Pirkei Avos tells us that we should show respect for
every person for “each one has his hour.” Sometimes, major events of history turn
on the actions of seemingly insignificant individuals. If this is true in
general, it is certainly true in the saga of the recognition of the new State
of Israel by President Harry S Truman in 1948.
But to understand this very interesting chain of events, let us go back
to the administration of the president who preceded Truman.
There was once a
saying that American Jews believed in three worlds: “Di velt, yenner velt, and
Roosevelt – this world, the next world, and Roosevelt.” The overwhelming
majority of Jews voted for and loved Franklin D. Roosevelt. Years after the
war, blame for not rescuing more Jews from Hitler’s clutches was laid at FDR’s
feet. He could have done more, but he didn’t. Roosevelt regularly advised
Jewish leaders to be patient, to put their demands on hold. He said that the
best way to help Europe’s Jews was to win the war.
A fervent believer
in FDR’s promises was Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise. Eliyahu Epstein (Elath), who
later became Israel’s first ambassador to the United States, regarded Wise as
the dominant figure among America’s Jewish leadership. Wise, despite much
evidence to the contrary, believed that the Jews had a “great, good friend in
Washington who was thinking about them and planning for their future.” Wise was
one of the only Jewish leaders with direct access to the President, but this
very closeness prevented him from being firm in his advocacy.
As the Holocaust
became more widely known and as Wise aged and was seen as being a sycophant,
new leadership emerged among American Jewry. The new leader who aimed to push
aside Wise was another Reform Rabbi, Abba Hillel Silver. He loathed “quiet
diplomacy” and vied with Wise for control of the Zionist movement. Unlike Wise,
Silver was abrasive and not at all charming. He was confrontational and
unyielding, and a lot of people did not like him. Among them were FDR and
Truman. But he was a very effective political strategist and organizer, and as
the New York Times reported, “his
baritone-voiced oratory would do credit to a Shakespearian actor.”
By the end of
World War II, Roosevelt was a very sick man. Two days after his inauguration
for his fourth term, he set out for Yalta, where he conferred with Stalin and
Churchill on a number of issues. Roosevelt actually believed that he could
convince the king of Saudi Arabia to support admitting Jewish Holocaust survivors
into Palestine. On February 14, 1945, on the way back from Yalta, he met King
Saud aboard the Navy cruiser, the Quincy, and tried to charm the monarch.
Roosevelt was known as “a charming host and witty conversationalist,” which
always won over whomever he talked to as a friend. However, when Roosevelt
introduced the problem of the Jewish refugees and asked the King for his
“advice and help,” he was surprised by King Saud’s reaction: “Make the enemy
and the oppressor (the Germans) pay; that is how we Arabs wage war….Arabs would
rather die,” he told FDR, “than yield their land to the Jews.”
Roosevelt’s chief
advisor, Harry Hopkins, later said he believed that the President’s ill health
had led him to be overly impressed with Ibn Saud and had caused him to abandon
his earlier pro-Zionist positions far too easily. In short, it is fair to
assume that, had Roosevelt been president in 1948, he would have listened to
the Arabists in the State Department and would not have supported a Jewish state
in Palestine.
A mentch tracht un G-t lacht. Yalta exhausted
the ailing President. He went down to Warm Springs to rest. On April 12, 1945,
Roosevelt suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died. The new vice-president,
Harry Truman, was called from presiding over the Senate – it seems vice-presidents
did that a lot more than nowadays – and told to come to the White House
immediately. At 5:25 p.m. he was taken to the second floor, where Eleanor
Roosevelt told him, “Harry, the President is dead.” Truman found himself unable
to speak. “Is there anything I can do for you,” he asked the First Lady. She
immediately replied, “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one
in trouble now.”
* * *
Very few were
confident that Truman could fill the shoes of the great leader, Roosevelt. He
was a senator from Missouri, a product of the Tom Pendergast political machine,
an “accidental president.” The new president knew that millions of Americans
viewed Roosevelt as indispensable. But, as we will see, Harry Truman was, in
the opinion of more recent scholarship, one of the better presidents. That was
not necessarily how people saw it at the time.
I must, of course,
skip many topics, such as the decision to drop the atom bombs on Japan, but I
will deal with Truman’s response to the Jewish survivors stuck in DP camps in
Europe. Truman felt confident that he could handle that. He felt strongly about
the terrible situation of the Jews in Europe and the promises made to them for
a homeland in Palestine. Raised as a Baptist, Truman had read the Bible “at
least a dozen times” before he was 15. Truman believed in the Bible. And in the
Bible, he read of the Jewish people’s longing to return to their ancient homeland.
His favorite psalm was number 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat
down, yea we wept, when we remembered Zion.”
After the war,
when knowledge of the Holocaust was evident to all, the American Jews, perhaps
out of guilt for how pitifully little they had done to save their relatives
from death, mounted a very effective PR campaign. The Zionists were beginning
to win the public relations war. David Niles, one of Truman’s closest advisors
and a Jew himself, received the results of a poll taken in April, 1945. Half of
all Americans knew about the idea of establishing a Jewish state, and among
those who had an opinion on the issue, three–to-one, the American people
thought the U.S. government should use its influence to establish it.
At this point, one
might think that the road to a Jewish state was clear, but it was far from
that. Two main sources of opposition were Great Britain, whose army was in
control of Palestine, which wouldn’t let the Jews into the country, and the
United States Department of State, which fought tooth and nail against a Jewish
state and were determined to outsmart and overrule the president, as we will
see.
At a certain
point, the Arabs realized that the new president sympathized with the Jews. On
August 24, the head of the Arab League announced publicly that FDR had given a
pledge to Ibn Saud that “he would not support any move to hand over Palestine
to Jews.” Ibn Saud, he added, had also told Roosevelt that if Palestine were
given to the Jews, “He would start a war against the Zionists and all who
supported them and would never rest until ‘I and all my sons have been killed
in the defense of Palestine.’” Then, according to this Arab diplomat, Ibn Saud
had stood and told Roosevelt to “swear that you will never support the Zionists,
and Roosevelt shook his hand and pledged that he would not support the Jews
against the Arabs.”
I do not know how
Winston Churchill would have acted in regard to a Jewish state. He had
certainly been pro-Zionist, at least verbally, in the past. But Churchill was
defeated in the British election right after the war, and the new Labor government
was pro-Arab. It was against any easing of the White Paper that restricted
Jewish immigration into Palestine. Though the Labor Party had also been pro-Zionist
on paper, they changed their tune upon assuming power. To get the pressure off
of him, Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin suggested a joint U.S.-British committee
go to Europe and Palestine and assess the situation. He even said he would
abide by their suggestions.
The situation of
the DPs (displaced persons), those Jews who had survived the war, was dire.
Truman sought a stopgap measure; he asked the British to allow 100,000 Jews to
enter Palestine. Bevin was very much a bulldog. He said that the real reason Truman
wanted 100,000 Jews in Palestine was because he did not want them in New York.
He berated the Jews for trying to get to the head of the line and wanting
special treatment over all the other refugees in Europe.
But to me the most
revolting reason for British opposition to a Jewish state was held by Bevin and
others, including Richard Crossman, a Labor Member of Parliament who was
appointed to the 1946 Anglo-American Commission. They believed that the Zionist
position was wrong, that that to view Jews as a nation was an anti-Semitic
reflex. Rather, the survivors had to be liberated from the separateness that
Hitler had forced upon them and become assimilated Europeans with full rights
and duties, wherever they settled. To advocate the Zionist cause, wrote
Crossman, was really “a reflex of anti-Semitism” since it distanced the Jews
from the rest of the world to an even greater extent than they already were. It
meant that one would be joining the anti-Semites who wanted to remove Jews from
Europe and put them all in Palestine. And no single place was worse, thought
Crossman, for a persecuted people than this strategic place, where the whole
Arab world was against them.
As time went on, however, and Crossman became more familiar
with the situation as it actually was, he, to his credit, made a U-turn in his
views. He came to believe that the Jews were not simply a
religious community but a nation, and he became
an advocate of partition (the Zionist position). On this score he
disagreed with the post-war Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, who
regarded the Jewish people merely as a religious group. Crossman’s views were heavily influenced by Chaim Weizmann, whom
he regarded as a great man. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to
describe Crossman as a satellite of Weizmann.
As an
aside, I recall Rabbi Berel Wein saying in one of his lectures that had the
British not been so stubborn – had they actually allowed 100,000 Jews into
Mandatory Palestine – it is unlikely that the State of Israel would have come
into being in 1948. That is because there was tremendous sympathy for the Jews
for that brief moment in history. Besides guilt over not having done enough to
help the Jews during the Holocaust, the sight of the refugees living behind
barbed wire in prisoner-of-war-like camps aroused demands for immediate
action. Had the pressure been relieved by the elimination of DP camps and
100,000 Jewish refugees being settled, the world would not have seen it as such
an urgent issue, and the “window of opportunity” when the Zionists had world
sympathy would have evaporated.
Was Bevin’s view,
that the Jews should be resettled in Europe, in the least realistic? Near
Frankfurt, Germany, a poll was taken of 18,311 DPs. Only 13 wanted to stay in
Europe. Many of the DPs came from Poland and were the sole survivors of what
had once been large families. Some had walked hundreds of miles to their old
towns, only to have to turn around and trudge back to the camps. Some who
returned never made it back, having been murdered by non-Jewish residents.
* * *
The Committee came
to a unanimous decision. It recommended the immediate issuance of 100,000
certificates by Britain to allow Jews into Palestine. For the long run, it
rejected both an Arab state and a Jewish state in Palestine and called for a
country in which the legitimate national aspirations of both Jews and Arabs could
be reconciled. The details would be worked out by the United Nations.
President Truman
disagreed with Zionist leaders, especially David Ben Gurion, who declared it “a
disguised new edition of the White Paper, though more cleverly compiled.” The
President came out in favor of implementing the recommendations. Bevin felt
that the whole thing was a sell out to the Americans. The State Department’s
Loy Henderson told the British ambassador that he deeply regretted the
President’s statement, that the State Department had done all it could to
prevent the President from issuing it. Henderson said that, up to the last
minute, the State Department had put all possible pressure on the White House
not to do it. Henderson confided that there were forces in the White House that
the State Department was not able to control.
(Do you think he meant that there were Jews surrounding Truman who
pleaded the Zionist cause?)
We need to
understand that President Truman was sympathetic, up to a point. He was worried
that the United States would be forced to send military forces to Palestine to
enforce the committee’s recommendations. At that point, almost everyone, except
maybe David Ben Gurion, really believed that there was little chance the Hagana
could defeat all the Arabs, that the only way to achieve some sort of peace
would be with American troops. That was never under consideration by Truman or
Congress. The tough British response to Jewish “terrorism” and the “open
defiance” of the Yishuv by this point risked not just a war in Palestine but a
third world war – with Russia coming in to help the Arabs. To sum it up in one
word: oil.
The British were
stalling. The American Jews were impatient. Truman was in a bad mood because he
was getting too much pressure and had a lot of other problems at the time. He
refused to meet Jewish leaders. Finally, Congressman Emanuel Celler led the
entire New York Congressional delegation into a meeting with the President. It
did not go well. Celler reported that he had hardly begun to speak when Truman
stopped him. “His voice and face were cold as he said, in effect, that he was
tired of delegations visiting him for the benefit of the Poles, the Italians,
the Greeks. I remember him saying, ‘Doesn’t anyone want something for the
Americans?’” Truman took to calling Rabbis Silver and Wise “extreme Zionists”
and Celler and the New York politicians as “the pressure boys.”
* * *
Now, we come to Eddie
Jacobson, who is the hero of this story. The Zionists were no longer in
Truman’s good graces; he refused to meet with them. Eddie Jacobson was the son
of Eastern European immigrants, a “posheteh
Yid,” not a Jewish leader but simply
a Jew who knew Harry Truman. They knew each other as teenagers and then again
when they were together in the army in World War I. While the two of them were
waiting for their overseas travel orders, Truman asked Jacobson to help him set
up a canteen at Camp Doniphan in Oklahoma. They collected two dollars from each
of the 1,100 men in the camp, which they paid back within six months,
generating a $15,000 profit. The canteen’s success was duly noted and helped
Truman’s military career. Truman wrote a letter to his girlfriend, Bess: “I
have a Jew in charge of the canteen by the name of Jacobson, and he is a
crackerjack.”
After the war,
they decided to go into business together, Truman and Jacobson’s Gents’
Furnishings. Unfortunately, there was a depression in 1921, and they went bankrupt.
Truman went on to become a political hack, getting a position as a judge of the
Jackson County Court, and Jacobson became a traveling salesman. Shortly after
FDR died and Truman became president, Jacobson opened another store in Kansas
City, called Westport Menswear. Suddenly everyone was approaching him and
asking him to use his connection with the President to help them gain office or
receive support for various projects. But Jacobson was very protective of his
friend and didn’t want to be used; he let it be known that he would not ask the
President for personal favors for himself or anyone else.
Jacobson was not
particularly well versed in the situation of the Jewish refugees in Europe. But
this was to change. First, he was visited by the president of the Zionist
Organization of America, Rabbi Israel Goldstein. He turned him down as well. Then
he was invited to a meeting in someone’s home, where he met and was impressed
by Reform Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld. Jacobson was so impressed that he agreed to take
the rabbi with him to see Truman. Jacobson had a good friend, a lawyer, who was
active in Bnai Brith, and through him he was introduced to the Bnai Brith’s international
president. Jacobson had “Orthodox” parents but was himself a member of the
local Reform Temple. He was not very knowledgeable, but the Zionists “educated”
him.
It took a year for
Lelyveld and Jacobson to visit the President. Eddie could come and go without
an appointment any time he wanted. On June 26, 1946 they had a nice meeting,
and Lelyveld reported to Rabbi Silver that Truman had told them he knew all
there was to know about Palestine. He wanted to deal on an operational level
without focusing on long-term objectives. Lelyveld reported that Truman told
him that, after the first 100,000 arrived, we would think about the next
100,000. On the discouraging side, Truman was too impressed by what the State
Department was telling him about the Arabs. He was worried that the Arabs would
cut off the oil. Also, he was upset that both Silver and Wise focused solely on
Zionism and seemed not to be concerned with the larger issue of world peace and
Soviet expansionism.
Then Truman told
them something very important. He said he was not upset by Bevin’s outburst,
because he knew that he himself was “often tempted to blow up” because of the
pressure and agitation from New York. Truman, when unduly pressed, would let
off steam and then calm down. He was absolutely not an anti-Semite, but he was
put off by the “New York Jews,” who were too pushy.
* * *
Meanwhile,
Palestine was an armed camp. The British were coming down hard on the Yishuv,
and the Jews were fighting back. There was military rule and press censorship
and lots of emergency decrees. On what become known as Black Sabbath, the
British arrested all the Zionist leaders they could find, a total of 2,000
people. The British leader Cunningham told Chaim Weizmann that unless the Jews
ceased all military operations against the British, they would destroy Haifa.
Throughout these
tumultuous years, there were three options: a bi-national state, partition into
two states, and a UN Trusteeship. The latter would mean the White Paper would essentially
remain in effect because the Jews would not really be independent and would be
limited in what they could do. None of these options ever took into
consideration that foreign occupying forces would be necessary to keep the
peace. Still, the issue of letting in 100,000 refugees would not go away, and
the British were intransigent.
Now we come to
another influential Jew, Abe Feinberg. Feinberg was wealthy. He raised money
for the Hagana, and he visited the European DP camps. Feinberg purchased and
outfitted ships to take the refugees from France and Italy to Palestine. In
fact, Abe Feinberg happened to be in Eretz Yisrael on the day that the British
rounded up all the Jewish leaders. He was also arrested, but the British let
him go because he had a personal relationship with President Truman. (Rabbi
David Katz, in one of his lectures, mentioned that Abe Feinberg was the main
financial supporter of Truman when he ran in the 1948 election, although that
comes later.)
The British were
delaying and delaying. Meanwhile, the American election of 1946 was
approaching, and both parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, were anxious
to capture the Jewish vote, particularly in New York. Abe Feinberg gave Harry
Truman some advice. If he wanted to make his position known to the Jewish people,
a good time to do it would be “just before the holiest day in the Jewish year,
Yom Kippur. Even unobservant Jews, such as myself, tend to go to the synagogue
on the night before, which is a most somber night.” Feinberg told Truman that
every rabbi in the country would have a packed house and would speak favorably
about him. This would get directly to the Jewish people.
In his statement, Truman
reminded Americans of his many attempts to gain admission to Palestine of
100,000 Jewish DPs. He reviewed the various committees and attempts to come to
terms with the British and how none of it had come to fruition. The message was
very well received by the Jewish community.
* * *
Meanwhile, events
were making the old goal of 100,000 immigrant visas no longer good enough. The
Jewish Agency wanted partition and an independent Jewish state in part of
Palestine. Truman said, “To such a solution our government could give its
support.” Although the British wanted to think that this was just electoral
politics, a visiting British diplomat said that was not the case: “This is part
of the general outlook of Americans of both parties.”
A lot of
machinations were going on. Bevin visited Washington, never giving an inch.
Bevin asked Truman if perhaps he could find another place on earth for the
100,000 Jews. Then the Zionists had their world conference, and Ben Gurion
pushed out Weizmann, who was now no longer president of the World Zionist
Federation. Then Abba Hillel Silver pushed out Stephen Wise as head of the
American Zionists. Both Weizmann and Wise were viewed as not militant enough.
Keep this in mind. Later we will see that Chaim Weizmann was “the man.” He was
the wise old man who could get through to Truman. At that time, he had no
formal position but he proved to be invaluable.
There was one last
meeting between the Zionists and Bevin.
Bevin declared he was against partition, saying it would be unfair to
the Arabs. The Arabs demanded that the British just leave already and let them
take care of the Jews by war. The Zionists thought that Bevin wanted to scare
the Jews into submission out of fear of having to face the Arabs alone. Nothing
was accomplished, and Bevin had reached the end of the road, as far as he was
concerned.
On February 18, 1947,
Ernest Bevin announced in the House of Commons that Britain was referring the
Palestine question to the United Nations without recommendations. Palestine had
become too much to bear. A special session of the UN General Assembly was
called. Before that session, a special committee – the UN Special
Committee on Palestine, or UNSCOP – was created to investigate the entire
question of Palestine. With representatives from Sweden, Netherlands, Canada,
Australia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Peru, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Iran, India,
and China, the Committee would visit Palestine and speak to all the relevant
parties. They would then bring their recommendation to the General Assembly.
The Soviet Union
now had a surprise. Stalin had always opposed Zionism. So it came as a shock
when, on May 14, the Soviet ambassador, Andrei Gromyko, proclaimed the Soviet
Union’s belief that the mandate was bankrupt and that the Soviet Union
supported “the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own state.” The
Zionists were taken by surprise. At this point, the United States had not made its
opinion known. The State Department said that the pro-partition speech Truman
gave on erev Yom Kippur was not
American policy, just his personal opinion. There was a new Secretary of State,
General George Marshall, and he was being briefed exclusively by the Arabists
in the State Department.
* * *
The Arabs
boycotted the Committee and refused to cooperate or send representatives. The
Jews, on the other hand, gave the committee a warm welcome. Abba Eban and David
Horowitz were the liaisons from the Jewish Agency. Of all the people who
appeared before the Committee, the one who made the greatest impression was the
elderly statesman, Chaim Weizmann. It is fair to say that the group that
visited Weizmann was captivated. Ralph Bunche, the African-American diplomat,
declared his emotional identification with the feelings of Jewish destiny.
Weizmann held no position, having been put out to pasture by Ben Gurion, but,
of him, a committee member said, “Well, that’s really a great man.”
At this time, the
conflict between the Irgun and the Hagana was heating up, and the British were
going to hang several Irgun youths for participating in a jailbreak from Acco prison.
It was a powder keg. The Irgun captured two British sergeants and threatened to
hang them if the British hanged the two Irgun prisoners.
By coincidence,
members of the Committee were in Haifa port when the ship “Exodus 1947” with
its 1,500 refugees being towed into the harbor. A reporter wrote, “Thousands of
people crowded the uppermost deck. The blue-and-white flag flew, and the people
were all singing ‘Hatikva.’ The British forcibly removed them from the ship,
separated the men from the woman. Some of the Jews began screaming because in
the concentration camps, separation meant death.
Witnessing the
scene were two UNSCOP members from Sweden and Yugoslavia who had been brought
there by Abba Eban. What they witnessed upset them, and it was a public
relations disaster for the British. The Committee visited the DP Camps. After
much debate, the delegates came to agreement that the British Mandate had to
end, but they could not agree on what sort of entity or entities would be
created in Palestine.
Finally, on August
31, 1947, UNSCOP presented two reports. The majority report proposed the
creation of two states: Arab and Jewish. The United Nations would supervise a
two-year trusteeship to help them transition to independence. The minority
report, supported by India, Iran, and Yugoslavia, called for a federal state to
be created within three years with Arab and Jewish provinces.
As for the United
States, Truman had had it with the Zionists, especially Abba Hillel Silver,
whom he detested. And I cannot overemphasize how absolutely opposed to
partition the State Department was. Although President Truman had publicly
declared his support for the Partition Plan and said that the U.S. would vote
for it in the UN, the State Department, like a spoiled child, refused to lift a
finger.
In short, things
looked pretty bad for the Jews. Would the Zionists win? Would there be a two-thirds
vote in the UN in favor of partition? Would the State of Israel come into
being? Next time, we will tell “the rest
of the story.”
The information in this article comes from the book, A Safe Haven:
Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel, by
Ronald Radosh, published by Harper Collins.
To be continued.
