Summary
President of the United States, the subject of Chapter 3 of Perceptions of Palestine, “Franklin Roosevelt: Locked In”: he made no major Palestine decisions, but his tenure was pivotal because he perpetuated the already set pro-Zionist Frame of reference by rote at a critical time (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 562-570).
Details
- Elected in 1932, Roosevelt was in office from the era of increased Jewish immigration to Palestine prompted by Hitler’s rise, through the Holocaust, to the beginning of serious discussion of Jewish statehood; the United States in his tenure accepted Zionism virtually by rote, and the commitment slid from a Jewish homeland in some part of Palestine to a pledge to turn all of Palestine over to the Jews without policymakers noticing the change (lines 562-570).
- His views were based primarily on a religious upbringing heavily imbued with Bible readings featuring a Jewish Palestine, and on the widespread perception of Arabs and Muslims as primitive and pagan; en route to Tehran in 1943 he ordered his pilot to fly low over Palestine and showed great excitement at seeing everything from “Beersheba to Dan” (lines 562-570).
- Christison records that he did virtually nothing to help Europe’s Jews: he never made a serious effort to curb State Department obstruction of Jewish immigration, allowed Breckinridge Long to talk him into a go-slow approach under which Long practiced deliberate obstruction, and exhibited a casual “jocular anti-Semitism”; yet Jews, about 3 percent of the U.S. population, constituted 15 percent of his top appointments, and Zionist leaders such as Stephen Wise and Felix Frankfurter had easy access and repeatedly won private reassurances while he publicly quashed discussion, even refusing in July 1942 to meet David Ben-Gurion (lines 572-588).
- He misconceived the Balfour Declaration: writing to Secretary of State Cordell Hull in 1939 he stated his understanding that Britain’s intention from the beginning had been that Palestine would be “converted” into “a Jewish Home which might very possibly become preponderantly Jewish within a comparatively short time. Certainly that was the impression given to the whole world at the time of the Mandate”, and that Britain therefore could not legally limit Jewish immigration as its 1939 white paper proposed; he was unaware of Britain’s commitments to the Arabs (lines 590-598).
- In the same memorandum he discounted Arab objections on the ground that Arab immigration since 1920 had “vastly exceeded” Jewish immigration; British statistics given by Christison show Jewish immigration 1920-1938 totalling 306,049 against Arab immigration of 23,407, and the population balance moving from 90 percent Arab in 1920 to 69 percent Arab versus 31 percent Jewish in 1939 (lines 592-598).
- He discussed sending 200,000–300,000 Palestinian Arabs to Iraq — to Brandeis in 1939, to the British, and a year later to Chaim Weizmann — and told a cabinet member he wanted to begin moving the Arabs elsewhere so that eventually 90 percent of Palestine would be Jewish (lines 600-606).
- To Roosevelt, Palestine’s Arabs were part of a sea of “seventy million Mohammedans” who desired nothing more than to “cut [the Jews’] throats the day they land”; he attributed Arab discontent to ethnic hostility and economic deprivation and, shortly before his death in 1945, proposed looking into something like the Tennessee Valley Authority in Palestine (lines 608-610).
- On February 14, 1945, aboard USS Quincy, he met Saudi King Abdulaziz Al-Saud — the first meeting of a U.S. president with an Arab leader — and undertook to consult fully with both Arabs and Jews on all Palestine decisions and to “do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs”, confirming the pledge by letter in early April; within the same weeks he authorised Wise to state publicly that he continued to support unlimited Jewish immigration and the establishment of a Jewish state (lines 650-672).
Related pages
Perceptions of Palestine, Frame of reference, Balfour Declaration, Abdulaziz Al-Saud