truman had said he would not have had to do what he did if Britain had not played the Zionist card in the first place, he would have had a point. A good point.
And it was to be made in 1968 by Arnold Toynbee. Before he was recognised as one of the world’s most eminent historians, Toynbee had dealt directly with the Palestine Mandate in the British Foreign Office. In 1968 he delivered this judgement (my emphasis added):

All through those 30 years [from the Balfour Declaration to the moment Britain dumped the problem into the lap of the UN] Britain admitted into Palestine, year by year, a quota of Jewish immigrants that varied according to the strength of the respective pressures of the Arabs and the Jews at the time. These immigrants could not have come if they had not been shielded by a British
chevaux de frise
[literally translated “the closed ranks of mounted troops”]. If Palestine had remained under Ottoman Turkish rule, or if it had become an independent state... Jewish immigrants would never have been admitted into Palestine in large enough numbers to enable them to overwhelm the Palestinian Arabs in this Arab peoples’ own country.
The reason why the state of Israel exists today and why 1,500,000 Palestinians are refugees is that, for 30 years, Jewish immigration was imposed on the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own. The tragedy of Palestine is not just a local one: it is a tragedy for the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world’s peace.

It was also Toynbee in
A Study of History, Volume VIII
who offered the most graphic description of Truman’s role and its consequences:

The Missourian politician-philanthropist’s eagerness to combine expediency with charity by assisting the wronged and suffering Jews would appear to have been untempered by any sensitive awareness that he was thereby abetting the infliction of wrongs and sufferings on the Arabs; and his excursions into the stricken field of Palestine reminded a reader of the
Fioretti di San Francesco
[The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi] of the tragic-comic exploit of the Juniper, who, according to the revealing tale, was so effectively moved by a report of the alimentary needs of an invalid that he rushed, knife in hand, into a wood full of unoffending pigs and straightaway cut off a live pig’s trotter to provide his ailing human being with a dish that his soul desired, without noticing that he was leaving the mutilated animal writhing in agony and without pausing to reflect that his innocent victim was not either the invalid’s property or his own.
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A year after his fateful decision, Truman was visited by the Chief Rabbi of Israel. According to what the President himself told Miller on tape, the Rabbi said: “God put you into your mother’s womb so that you could be the instrument to bring about the rebirth of Israel after two thousand years.”
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Then, apparently, great tears started to roll down Harry Truman’s cheeks.

The Chief Rabbi’s words were undoubtedly a source of great comfort for President Truman; but he may not have been so comforted by the words of another distinguished visitor from Israel.

On his last visit to America as Israel’s Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion was reported to have said the following to Truman: “You have a secure place in the history of Israel, but I do not know how you will stand in American history”
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One possible implication is that Ben-Gurion was thinking but not saying something like: “Your place in your own country’s history might not be so secure if why you did what you did becomes a matter of public knowledge.”

Lilienthal was to make an observation with which I agree. “It is to the credit of the Zionists’ acumen that they grasped their chance. But it is perhaps less to the credit of America’s non-Zionist Jewry that it permitted its self-appointed Zionist leaders to bet the future of American Judaism on the roulette of power politics.”
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But I go further than Lilienthal.
What I think was bet on the roulette of power politics was not just the future of American Judaism but Judaism in its entirety.

It was, in fact, President Truman himself who committed to paper the most honest statement of why events unfolded as they did. In a memorandum to Niles he said: “We could have solved this Palestine thing if U.S. politics had been kept out of it.”
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That memorandum, written on 13 May 1947, went on: “Terror and (Rabbi) Silver are the contributing causes of some, if not all, of our troubles.”

The terrorism to which Truman was referring was, as we have seen, Zionist terrorism.

Rabbi Silver’s single greatest contribution to the catastrophe- in-the-making was the inspiration and direction he gave to American Zionism’s campaign to kill Truman’s visa initiative which, if the legislation the President needed had been forthcoming, would have allowed all or virtually all of Europe’s uprooted and displaced Jews to start a new life in America. Which was the option most of them would have taken if they had been given the choice. At the end of his account of President Truman’s role in the creation of the Arab-Israel conflict, Lilienthal offered this thought: “In ignoring the advice of three of his Secretaries of State and of Secretary of Defence James Forrestal, Truman may have written U.S. foreign policy’s ‘American Tragedy.’”
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When Lilienthal first put those words into print (1978), I would have agreed with him. But after the events of 11 September 2001 and all they symbolised, I would replace “Truman may have written” with “Truman wrote.”

There remains a most intriguing question, one that is still not asked in politically correct circles. It is provoked by Marshall’s comment to Eleanor Roosevelt—“More than this I am not free to say.”

What was it that Marshall was not free to say to her or even hint at in confidence?

I cannot see that he would have had any difficulty saying: “It’s politics, Jewish campaign funds and Jewish votes. We may not like it, but that is the way it is.”

In my view, it is not unreasonable to speculate that Ben-Gurion had Truman informed that if the U.S. did not recognise the Jewish state as soon as it came into existence, the Soviet Union would, and Israel would then look to it, not the U.S., as its superpower friend and ally. In short, I think it possible that Ben-Gurion played, or had played for him, the ultimate blackmail card. In that light, Clifford’s remark at the showdown meeting about “stealing a march on the U.S.S.R.” would not be quite the throw-away line it can appear to be.