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February 10, 2024

Researching America’s role in the founding of the modern Jewish state led me to a fascinating historical nugget that rejiggers much of what we know about modern Israel’s founding. The truth is not what you may think it is. It shows that the state was very early on a pawn in the Cold War and that Truman was callously willing to jettison the Jews if need be.

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In a 1998 essay marking Israel’s 50th anniversary, historian Paul Johnson addressed a “paradoxical aspect of the Zionist miracle, which we certainly did not grasp at the time and which is insufficiently understood even now.” Martin Kramer explained in an illuminating essay from November 2017.

On November 29, 1946, the United States voted for the resolution to partition British Palestine into two separate sectors, one Jewish and one Arab. At the same time, though, it imposed an arms embargo to stop any arms from going to the Jews in British Mandate Palestine. This left 650,000 Jews alone and without weapons to defend themselves and face 50 million Arabs pledging to finish what Hitler started.

No Truman defenders can deny this reality. We can only conclude the president was prepared to accept another Jewish genocide. He knew that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, had raised an Islamic army for the Nazis in return for a German promise to this end. After the war, he was a wanted war criminal. There are still surviving pictures of him with his good friend Adolf Hitler. He was the spiritual father of the Gaza and West Bank Arabs and terrorist Yasser Arafat’s uncle.

Image: Harry Truman meeting with Ben Gurion and Abba Eban. Public domain.

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The Arabs, meanwhile, easily obtained arms. Jordan’s Arab Legion was armed and trained by the British and led by a British officer. At the end of 1948 and in the beginning of 1949, British RAF aircraft flew with Egyptian squadrons over the Egyptian-Israel border. On January 7, 1949, Israeli planes shot down four British aircraft.

That wasn’t the only strange thing that the United States did. After first approving a two-state solution, by March of 1948, the United States reversed itself on the two-state solution and, instead, sought a temporary United Nations (UN) trusteeship. On the eve of the British withdrawal from Israel in May 1948, America’s top diplomat warned Israeli leaders against declaring independence.

What was all this sea-sawing from the United States? The answer lies in the Cold War.

Harry Truman faced a difficult presidential election in 1948 and needed every vote and campaign contribution he could muster, including from America’s Jews. This was the driving force behind his support for establishing the state of Israel. However, the Cold War ultimately drove his policies, and he was indifferent about the fate of the Jews. Once out of office, though, Truman would unabashedly take full credit for Israel’s creation simply because, in May 1948, he recognized Israel as a fait accompli (de facto) but not de jure, as a legal entity.

By contrast, the Soviet Union under Stalin also voted for partition and recognized the new State of Israel de jure as opposed to the limited de facto recognition from Truman. It held firm in its commitment before and after the vote for partition.

In a May 1947 United Nations speech, Soviet Ambassador to the U.N., Andrei Gromyko, astonished the assembly with a humanist speech about Israel. Kramer writes (emphasis mine):