How Harry Truman Crossed His Own State Department to Recognize Israel in 1948 - by Efraim Karsh

In the moments leading up to Israel’s independence, America’s diplomats did everything they could to stop the process, and the president, cold.

Efraim Karsh..
Mosaic Magazine..
16 April 18'..

As Israel celebrates its 70th anniversary, Martin Kramer has shed fresh light on a key event in the days immediately preceding the proclamation of the state. This was the marathon meeting of the People’s Administration, soon to become the state’s provisional government, on May 12, 1948. Among the topics on the participants’ minds was the massive international campaign, led by the U.S. Department of State, to postpone any declaration of independence until such time as a UN-sponsored truce could pacify the situation in Palestine, where Arab anti-Jewish agitation was at a high pitch.

Kramer effectively demolishes the long-established trope that the Zionist leaders were seriously divided on the issue of whether or not to postpone independence and that therefore the matter finally had to be decided by a close vote. In meticulously overturning this piece of conventional wisdom, he renders an important service to the cause of historical accuracy while also underlining the utter congruence on this matter between the leaders of the state-to-be and the feelings of the Jewish public in “the 600,000-strong yishuv, which was steeling itself precisely for just such a day.”

Here I wish to embellish Kramer’s account by focusing on a truly contentious battle of opinions on this same subject that took place within the leadership of the United States. Fortunately for the Zionists, they had in Washington one powerful ally in their fight against the latest ploy to defer, if not to abort, the creation of a Jewish state: namely, President Harry Truman. Indeed, at precisely the same time as their own deliberations in Tel Aviv, Truman was laboring to convince George Marshall, his formidable secretary of state, that the U.S. should extend recognition to the soon-to-be-declared Jewish state.

And therein lies a tale.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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The Shameless Promotion of Colonialism of the Anti-Israel Left

...Judis pretends that his book is an anti-colonial work when it is really a lament for the colonial intervention that should have taken place under Truman and a plea to Obama to engage in a final colonial intervention to displace an oppressed indigenous minority from its land.

Daniel Greenfield..
frontpagemag.com..
18 February '14..

The first error in John Judis’ book “Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict” is in its title. The genesis of this conflict took place thousands of years before Truman when the Roman Empire imposed its colonial rule on the Jewish population using Arab mercenaries and when the Muslim Arab conquerors colonized Israel.

Judis describes the Roman ethnic cleansing of Israel’s Jewish population as the land going “through different religious incarnations after the pagan Romans ousted the Maccabee.” This is akin to another type of revisionist historian describing the Holocaust as Europe going through a new religious incarnation after the pagan National Socialists ousted Jewish communal leaders.

All the familiar myths of anti-Israel revisionist historians are present in Judis’ Genesis making it the least original book on Israel in some time. There are the European Jewish colonists seizing Arab land and powerful American Jewish lobbies intimidating politicians concerned about the “Palestinians” who would not spring into existence until after the failed invasions of Israel by the Arab colonial powers.

The Arabs are treated as a majority when it comes to their claim on the land and as a minority when it comes to soliciting liberal sympathy on their behalf. Judis justifies this political juggling act by rewriting history so that the Jews of Israel are reduced to European colonists rather than an indigenous minority.

Middle Eastern Jews are largely absent in his Eurocentric narrative because their existence upends his depiction of the Jewish resettlement as a Western colonial assault against a hapless native population. The Middle Eastern Jews, whose existence the left denies or minimizes, demonstrate that Zionism was no different than the national liberation movements of minorities like the Kurds or the Armenians.

Most Israeli Jews are Middle Eastern. Middle Eastern Jews were and are an oppressed minority under Arab Muslim rule. Their situation only improved under European colonialism. Instead of addressing that oppression; Judis pretends that Jews were better off as an oppressed minority under Muslim rule.

Like most champions of the Palestinian cause, Judis adopts the narrative of the Muslim conquerors, accepting its often imaginary and inconsistent history while disdaining the extensive history of the conquered and oppressed indigenous populations who suffered and suffer under their rule.

Pres. Truman, The Jewish State, and the Decline in the NY Times Standards

...Finally, it is worth noting that it was an explicitly Jewish state described in the top story of the May 15, 1948 edition of The New York Times. Its article on Israel's independence put in words what everybody already understood: "The Jewish state, the world's newest sovereignty, to be known as the State of Israel, came into being in Palestine at midnight upon termination of the British mandate."

Gilead Ini..
CAMERA Media Analysis..
07 February '14..

Two news articles, published five years apart but referencing the same historical event, paint a damning picture of a recent decline in New York Times standards.

The event occurred in May 1948. Only days before the leaders of the Jewish community in British-ruled Palestine were to declare the establishment of the State of Israel, it was still unclear whether President Harry Truman would side with his Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, who opposed recognition of the Jewish state, or with his senior advisor Clark Clifford, who urged Truman to follow his impulse in favor of recognition.

The dramatic debate was settled only hours before the modern state of Israel came into formal existence. At 6:11 P.M. in Washington, D.C., or just 11 minutes after the midnight rebirth of the Jewish state, Truman's press secretary read the following statement:

This government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof.

The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel.

The New York Times referred to this presidential statement twice in the past five years, and the way the did so exposes an unfortunate decline in the newspaper's standards. In both articles, reporters mentioned recent Palestinian attempts to cast a last minute change in the language of the statement — one of the letter's two references to "Jewish state" was changed to "State of Israel" — as supposedly showing that Truman did not support the idea of a Jewish state. But while the earlier article gave some clarifying context that suggested Palestinian leaders are misusing the letter, the more recent piece relayed the misinformation with no qualification, leaving New York Times readers severely misinformed about Truman's position.

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The Origins of the U.S.-Israel Relationship: Truman and the Jewish State

Allis Radosh and Ronald Radosh
The Washington Institute
for Near East Policy
30 April '10

As Israel marks its sixty-second birthday in 2010, U.S.-Israeli relations currently face the sort of tension that has periodically bedeviled the two allies. Indeed, from the very founding of Israel, the concept of creating a Jewish state was widely popular among the American people but deeply controversial among the policymaking elite. As President Truman himself admitted, no issue was "more controversial or more complex than the problem of Israel."

Listen to Audio

The Washington Institute honored Allis and Ronald Radosh, winners of the 2009 Washington Institute Book Prize for A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel, at a special Policy Forum on April 30, 2010, where they discussed the origins of the U.S.-Israel relationship and the evolution of the Truman administration's policy toward the idea of a Jewish state.

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Another thought experiment

FresnoZionism.org
17 December 09

Recently while reading “A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel” by Allis and Ronald Radosh (a Hanukah gift from my wife, thank you!) I was struck yet again by the stubborn refusal of the Arab nations during that period — not just the Palestinian Arabs, but Ibn Saud, the Syrians, Iraqis, Egyptians, etc. – to consider any kind of compromise on Jewish immigration into Palestine (not to mention a Jewish state). This despite the fact that there was clearly enough room and resources in the area to support both Jews and Arabs, and although the Jewish presence had already improved economic conditions greatly, even leading to an increase in the Arab population.

As everyone knows, their refusal to compromise ultimately led to war, and a much worse end result for the Palestinian Arabs. And the cynical use of the Arab refugees as a weapon against Israel by the Arab leadership from 1948 to today constitutes one of the most massive violations of human rights since WWII. What a scandal it would be if it weren’t for the remarkably twisted perceptions of those organizations concerned with human rights!

Arab opposition to Jewish immigration actually began at the beginning of the 20th century. It was usually expressed by saying that the Jews would ‘take over’ although the Arabs themselves had not been in charge for centuries. And partition proposals which would have limited Jewish sovereignty to small parts of Palestine were violently rejected.

Today, sixty-one years after the founding of the state and (roughly) 120 years since the beginning of the Zionist enterprise, Arab opposition to it is probably stronger than ever. Even the fact that two Arab states have signed peace agreements with Israel does not disprove this — in practice the ‘peace’ is as cold as possible, antisemitic incitement continues, and only massive American bribes keep it in force.

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