Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (57 page)

McGrath continued as though Forrestal had not spoken. “Beyond this the Jews expect the United States to do its utmost to implement the partition decision if it is voted by the UN, through force if necessary.”

Forrestal stuck to his line that if they were talking about lifting foreign affairs out of domestic politics, “there is nothing more important to lift out than Palestine.” At the end of what must have been an uncomfortable and distressing learning experience for the Secretary of Defence, he almost begged Senator McGrath to give the matter “a lot of thought,” because it involved “not merely the Arabs of the Middle East, but also might involve the whole Muslim world with its four hundred millions of people in Egypt, North Africa, India and Afghanistan.” (The four hundred millions of then are today about 1.4 billion and rising; a quarter of humankind).

McGrath said he would read carefully the CIA report and come back to Forrestal.

Before he tackled the Republican leadership, Forrestal talked strategy with Jimmy Byrnes who, disillusioned, had resigned as Secretary of State in January to be replaced, eventually, by Marshall. Over lunch on 3 December, four days after the General Assembly’s rigged vote on partition, Forrestal asked Byrnes what he thought about the possibility of getting Republican leaders to agree with the Democrats to have the Palestine problem taken out of party politics.

Byrnes was “not particularly optimistic” for two reasons.
¹⁴
One was the success Rabbi Silver was having in persuading the Republicans that the Zionist card could be of use to them, too. The other was the sabotaging influence behind the scenes of Niles in the White House. Byrnes said it was Niles who had been chiefly responsible for persuading Truman to reject the Morrison-Grady Plan; a decision, Byrnes told Forrestal, that had placed Attlee and Bevin “in a most difficult position.”
¹⁵
Niles had told Truman that if he supported the Morrison-Grady Plan, the Republicans would come out with a statement favouring the Zionist position on Palestine.

It was after that lunch that Forrestal made the diary entry I quoted in the previous chapter and which bears repeating. “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.”

A week later Forrestal made his first attempt to get Republican support for his campaign to take Palestine out of party politics. On 10 December he talked with Senator Arthur Vandenberg. This very influential Republican said that he himself had tried to “keep aloof” from the matter but there was, he told Forrestal, one obvious difficulty. “There is a feeling among most Republicans that the Democrat Party has used the Palestine question politically and the Republicans feel they are entitled to make similar use of the issue.”
¹⁶

At the Gridiron Dinner three days later Forrestal had the opportunity to engage with New York’s Governor Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate. Forrestal told the Governor that “the need to take the Palestine problem out of party politics is a matter of deepest concern to me as Secretary of Defence in terms of the security of the nation.”
¹⁷

Dewey said he agreed with Forrestal in principle but that it would be difficult to get results for two reasons. The first was “the intemperate attitude of the Jewish people who have taken Palestine as the emotional symbol.” The second was that the Democratic Party “will not be willing to relinquish the advantages of the Jewish vote.”

It was also the case, Dewey said, that he had become “very cynical about entering into gentlemen’s agreements” because of his experience of the 1944 election campaign. He had had a very clear agreement with Roosevelt not to raise the question of the use of force by the United Nations. (Roosevelt had feared that public opinion would be against U.S. membership of the new world body if Americans were expected to fight and die for it.) But late in the election campaign, when President Roosevelt believed he could play the UN card to his advantage, he had broken his word to Dewey and raised the question of the use of force by the world body.

Forrestal, a good listener, replied that he was well aware of the past actions and attitudes, political and otherwise, which would make a non-partisan approach to the Palestine problem difficult to achieve. And then he said: “I consider that I would be derelict in my duty if I did not try.” He added that although he was not authorised to speak for President Truman “beyond the fact that he agreed to let me present my view of the matter to Republican leaders”, he was certain that Truman would honour any agreement he might make with Dewey.

Vandenberg had sat next to Dewey at the dinner and after it Forrestal asked him if the Governor’s attitude had been at all responsive. Vandenberg replied, “Responsive but sceptical.”

Forrestal’s account of his conversations that evening included a contribution of great insight from Senator Vandenberg.

Dewey had said he thought the U.S. was “already committed to an unfortunate course” in Palestine, and he had asked Forrestal “what can we do now?” The Defence Secretary had replied that as things were, two things would inevitably be coming up—a Zionist demand that the U.S. arm the Jews to fight the Arabs, and a Zionist demand for unilateral action by the U.S. to impose the partition plan by force if necessary. At this point Vandenberg had interjected to say with passion that he was “completely and unequivocally” against such action because, in his opinion, “it would breed a wave of violent anti-Semitism in this country.”

By inference Vandenberg was saying he was aware of how fickle American public opinion was. At the time they were speaking, and because of the Nazi holocaust and Zionism’s brilliant exploitation of it, probably the majority of all Americans were emotionally in favour of the creation of an independent Jewish state; but the mood could change, Vandenberg was implying, with terrifying consequences for Jews in the U.S., if Americans had to fight and die for the Zionist cause.

As 1947 was drawing to its close and he was waiting for a response from the party politicians to his Palestine initiative, Forrestal was pre- occupied with the awesome challenge of defining how the U.S. could best provide the leadership that was required to prevent the spread of Soviet communism to the “Free World” of western terminology. It was a monumental task that required everything he had to give in terms of energy, intellect, vision and the political skills to sell to the military and Congress whatever policy proposition he came up with. And the proposition he had come up with was not to the military’s liking. It offended many of those who were part and parcel of the Military Industrial Complex or MIC for short—the name subsequently given by President Eisenhower, as we shall see later in these pages, to the most powerful of all the vested interests.

In Forrestal’s view, expressed in a letter to Chan Gurney, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, what happened in war-devastated Europe would be the key to national and global stability and security. In the face of the Soviet Union’s military might and uncertainty about Soviet intentions, world stability would not be restored until the vacuum created by the destruction of German power and the weakening of the power of Western Europe as a whole had been filled. Forrestal had the vision to see, and the courage to say, that mighty though the U.S. was, it could not do three things simultaneously—“finance European economic recovery, European rearmament and a defence of Europe by American forces.”
¹⁸
So?

Forrestal’s policy required the U.S. to spend less on the military in order to have more to spend on financing Europe’s economic recovery. In short, the name of the investment banker’s game was preventing the spread of communism not by the deployment of troops in great strength (which would require mobilisation and might provoke the Russians), but by assisting ruined Western Europe to become prosperous again. The logic was sound. Free and prosperous peoples would see no virtue in Communism and, in time, would contribute progressively more to their own defence.

Forrestal knew that he was requiring the U.S. to take a “calculated security risk”, but he justified taking it with these words: “As long as we can out-produce the world, can control the sea and can strike inland with the atomic bomb, we can assume certain risks otherwise unacceptable in an effort to restore world trade, to restore the balance of power—military power—and to eliminate some of the conditions which breed war.”
¹⁹

Unfortunately dramatic events were to be set in motion by the Russians which caused the calculations on which Forrestal’s strategy was based to be revised. The first dramatic event was (as I noted in the previous chapter) the Communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia on 24 February, just three days after Marshall sent his “URGENT AND SECRET” cable to President Truman saying that if it was not possible to implement the General Assembly’s recommendation for the partition of Palestine, there would have to be a reversal of U.S. policy—by implication no matter how much that would offend the Zionists. The second dramatic event on 31 March, the day after Ambassador Austin introduced the American resolution for Palestine to become a UN trusteeship, with Jerusalem an international city, was the beginning of the Soviet blockade of Berlin.

Those events were to require Forrestal to become immersed in crisis management without, he hoped, compromising his strategic vision too much. He had to go for a bigger military budget; and he had to prevent the Defence Department being torn apart by inter-service rivalries and disputes over which of the services and which of their requirements should have priority. The very last thing he needed was to have to be concerned with Palestine and Zionism’s outrageous demands.

But even without the demonstrations of hostile intent by the Russians, there was a downside to spending less on the military in order to spend more on the reconstruction and development of Western Europe, in order to assist it to become an anti-Communist bastion. The U.S. would not have the military manpower capacity for emergencies outside Europe. Reality check. There was simply no way that the U.S.—unilaterally or under a UN umbrella—could provide more than a token number of troops to impose the partition plan or to enforce the preferred policy option of UN trusteeship. Conclusion? The Palestine problem just HAD to be solved by diplomatic and political means. Lifting it out of American domestic politics, in order to prevent Zionism calling the policy shots, in order for there to be at least the prospect of a solution in the real interests of all concerned, was now more vital than ever; and becoming more urgent because the end of the British mandate was fast approaching.

Put another way: If the U.S. was not to risk losing the goodwill of the Arab and wider Muslim world and all that implied in terms of oil, strategic anti-Communist defence alliances and trade in general, the Zionists would have to be told “No” to an independent Jewish state. Telling them was politically possible only within the framework of a non-partisan approach to the Palestine problem.

The Zionists would say they had been betrayed but that would not be the truth. A solution “in the best interests of all concerned” meant one that would provide for the creation of a Jewish home in Palestine as envisaged by the Balfour Declaration (assuming it could be taken at face value). With time fast running out for all concerned the probability was that the Arab leaders who mattered most would accept a Jewish home in Palestine that was less than a state, provided there were agreed limits on further Jewish immigration. If that kind of Jewish home could be delivered at the eleventh hour by diplomacy and politics, there was no way the Zionists—in the light of what they had actually been promised—could get away with the claim that they had been betrayed. That President Truman himself shared this analysis in private is indicated by his memorandum that the “Palestine thing” could have been solved if...

As January (1948) advanced Forrestal was alarmed by the absence of any considered response to his Palestine initiative from either McGrath for the Democrats or Governor Dewey for the Republicans. In the early days of that first month of the most fateful year in Palestine’s history, the Defence Secretary had told senior officials of the State Department over lunch that without access to Middle East oil “the Marshall plan could not succeed, we could not fight a war and we could not even maintain the tempo of our own peacetime economy.”
²⁰

On 21 January, Forrestal decided to make a determined effort to enlist the support of the State Department. That morning he cleared his mind of all other matters and wrote a paper that he intended to run past Lovett later in the day before presenting it to Marshall.

“It is doubtful”, he wrote, “if there is any segment of our foreign relations of greater importance or of greater danger in its broad implications to the security of the United States than our relations in the Middle East.”
²¹
On that basis, Forrestal’s paper continued, it would be “stupid to allow the situation to develop in such a way as either to do permanent injury to our relations with the Muslim world or to end in a stumble to war.”

For the first time Forrestal revealed that he had had “permission from the President” to make an informal attempt to secure Republican agreement to lift the Palestine problem out of U.S. domestic politics. Then, summing up the results of his initiative to this point, he wrote:

I have had encouragement from Senator Vandenberg, accompanied by scepticism as to the ultimate outcome, somewhat less encouragement from Governor Dewey, and complete agreement as to the desirability of the objective from various other Republicans not in the leadership such as John Taber, James W. Wadsworth, Dewey Short and Everett Dirksen.