Washington's Battle Over Israel's Birth

Richard Holbrooke
Wednesday, May 7, 2008; Page A21

In the celebrations next week surrounding Israel's 60th anniversary, it should not be forgotten that there was an epic struggle in Washington over how to respond to Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948. It led to the most serious disagreement President Harry Truman ever had with his revered secretary of state, George C. Marshall -- and with most of the foreign policy establishment. Twenty years ago, when I was helping Clark Clifford write his memoirs, I reviewed the historical record and interviewed all the living participants in that drama. The battle lines drawn then resonate still. The British planned to leave Palestine at midnight on May 14. At that moment, the Jewish Agency, led by David Ben-Gurion, would proclaim the new (and still unnamed) Jewish state. The neighboring Arab states warned that fighting, which had already begun, would erupt into full-scale war at that moment.

The Jewish Agency proposed partitioning Palestine into two parts -- one Jewish, one Arab. But the State and Defense departments backed the British plan to turn Palestine over to the United Nations. In March, Truman privately promised Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel, that he would support partition -- only to learn the next day that the American ambassador to the United Nations had voted for U.N. trusteeship. Enraged, Truman wrote a private note on his calendar: "The State Dept. pulled the rug from under me today. The first I know about it is what I read in the newspapers! Isn't that hell? I'm now in the position of a liar and double-crosser. I've never felt so low in my life. . . ."

Truman blamed "third and fourth level" State Department officials -- especially the director of U.N. affairs, Dean Rusk, and the agency's counselor, Charles Bohlen. But opposition really came from an even more formidable group: the "wise men" who were simultaneously creating the great Truman foreign policy of the late 1940s -- among them Marshall, James V. Forrestal, George F. Kennan, Robert Lovett, John J. McCloy, Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson. To overrule State would mean Truman taking on Marshall, whom he regarded as "the greatest living American," a daunting task for a very unpopular president.

Beneath the surface lay unspoken but real anti-Semitism on the part of some (but not all) policymakers. The position of those opposing recognition was simple -- oil, numbers and history. "There are thirty million Arabs on one side and about 600,000 Jews on the other," Defense Secretary Forrestal told Clifford. "Why don't you face up to the realities?"

On May 12, Truman held a meeting in the Oval Office to decide the issue. Marshall and his universally respected deputy, Robert Lovett, made the case for delaying recognition -- and "delay" really meant "deny." Truman asked his young aide, Clark Clifford, to present the case for immediate recognition. When Clifford finished, Marshall, uncharacteristically, exploded. "I don't even know why Clifford is here. He is a domestic adviser, and this is a foreign policy matter. The only reason Clifford is here is that he is pressing a political consideration."

Marshall then uttered what Clifford would later call "the most remarkable threat I ever heard anyone make directly to a President." In an unusual top-secret memorandum Marshall wrote for the historical files after the meeting, the great general recorded his own words: "I said bluntly that if the President were to follow Mr. Clifford's advice and if in the elections I were to vote, I would vote against the President."

After this stunning moment, the meeting adjourned in disarray. In the next two days, Clifford looked for ways to get Marshall to accept recognition. Lovett, although still opposed to recognition, finally talked a reluctant Marshall into remaining silent if Truman acted. With only a few hours left until midnight in Tel Aviv, Clifford told the Jewish Agency to request immediate recognition of the new state, which still lacked a name. Truman announced recognition at 6:11 p.m. on May 14 -- 11 minutes after Ben-Gurion's declaration of independence in Tel Aviv. So rapidly was this done that in the official announcement, the typed words "Jewish State" are crossed out, replaced in Clifford's handwriting with "State of Israel." Thus the United States became the first nation to recognize Israel, as Truman and Clifford wanted. The secret of the Oval Office confrontation held for years, and a crisis in both domestic politics and foreign policy was narrowly averted.

Clifford insisted to me and others in countless discussions over the next 40 years that politics was not at the root of his position -- moral conviction was. Noting sharp divisions within the American Jewish community -- the substantial anti-Zionist faction among leading Jews included the publishers of both The Post and the New York Times -- Clifford had told Truman in his famous 1947 blueprint for Truman's presidential campaign that "a continued commitment to liberal political and economic policies" was the key to Jewish support.

But to this day, many think that Marshall and Lovett were right on the merits and that domestic politics was the real reason for Truman's decision. Israel, they argue, has been nothing but trouble for the United States.

I think this misses the point. Israel was going to come into existence whether or not Washington recognized it. But without American support from the very beginning, Israel's survival would have been at even greater risk. Even if European Jewry had not just emerged from the horrors of World War II, it would have been an unthinkable act of abandonment by the United States. Truman's decision, although opposed by almost the entire foreign policy establishment, was the right one -- and despite complicated consequences that continue to this day, it is a decision all Americans should recognize and admire.

Richard Holbrooke writes a monthly column for The Post. He co-authored Clark Clifford's "Counsel to the President: A Memoir."

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WORLD'S WORST NEIGHBOURHOOD
Daniel Pipes
National Post, May 6, 2008

Two religiously identified new states emerged from the shards of the British empire in the aftermath of the Second World War. Israel, of course, was one; the other was Pakistan.

They make an interesting, if infrequently-compared pair. Pakistan's experience with widespread poverty, near-constant internal turmoil and external tensions, culminating in its current status as near-rogue state, suggests the perils that Israel avoided, with its stable, liberal politics, dynamic economy, cutting-edge high-tech sector, lively culture and impressive social cohesion.

But for all its achievements, the Jewish state lives under a curse that Pakistan and most other polities never face: the threat of elimination. Its remarkable progress over the decades has not liberated it from a multi-pronged peril that includes nearly every means imaginable: weapons of mass destruction, conventional military attack, terrorism, internal subversion, economic blockade, demographic assault and ideological undermining. No other contemporary state faces such an array of threats; indeed, probably none in history ever has.

The enemies of Israel divide into two main camps: the left and the Muslims, with the far right a minor third element. The left includes a rabid edge (International ANSWER, Noam Chomsky) and a more polite centre (United Nations General Assembly, Canada's Liberal party, the mainstream media, mainline churches, school textbooks). In the final analysis, however, the left serves less as a force in its own right than as an auxiliary for the primary anti-Zionist actor, which is the Muslim population. This latter, in turn, can be divided into three distinct groupings.

First come the foreign states: Five armed forces invaded Israel on its independence in May, 1948, and then neighbouring armies, air forces and navies fought in the wars of 1956, 1967, 1970 and 1973. While the conventional threat has somewhat receded, Egypt's U.S.-financed arms build-up presents one danger and the threats from weapons of mass destruction (especially from Iran, but also from Syria and, potentially, many other states) present an even greater one.

Second come the external Palestinians, those living outside Israel. Sidelined by governments from 1948 until 1967, Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) got their opportunity with the defeat of three states' armed forces in the Six-Day War. Subsequent developments, such as the 1982 Lebanon war and the 1993 Oslo Accords, confirmed the centrality of external Palestinians. Today, they drive the conflict, through violence (terrorism, missiles from Gaza) and, more importantly, by driving world opinion against Israel via a public relations effort that resonates widely among Muslims and the left.

Third come the Muslim citizens of Israel, the sleepers in the equation. In 1949, they numbered merely 111,000, or 9% of Israel's population, but by 2005 they had multiplied ten-fold to 1,141,000 and 16% of the population. They benefited from Israel's open ways to evolve from a docile and ineffective community into an assertive one that increasingly rejects the Jewish nature of the Israeli state, with potentially profound consequences for the future identity of that state.

If this long list of perils makes Israel different from all other Western countries, forcing it to protect itself on a daily basis from the ranks of its many foes, it also renders Israel oddly similar to other Middle Eastern countries, which likewise face a threat of elimination.

Kuwait, conquered by Iraq, actually disappeared from the face of the Earth between August, 1990, and February, 1991; were it not for an American-led coalition, it would quite certainly never have been resurrected. Lebanon has been effectively under Syrian control since 1976 and, should developments warrant formal annexation, Damascus could at will officially incorporate it. Bahrain is occasionally claimed by Tehran to be a part of Iran, most recently in July, 2007, when an associate of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, claimed that "Bahrain is part of Iran's soil," and insisted that "The principal demand of the Bahraini people today is to return this province to its mother, Islamic Iran." Jordan's existence as an independent state has always been precarious, in part because it is still seen as a colonial artifice of Winston Churchill, in part because several states (Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia) and the Palestinians see it as fair prey.

That Israel finds itself in this company has several implications. It puts Israel's existential dilemma into perspective: If the fear of elimination is a nearly routine problem within the Middle East, this would suggest that Israel's unsettled status will not be resolved any time soon. This pattern also highlights the Middle East's uniquely cruel, unstable and fatal political life; the region ranks, clearly, as the world's worst neighbourhood. Israel is the child with glasses trying to succeed at school while living in a gang-infested part of town.

The Middle East's deep and wide political sickness points to the error of seeing the Arab-Israeli conflict as the motor force behind its problems. More sensible is to see Israel's plight as the result of the region's toxic politics. Blaming the Middle East's autocracy, radicalism and violence on Israel is like blaming the diligent school child for the gangs. Conversely, resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict means only solving that conflict, not fixing the region.

If all the members of this imperiled quintet worry about extinction, Israel's troubles are the most complex. Israel having survived countless threats to its existence over the past six decades, and having done so with its honour intact, offers a reason for its population to celebrate. But the rejoicing cannot last long, for it's right back to the barricades to defend against the next threat.

(Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and the Taube/Diller
distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.)