Summary
President of the United States whose administration made the first official U.S. decisions on Palestine after World War I, and the subject of Chapter 2 of Perceptions of Palestine, Woodrow Wilson: “Rising Above” Self-Determination (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 377-385).
Details
- Wilson was a devout Christian, son of a Presbyterian minister, well tutored in the biblical history of Jews and Christians in Palestine, for whom a Jewish return seemed a natural fulfilment of biblical prophecy; he had, in Christison’s account, no inkling of Palestine’s Arab history or its thirteen centuries of Muslim influence, and few people pressed the Arab case with him (lines 377-385).
- He was more than usually free of bigotry for his period: as president of Princeton University (1902-1910) he appointed the first Jew and first Roman Catholic to the faculty, as governor of New Jersey (1910-1912) the first Jew to the state Supreme Court, and in 1916 he appointed Louis D. Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court, the first Jew named to it; but he held a paternalistic view of dark-skinned peoples as deserving kindness and compassion but not equality, and was unready to extend equal treatment to blacks or, in the end, to most colonial subjects (lines 377-395).
- His self-determination doctrine, enunciated in January 1918 in the Fourteen Points, was qualified by Wilson himself for “undeveloped peoples”, who were not yet ready for “the full responsibilities of statehood” and should receive friendly “guidance”, as in the British and French mandates (lines 387-395, 425-433).
- In October 1917 Wilson endorsed Britain’s plan for the statement issued a month later as the Balfour Declaration; Christison states his primary purpose was to support a wartime ally, that he endorsed casually a month after Britain requested his support and only on being reminded, that he apparently did not know or care about its precise content in advance, and that he did not speak publicly for the Zionist enterprise for several more months, probably so as not to antagonise Turkey (lines 387-405).
- His friendship with Brandeis was probably the heaviest influence toward active support for Zionist goals; Brandeis and other U.S. Zionists approached him frequently in the war’s last year and the first year of the Versailles conference for public and private reassurances (lines 397-405).
- Wilson regarded his support for the Balfour Declaration as an unbreakable solemn promise and told the King-Crane commissioners before their departure that the Palestine question had already been virtually closed by the Allies; the commission’s report went unpublished for three years until Wilson, out of office, authorised its publication in July 1922, and there is no evidence he ever read it (lines 435-453; the text at this point is garbled in both the text copy and the original — see Perceptions of Palestine, Open questions).
- By 1920 Wilson’s public statements pledged U.S. support not simply for a Jewish homeland in Palestine but for a Jewish commonwealth, though he did not himself use the broader Zionist formulation that the declaration meant all of Palestine as a Jewish national home (lines 447-453).
Related pages
Perceptions of Palestine, Balfour Declaration, King-Crane Commission, Louis D. Brandeis, Self-determination