Summary
President of the United States from 1945, the subject of Chapter 4 of Perceptions of Palestine, “Harry Truman: History Belongs to the Victors”, in which his support for Israel is presented as more ambivalent, and his role more complex, than either a domestic-political or a moral explanation warrants (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 726-734).
Details
- Christison distinguishes three Trumans: the statesman, who remained uncertain about the impact of a Jewish state on U.S. national interests and heeded the overwhelmingly anti-Zionist advice of every government agency; the man, emotionally bound up from the day he took office in securing a Jewish haven in Palestine; and the politician, grappling in an election year with a popularity rating around 35 percent and attuned to the powerful Jewish vote. None of the three had much concern for the Arab side of the debate (lines 726-734).
- He was a lover of the Bible who told a biographer he had read it at least twice before starting school, considered himself something of an expert on Jews and Arabs alike, and held that the Arabs had shown a deplorable lack of enterprise about developing the area (lines 726-734).
- In June 1945 he sent Earl Harrison to investigate Europe’s displaced-persons camps and passed Harrison’s recommendation that one hundred thousand Jewish displaced persons be admitted to Palestine to the British, without understanding that immigration was inseparable from the political problem because it would tip the demographic balance overnight; in his first year or two he did not favour a Jewish state, disliked states established on racial or religious lines, and said he was not willing to send “half a million American soldiers” to defend the Jews in Palestine (lines 736-744).
- Egyptian Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha’s mid-1945 letter protesting the program of setting up a Jewish state, quoted by Truman in his own memoirs a decade later, did not change his understanding: in the memoirs he put the Arabs’ announced defence of their “rights” after the November 1947 partition decision in derisive quotation marks, and he treated the Balfour promise to “re-establish” a Jewish homeland as a fulfilment of “the noble policies of Woodrow Wilson, especially the principles of self-determination” (lines 748-758).
- He took no definite stand on any aspect of the issue except when the outcome was already inevitable: support for the 1947 UN partition resolution came when partition appeared the only viable solution, and immediate diplomatic recognition in May 1948 when Jewish statehood would be declared regardless (lines 760-774).
- His battle with the State Department arose, in this account, less from its opposition to a Jewish state than from patrician diplomats patronising him — his “striped pants boys” — though he took Secretary of State George Marshall’s opposition seriously; his anger at Zionist pressure led him to ban Abba Hillel Silver from the White House after Silver shouted at him and pounded on his desk in mid-1946 (lines 776-778).
- His friend and former business partner Eddie Jacobson persuaded him in early 1948 to receive Chaim Weizmann, at which meeting Truman committed himself to supporting partition and Jewish statehood — a contribution Truman credited as of “decisive importance” (lines 780-798).
- His three main advisers on the issue, Clark Clifford, David Niles and Max Lowenthal, all strongly pro-Zionist, fed him memoranda designed to influence his emotions and perceptions of Arabs and Jews, and enabled him to believe with utter sincerity that his decisions were not bowing to electoral pressure but doing the right thing (lines 780-798).
Related pages
Perceptions of Palestine, Frame of reference, Clark Clifford, David Niles, Max Lowenthal, UN General Assembly Resolution 181