GENESIS
Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict
John B Judis
Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 432 pages; $30
"I received about 35,000 pieces of mail and propaganda from the Jews in this country," Harry Truman told Senator Claude Pepper in 1947. "I put it all in a pile and struck a match to it." The man destined to be canonised by American Jews as a champion of Israel felt exhausted and outmatched by the young but influential Zionist lobby.
Over the course of Genesis, John B Judis recounts Truman's predicament, trapped between his desire to find a fair and equitable outcome for Arabs and Jews in Palestine and the seeming impossibility of doing so. But Mr Judis is interested in telling a larger story, one that lays a good deal of responsibility on the American Zionist lobby for Truman's - and America's - failure to construct a just and peaceful solution.
The influence of America's Israel lobby has, of course, become a loaded topic in recent years. Genesis comes trailing John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and Peter Beinart's The Crisis of Zionism, both of which ignited firestorms that have yet to die out.
Mr Judis approaches his subject from the more distant precincts of history, but history is served on the tip of a sharp spear. Though he may write of Harry Truman in 1947, it is Barack Obama and contemporary America at which he aims. "The underlying problem," he says, "remains the same: whether an American president and the American people can forthrightly address the conflict of Jew and Arab in the Middle East, or whether they must bow to the demands of a powerful pro-Israel lobby." These are clearly fighting words. Nonetheless, Mr Judis, a senior editor at The New Republic, is a careful historian, looking at the origins of the conflict in Palestine, the rise of the American pro-Israel lobby and, finally, the fateful encounter between the lobby and Truman over the three years from his accession to the presidency to the creation of the new nation.
When Truman entered the White House in 1945, the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, pushed off the diplomatic agenda by the war, was again becoming an international issue. By 1946, thousands of Jewish refugees, survivors of Nazism, were stranded in displaced-persons camps in Europe, unwilling or unable to remain on a continent that had been the deathbed of nearly six million of their compatriots. Most countries didn't want them, and in any case, most of the refugees wanted to join their fellow Jews already in Palestine.
But to Palestine's Arab population these Jews represented an enormous threat to their own desire for self-determination. A huge new influx of Jewish refugees from Europe endangered both their majority and their land. Palestine's British rulers had tried to solve this problem time and again in the 1930s, but flailed futilely in attempting to do right by both Arab and Jew. In exasperation, Britain turned to the United Nations and the Americans.
"There was probably never a time after December 1917" - in the wake of the Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine - "that the Jews and Arabs in Palestine could have agreed on their own to share or divide the country," Mr Judis writes. "So," he goes on, "if any agreement were possible, it would have had to be imposed by outside powers, and then enforced by them until the Jews and Arabs agreed to abide by it."
Truman and the US, according to Mr Judis, had the power to enforce an agreement, and just might have done so if it were not for America's pro-Zionist lobby. This is the crux of his argument, and to make it, he gives us the history of the lobby's rise to influence, from Louis Brandeis, who used his immense prestige and skills to put Zionism on the American political map, through the Zionist Organisation of America that he founded, to the formidable Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, who forcefully took control of the pro-Zionist lobby in the 1940s.
Brandeis, the great liberal legal champion, had found fame and a comfortable place among Boston's Brahmins. But he soon discovered in Zionism and its early socialist ethos a means to meld his emerging Jewish identity with his progressive principles. Zionism became, for Brandeis, the perfect embodiment of his liberal ideals.
Yet, in Mr Judis' eyes, Brandeis and those who came after him betrayed those ideals as they became advocates for a Jewish state. For Mr Judis, the push for a separate Jewish state was a "narrow" and exclusive form of nationalism doomed to end in conflict.
Mr Judis admits a binational state had only marginal support among Jews in Palestine and absolutely none among Arabs. As he says, it would have had to be imposed on them from the outside. But could this realistically have happened?
The fact is, we have test cases of arrangements imposed by the West in multiethnic states like Iraq and Lebanon. The results have been anything but stable and peaceful. With regard to Palestine, Arabs and Jews were probably destined to clash sooner or later. Mr Judis apparently believes that partition of the land was the cause. In the short run, perhaps. But so long as Arabs and Jews inhabited Palestine together, it's hard to see how war could have been avoided. There were no grounds for compromise between the two peoples because in the end their goals were at odds with each other.
The American pro-Zionist lobby, particularly under Silver, could be a blunt instrument. It was able to wield considerable influence not only because Truman had close Jewish friends but also because he needed their money and support against Thomas E Dewey in the 1948 campaign. Mr Judis does a fine job of detailing the excruciating twists and turns Truman took to placate the lobby while caught between its aims, those of the British and the goals of his own anti-Zionist State Department.
But to assume a peaceful solution might have been found without the Zionist lobby's influence overstates the case. The UN partition plan came from the realisation that Arabs and Jews could never cooperate. Based on what it knew then, and what we know today, separation was the only workable solution.
Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict
John B Judis
Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 432 pages; $30
"I received about 35,000 pieces of mail and propaganda from the Jews in this country," Harry Truman told Senator Claude Pepper in 1947. "I put it all in a pile and struck a match to it." The man destined to be canonised by American Jews as a champion of Israel felt exhausted and outmatched by the young but influential Zionist lobby.
Over the course of Genesis, John B Judis recounts Truman's predicament, trapped between his desire to find a fair and equitable outcome for Arabs and Jews in Palestine and the seeming impossibility of doing so. But Mr Judis is interested in telling a larger story, one that lays a good deal of responsibility on the American Zionist lobby for Truman's - and America's - failure to construct a just and peaceful solution.
The influence of America's Israel lobby has, of course, become a loaded topic in recent years. Genesis comes trailing John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and Peter Beinart's The Crisis of Zionism, both of which ignited firestorms that have yet to die out.
Mr Judis approaches his subject from the more distant precincts of history, but history is served on the tip of a sharp spear. Though he may write of Harry Truman in 1947, it is Barack Obama and contemporary America at which he aims. "The underlying problem," he says, "remains the same: whether an American president and the American people can forthrightly address the conflict of Jew and Arab in the Middle East, or whether they must bow to the demands of a powerful pro-Israel lobby." These are clearly fighting words. Nonetheless, Mr Judis, a senior editor at The New Republic, is a careful historian, looking at the origins of the conflict in Palestine, the rise of the American pro-Israel lobby and, finally, the fateful encounter between the lobby and Truman over the three years from his accession to the presidency to the creation of the new nation.
When Truman entered the White House in 1945, the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, pushed off the diplomatic agenda by the war, was again becoming an international issue. By 1946, thousands of Jewish refugees, survivors of Nazism, were stranded in displaced-persons camps in Europe, unwilling or unable to remain on a continent that had been the deathbed of nearly six million of their compatriots. Most countries didn't want them, and in any case, most of the refugees wanted to join their fellow Jews already in Palestine.
But to Palestine's Arab population these Jews represented an enormous threat to their own desire for self-determination. A huge new influx of Jewish refugees from Europe endangered both their majority and their land. Palestine's British rulers had tried to solve this problem time and again in the 1930s, but flailed futilely in attempting to do right by both Arab and Jew. In exasperation, Britain turned to the United Nations and the Americans.
"There was probably never a time after December 1917" - in the wake of the Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine - "that the Jews and Arabs in Palestine could have agreed on their own to share or divide the country," Mr Judis writes. "So," he goes on, "if any agreement were possible, it would have had to be imposed by outside powers, and then enforced by them until the Jews and Arabs agreed to abide by it."
Truman and the US, according to Mr Judis, had the power to enforce an agreement, and just might have done so if it were not for America's pro-Zionist lobby. This is the crux of his argument, and to make it, he gives us the history of the lobby's rise to influence, from Louis Brandeis, who used his immense prestige and skills to put Zionism on the American political map, through the Zionist Organisation of America that he founded, to the formidable Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, who forcefully took control of the pro-Zionist lobby in the 1940s.
Brandeis, the great liberal legal champion, had found fame and a comfortable place among Boston's Brahmins. But he soon discovered in Zionism and its early socialist ethos a means to meld his emerging Jewish identity with his progressive principles. Zionism became, for Brandeis, the perfect embodiment of his liberal ideals.
Yet, in Mr Judis' eyes, Brandeis and those who came after him betrayed those ideals as they became advocates for a Jewish state. For Mr Judis, the push for a separate Jewish state was a "narrow" and exclusive form of nationalism doomed to end in conflict.
Mr Judis admits a binational state had only marginal support among Jews in Palestine and absolutely none among Arabs. As he says, it would have had to be imposed on them from the outside. But could this realistically have happened?
The fact is, we have test cases of arrangements imposed by the West in multiethnic states like Iraq and Lebanon. The results have been anything but stable and peaceful. With regard to Palestine, Arabs and Jews were probably destined to clash sooner or later. Mr Judis apparently believes that partition of the land was the cause. In the short run, perhaps. But so long as Arabs and Jews inhabited Palestine together, it's hard to see how war could have been avoided. There were no grounds for compromise between the two peoples because in the end their goals were at odds with each other.
The American pro-Zionist lobby, particularly under Silver, could be a blunt instrument. It was able to wield considerable influence not only because Truman had close Jewish friends but also because he needed their money and support against Thomas E Dewey in the 1948 campaign. Mr Judis does a fine job of detailing the excruciating twists and turns Truman took to placate the lobby while caught between its aims, those of the British and the goals of his own anti-Zionist State Department.
But to assume a peaceful solution might have been found without the Zionist lobby's influence overstates the case. The UN partition plan came from the realisation that Arabs and Jews could never cooperate. Based on what it knew then, and what we know today, separation was the only workable solution.
©2014 The New York Times News Service