The Dust Never Settled

Woodrow Wilson’s plans for an enduring peace with justice were threatened even before the Senate rejected American membership in the League of Nations. His concession to British and French demands for massive reparations from Germany eventually brought that country to the brink of revolt and economic collapse. Britain and France also wanted colonial rule over the Arab areas liberated from Turkey; they considered barely tolerable the concept of guiding new states to independence under League of Nations mandates. The idea of heeding the findings of a plebiscite in defining the areas to be mandated and their forms of government was even more repugnant to America’s allies. They had plans of their own.

France, supported by the Zionists (well aware that an overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of Palestine opposed a Jewish homeland there), delayed as long as possible the formation of the Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey. President Wilson, committed to the principle of self- determination for the Arabs, finally sent the American section of the commission alone to the Near East in mid-1919. The commission was still in Damascus when the Treaty of Versailles was signed and the concept of government under mandates was approved.

By the time the commission had completed its survey and report, President Wilson had returned to the United States to wage his unsuccessful battle for American membership in the league and ratification of the Versailles Peace Treaty. Now disillusioned and seriously ill, Wilson consigned the King-Crane Report to oblivion in the Department of State. Although sentiment in the Near East strongly favored having the United States as a mandatory power, there seemed to be no possibility that Congress would agree to such foreign involvement. It did not become fully evident until the release in 1947 of the Paris peace documents, however, just how badly America’s failure to assume a responsible place in the peace negotiations and treaty drafting damaged the prospects for justice and stability in the Near East.

In the end, Wilson’s pledges of “self-determination” and “unmolested autonomous development” for the peoples of Arab Asia were ignored by Britain and France. The publication of the King-Crane Report revealed that Wilson’s advisors had been aware of the popular aspirations of the newly liberated people and had accurately forecast the results of the failure of the United States to keep the promises upon which they had relied.

Finding the people of Syria almost unanimous in their opposition to French rule or to the detachment of Lebanon or Palestine to form separate states, the King-Crane Commission recommended that a united Syrian state be given independence and ruled by Emir Feisal of Arabia.

The Allies had accepted the principles of Britain’s Balfour Declaration, and the commission gave lengthy and sympathetic consideration to Zionist aspirations for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In its report, however, the commission opposed this after finding that the majority of the people rejected the concept of imposing a new religious community in the midst of the non-Jewish population of Palestine-nearly nine-tenths of its whole. As for Zionist claims that they had a “right” to Palestine based on an occupation two thousand years before, the commission concluded that these “can hardly be seriously considered.” The commission did recommend a British mandate over Mesopotamia (to become Iraq), and, were Palestine to be severed from Syria, proposed Britain as a mandatory power over Palestine.

In 1920, Britain and France convened the San Remo Conference to decide on peace terms with Turkey. Not having declared war on the Ottoman Empire, the United States was not a participant, nor was it consulted when the British and French used the conference to divide among themselves all oil rights within the Arab countries that had been under Turkish rule. Because of uncertainty about America’s willingness to accept a political role in the Near East, and because of squabbles between the Allies, the Anglo-French mandates were not officially defined until 1923 (in the Treaty of Lausanne). Again, the United States was neither a negotiator nor a signatory.

Meanwhile, Great Britain and France had arbitrarily divided Palestine from the rest of Syria and enlarged the areas over which they had assumed “provisional mandates.” First, the American and British nominee for ruling a united Syria, Emir Feisal, was ousted by French forces, which also annexed parts of Turkey to Syria. Then, despite local opposition, France greatly enlarged the Christian section of Syria (Mount Lebanon) and created an expanded state called Lebanon.

Britain annexed oil-rich Turkish territory (Mosul and Kurdistan) to Mesopotamia and delineated Iraq as an independent state with Feisal as its king. Still beholden to the Hashemite dynasty of Arabia for leading the Arab revolt against Turkey, however, the British divided Palestine, east of the Jordan River, and created Transjordan, with Emir Abdullah on its throne.

This Anglo-French game of musical chairs, contravening American promises of indigenous approval, consisted largely of drawing artificial lines on the Near Eastern map and gravely undermined the prospects of peace in the area. Moreover, these arbitrary territorial divisions were made before the mandates under which they would be governed received ex post facto sanction under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

Between 1918 and 1949, there were eighteen revolts in Syria, and the Syrian independence promised for 1939 was not granted by France until 1945. The French mandate over Lebanon expired in 1941. It was not until 1944 that France agreed to Lebanese independence, and U.S. diplomatic pressure was necessary to force French troops to leave in 1946. In 1942, troops were sent from India and Transjordan to overthrow a nationalistic Iraqi government, illustrating that Iraq’s “independence” existed in name only.

Instead of demanding reparations and seeking new territory at the end of the Second World War, America’s European allies relied on the Marshall Plan to finance their recovery. It was the economic impact of the war on Great Britain that brought the United States to the fringes of the Near Eastern arena, taking over British commitments to support Greece and Turkey against the communists. The assistance furnished these countries under the Truman Doctrine was extended to include Iran, where strong U.S. pressure induced Russia to withdraw troops stationed on Iranian soil since the end of the war. Although American involvement in Arab affairs between the two wars had been largely commercial in nature, postwar developments in Palestine brought the United States squarely into a political confrontation with the Arabs.

Motivated by both humanitarian and domestic political considerations, the Truman administration facilitated passage of the United Nations Partition Resolution of 1947, which recommended the establishment in Palestine of independent Jewish and Arab states, joined by an economic union, and the creation of a U.N. trusteeship over the city of Jerusalem. Vehemently opposed to this formula, the Arab states demanded that an independent Palestinian state replace the British mandate.* Legally, the General Assembly resolution had no standing in international law, and, as violence escalated in the Middle East, it became questionable if partition could be enforced without intervention by outside powers. One of the King-Crane Commission’s conclusions now proved prophetic in connection with Great Britain’s position: in 1919 America’s investigators had concluded that “not less than fifty thousand soldiers would be required even to initiate the [Zionists' Jewish homeland] program” and that it could not “be carried out except by force of arms.” In 1947, Britain’s fifty thousand troops were hard pressed to protect themselves from terrorist attacks and to cope with illegal Jewish immigration. Unwilling to force partition on the Arabs, Great Britain announced that it would relinquish its mandate over Palestine on May 14, 1948, and asked the United Nations to decide the future of that area.

Seeking additional time, the U.S. advocated consideration of a resolution establishing U.N. trusteeship over Palestine, and political solutions were being debated at the moment when British troops abandoned the mandate. Seizing an area considerably larger than that proposed for them in the Partition Resolution, the Jews proclaimed the new state of Israel, and President Truman unexpectedly extended de facto recognition just a few minutes later, leaving the United Nations (including the U.S. delegation) in total confusion. 

Arab armies attacked the new state immediately. Wracked by dissension and equipped with inferior weapons purchased by corrupt politicians, the Arab troops were no match for the survival-motivated Israeli forces. A series of cease-fires and truces were arranged by the U.N. Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, and then broken, always leaving the Israelis with more territory. Four days before the U.N. General Assembly was to meet in Paris to consider Bernadotte’s plan for an Arab-Israeli peace settlement, he was assassinated in Jerusalem by Zionist terrorists who wanted Israel to have all of mandated Palestine. With the final weeks of a presidential-election campaign before them, neither U.S. political party wished to risk losing the Jewish vote by adopting a strong stand on settling the Palestine problem. As 1948 neared its end, the army of Israel held nearly 80 percent of British-mandated Palestine (2,500 square miles more than the 5,600 allotted in the Partition Resolution), including the new city of Jerusalem. Clearly, Israel had established by force of arms both its existence and its ability to survive against the Arabs. Approval of the Provisional Government of Israel’s application for membership in the United Nations, and de jure recognition by the U.S. government, remained pending, however, and American policymakers sought an alternative to the Bernadotte plan. Meanwhile, President Truman’s Near Eastern advisers recommended that American support of Israel’s application for U.N. membership be withheld until the 1949 session of the General Assembly.

This was the situation on December 10, 1948, the day my family and I started west to the Army Language School in California. As I drove toward my first encounter with the Arabs and their language, men who would influence my own life and the course of peace in the Middle East were engaged in critical conversations thousands of miles away.

An excerpt from, “American Presidents and the Middle East” By George Lenczowski, 1990, Duke University Press, Pg. 21 – 30:

In 1939 British-Zionist relations entered a phase of tension. This was the year when, in May, the British government issued a White Paper drastically reducing and eventually stopping altogether Jewish immigration to British-mandated Palestine and severely restricting land transfers from Arab to Jewish owners. To Zionists this act constituted a major defeat, in fact a stunning blow, because it was viewed as a virtual repudiation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. That declaration, in which Britain pledged the establishment of a Jewish Na- tional Home in Palestine, was a charter on which Zionists based their hopes for a redemption of the Jewish people in their own homeland and on the basis of which they brought close to a half-million settlers into the mandated territory.

The British, whose first concern after 1939 was to survive and win the war, enforced their ban on Jewish immigration and land sales resolutely or, as their Zionist critics would say, ruthlessly. Leaky ships bringing Jewish wartime refugees to the Palestine coasts were intercepted by the Royal Navy and either turned away, occasionally to perish in the Mediterranean, or directed to Cyprus-a British crown colony-where their refugee passengers were interned in barbed-wire- enclosed camps for the duration of the war.

In response the Zionists, who had cherished an alliance with Britain since 1917, now turned against her. Their action took three forms. First, on the political level a Zionist conference held in New York in 1942 produced the so-called Biltmore Program which set as a goal the transformation of the whole of Palestine into a Jewish State, rather than the modest establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine (as stipulated by the Balfour Declaration). Furthermore, at the Biltmore Conference American Jews wrested the leadership of the world Zionist movement from the European Jews, whom they criticized for weakness and indecision. Second, major efforts were exerted to promote illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine to save as many survivors of the Hitlerian holocaust as possible. And third, the extremist segment of the Jewish community in Palestine, grouped in such organizations as the Irgun Zvai Leumi under Menachem Begin and the Stern gang, launched, in the latter part of World War II, a campaign of terror against the British, with the ultimate objective of forcing them out of Palestine.

This was precisely the tense situation that President Truman found upon his advent to office. It was aggravated by the presence, in the displaced persons (dp) camps in Western Europe, of multitudes of Jewish survivors whose numbers were growing as a result of the Soviet takeover of Poland and her neighboring countries.

Truman was sworn in as president on April 12, 1945, but already on April 20 Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council, called on him to help in the resettlement of the refugees and to discuss the proposed Jewish homeland and state in Palestine. From that time on the president became intimately involved in the question of Palestine through its successive phases.

The first phase centered on the Jewish refugees in the dp camps and their admission to Palestine. Truman sympathized with the plight of the survivors of the holocaust and, in a genuinely humanitarian spirit, felt that their sufferings should be alleviated. He was critical of the British White Paper of 1939 and, in a communication to Prime Minister Churchill on July 24, 1945, he asked Britain to lift restrictions on Jewish immigration. Following the victory of the Labour Party the president raised the question of refugees with Premier Clem¬ ent Attlee on August 31, 1945, urging Britain to admit immediately 100,000 Jewish immigrants to Palestine.

Despite its earlier endorsement of the Zionist program, once in power the British Labour Party adopted a policy that closely resembled the one followed by its Tory predecessors. This policy could be summed up under two points: first, in view of her widespread imperial interests Britain should avoid provoking the Arab world into a posture of hostility,- second, in view of her strained financial and military resources Britain should seek a peaceful solution in adjudicating Jewish and Arab claims in Palestine, a task deemed impossible to attain if a sudden influx of 100,000 Jews were to occur. For these reasons British response to Truman’s appeals represented a mixture of resentment at the pressures from Washington, criticism of the American initiative as one that urged action in Palestine but eschewed responsibility for its enforcement, and even a degree of cynicism regarding real American motivations. (Later Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, speaking at the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth on June 12, 1946, made a flippant remark that American policy-makers want to ensure Jewish immigration into Palestine “because they did not want too many of them in New York.”)

Concretely, the British proposed, with an eye to sharing responsibility with the United States, to set up an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, a binational “blue ribbon” body, to review the situation in Palestine and recommend a solution. Upon Washington’s acceptance the committee was appointed. It carried out its assigned mission in the period between the first and second appeals made by Truman to admit the refugees. In April 1946 it recommended continuation of the British mandate for Palestine pending the establishment of a United Nations trusteeship; immediate admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees; and repudiation of the land transfer limitations. The next step was the creation of a new Anglo-American Commission whose task was to devise methods to implement the committee’s recommendations. The result was the Grady-Morrison report that recommended the creation of a federalized Jewish-Arab state of Palestine and put forth a requirement of a common Jewish-Arab consent to permit further Jewish immigration. The Grady-Morrison Plan, disappointing as it was to the Zionists, was not accepted by President Truman. Instead, on October 4, 1946, he sent a second message to Attlee repeating his appeal for immediate admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine.

Without going into the complex details of U.S. interagency procedures and the American-British diplomacy, it is possible to state that in this initial phase of the Palestine problem (1945-46) President Truman was primarily concerned with the humanitarian aspects of the Jewish question. Although aware of the Zionist goal to create a state, he was not yet ready to endorse it. In fact, he deplored Zionist appeals for American support as an obstacle to the attainment of the immediate objective, which was to open the gates of Palestine to Jewish refugees.

As the question of Palestine entered its second phase, following the collapse of joint U.S. -British efforts to adopt a mutually acceptable solution, the issue of statehood emerged as the primary concern of international diplomacy. It coincided with the British decision, in April 1947, to submit the Palestinian dispute to a special session of the United Nations General Assembly. As the assembly and its Special Committee on Palestine (unscop) deliberated in the spring, summer, and fall of 1947, the president’s ideas on Jewish statehood gradually crystallized.

It is interesting to observe that Truman’s perceptions in this matter were rooted in his belief in the principle of self-determination. This was, in terms of history and logic, a paradoxical construction. Generally, when issues of imperialism and colonialism are discussed, it is understood that self-determination means the right of a people subjugated by another nation to regain freedom and determine its own destiny; it does not mean the right of the colonizers to set up their own rule over the unwilling conquered people. Yet Truman unmistakably declared: “The Balfour Declaration, promising the Jews the opportunity to re-establish a homeland in Palestine, had always seemed to me to go hand-in-hand with the noble policies of Woodrow Wilson, especially the principle of self-determination.” In evaluating without prejudice Truman’s formulation, one should note that he speaks of the reestablishment of a homeland, in other words, of a return to a situation that had prevailed in Palestine some two millenia earlier. In his eyes this apparently justified the Zionist claim for a state of their own even though the majority of the population in Palestine had been Arab for thirteen centuries.

But even with this special definition of self-determination, there was an element of ambiguity in Truman’s thinking. In his memoirs he quotes extensively from a letter addressed to him by Egypt’s prime minister, Nokrashy Pasha, protesting the Zionist program and his reply to it reaffirming an earlier American pledge (made by Roosevelt to King Ibn Saud) that “no decision should be taken regarding the basic situation in Palestine without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews.” Commenting on this exchange, Truman stated: “It was my position that the principle of self-determination required that Arabs as well as Jews be consulted.” In line with this policy and in accordance with the State Department’s recommendation, he authorized public release of Roosevelt’s letter to the king of Saudi Arabia (dated April 5, 1945).

Whether on the issue of immigration or on that of Jewish statehood, Truman was aware of considerable resistance to these initiatives in the State Department and the military. He spoke somewhat deprecatingly of the “striped pants boys” who, according to him, did not care enough about the fate of Jewish displaced persons and who were mainly concerned with Arab reactions to American proposals. Indeed, the State Department professionals, watching as they did over the entire range of U.S. interests in the Middle East, viewed the farreaching commitments to the Zionists with apprehension. The same was true of Acheson, a man supremely loyal and devoted to Truman, who held his own opinion on the matter: “I did not share the Presi¬ dent’s views on the Palestine solution to the pressing and desperate plight of great numbers of displaced Jews. . . . [T]o transform the coun¬ try into a Jewish state capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western interests in the Near East.” Similarly, Acheson found Roosevelt’s and Truman’s assurances to consult the Arabs inconsistent with their sympathy toward Zionist aspirations.

Serious reservations about support for the Zionist program were also voiced by the military. In response to the president’s request for an opinion, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended against any action that would cause disturbances in Palestine beyond Britain’s military capability to control and definitely opposed the use of U.S. forces. Such a use of troops, they believed, would not only hurt British and American interests in the Middle East (including adverse effects on control of oil) but also pave the way for the Soviet Union “to replace the United States and Britain in influence and power in much of the Middle East.”

Perhaps most vocal on this issue was the secretary of defense, James Forrestal. He spoke to the president repeatedly about the peril of arousing Arab hostility, which might result in denial of access to petroleum resources in their area, and about “the impact of this question on the security of the United States.”

In spite of these critical voices within the administration, Truman gradually was won over to the idea that a Jewish state should be established. Thus when the UN Special Committee on Palestine recommended partition of the mandated territory into a Jewish and an Arab state, with Jerusalem as an international enclave, the president instructed the State Department to support the partition plan. Accordingly, the U.S. delegate in the un General Assembly voted for partition on November 29, 1947. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed in Tel Aviv, and the next step for the U.S. government was to decide the time and kind of recognition to be extended to it. The president did not hesitate: within eleven minutes of Israel’s proclamation of statehood the president gave de facto recognition to the newly created Jewish state. It was followed by the de jure recognition on January 31, 1949.

Although Truman adopted a policy designed to satisfy Zionist objectives, he did not do it without misgivings and caveats. These are summarized below.

(a) In advocating, first, the admission of Jewish refugees and, later, the establishment of a Jewish state, he wanted to accomplish these objectives in a peaceful way so as to avoid violent conflict in Palestine.

(b) By making public Roosevelt’s letter to Ibn Saud, he tried to convey the idea that the United States was anxious to honor its pledges to the Arabs as well.

(c) No matter what the possible outcome of his political decisions, he was determined not to send U.S. troops to Palestine.

(d) He was concerned with the danger that “the Russians would be ready to welcome the Arabs into their camp.”

Furthermore, following the outbreak of Jewish-Arab hostilities after the un partition resolution the president, however reluctantly, accepted the State Department proposal (March 19, 1948) that, unless a peaceful transition to the partitioned status could be found, Palestine should be placed under the un Trusteeship Council — a solution, as he was aware, that would be regarded as a betrayal by the Zionists. Before another special session of the General Assembly, called to consider this proposal, was able to reach any decision, swiftly moving events in Palestine outdistanced its deliberations and the State of Israel was proclaimed in mid-May.

The President was quite firm on opposing U.S. military intervention; therefore, when upon achievement of statehood Israel found itself at war with the surrounding Arab states, it was offered neither U.S. troops nor military advice. Moreover, the United States proclaimed an embargo on arms exports to both sides of the conflict — to the considerable chagrin of the Zionists, who did their best to circumvent it by smuggling out certain weapons and by securing them from Soviet bloc sources. By contrast, however, the president was ready to extend financial assistance to the newly born state. When Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, paid a visit to the White House on May 25, 1948 — within ten days of the proclamation of independence — the president pledged a $100 million loan. Anxious as he was to see peace restored to the Holy Land, Truman showed a degree of flexibility regarding Israel’s national territory. This was demonstrated when the newly appointed un mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, proposed that to avoid further aggravation in hostilities the extensive region of Negeb, mostly desert inhabited by Arabs, assigned to Israel by the Partition Resolution, should revert to Arab control. Concurring with the view of the State Department, the president, again somewhat reluctantly, agreed to support this proposal at the un Security Council. (Paradoxically, it was the Soviet Union that opposed it in spite of her long-range pro- Arab policy.) Generally, on the territorial issue the president preferred to stay within the framework of the Partition Resolution. This applied specifically to Jerusalem, whose international status, with his concurrence, was reaffirmed both by the Democratic Party platform for the 1948 campaign and by the State Department.45 This basic stance also explains why the United States government has, through subsequent vicissitudes, refused to move its Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Notwithstanding continuous inputs into the decision-making process by the State and Defense Departments and the Central Intel-1 ligence Agency, President Truman insisted on personally directing American policy toward Palestine. This was acknowledged by Acheson in his memoirs46 and by such eyewitnesses and participants as Evan Wilson, one-time consul general in Jerusalem. Truman himself was emphatic on exercising full control of foreign policy and repeatedly expressed annoyance at the attempts by entrenched career bureaucrats to thwart presidential directives: “I wanted to make it plain that the President of the United States, and not the second or third echelons in the State Department, is responsible for making foreign policy, and, furthermore, that no one in any department can sabotage the President’s policy.”

In shaping his policy toward Palestine Truman experienced continuous pressures, especially from the Jewish community, virtually from the very moment he took office as president. These pressures were not limited to solicitation of his political and diplomatic support. “Top Jewish leaders in the United States were putting all sorts of pressure on me to commit American power and forces on behalf of the Jewish aspirations in Palestine.”

When the Palestine question reached the forum of the United Nations, Zionist efforts to ensure partition gained in intensity. They also bifurcated: some were directed toward securing a favorable vote of lesser Latin American countries and some were aiming straight at the U.S. president. According to Truman,

The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before but that the White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders — actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats — disturbed and annoyed me.”

The president’s daughter, Margaret, also testifies to the relentlessness and intensity of the Zionist campaign that “irritated” the president. Zionist leaders, she recalls, urged her father to “browbeat” South American and other countries into supporting partition. She acknowledges that “It was one of the worst messes of my father’s career. … To tell the truth about what had happened would have made him and the entire American government look ridiculous. Not even in his memoirs did he feel free to tell the whole story, although he hinted at it. Now I think it is time for it to be told.” Thus she reveals that on August 23, 1947, some three months before the un partition vote, the president expressed his disapproval of Zionist pressures in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt: “The action of some of our United States Zionists will prejudice everyone against what they are trying to get done. I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on the top, they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.”

But the president’s resentment at the pressures intensified when they were accompanied by threats. Margaret Truman recalls an episode when, in October 1948, a New York Democratic Party delegation called on her father to urge him to offer Israel de jure recognition, lift the arms embargo, and endorse the widest possible boundaries for the Jewish state. Failure to do this, they warned, would result in certain loss of New York State. On this occasion Truman did not conceal his irritation. “Dad looked them in the eye and said: ‘You have come to me as a pressure group. If you believe for one second that I will bargain my convictions for the votes you imply would be mine, you are pathetically mistaken. Good morning.’ “

It should be noted that pressures were not restricted to recognized Zionist leaders. They also emanated from highly placed White House officials, both Jewish and non-Jewish, such as David K. Niles, adviser on national minorities, Samuel I. Rosenman, a counselor, and Clark Clifford, an assistant to the president (and later a cabinet member). A rather special role was played by Truman’s former partner in the haberdashery business, Eddie Jacobson, who in March 1948 urged and convinced the president to overcome his reluctance and receive Dr. Chaim Weizmann, at that time head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.

Furthermore, one should not underestimate the influence exerted on behalf of the Zionist cause by non-Jewish leaders. These included a variety of individuals and groups ranging from religious fundamentalists to politicians. Mobilization of these elements in favor of the Zionist program constituted a major strategic objective of the Zionist leadership. On the other hand, while some of these Christian leaders gave wholehearted support to Zionist efforts, certain well-established and affluent Jewish notables opposed, or were indifferent to, the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland, inasmuch as they considered it harmful and likely to expose them to charges of dual loyalty and unpatriotic behavior. Prominent Jewish Americans such as Jacob H. Schiff, Felix M. Warburg, Adolph S. Ochs, Julius Rosenwald, and Monroe Deutsch could be listed as belonging to this category.

Whatever misgivings Truman might have had about the Zionist program, he eventually not only embraced it but added impetus to it by ordering the U.S. delegation at the United Nations to vote for partition. It is not easy to give an evaluation of his motives in choosing this option. Initially, as we have seen, he was merely interested in relieving human misery by urging admission of displaced Jews to British-ruled Palestine. In that early stage he appeared to be quite firm in rejecting “a political structure imposed on the Near East that would result in conflict.” He was also aware, as we have seen, of the gains likely to accrue to the Soviets if Arabs were to be antagonized. Yet he ultimately chose a policy that did lead to conflict and opened the gates to Soviet penetration of the Arab world, as the examples of Nasser’s Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and other states showed. Was this policy based on his genuine conversion to the idea that the thus generated conflict in the Middle East was of secondary importance and that the Soviet factor could be safely disregarded? This alternative does not quite square with his determination to stop Soviet advances in the northern tier of Iran, Turkey, and Greece. Furthermore, as his arms embargo indicated, he did not identify U.S. interests with Israel’s victory and never went on record claiming that Israel was America’s ally or strategic asset. This leaves us with the other possible alternative — that despite his resentment of the political pressures at home he chose to give them priority over other considerations. Certain observers who stood close to the decision-making process of that era were convinced that domestic politics constituted a major motivation in Truman’s behavior. In the often quoted statement addressed to four American envoys from the Middle East who, at a meeting in the White House on November 10, 1945, warned him of adverse effects of a pro-Zionist policy, he declared: “I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

In throwing his support to the creation and de jure recognition of Israel, Truman committed the United States to the idea of the Jewish state’s legitimacy. Although this constituted a major innovation in U.S. foreign policy, it did not yet determine the exact nature of American-Israeli relations. These could in the future follow the lines of friendship, antagonism, or neutrality, depending on the perceptions of Truman’s successors and the actual political circumstances. In spite of the critical Arab response to Truman’s Palestine policies and the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, his presidency was spared a major crisis in which American interests would suffer a drastic setback. Such crises occurred later during successive presidencies, in the course of which a substantial evolution took place in American-Israeli as well as in American-Arab relations.