Perceptions of Palestine

Summary

Kathleen Christison argues that U.S. policy on Palestine has been made within an Israel-centered Frame of reference — a body of assumptions, inherited from nineteenth-century Orientalism and reinforced by media, Congress and a skilled Zionist lobby — in which Palestinians are politically invisible, their 1948 dispossession is “an unrecognizable episode”, and their national claim is treated as artificially inspired rather than as the grievance of a native population with its own claim to the land (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 145-167). Part 1 covers the Introduction and Chapters 1-3 in full and Chapter 4 through printed p.77-78: the frame’s formation in nineteenth-century travel writing, its operation under Woodrow Wilson (the Balfour Declaration endorsed without consulting Palestine’s Arab majority, the King-Crane Commission ignored), its perpetuation by rote under Franklin Roosevelt, and its hardening under Harry Truman as partition and recognition approached. Part 2 completes Chapter 4 (the press as battleground and advocate for partition, the Broadcasts myth recycled, State’s rapid acceptance of Israel and abandonment of a Palestinian state), gives Chapter 5 in full (Palestinians politically nonexistent under Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson; the Exodus image, the Eichmann Trial, UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the PLO’s emergence), Chapter 6 in full (Nixon, Kissinger and Ford: a Soviet-centered frame, the 1970 Jordan crisis, the 1973 war, Arafat’s rebuffed overtures, the Rabat decision and Arafat’s UN speech, the 1975 pledge not to recognize or negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Saunders Document), and Chapter 7 through printed p.167 (Carter’s homeland statement and his team’s break with, and limits within, the frame).

What the file is

The UC Press E-Books Collection Archive edition of the 1999 University of California Press book (Berkeley / Los Angeles / London), downloaded as HTML from the publisher’s free archive, with a text copy supplied from a memex vault. Preferred citation as given in the text copy: Christison, Kathleen. Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt5t1nc6tp (lines 1-33). The text copy has no page markers; printed page numbers appear in the text at page turns, and locators below give the line range and the printed page. The copy carries frequent spacing slips where words are joined or split (for example “Ineeded”, lines 130-141; “statewasallbuta”, lines 473-475), most of which are also present in the original HTML as checked. Contents: Acknowledgments (printed p.ix), Introduction (1), 1. Palestinians in the Nineteenth-Century Mind (16), 2. Woodrow Wilson: “Rising Above” Self-Determination (26), 3. Franklin Roosevelt: Locked In (45), 4. Harry Truman: History Belongs to the Victors (61), 5. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson: Possession Is Nine-Tenths of the Law (95), 6. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: An Unrecognizable Episode (124), 7. Jimmy Carter: Making a Difference (157), 8. Ronald Reagan: Missed Opportunities (195), 9. George Bush: No Illusions (242), 10. The Pictures in Our Heads (274), 11. Afterword: Clinton’s Legacy (294), Notes (313), Selected Bibliography (359), Index (371) (lines 66-129).

Section by section

Acknowledgments (lines 130-141 / printed p.ix)

The book grew out of Philip Mattar’s suggestion for an article on the mind-set, or “frame of reference”, from which policymakers approach the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; investigating the Bush-era mind-set led back first to the Truman administration and then to still earlier periods. Thanks to Mattar, Ann M. Lesch, John Ware, former policymakers interviewed, John Sherman, Don Lamm, Lynne Withey and Rose Anne White of UC Press, editor Pamela Fischer, and the author’s husband Bill, to whom the book is dedicated.

Introduction (lines 145-277 / printed p.1-15)

Malcolm Kerr wrote in 1980 that the conventional wisdom about the Arab-Israeli conflict had become so entrenched in the United States that diplomats were severely inhibited in formulating policy, serious discourse had ceased, and officials fell back on the analysis prevailing in Congress, the press and the public (lines 145-149). Two elements of that wisdom concern the Palestinian-Israeli issue: that Palestinian national claims are “artificially and mischievously inspired” and may be ignored, and that the only real issue is an unreasonable Arab refusal to accept Israel’s existence, not a real grievance arising from the Palestinians’ displacement. The resulting frame of reference is Israel-centered and seldom recognises a Palestinian perspective; the 1948 dispossession of over seven hundred thousand people remains “an unrecognizable episode”, and Israel’s version has prevailed because, in a well-known Israeli historian’s phrase quoted here, history is “the propaganda of the victors” (lines 153-167). The frame assumes a unique U.S.–Israel bond from a common biblical heritage, the Holocaust, and identification with Israel’s “national style”; Peter Grose is quoted that “Americans and Israelis are bonded together like no two other sovereign peoples” (lines 159-167). Edward Said’s account in Orientalism of how authoritative texts create the reality they appear to describe is applied to the conventional wisdom (lines 169-177). The prime example of a misrepresentation creating false knowledge is the Broadcasts myth: no Arab authority issued broadcast orders for Palestinians to flee in 1948; Dan Kurzman found no record of such orders in Israeli military archives or BBC monitoring files, and Benny Morris concluded no “blanket instructions, by radio or otherwise, to Palestine’s Arabs to flee” were issued, while a “small but significant proportion” of the flight resulted from explicit expulsion orders by Jewish forces (lines 179-189). Further illustrations: the Israeli press and the New York Times describing the nakba as a designation for Israel’s creation rather than for the Palestinians’ dispossession, and Bernard Reich’s 1996 An Historical Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, whose terminology, data selection and omissions — including nothing on pre-1948 Zionist–Transjordan cooperation to prevent a Palestinian Arab state and nothing on the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 — approach most issues from an Israeli perspective (lines 191-205). Terminology shapes reality: Baruch Kimmerling on Eretz Israel granting Jews an “eternal title” and Mandate-era historiography treating Palestine “as an almost exclusive ‘Jewish bubble.’”; Rashid Khalidi on naming as an attempt “to privilege one dimension of a complex reality at the expense of others” (lines 201-213). The frame also works by knowledge withheld: Palestinians politically invisible since Wilson’s endorsement of the Balfour Declaration, which called them merely “non-Jews”; ABC’s Nightline producer citing a dearth of “credible Arab guests”; a conciliatory June 1988 statement by an adviser to Yasir Arafat rejected by the Washington Post and reported only by the Wall Street Journal on page nineteen; a New York publisher rejecting Naguib Mahfouz because “Arabic is a controversial language” (lines 207-227). Policymakers operate on inherited assumptions they do not scrutinise, seek only opinions that reinforce them — Harold Saunders on instinctive basic choices, the 1973 ha-Konseptzia, and the standing given to Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami as against an “Arabist” who “tends to be dismissed as pleading for a client” — and lack continuity and historical knowledge: Richard Parker found that in each U.S. miscalculation he studied there was a tendency to ignore expertise (lines 229-277). The book’s plan: for each administration since Wilson’s, to analyse the president’s and key policymakers’ knowledge and preconceptions, the state of public knowledge and perceptions, and how policy was influenced by the conventional wisdom (lines 263-269).

Chapter 1: Palestinians in the Nineteenth-Century Mind (lines 281-375 / printed p.16-25)

The frame began forming in the mid-nineteenth century, not in 1948 or with Zionism. Hundreds of travel books conveyed an almost uniformly derogatory image of Palestine and its Arabs; Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869) — Palestine “a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land”, its Arabs “all abject beggars by nature, instinct, and education” — is still used in Israeli government press handouts to present a previously empty and barren land redeemed (lines 281-293). Travel books were the era’s most popular U.S. genre: John Lloyd Stephens’s 1837 travelogue sold over twenty thousand copies in two years, William Thomson’s The Land and the Book almost two hundred thousand, Twain’s sixty-seven thousand in its first year; as many as twenty thousand people visited Jerusalem alone every year (lines 295-301). Orientalism, in Said’s definition the “corporate institution for dealing with the Orient”, operated from assumed Western superiority, polarised West and East, and distilled its ideas about the Orient — “its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness” — into an unchallenged coherence (lines 303-305). U.S. orientalism joined religion to a Manifest Destiny-like impulse to restore Christianity and the ancient kingdom of Israel in Palestine, repossessed from Muslim intruders; Islam was cast as Europe’s quintessential “Other”, and Arabs and Muslims, made interchangeable, as indolent, obstinate and sensual (lines 307-315). Palestine’s Arabs, uniquely, were represented as aliens in their own land: historians left a thousand years of Arab and Muslim history untouched, travellers felt “a sense of injured pride, of molested personal property” at finding Muslims guarding “his” holy places, and writers such as Stephens and Thomson simply ignored a population that was well over 90 percent Muslim Arab, mostly town and village inhabitants rather than nomadic Bedouin; Twain described all-Arab Nablus under its biblical name Shechem without mentioning an Arab presence (lines 317-323). Where not reviled or ignored, Palestinians were romanticised as biblical props; local Christian Arabs were disdained, their churches’ “gaudy and inappropriate ornaments” condemned, and Protestant missionaries came into active hostility with the orthodox clergy (lines 325-333). The assumption that the real Palestine was Christian or Jewish rather than Arab or Muslim was a symbolic dispossession that preceded Zionist settlement: Zionist writers seized on it with the slogan of a “land without people for a people without land”, while Palestine’s Arabs — with no separate Palestinian administrative entity under Ottoman rule and no developed sense of a territorial Palestinian nationalism to enunciate, and no need felt, as possessors, to organise or propagandize — had already lost a major battle; by the First Zionist Congress in 1897 there were 117 local Zionist groups worldwide, and 900 a year later (lines 335-343). The counter-current was small: U.S. missionary educators — the founders of the Syrian Protestant College, later the American University of Beirut, and the Quakers’ Ramallah schools — became advocates for Arab independence at Versailles, but their schools numbered more than four times as many in Armenian areas as in Syria and Palestine, and one of the earliest U.S. attempts to generate support for Jewish settlement in Palestine came from a missionary: in 1891 Presbyterian minister William Blackstone presented President Benjamin Harrison a petition, signed by 413 prominent non-Jewish Americans including John D. Rockefeller, that Palestine be given to the Jews as a national home (lines 345-359). Grose’s claim that anti-Semitic children’s literature indelibly marked the State Department officials who later opposed Israel’s creation is answered: the policymakers who supported Zionism read the same literature, and the derogatory writing on Palestine’s Arabs must have made at least as enduring an impression; Senator Henry Cabot Lodge recalled in 1922 that reading Scott’s Ivanhoe and The Talisman as a boy left “hostility to the Mohammadan” as the dominant impression (lines 345-375).

Chapter 2: Woodrow Wilson: “Rising Above” Self-Determination (lines 377-560 / printed p.26-44)

Wilson, a devout Presbyterian steeped in biblical Palestine, had no inkling of Palestine’s Arab history or its thirteen centuries of Muslim influence; a Jewish return seemed a natural fulfilment of prophecy, while few pressed the Arab case (lines 377-385). His self-determination doctrine (Fourteen Points, January 1918) was applied inconsistently: Wilson held a paternalistic view of dark-skinned peoples as deserving kindness but not equality, and qualified the principle for “undeveloped peoples” with friendly “guidance” through mandates (lines 387-395, 425-433). His October 1917 endorsement of the Balfour Declaration was a casual gesture of wartime support to an ally, given a month after Britain requested it and only on being reminded, without knowledge of its precise content; biblical nostalgia played some part, practical politics the primary part (lines 387-405). Pressure came from his friend Louis D. Brandeis, a founder of the Zionist Organization of America in 1915, whom Chaim Weizmann and Rabbi Stephen Wise used as an entrée; the opposing missionary channel through Cleveland Dodge centred on Armenia and on Christian Arabs in Syria, not on Palestine, and U.S. Protestants were in any case divided, the Presbyterian General Assembly having resolved in 1916 for a Jewish homeland (lines 397-423). Zionism and self-determination were never reconcilable for Palestine’s Arab majority: Brandeis told Balfour in Paris in 1919 that Zionism dealt with a “world problem” transcending any local community, and Balfour’s own memorandum acknowledged that “in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country”, Zionism being of “far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land” (lines 415-433). Britain had already hedged the McMahon correspondence promise of Arab independence, which Arabs believed included Palestine (lines 425-433). The King-Crane Commission of 1919, whose leaders began with a “predisposition” in favour of Zionism, found Palestine’s Christian and Muslim Arabs — 90 percent of the population — virtually unanimously opposed to the Zionist program, concluded the full program would be a “gross violation” of self-determination and that the Zionists looked forward to “a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase”; its report had no impact, went unpublished for three years, and there is no evidence Wilson ever read it (lines 435-453). By 1920 the frame was set: Wilson’s statements moved from a Jewish homeland to a Jewish commonwealth, Zionists insisted the declaration meant all of Palestine as a Jewish national home, and in 1922 Secretary of State Charles Hughes told Balfour the United States interpreted a homeland to mean a Jewish state; the 1924 Anglo-American Convention formalised U.S. endorsement of Britain’s control and of Zionism (lines 447-463). The State Department’s reputation for opposing Zionism is not borne out for this period: opposition from Secretary of State Robert Lansing, from officials warning of bloodshed, and from Allen Dulles — who in 1922 urged neutrality against “the cold fact” that Jews were only 10 percent of Palestine’s population — was ignored or unheeded, while officials such as William Yale moved to pro-Zionist views and a 1922 Near Eastern affairs memorandum held the Arabs had not been “as severely treated as their known tendencies might require”; the Department’s refusal of active backing for Zionism became identified with anti-Zionism, and “Arabist” came to label any official who spoke for the Arab perspective (lines 455-475). Congress passed the Lodge-Fish joint resolution for a Jewish national home in 1922 after organised Zionist lobbying that made support “a local issue with Representatives and Senators who sought election”; Lodge declared he never could accept “the thought that Jerusalem and Palestine should be under the control of the Mohammedans”, and Fish foresaw a Jewish “state” as a democratic bastion between the “warlike races” of Muslim Africa and Asia (lines 477-486). Press coverage in 1917 in four leading newspapers almost universally favoured Zionism and condemned Muslim/Turkish rule, hailing Allenby’s capture of Jerusalem as a crusade that had “redeemed” the city; the missionaries’ anti-Turkish campaign over the Armenian massacres of 1915-1916 deepened the conflation of Turk and Arab; through the 1920s the New York Times averaged just under an article a week on Palestine, yet in the first seven months of 1929 ran fifty-one articles with a single paragraph enumerating Palestinian Arab demands, and after the 1929 rioting only 5 percent of articles in four leading papers addressed the Arab perspective; an independent Palestinian Arab state was, in the Times’s estimation, “fit for Bedlam only” (lines 488-516). Almost ninety U.S. films of the 1920s dealt with Arabs, most portrayed as lawless, violent, oversexed and without honour; the movie screen “is where America has met most of its Arabs” (lines 518-528). Zionist organisation peaked when needed — the Zionist Organization of America grew from twenty thousand members before World War I to almost two hundred thousand during it — while Arab American lobbying was minuscule and ignored (lines 530-538). The Balfour Declaration’s designation of the Arab majority, over 90 percent of the population, as “existing non-Jewish communities”, repeated in the 1922 Mandate instrument which assured their civil and religious but not political rights and never used the term Arabs, established Palestinian political nonexistence as a principal element of the conventional wisdom; Arab political development, in Mark Tessler’s account, was still expressive rather than mobilising until the interwar years (lines 540-560).

Chapter 3: Franklin Roosevelt: Locked In (lines 562-710 / printed p.45-60)

Roosevelt made no major Palestine decisions, but his tenure was pivotal because he perpetuated the frame by rote at a critical time — from the Hitler-era rise in Jewish immigration through the Holocaust to serious discussion of statehood — and the commitment slid unnoticed from a Jewish homeland in some part of Palestine to a pledge to turn all of Palestine over to the Jews (lines 562-570). Roosevelt, formed by Bible readings featuring a Jewish Palestine, held the widespread perception of Arabs and Muslims as primitive and pagan; he has been severely criticised for doing virtually nothing to help Europe’s Jews, allowed Breckinridge Long’s deliberate obstruction of Jewish refugee immigration, and exhibited a casual “jocular anti-Semitism”, yet Jews constituted 15 percent of his top appointments though about 3 percent of the population, and Zionist leaders — Stephen Wise, who had revitalised the Zionist Organization of America by 1935, and Felix Frankfurter — had easy access and repeatedly won private pro-Zionist reassurances while Roosevelt publicly quashed discussion (lines 572-588). Political support for Zionism, Christison argues, was far easier than any tangible step to help Jews, and did not require an absence of prejudice against Jews. Roosevelt misconceived the Balfour Declaration itself, writing to Secretary of State Cordell Hull in 1939 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”, against the 1922 white paper’s clarification that Britain had not “at any time contemplated … that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home”; he was likewise unaware of Britain’s commitments to the Arabs (lines 590-598). He discounted Arab objections on the mistaken ground that Arab immigration since 1920 had “vastly exceeded” Jewish immigration: British statistics given here show Jewish immigration 1920-1938 totalling 306,049 against Arab immigration of 23,407, and the population balance moving from 90 percent Arab and 10 percent Jewish in 1920 to 69 percent Arab versus 31 percent Jewish in 1939 (lines 592-598). He devoted considerable thought to moving Arabs aside — proposing to Brandeis in 1939, to the British, and to Weizmann sending 200,000–300,000 Palestinian Arabs to Iraq, and telling a cabinet member he wanted eventually 90 percent of Palestine to be Jewish — while Britain, which bore responsibility, was retreating from full support for the Zionist program after the Arab Revolt toward limits on immigration and land purchases (lines 600-606). To Roosevelt the Arabs were an undifferentiated part of “seventy million Mohammedans” who desired to “cut [the Jews’] throats the day they land”, their discontent economic rather than political, to be answered with something like a Tennessee Valley Authority for Palestine (lines 608-610). The State Department in 1939-1948, on a review of its communications cited here, never showed particular concern about which side would ultimately control Palestine; Undersecretary Sumner Welles had “pronounced Zionist sympathies”, and anti-Semitism among officials did not translate into support for Palestinian Arab aims (lines 612-618). In Congress and the country the lobby consolidated: the revived American Palestine Committee (April 1941) counted sixty-eight senators and two hundred congressmen though run out of Zionist offices; the May 1942 Biltmore Program, presented by David Ben-Gurion and carried by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver’s maximalists, was the first unified U.S. Zionist position for full statehood; Silver’s American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC) built four hundred local committees within little more than a year and in 1944 generated pro-Zionist resolutions and telegrams from as many as three thousand organisations; in November 1942 sixty-three senators and almost two hundred members of Congress called for a Jewish national home despite Roosevelt’s efforts to downplay public references, and both 1944 party platforms called for “a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth” and unrestricted Jewish immigration — while, as one Zionist leader complained, Zionism remained “a closed book to them” in Washington, and no congressional declaration showed knowledge that more than two-thirds of Palestine’s population was Arab (lines 620-648). By the end of the war 80 percent of Americans had at least heard or read about Palestine, and the Arab claim was pushed aside (lines 638-648). Roosevelt’s February 14, 1945 meeting aboard USS Quincy with Saudi King Abdulaziz Al-Saud — the first meeting of a U.S. president with an Arab leader — produced a pledge to consult fully with both Arabs and Jews and to “do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs”, confirmed by letter in early April, and a stated wish to “re-examine our entire policy in Palestine”; within weeks he authorised Wise to state publicly that he continued to support unlimited Jewish immigration and a Jewish state, and the State Department had to explain the inconsistency away (lines 650-672). The Arab side remained unheard: an Arab Information Office opened in Washington only in 1945, and the Palestinian image was damaged above all by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Hussaini, whose cooperation with Nazi Germany, on Philip Mattar’s conclusion as quoted here, his defenders ignored while Zionists exaggerated his connections to prove war crimes; the Arab Revolt and Britain’s response killed over three thousand Arabs, and Britain’s exile or arrest of the entire local Arab political leadership left the Arabs in disarray, increasingly dependent on the Arab states and so reinforcing the belief that all Arabs were interchangeable — while Transjordan’s King Abdullah was being encouraged by Britain and the Zionists to prepare to absorb any part of Palestine left outside a future Jewish state (lines 660-696). Even a better Palestinian effort, Christison concludes, would probably not have altered events against the combined weight of the frame, the Holocaust, the organised Zionist lobby and the Arab states’ undercutting of Palestinian claims; the era’s engine was policy inertia, which made the 1917 commitment an unassailable pillar (lines 674-710). Eleanor Roosevelt stated the resulting mind-set in Damascus in 1952: support for the Balfour promise had “practically committed our government to assist in the creation of a government there eventually, because there cannot be a homeland without a government” (lines 698-710).

Chapter 4: Harry Truman: History Belongs to the Victors (lines 712-1022 / printed p.61-94)

The chapter opens with the “old” history of 1948 as Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris describe it — written by official historians, participants and hagiographers, holding the Zionist movement “incomparably just and moral” and Arab leaders “feudal and obscurantist all” — which Americans accepted because the image of a small, besieged Israel building a nation from barren desert recalled their own revolution and pioneer history and answered the Holocaust’s horrors (lines 712-720). By 1945 Israel’s creation was, on this account, inevitable, and the Palestinians’ displacement became Kerr’s “unrecognizable episode”; Truman has been lionised for half a century as the man who made Israel’s birth possible, weeping when Israel’s chief rabbi and later Ben-Gurion credited him with Israel’s rebirth (lines 722-730). His support was in fact ambivalent: Truman the statesman heeded the anti-Zionist advice of every government agency, Truman the man was emotionally bound to securing a Jewish haven, and Truman the politician, at about 35 percent popularity in an election year, was attuned to the Jewish vote; none of the three had much concern for the Arab side (lines 726-734). A Bible lover who considered himself an expert on Jews and Arabs alike, he acted first on Earl Harrison’s June 1945 report on the displaced-persons camps, passing to the British Harrison’s recommendation that one hundred thousand Jewish displaced persons be admitted to Palestine without grasping that immigration was inseparable from the political question, since it would tip the demographic balance overnight; he did not favour a Jewish state in his first year or two and said he was unwilling to send “half a million American soldiers” to defend the Jews in Palestine (lines 736-744). Arab intercessions did not arouse his concern: Egyptian Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha’s mid-1945 letter — British census estimates given here put Palestine’s end-1944 population at 1,179,000 Arabs and 554,000 Jews — protested that “the guests at the Arab’s table are declaring that in any case they are going to bring in large numbers of their kinsmen, take over all of his lands, and rule to suit themselves”; Truman quoted the letter in his memoirs a decade later yet still put the Arabs’ announced defence of their “rights” after the November 1947 partition decision in derisive quotation marks (lines 748-758). Partition is presented as unjust in Arab eyes on three grounds: imposed by an outside body without a significant Palestinian voice; 55 percent of the land designated for the Jewish state when Jews owned 7 percent and made up one-third of the population; and a substantial Arab minority left inside the Jewish state (lines 752-758). Truman inverted Self-determination, treating 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”, where the principle had generally meant, in George Lenczowski’s observation, the right of a subjugated people to determine its own destiny, not another people’s right to rule over an unwilling conquered people (lines 752-758). He took no definite stand except when the outcome was already inevitable — partition support, then immediate recognition in May 1948 — and was torn by strategic dilemmas (Soviet entry, Arab oil and the Marshall Plan, UN credibility) while the moral dilemma, a clash of two just causes, he did not struggle with because he believed from the beginning that justice was on the Jews’ side (lines 760-774). His battle with the State Department arose less from its opposition to a Jewish state than from patrician diplomats patronising the Missouri haberdasher — his “striped pants boys” — though he took George Marshall’s opposition seriously; his anger at Zionist pressure, which banned Abba Hillel Silver from the White House after Silver shouted at him and pounded his desk in mid-1946, was in the end overcome by his own sympathies and by inevitability (lines 776-778). The decisive influences were his friend and former business partner Eddie Jacobson, who in early 1948 persuaded him to receive Weizmann, at which meeting Truman committed himself to partition and Jewish statehood — a contribution Truman credited as of “decisive importance” — and his three pro-Zionist advisers Clark Clifford, David Niles and Max Lowenthal, whose memoranda fed him material built on stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims: Clifford in early March 1948 warned that U.S. uncertainty over partition made it appear to be “trembling before threats of a few nomadic desert tribes” and guilty of “shilly-shallying appeasement of the Arabs”, and Niles sought to plant the idea that Christian Arabs had “more to fear from the Moslems than from any other competitive religious groups” (lines 780-798, 798-806). Niles passed State Department memoranda opposing partition to the Zionists and served as their principal entrée to the White House; a February 1948 Jewish Agency meeting with a Zionist “brain trust” settled a two-track approach — pressing the line that Zionism was compatible with U.S. national interests, and impressing on both parties the electoral danger of not supporting partition (lines 780-806). Clifford in November 1947 warned the Philippine ambassador, apparently without Truman’s knowledge, that a vote against partition would endanger U.S. relations with the Philippines, which then voted for partition; and after the indecisive recognition meeting at which Marshall threatened not to vote for Truman if he recognised Israel, Clifford solicited the Jewish Agency’s formal recognition request from its Washington representative Eliahu Epstein, helped write it when no one at the Agency knew how to word it, and with Niles wrote the official U.S. reply — all before Truman had finally decided (lines 808-814). Between 1945 and 1948 U.S. Zionist organisations created the frame that assumed the Zionist program’s rightness: membership grew to just under one million, about one-fifth of the U.S. Jewish population; the United Jewish Appeal raised an annual $150 million in 1947 and 1948, four times the entire nation’s American Red Cross contributions; thirty-three state legislatures representing 85 percent of the U.S. population passed resolutions for a Jewish state in 1945; and in the second half of 1947 the White House received 135,000 telegrams, postcards, letters and petitions on Palestine (lines 816-830). The Zionists’ appeal worked through humanitarian impulses after the Holocaust and through romance and passion: Abba Eban was brought to the United States in 1947 to add zest to a Zionist legal brief that was “scholarly, precise, and authoritative” but lacked any “tang”; I. L. Kenen staged the Zionists’ lack of official UN status to draw attention to their statelessness; and the Exodus 1947, with forty-five hundred European Jewish refugees returned to Europe by the British, persuaded most UNSCOP members that resolving Europe’s Jews’ fate had priority over Palestine’s demographic realities (lines 824-846). Boston Herald editor Frank Buxton, an Anglo-American Committee member, wrote after the partition decision, “Regardless of the relative merits of the Jewish and Arab claims, here’s something portentious [sic] and exhilarating—’ manifest destiny,’ ‘the in evitability of history,’”; committee member Richard Crossman predicted Americans would “give the Jewish settler in Palestine the benefit of the doubt, and regard the Arab as the aboriginal who must go down before the march of progress” (lines 840-860). By late 1947 the Arabs’ only possible course was compromise on partition, for what was politically possible no longer had any relation to what they believed just; the Arab Higher Committee’s boycott of UNSCOP, on the conviction that no outside body had authority to decide the fate of their land, made the Zionists appear reasonable and the Arabs intransigent, and the Arabs rejected both UNSCOP’s majority partition recommendation and its minority federated-state recommendation, and in November 1947 the General Assembly’s partition vote (lines 846-860). Partition itself had long been a foregone conclusion: the question on all minds except the Palestinians’ was how, no longer whether, Jews could find a home in Palestine, and the Arabs, long invisible, became a nuisance and an obstacle to a Britain seeking an easy exit, a world eager to solve the Jewish refugee problem, a new UN seeking credibility, and a United States seeking to limit Cold War tensions and accommodate a politically powerful segment of its population (lines 862-868). The press was the battleground on which administration factions fought: in the fifty days after the November 29, 1947 vote the New York Times alone ran 360 articles on Palestine in seven weeks, the paper moved from opposing a religiously based state to accepting “any favorable UN decision” once UNSCOP recommended partition, and the New Republic held that whether the UN decision “was wise or unwise, just or unjust, was from that moment on irrelevant” (lines 870-884). The March 1948 trusteeship episode — State proposing trusteeship to postpone partition, Truman first entertaining it, then, after a secret meeting with Weizmann, promising continued support for partition without informing State, while State announced trusteeship without informing Truman — left Truman controlled rather than controlling in his interaction with a press that had become a partition advocate (lines 870-884). Reporting of the 1948 fighting was virtually all from the Jewish perspective, with value-laden vocabularies (“feudal”, “violent”, “fanatics”, “murderous” for Arabs; “American-like”, “heroes”, “clean”, “courageous”, “peaceloving” for Israelis), and the press knew from the start Israel would win: the Haganah had 35,780 troops mobilized in May 1948 and 63,000 by July, against about 30,000 combined regular Arab troops in Palestine at any stage, with superior organization and command (lines 886-904). Polls reflected the Palestinians’ disappearance, even in their wording: in 1947, 82 percent answered “Jews” or “Zionists” to which groups had been having trouble in Palestine, against 45 percent answering “Arabs” or “Mohammedans” (lines 906-914). After the war the press articulated a Palestine minus its Arabs — Gertrude Samuels’s sabras as “bronzed, blue-eyed, tough and blond”, a Jerusalem panorama caption that noted the Jewish Quarter’s destruction and the New City “95 per cent Jewish controlled” while omitting destroyed Palestinian neighbourhoods and towns, and James McDonald’s 1951 certainty that the heroic themes were already well known — while over seven hundred thousand displaced Palestinians received minimal coverage, a March 1949 State Department study concluding the U.S. public was generally unaware of the refugee problem (lines 906-924). The Broadcasts myth became folklore: Israeli historians using declassified archives concluded there were no broadcast or blanket orders to leave, and Morris concluded the exodus had multiple causes, with “the final and decisive precipitant to flight” in most cases attack by Jewish/Israeli forces or fear of it, and expulsion occurring more often in the war’s second half; Weizmann called the exodus a “miraculous simplification of Israel’s tasks” (lines 926-940). State, vilified as anti-Zionist, had in fact been joined by Defense, the Joint Chiefs, the NSC staff and the CIA in strategic opposition to partition, and changed direction with alacrity once Israel was a reality: by June 1948 its policy was “postulated upon the continuing existence of the State of Israel”, it assumed the Palestinian state called for by partition would never come into being and that the remaining Arab areas would go to Transjordan and Egypt, and by November 1948 the official U.S. position was that “Arab Palestine standing alone could not constitute a viable independent state” — a formulation repeated by rote at least through the Bush administration (lines 942-960). The Zionist–Abdullah discussions to split Palestine, the All Palestine Government episode (State calling a Palestinian government prejudicial to Palestine’s Arabs for lack of consultation while itself pursuing transfer of the Arab areas to Transjordan without consultation), and State’s impatience with Arabs who would not accept Jewish contributions are given as the frame in bureaucratic practice (lines 962-974). The United States supported UN General Assembly Resolution 194 in December 1948 but took few serious steps to pursue it; proposals to repatriate one to two hundred thousand were explored and never agreed, and Israel eventually permitted only about twenty-five thousand to return; the approximately 725,000 displaced are treated throughout U.S. policy as refugees without political content, never as a people with national rights (lines 976-982). Dulles summed up official sentiment to two Lebanese officials in December 1948: Israel’s establishment “under livable conditions was a historical necessity”, doing so “involved certain injustices to the Arab States” — the injustices already assigned to the states, not to the Palestinians (lines 984-996). Truman was an uncertain midwife, deciding only at the last minute; policymakers in the end merely reacted — to compassion, to Zionist pressure, to the information campaign, and to a mind-set that painted Arabs in dark colors — and acceptance of the inevitable was swift, the Joint Chiefs by early 1949 viewing Israel as a strategic asset, a military power second in the Middle East only to Turkey (lines 984-1022). The issue became zero-sum, and a moral corollary held Palestinians immoral for opposing a Jewish state at all; against this, Eban is quoted in retrospect that the Palestine Arabs, absent the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, “could have counted on eventual independence” and that had they submitted to Zionism with docility “they would have been the first people in history to have voluntarily renounced their majority status” (lines 1000-1022).

Chapter 5: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson: Possession Is Nine-Tenths of the Law (lines 1024-1300 / printed p.95-123)

Out of sight, out of mind: throughout the 1950s and 1960s the name Palestine disappeared from the political register, its remaining parts designated the Gaza Strip and the West Bank under Egypt and Jordan, and Palestinians were known only as “Arab refugees”; Israel, as victor, possessed the territory and the history and set the limits of discourse (lines 1024-1044). Eisenhower had no emotional commitment to Israel — Eban recalls him saying of Jews that the Bible “spoke of cherubim and seraphim and other creatures who, to the best of his knowledge, no longer existed. He [had] thought the Jews were in this category of extinct species” — and was the only president to exert heavy pressure on Israel for a territorial withdrawal, after the 1956 Suez War; he ordered State to handle affairs “exactly as though we didn’t have a Jew in America”, kept no “Jewish portfolio”, and held that “to take sides” “could do nothing but to destroy our influence” (lines 1046-1058). But his impartiality assumed the post-1948 status quo — no Palestinian entity, Jordanian and Egyptian control of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel within the 1949 armistice borders — so it worked against Palestinian interests, and throughout his two terms decision makers made virtually no effort to identify anyone with authority to speak for the Palestinians (lines 1060-1074). His overriding concerns were preventing Soviet penetration and guaranteeing oil access: support for Nasser’s right to nationalize the Suez Canal but opposition to the 1956 invasion and to Israel’s excessive retaliation, the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of Mussadegh in Iran, and Marines sent to Lebanon in 1958 (lines 1060-1074). Dulles lamented after a Middle East tour that Arabs were more afraid of Zionism than of communism and had found “deep resentment” against the United States; by 1958 Eisenhower was musing about how to “get at the underlying Arab thinking” and in the end more or less ceased trying (lines 1076-1084). The July 1953 NSC objectives document acknowledged the “Arab refugee problem” only in a rote formula of resettlement, repatriation “to the extent feasible” and economic development, and called for settlement “between the Arab states and Israel” (lines 1076-1084). Eban, ambassador throughout the 1950s, made Israel “so acceptable to the American public” that any administration would be reluctant to carry a disagreement to confrontation, working through U.S. Jewish organizations and American Israel Public Affairs Committee — formed in 1951 under I. L. Kenen, which secured congressional support for aid before Eban formally approached Secretary of State Acheson (lines 1086-1112). Popular culture did the rest: Commager in 1958 calling Arab nationalism committed to “chauvinism, militarism, and territorial and cultural imperialism”, the Nation and National Review vilifying Arabs and Nasser, Hollywood’s “cultural convergence” promoted by Teddy Kollek, and above all Leon Uris’s Exodus (novel 1958, film 1960), commissioned as a public-relations scheme, sold over twenty million copies as a book and reached hundreds of millions as a film, portraying Palestinians as fanatical successors to the Nazis on land that “had lain neglected and unwanted for a thousand years in fruitless despair until the Jews rebuilt it” (lines 1098-1130). Kennedy tried again to befriend Nasser and again on repatriation and resettlement, and failed on both: Arab states feared resettlement would signify acceptance of the dispossession, and Kennedy, who dealt with Israel and Arab states but talked around Palestinians — “a problem, not a people” — took relations with Israel, which he was frank had helped elect him (an estimated 80 percent of the Jewish vote), to precedence (lines 1114-1150). Kennedy was the first president to call the tie a “special relationship”, the first to appoint a full-time White House aide for contact with the U.S. Jewish community, and the first to sell arms to Israel, the 1963 Hawk missiles — a sale whose real purpose, Christison argues, was a failed inducement to stop Israel’s nuclear-weapons production at Dimona, detected by U-2 photographs in December 1960; a March 1963 CIA memorandum, noting “Israel already enjoys a clear military superiority over its Arab adversaries, singly or combined”, predicted nuclear acquisition would render Israeli policy toward the Arabs “more rather than less tough” (lines 1152-1170). Johnson told an Israeli diplomat Israel had lost a great friend in Kennedy but “you have found a better one”, and cast the frame in concrete: his circle of friends and advisers — Ephraim Evron, Abe Fortas, Arthur Goldberg, Walt and Eugene Rostow, Harry McPherson, Abraham Feinberg, Arthur and Mathilde Krim — shaped his view, and, in Eban’s words, he sought “to find out everything essential about Israel in the briefest possible time” while making no similar effort to learn about Arabs from Arabs (lines 1172-1192). Eugene Rostow’s later writings, describing the Mandate and the 1948 war without ever mentioning Palestine’s Arabs or their exodus and premised on there being no distinct Palestinian people with rights in Palestine, illustrate Kerr’s “unrecognizable episode” (lines 1184-1192). Johnson’s primary concern in May-June 1967 was avoiding U.S. involvement, though U.S. intelligence was unanimous Israel would need only a week to ten days to “whip hell out of” the Arabs; his 1971 memoirs dismissed the refugee issue and asked the region to turn “away from the past” and accept Israel as a reality, mislocating Arab resentment in Israel’s mere emergence rather than in the Palestinians’ dispossession (lines 1194-1220). The PLO was formed by fiat at an Arab summit in 1964 to co-opt the Palestinian movement and was dismissed accordingly, while Fatah under Arafat, organized by the early 1960s on armed struggle and political self-reliance, took over the PLO’s leadership within four years and by 1968 had transformed it into an umbrella organization generally independent of the Arab states (lines 1222-1226 and lines 1228-1300). The policy formed after the 1967 war — Israel to withdraw from territories only for a “real, guaranteed, meaningful peace” — became UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called for a just settlement of the refugee problem without mentioning Palestinians by name or in a political context (lines 1228-1246). The Eichmann Trial of 1961 and the Holocaust theology of Wiesel, Fackenheim and Greenberg transferred European history to the Middle East — Marc Ellis: “insofar as Palestinian Arabs and the Arab world in general attempt to thwart Jewish empowerment in Israel, they symbolize to Holocaust theologians the continuity of the Nazi drama” — and after the 1967 war sympathy for Israel surged to 55 percent while sympathy for Arabs fell to near zero (lines 1248-1300). More than two hundred thousand Palestinians became refugees in 1967, perhaps almost half of them fleeing a second time, and Israel now ruled one and a quarter million Palestinians; the shock of 1967 and Fatah’s resistance at Karameh in March 1968 raised Palestinian political consciousness and drove thousands of recruits to the guerrilla organizations (lines 1248-1300).

Chapter 6: Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: An Unrecognizable Episode (lines 1302-1620 / printed p.124-156)

Nixon came to office in 1969 intending impartiality but knowing little about the Palestinians; neither Rogers nor Kissinger was better informed, and Kissinger, who became keenly aware of the Palestinians’ centrality, spent much of his last three years in office trying to undermine their growing political strength (lines 1302-1320). Both men were globalists for whom every Middle East move was primarily a move against the Soviet Union: Nixon began espousing “evenhandedness”, believing the Arab world had aligned with Moscow because the United States had not been impartial, but came over to Kissinger’s strategy of strengthening U.S. allies, guaranteeing Israel’s military superiority and frustrating Soviet efforts to satisfy Arab demands, against the State Department regionalists around Rogers, who held the conflict had local causes and deadlock only worsened the U.S. position (lines 1322-1342). The Rogers Plan of 1969, calling for withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders with “minor adjustments”, was put forth as a signal to the Arabs while Nixon and Kissinger separately signaled the Israelis the United States did not wholeheartedly support it (lines 1322-1342). The September 1970 Jordan crisis — fedayeen growth after Karameh, the PFLP’s hijacking of four airliners, Syrian tanks crossing into northern Jordan, and Hussein’s request for U.S. and Israeli help — was read by Nixon and Kissinger purely as a face-down with Moscow, although, on the evidence given here, the Soviets had no relationship with the fedayeen or the PLO, no reason to overthrow Hussein, and urged restraint; Talcott Seelye called the claim of Soviet involvement “pure nonsense” (lines 1344-1358). Nixon mentioned Palestinians more than twice nowhere in his 1,100-page memoir, and then as guerrillas or extremists; Kissinger, who before 1969 had never visited an Arab country, gives in his memoirs an account of the conflict’s origins that omits the Palestinians and their displacement entirely (lines 1360-1392). The Jordan crisis established Israel as a strategic asset: U.S. military credits rose from $25million,$85 million and $30millioninfiscal1968-1970to$545 million, $300millionand$307.5 million in fiscal 1971-1973, and $2.2billioninfiscal1974;in1971NixonpromisednottopressIsraeltowithdrawtothepre-1967borders,nottoforceitintocomprehensivenegotiations,andnottoforceittoaccepttheArabversionofarefugeesettlement(lines1394-1406).TheIsrael-centeredframethusbecameamatterofformalagreement,andtheadministrationsettledintoatorporKissingerlateracknowledgedhadmisjudgedSadat,missedhisFebruary1971interimSuezproposal,andfailedtorespondtohisexpulsionoffifteenthousandSovietadvisersin1972,untilEgyptandSyri{a}^{\prime }scoordinatedOctober1973attackshatteredthecomplacency(lines1408-1426).A1975pollassignedvirtuallyallpositivecharacteristicstoIsraelisoverArabsbymarginsofsixorseventoone,and"likeAmericans"toIsraelisby50percentto5percent;AIPACbroughtfourteenhundredJewishleadersfromthirty-onestatestoWashingtoninJanuary1970againsttheRogersPlan,its\ast MythsandFacts\ast wentthroughsixeditionsand750,000copiesbetween1964and1980,andJINSA,formedafterthe1973war,setoutnottolobby"butinshapingthought"amongU.S.defenseofficials(lines1428-1454).After1973theUnitedStatesworkedtoskirtthePalestinianissueandbounditselffurther:KissingerwatereddowntheGenevaconferenceinvitationtoexcludementionofPalestiniansandsecretlypromisedIsraelnootherpartieswouldbeinvitedwithouttheinitialparticipant{s}^{\prime }agreement,andtheUnitedStatescommitteditselfnottobeapartytointerpretingResolution242inawaythatwouldalter"thecharacteroftheStateofIsrael"(lines1456-1466).Arafatmadeatleastfouroverturesshortlybeforeandduringthe1973warindicatingacceptanceofIsraelandadesiretonegotiate;Kissingersent"anothingmessage"tothefirst,ignoredthesecondandthird,andsentGeneralVernonWaltersinNovember1973tolisten,notnegotiate,inordertokeepthePLOquiescent,andnothingpoliticalcameofthecontacts(lines1456-1484).AfterthefailureofanIsraeli-Jordanianagreementinsummer1974,theRabatsummitinOctober1974endorsedthePLOasthe"solelegitimaterepresentative"ofthePalestinianpeople,andamonthlaterArafattoldtheUN,"Ihavecometoyoubearinganolivebranchandthefreedomfighte{r}^{\prime }sgun.Donotlettheolivebranchfallfrommyhand";theUnitedStatesconcentratedontherevolveronhiship,andKissingerdismissedthespeechascallingforasuccessorstate(lines1468-1494).InMarchandApril1975ArafattoldSenatorsMcGovernandBakerthePLOwouldacceptastatelimitedtotheWestBankandGazaandagreetomutualrecognition(lines1486-1494).InSeptember1975,aspartofSinaiII,theUnitedStatespledgeditwould"notrecognizeornegotiatewiththePalestineLiberationOrganizationsolongasthePalestineLiberationOrganizationdoesnotrecognizeIsrae{l}^{\prime }srighttoexistanddoesnotacceptSecurityCouncilResolutions242and338"—arareself-limitationonU.S.foreign-policyautonomythatalsocastPalestiniansasintransigentfordecliningdemandsChristisonpresentsasunusual:Resolution242didnotdealwithPalestinianspolitically,andspecificrecognitionofanatio{n}^{\prime }s"right"toexisthadnotbeenrequiredofanyothernationorentity(lines1496-1508).Ford,whomentionedPalestiniansnowhereinhis1979memoirs,announcedareassessmentofpolicytowardIsraelinMarch1975andsuspendednewmilitaryandeconomicagreements;afterseventy-sixsenatorssignedaletterurginghimto"beresponsive"toIsrae{l}^{\prime }srequestfor$2.59 billion in aid, the reassessment ended with no policy change, and the outside experts’ near-unanimous advice to pursue a comprehensive Geneva settlement was shelved for the step-by-step process Israel favoured (lines 1510-1534). In November 1975 Harold Saunders testified that “in many ways” the Palestinian problem was the “heart” of the conflict — the Saunders Document, worded with extreme caution (Palestinians as “the Arab peoples who consider themselves Palestinians”), publicly dismissed by Kissinger as an “academic exercise” after Israeli and U.S. supporter anger, but a milestone: the first U.S. awareness the Palestinian issue had a political context (lines 1536-1576). Georgie Anne Geyer’s account of her own prejudice against Arabs and of “one of the most grotesque characterizations in journalistic history” in the U.S. press, the Jennings-Dunsmore 1970 documentary, and Sadat’s measured post-1973 public image mark the slow first stage of altering the mind-set (lines 1550-1620). The Palestinian image was double-edged: terrorism finally brought the name Palestinian to world consciousness and made terrorist and Palestinian synonymous, lingering for decades, yet also functioned as a “form of mass communication” without which Rabat, the UN invitation and the Saunders Document would most likely not have happened; Bernard Lewis’s January 1975 Commentary article and Hisham Sharabi’s account of having to be “moderate” to be heard close the chapter, with the conclusion that the 1975 PLO gag became the new blind spot and the easy way to avoid the Palestinian issue for another fifteen years or more (lines 1578-1620).

Chapter 7: Jimmy Carter: Making a Difference (lines 1622-1722 / printed p.157-167, in progress)

Carter changed the vocabulary and to a great extent the frame: broaching a Palestinian homeland, trying to deal with the PLO, recognizing Palestinians as a critical factor in any settlement, he made through 1977 an imaginative, good-faith effort no president before or since matched, and was ultimately defeated by the frame’s persistence and by electoral politics — no president except Eisenhower has won an election while putting heavy pressure on Israel (lines 1622-1656). He knew little about the Middle East when elected in 1976, and what he knew came from an Israeli perspective — one Israeli-government tour as Georgia governor, no Arab country visited, no Arab leader met — and held his commitment to Israeli security unshakable, as “compatible with the teachings of the Bible, hence ordained by God”; yet he came to office, in Saunders’s observation, almost alone among presidents knowing there were two sides to the conflict (lines 1622-1656). At Clinton, Massachusetts, on March 16, 1977, he said, uncleared with his aides and on his instructions never disavowed: “There has to be a homeland provided for the Palestinian refugees who have suffered for many, many years” — a break with the wisdom that located Palestinian hostility in nothing more than objection to Jews in their midst (lines 1622-1656). Human rights was the lens: Saunders and Quandt recall Carter comparing Palestinians to blacks in the South, another disenfranchised people, and answering that the conflict was hopeless and primordial by likening it to integration — behaviour, if not hearts, could be changed (lines 1622-1656). Yet Carter never defined what a homeland meant, never favoured an independent Palestinian state (favouring a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation and an end to occupation), and was concerned primarily with universal rights — to vote, to meet and debate, to own property free of confiscation, to be free of military rule — calling Israel’s “continued deprivation of Palestinian rights” “indefensible” (lines 1658-1674). His interest was intellectual rather than emotional; he never met a Palestinian until his 1983 trip as a private citizen, after which he told Saunders he had previously dismissed Saunders’s and Quandt’s accounts as the “experts’ view” but had discovered they were right, and was struck, on being handed a PLO leaflet, by how many times the word national appeared in it (lines 1658-1674). His team was unique: Brzezinski, who in 1975 had coauthored a Foreign Policy article advocating an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and helped draft the December 1975 Brookings report urging a comprehensive settlement with Palestinian self-determination, and Vance, a regionalist legalist who believed Palestinians had been “ejected from their homes” in 1948 and chafed under the 1975 no-negotiation pledge — against Mondale, David Aaron, Stuart Eizenstat and other domestic advisers who pressed for friendlier, politically safer policies toward Israel (lines 1676-1722). Quandt’s observation that presidents must function within boundaries set by the electoral cycle frames the chapter’s close in this part: Carter met a stone wall erected by Israel’s U.S. supporters and by Israel itself under Begin, the prime minister most determined not simply to ignore the Palestinians but actively to thwart their aspirations and extend Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza (lines 1702-1722). Part 2 ends mid-chapter, at printed p.167.

Key passages

• “The perception that the Palestinians have no rational basis for their hostility to Israel and no legitimate national claim to the land of Palestine is fundamental to the misconceptions surrounding this conflict” (lines 145-149 / printed p.1).
• “Americans and Israelis are bonded together like no two other sovereign peoples” (Peter Grose, quoted lines 159-167 / printed p.2-3).
• “blanket instructions, by radio or otherwise, to Palestine’s Arabs to flee” — Morris’s conclusion, as quoted, that no Arab authority issued such instructions (lines 179-189 / printed p.4-5).
• “the building-blocks from which a society constructs its collective self-image” — Meron Benvenisti on national myths, quoted lines 179-189 / printed p.4-5.
• “Arabic is a controversial language” — a New York publisher’s reason, as recalled by a Columbia professor, for selecting none of Naguib Mahfouz’s novels for translation (lines 215-227 / printed p.8-9).
• “in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country” — Balfour’s memorandum, quoted lines 425-433 / printed p.31-32.
• “that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase” — the King-Crane Commission’s impression, as reported lines 435-445 / printed p.32-33.
• “fit for Bedlam only” — the New York Times’s estimation of an independent Palestinian Arab state, as reported lines 502-510 / printed p.39-40.
• “is where America has met most of its Arabs” — an unnamed expert on the movie screen, quoted lines 518-528 / printed p.40-41.
• “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” — Roosevelt’s stated understanding of the Balfour Declaration, quoted lines 590-590 / printed p.48.
• “do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs” — Roosevelt’s undertaking to King Abdul Aziz, as reported lines 650-658 / printed p.54-55.
• “practically committed our government to assist in the creation of a government there eventually, because there cannot be a homeland without a government” — Eleanor Roosevelt, Damascus, 1952, quoted lines 698-710 / printed p.59-61.
• “the guests at the Arab’s table are declaring that in any case they are going to bring in large numbers of their kinsmen, take over all of his lands, and rule to suit themselves” — Nuqrashi Pasha to Truman, quoted lines 748-750 / printed p.65.
• “appears in the ridiculous role of trembling before threats of a few nomadic desert tribes” — Clifford’s March 1948 memorandum to Truman, quoted lines 780-798 / printed p.68-70.
• “did not realize that the President had still not decided how to respond to the request I had just solicited” — Clifford on Eliahu Epstein and the recognition request, quoted lines 808-814 / printed p.71-72.
• “give the Jewish settler in Palestine the benefit of the doubt, and regard the Arab as the aboriginal who must go down before the march of progress” — Richard Crossman’s prediction, quoted lines 846-860 / printed p.76-77.
• “the final and decisive precipitant to flight” — Morris’s conclusion on the 1948 exodus, as quoted lines 926-940 / printed p.84-86.
• “Arab Palestine standing alone could not constitute a viable independent state” — the official U.S. position by November 1948, as reported lines 948-960 / printed p.86-88.
• “Israel already enjoys a clear military superiority over its Arab adversaries, singly or combined” — a March 1963 CIA memorandum, quoted lines 1152-1170 / printed p.107-109.
• “I have come to you bearing an olive branch and the freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand” — Arafat at the UN, November 1974, quoted lines 1486-1494 / printed p.142-143.
• “not recognize or negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization so long as the Palestine Liberation Organization does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and does not accept Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338” — the September 1975 U.S. memorandum of understanding with Israel, quoted lines 1496-1508 / printed p.143-144.
• “There has to be a homeland provided for the Palestinian refugees who have suffered for many, many years” — Carter at Clinton, Massachusetts, March 16, 1977, quoted lines 1622-1656 / printed p.160.

Evidence the work relies on

• Malcolm Kerr’s 1980 observations on the conventional wisdom, as Christison presents them (lines 145-149).
• Edward Said, Orientalism, on the self-reinforcing life of authoritative texts and on orientalism as a corporate institution (lines 169-177, 303-305).
• Dan Kurzman’s search of Israeli military archives and BBC radio monitoring files, and Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, from declassified Israeli archives, on the absence of Arab broadcast evacuation orders (lines 179-189).
• Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (1983), on the U.S.–Israel bond, on anti-Semitic children’s literature, and on Balfour “rising above” self-determination (lines 159-167, 345-375, 435-445).
• Studies of newspaper coverage of Palestine in 1917 and through the 1920s in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Washington Post, including article counts for 1929 (lines 488-516).
• British demographic statistics, as cited, for immigration 1920-1938 and population balances in 1920, 1939 and at the end of 1944 (lines 592-598, 748-750).
• The King-Crane Commission report of 1919, Balfour’s 1919 memorandum, and the McMahon correspondence, as presented (lines 425-453).
• Memoirs and recollections as quoted: Truman’s memoirs, Dean Acheson’s account of the 1946 Truman–Faysal meeting, Clark Clifford’s memoirs on the partition vote and the recognition request, Abba Eban’s recollections, and I. L. Kenen’s account of Zionist lobbying (lines 748-758, 808-814, 832-846).
• Philip Mattar’s biography of the Mufti, as quoted on Husseini’s cooperation with Nazi Germany (lines 674-696).
• Bruce Evensen’s study of media treatment of the Palestine question in 1947-48, and the New York Times article counts for the fifty days after the partition vote (lines 862-894).
• Force figures for the 1948 fighting, as cited: Haganah mobilization in May and July 1948 against combined regular Arab strength in Palestine (lines 896-904).
• The July 1953 National Security Council objectives document on the Middle East (lines 1076-1084).
• The March 1963 CIA internal memorandum on Israel’s military superiority and the likely effects of nuclear acquisition, and a former CIA Tel Aviv station chief’s account of the Hawk-for-nuclear inducement (lines 1152-1170).
• U.S. military credit figures for fiscal 1968-1974, as cited, before and after the 1970 Jordan crisis (lines 1394-1406).
• Kissinger’s and Nixon’s memoirs, as quoted and as evidence of omission on the Palestinians (lines 1360-1392).
• The 1975 public-opinion poll assigning value-laden words to Israelis or Arabs (lines 1428-1440).
• Harold Saunders’s November 1975 testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Middle East Subcommittee, the Saunders Document (lines 1536-1576).
• The December 1975 Brookings Institution report and Brzezinski’s 1975 Foreign Policy article, as presented (lines 1676-1700).
• A review of State Department communications 1939-1948, and a scholar’s study of State Department memoranda of the 1920s, both as cited without the reviewers being named in the text read so far (lines 455-463, 612-618).

Analysis

Christison’s method in the part read is to reconstruct, administration by administration, three things together: what the president and his key policymakers knew and assumed, what the public was shown by press, books and film, and what organised pressure reached the decision-makers — and to argue that the first two, formed long before any given decision, explain the third’s success. The frame-of-reference concept does the analytical work: it is not a claim that any single decision was bought, but that the range of thinkable options was set in advance, so that Arab claims repeatedly failed to register as claims at all. The evidence given is largely secondary — historians’ studies of press coverage, memoirs, and other scholars’ archival findings such as Morris’s and Kurzman’s — presented in narrative form; the part read gives figures with sources in its notes (the notes themselves are in a later part). A limit visible in the part read: the Arab side is itself often characterised through its absence and its organisational weakness, and Arab actors appear mainly at the moments they failed to penetrate the U.S. frame, a presentation Christison treats as part of the phenomenon rather than as a judgment on the justice of the Arab case, which she states plainly at several points (for example lines 748-758, 846-860).

People, organizations, places and events

Kathleen Christison, Malcolm Kerr, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Yasir Arafat, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar al-Sadat, Golda Meir, Harold H. Saunders, Hisham Sharabi, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Fatah, Palestine Liberation Organization, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, UN General Assembly Resolution 194, UN Security Council Resolution 242, Karameh, Eichmann Trial, June 1967 War, Yom Kippur War, Peter Grose, Edward Said, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Mark Twain, William Blackstone, Woodrow Wilson, Louis D. Brandeis, Chaim Weizmann, Stephen Wise, Felix Frankfurter, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Clark Clifford, David Niles, Max Lowenthal, Abba Hillel Silver, Abba Eban, David Ben-Gurion, Abdulaziz Al-Saud, Amin al-Hussaini, Zionist Organization of America, American Zionist Emergency Council, American Palestine Committee, Jewish Agency, King-Crane Commission, Balfour Declaration, UNSCOP, Arab Higher Committee, UN General Assembly Resolution 181, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, United States

Concepts

Frame of reference, Orientalism, Broadcasts myth, Nakba, Self-determination, Eretz Israel, Christian Zionism, Zionism

How it relates to other sources

• With The Question of Palestine: Christison takes Said’s Orientalism as an explicit analytical frame for U.S. perceptions, and likewise centres the Balfour Declaration’s disregard of the native majority; where Said argues the Palestinian narrative’s exclusion, Christison traces the same exclusion inside U.S. policymaking, press and film administration by administration.
• With Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation: both quote Balfour’s 1919 memorandum dismissing consultation of the “700,000 Arabs”; Makdisi gives the King-Crane Commission’s finding that the Zionist program could be carried out only by force of arms, which Christison also reports through British officers consulted by the commission.
• With The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948: on UNSCOP and partition, Christison gives the same majority/minority recommendations and the same 55 percent figure for the Jewish state’s allotted area, and adds the U.S.-side lobbying and perception history — including the Exodus 1947 incident’s effect on UNSCOP members — that the other accounts treat from Palestine.
• With The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine: Kanafani presents the Mufti as head of a feudal-clerical leadership; Christison, through Mattar, presents Husseini as a leader radicalised by the mid-1930s whose cooperation with Nazi Germany damaged the Arab image in the United States — the two accounts are held separately on Amin al-Hussaini.

Open questions

• The “well-known Israeli historian” quoted in the Introduction for history as “the propaganda of the victors” (lines 153-157) is named only in the Notes, in a later part; in Chapter 4 the phrase is attributed to Avi Shlaim (lines 712-720).
• Text-copy spacing slips are frequent and are also present in the original HTML as checked at several points, including the King-Crane passage, which reads in both: “There is noevidence that Wilson, who had as troket womonths after there-port was issued, ever read it” (lines 435-445). The intended reading — no evidence Wilson, who had a stroke two months after the report was issued, ever read it — is given in the reading notes and not adopted silently on this page.
• The Grose quotation at lines 159-167 reads “so Israel restored adopted the vision and the values of the American dream” in both the text copy and the original HTML as checked; the wording is recorded as printed and not corrected.
• Note on the partition figures in this part: both passages give the same allotment and population share — partition allotted the Jewish state 55 percent of the land when Jews made up one-third of the population — at the close of Chapter 3 (lines 698-710) and in Chapter 4 (lines 752-758); the 7 percent Jewish land-ownership figure appears only in the Chapter 4 passage (lines 752-758).
• Whether the encyclopedia editor’s name is printed “Bernard Reich” throughout is to be checked against the Notes in a later part; the text read gives the name in that form (lines 191-199).

Coverage

lines 1-1722 of 7743, read in parts 1-2 of 9. Remaining: lines 1723-7743 (parts 3-9).