Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict

 

Video and Edited Transcript
John Judis
Transcript No. 408 (5 June 2014)

 

“Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict”


with

John Judis
Author and Journalist

  

Yousef Munayyer:
Today’s event is about a really fascinating recent publication, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict. Of course, we have copies available. We are very glad to have the author John Judis with us today and I’m sure he’ll be happy to put his signature on some of those copies afterwards as well. John is an American journalist born in Chicago. He received his BA at Amherst College and an MA in philosophy from the University of California Berkeley. He is a senior editor at The New Republic and a contributing editor to The American Prospect. He is the founding editor of Socialist Revolution (Socialist Review) in 1969 and of the East Bay Voice in the 1970s. He started reporting from Washington in 1982 when he became a founding editor and the Washington correspondent for In These Times; a democratic, socialist, weekly magazine. He has written for a variety of publications, covers the Israeli-Palestinian issue regularly for The New Republic and of course, the author of Genesis. So please join us in welcoming John to speak about “Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict”.
John B. Judis: He failed to mention that I’m a contributing editor of GQ, they used to always joke about my appearance. I did that for about five years.

I am very happy to be here. I’m going to talk for 35-40 minutes maybe and then I’m open for questions. I’m looking forward to you giving me a hard time, but a different hard time than I’ve usually been getting from audiences that are usually on the other side of the issue. So be at me because I’m happy to answer your questions.

I am not a professional Israel watcher and my connections to Judaism as a religion are very tangential, I have no religious background. I became interested in Israel in the mid-1960s. I was an anti-war protester and it looked like what was happening over there was much better than what was happening in my country. When the Six Day War broke out I called the consulate in San Francisco to volunteer and they said, “It’s too late, we don’t need you.” I think it was two or three days into that war. After that I began reading and I remember particularly Maxime Rodinson, you know his work, Israel and the Arabs? That had a lot of influence on me. And as the occupation took hold I began to rethink my own positions. But I have never been that involved with any particular organizations, pro or con, and at The New Republic, until very recently, the kinds of views that I had you would not commonly find in the magazine. If I was going to write about [Palestine-Israel], I would do it for somebody else.

I started this book in 2004-2005. I was trying to decide what to do when a friend said ‘well, why don’t you write your position, take a drawn position on what is happening now and what should happen?’ and I had two problems with that. The first is that I haven’t been a journalist in the Middle East and therefore I don’t know a lot. I have had these interviews with leaders but I don’t know the terrain that well. The second thing, which is more important, was that the debate in the United States about Israel and Palestine often takes the form a kind of divorce disagreement; a ‘he said she said’ – who was responsible for the Second Intifada? Who really screwed up Camp David? I didn’t want to get lodged in that particular debate. So I thought if I go backwards and look at the beginning, in terms of American policy in the Truman years, then that would provide a window into what happened subsequently and it would be more difficult for people to dismiss my views as being based on talking to the wrong people at the wrong time. I was going to do a scholarly book, which I did.

The only thing that I found in looking at the Truman years, and these were really the first years that an American administration was engaged with the issue, was that if you look from 1945 to 1948 and the debate in United States, the Holocaust just overshadows everything. It overshadows in a moral sense and makes it very, very difficult to understand the Arab side of the debate, or why the Arabs were so angry at the time and why they rejected the UN deal. What I found was that in order to present what I found from 1945 to 1950, I had to go back to 1890. Not to 200 BCE or something like that because then you get a whole different set of distortions. Nor to the crusaders, but to about the 1890s to look at the origins of Zionism and Arab nationalism. Let me just say a few things that you probably already know about that and then I’ll work my way up to Truman.

Zionism begins, there’s Christian Zionists for a long time, but as a movement it begins in the pale of settlement outside of a part of the Russian Empire in the 1880s-1890s. It begins as a kind of national liberation movement for the Jews. The key event is Theodore Herzl’s 1895 The Jewish State and the formation of the Zionist Organization, and even from the beginning there are really two sides. The one side of Zionism is a national liberation movement for a people who find themselves oppressed, persecuted, not simply as a religion, but as a separate nationality- but as a nationality without a nation. So the solution to that, it would seem, would be to have a nation so they weren’t seen as simply an alien nationality within Poland, Austria or Romania. That’s the origins of Zionism as a political enterprise.

The problem was that in settling on Palestine as a destination, as a place to have a nation, the Zionist movement was going to colonize a place where another people already lived and had lived for a thousand years. So in 1890, all the figures are in dispute, but I think a fair representation is about 500,000 people there; four percent Jewish, five percent Christian and, ninety percent Muslim Arab. [The Muslim population] are an overwhelming majority, many which have lived there since 600 CE and a lot can trace themselves back well before that. So the enterprise of Zionism had this problem at the core of it: it planned to establish a state where other people lived. That became especially acute after the Balfour Declaration in December 1917, when the British in effect gave their imprimatur to the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland, state and commonwealth in Palestine. At the same time, our president, Woodrow Wilson, and Lenin in the Soviet Union encouraged the idea of national self-determination for the formerly colonized people who, with the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in WWI, were suddenly put in the position where they could kind of have their own nationality. So what you get in the early 1920s is the beginning of this clash between Zionism and a Palestinian-Arab nationalism that persists to this day.

As you know, the Palestinian Arab part of it has become a loser. I have had several reviewers criticize me for saying in the conclusion of the book that Palestinians got screwed. I used the term as a vernacular in order to try to make the point and to try to get the reader’s attention. For at the end of this process, 120-130 years after Zionism starts, you have a situation where there is a state of Israel but the Palestinian Arabs themselves not only don’t have any state but they are a colonized people dispersed in refugee camps. So in that sense, yes: they got screwed.

But what about Zionism? And what about the 1920s and 1930s? What is the basis for supporting this enterprise even though it has this dark side of establishing a state where another people lived. At the time a lot of the justifications reflected the common imperial views of “more advanced people” coming in to help a “less advanced people.” But there were two things that really changed internationally the stature of Zionism.

The first was the Nazis come to power in 1933, and not just the Nazis but anti-Semitic parties in Central Europe, Eastern Europe and even France. So you have, beginning in 1933, this tremendous urgency about finding some place else to go. At the same time, the United States closes off immigration in 1924 and establishes quotas that are meant to discriminate, not just against Jews, but against Southern Europeans and anybody who had started coming here in about 1880. If you look at the population figures from 1880 to 1920, 2.5 million Jews emigrate from the Pale of Settlement, Eastern Europe and parts of Russia to the United States [and only] 30,000 go to Palestine. So what I conclude from that is that if United States hadn’t had those immigration quotas, if immigration had been as it had been before 1924, Israel would have been somewhere between Washington, DC and Scarsdale. In other words, it would have been a tremendous immigration to the United States and the politics of the world would look a lot different. But that didn’t happen. Instead, what happened was that the Jews in Central Europe were increasingly squeezed, increasingly desperate and saw Palestine as their only recourse.

If you then look at the situation in about 1945 when Truman takes office, on the one hand you have the Jews wanting desperately to establish Palestine as a safe haven for Jews who were facing persecution. [Because] at that point, nobody knew whether there would be Nazis in 1950 or 1955, that was part of the reality. The other part of the reality was that the Palestinian-Arabs in the 1930s had fought this desperate battle primarily against the British directed at their support for Zionism and the Jewish State. By 1945 or so, [Palestinians] had lost a lot of their leadership. A lot of what had been a political movement had become a guerrilla movement. We describe the Palestinian population at the time as being envenomed against any compromise with the Jews to the extent that the common proposal at the time, when they were having the negotiations in the end of the 1930s with the British, was that the Jews who had come before WWI were welcome and those who had come afterwards, except for the children of the ones who had come before, were not welcome. So there was really no room for compromise at that point. The two sides were dead set against another. The Palestinians were dead set against any immigration, and the Jews desperately wanted a state to which the persecuted Jews of Europe and those who remained from the Holocaust could emigrate.

[When] Truman comes to office in April of 1945 he does not have a great background on the issue. There is a mythology that has arisen afterwards that is entirely false, about him being a Christian Zionist since he was a child. He used to read the Bible because he was very nearsighted, he didn’t have glasses and it had big print. He particularly liked the stories about the kings and things like that. He was not like Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George or Arthur Balfour, a Christian Zionist from that standpoint.

His attitude was compounded of two things. His foreign policy was based on a moral outlook; there were bullies in the world, there were underdogs, there were people that the bullies were taking advantage of and he hated the Nazis. If you read his speeches from the 1940s, he was not a great speaker, I’d say Jimmy Carter would be an example of a similar speaking style, but I read one speech that he gave in 1944 about the plight of the Jewish refugees that was totally from the heart. It showed an intense anger against fascism and Nazis. That was very important to his outlook, and from the beginning he supported the idea that the Jewish refugees in Europe should be allowed to emigrate to Palestine. The British were very much against this because they didn’t want to provoke another four years of a war with the Arabs and they were afraid that was exactly what would happen if they allowed the concentration camp survivors and other people to go to Palestine.

The other part of his outlook was that Truman was not a Zionist, contrary to the way he portrayed himself in the fifties. He was very skeptical about the idea of either a Jewish state or an Arab state. His model as an American was multinational. He’d grown up in southern Missouri in a place that had been torn apart by the Civil War but had finally reconciled. He had this view of America as a place where people of different races and religions could get along. That was his ideal. So morally, speaking of the idea of a Jewish state or an Arab state was anathema to him.

When people began pressuring him about it he would fight back. When leaders of American Zionism came to visit him he would say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t agree with that, that’s not my position.’ The other aspect was that he was worried that if you had either a Jewish state or an Arab state you’d have World War III, because he worried that the Russians would intervene and we would get caught up in a war. He didn’t want American forces to be involved in the Middle East. At the time, the Cold War was beginning in Europe and he was worried that if you tried to force either a Jewish state or an Arab state what you’d have was 40 years of war, not that that’s happened or anything. Those two things were Truman’s concern: the moral issue of fairness and the issue of war.

Early in his administration, 1945 and 1946, he works with the British and Foreign Secretary Bevin to establish the British-American Commission and the Morrison-Grady Plan. Morrison was the British guy and Grady was the State Department-American guy who went over and conferred with Truman regularly. They come up with the plan in late July 1946, which is as close to anything that Truman wanted to see happen. It consisted of, on the one hand, the British allowing 100,000 refugees to go to Palestine. That was very important to [Truman]. On the other hand, you would get a state that was neither Arab nor Jewish and was binational or federated. Modeled somewhat on Switzerland, there would be a Jewish part, an Arab part and an internationalized part where some mandated United Nations power would temporarily have control of foreign policy and higher financial concerns until such a time that the people could get together. But the basic idea was a binational or federated state. [Truman] gets ready to give a joint announcement with Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister, of his support for [the plan] until all hell breaks loose.

In America, after WWII and revelations about the final solution, the American Zionist movement, which would have been at most in the tens of thousands, becomes a large, mass, powerful movement of 100,000, 200,000. It has at that point, which it doesn’t have now, a lot of voting power (it has fundraising now) because New York was the most popular state in elections, the way California is now. And the Jewish population in New York is a swing vote. Maryland, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania; all of those are important states. 1946 is a crucial election: the Democrats have had control over the House of Representatives since 1932 and their control is threatened. If the Republicans get in they could basically repeal the New Deal, and the Democrats and Truman are worried to death that that could happen.

The American Zionist Movement at this point has a leader, Abba Hillel Silver, who understands lobbying and is a brilliant man in terms of American politics. He understand that even though most Jews vote for Democrats and continue to vote for Democrats, what the lobby has to do is hold up the threat that they won’t because of this single issue of establishing a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. Truman is scared to death of this. Henry Wallace, the Secretary of Commerce, describes a meeting of the Cabinet in late July where Truman holds up this enormous stack of letters (this was at a time when after receiving 2,000 letters from the State of Connecticut a politician would start to worry). So there were rallies all over the country. There was letter writing and pressure from Congress, so Truman backs down and gives up.

Truman is known as “the buck stops here” guy, with the sign on his desk. And in terms of the Cold War, Berlin airlifts, etc., he was very much like that. In terms of Palestine, however, it was just the opposite. He was trying desperately to get other people to resolve it. At that point, in August 1946, he repeatedly tries to bow out of the issue. But it flares up and there’s finally a battle between the State Department, the American Zionists and the British – and he has to intervene. What he does when he intervenes is still try to reach an agreement that’s fair and that respects both the Arabs and the Jews. When you get to the United Nations in 1947, the Zionist movement in Israel decides, brilliantly, to accept partition. The American Zionists were for an undivided Palestine, they wanted the whole thing, but Ben-Gurion and Menachem Goldman decided that that was simply not a viable option. So what Truman does in the United Nations is to try to reach some kind of an agreement that reflects the populations, at that point 70-30 Arab-Jewish. The proposal that passes in November of that year is 56-40 Jewish with the rest internationalized, so it’s almost a reversal of population and land. Truman and Marshall again try for something much closer to 50-50, or maybe even – because the Arabs were going to get the Negev – it would have actually been a little more Arab than Jewish territory, but the same pattern happens and he backs down under pressure. And that’s pretty much the pattern for the rest of his administration. He tries after the 1948 War for some kind of agreement on refugees; he tries for some kind of agreement on borders, with the Negev as a big issue, but under pressure he backs down. At this point Truman is completely preoccupied with the Cold War and after that, Korea. He doesn’t give a great deal of attention to [Palestine-Israel] and when he gives attention again his first impulse is the same principles that guide him, but under pressure he wilts.

Now the strange thing is that throughout this whole period, late July 1946 up through the recognition of Israel on May 15th, Truman never abandons his original idea of the Morrison-Grady Plan. I found this very odd when I was going through his papers. He recognizes Israel on May 14th of 1948, and on May 15th he writes Bartley Crum, “You of course are familiar with all the effort put forth by me to get a peaceable and satisfactory settlement of the Palestine question. I am still hoping for just that. I think the report of the British-American Committee on Palestine was the correct solution, and I think eventually we are going to get it worked out just that way.” Three days later he writes another person who had written him about the issue, and this is after he has recognized Israel. “My sole objective in the Palestine procedure has been to prevent bloodshed. The way things look today we apparently have not been very successful. Nobody in this country has given the problem more time and thought than I have. In 1946, when the British-American Committee on Palestine was appointed and Mr. Bevin had made an agreement with me that he would accept the finding of that committee, I thought we had the problem solved. But the emotional Jews in the United States and the equally emotional Arabs in Egypt and Syria prevented that settlement from taking place.”

Four months later in September of 1948, a delegation from the Jewish War Veterans comes to see Truman and he thinks it’s either going to be in the Oval Office or a ceremonial visit where they ask him to appear at their convention, give him an award or a letter and they’re off. But instead, the head of the Jewish War Veterans reads him a list of demands related to the State of Israel and Truman gets angry. He says that he is “the best friend the Jews had in America.” He said that he and Bevin “had agreed on the best possible solution for Palestine. It was the Zionists who killed that plan by their opposition.” Again, I’m just trying to say something more about Truman than what the ideal solution was. But he in his mind remained wedded to this idea. You absolutely would not know that from most of the biographies you read or from Truman’s own memoirs in the fifties. He changes his mind in 1950-1951 after he becomes celebrated for recognizing Israel. Even afterwards, in September 1948, he still thinks that the best plan would have been something completely different.

Now let me talk a minute about the plan itself. Would it have worked, and was it a viable solution in 1946, ‘47, ‘48? I’m not a determinist in terms of history, I don’t think everything had to happen exactly as it happened and if you look at that history there were very slight windows that were opened. In August of 1946 there was a window for a kind of agreement. Bevin was going to do it, but he had a heart attack and all of these odd things happened, so the British Colonial secretary, who had a real tin ear, becomes the one in charge of negotiating with the Arab League where there was some sympathy for a compromise. But [the Arab League] said, “The only way you’re going to get a compromise is if we work it out privately. If you get this issue public, then we’re going to have to take an adamant stand against any agreement.” But the Colonial Secretary insists on doing it in public and nothing comes of it.

There’s a similar thing that happens in February when Ben-Gurion worries suddenly that the issue’s going to get thrown into the United Nations. There he fears the Soviet Union, who the Jews and the Americans thought were going to side of the Arabs, would outvote them and they’d end up with something even worse. Therefore, in February Ben-Gurion proposes some kind of interim solution that would involve a federation. But he’s too late. By then the British had already decided they were fed up, they want to get out of there and they want to get out of there by 1948, so there’s no compromise. Given those two very slight windows, I’d say for the most part it is very hard to see how things could have happened other than they did. The only way in which Truman’s solution, the Morrison-Grady Plan, could have worked would have been if the United States had been willing to put troops on the ground to enforce the plan in order to keep the sides apart – a Kosovo-Bosnia kind of solution. I think that it would be a good bet that it still wouldn’t have worked, but in any case the one thing that Truman absolutely did not want to do was to send any troops to the Middle East. This was the time of the Berlin airlift, and they were scared to death that they were going to have to fight a land war on the European continent.

The United States really didn’t have a viable option. You look at the debate in late July and Truman is pressing something that really was not going to work unless the Americans were willing to take the further step and put forces behind it, which they weren’t. So what’s to conclude from this? The thing that I took from it was that the principles that guided Truman, led him to support Morrison-Grady, make the effort at the beginning and finally to give up were valid. Those [principles] were again the idea that you needed to have a settlement that was fair to both sides, to the Arabs and the Jews. Secondly, that if you didn’t get a settlement, you were going to have riot, rebellion, and war for decades and decades. So I think that those two guiding principles in Truman were right, but in terms of the application I think they were flawed, and it’s hard for me to imagine a different kind of outcome.

What about the present? When I talked about the book I would usually end on a hopeful note about Kerry’s negotiations. I guess I had the same kind of illusions that Truman had about Morrison-Grady, because wiser people than me knew that this was not going to work. I think we are in a very difficult situation. I think that it’s hard to conceive of anything happening there between the Palestinians and the Jews in Israel and Palestine without outside pressure. I had a lot of hope that the EU would play a strong role, but the EU is really crippled by the Euro crisis and I worry that it’s even going to fall apart. So I don’t think that it’s a strong contender for an institution that would go in and exert a lot of pressure. The United States, again I give Kerry credit for trying, but in order for him to have succeeded he would have had to have at least two things. He would have had to have the President completely onboard, which I don’t think he was. I think that it was something that they handed off to Kerry and watched it unfold and finally took some steps, but they didn’t fully put the President behind that. Secondly, in terms of fully behind it, the United States would have to use some muscle and some leverage, and I think it would have to use leverage primarily with the Israelis.

The Palestinians, as far as I can tell, have the most moderate government in my lifetime, certainly the most amenable to compromise. The Israeli government, I know there are some arguments that they’re really left-wing because they believe in a two-state solution now, but I don’t see it. I see them becoming more intransigent, increasing settlements and making any kind of two-state solution more and more difficult. The way for the United States to have any effect would be to threaten, I don’t see any other way to do it. That’s how George H. W. Bush got the Madrid Conference in 1991, that’s in fact what Clinton did at Wye River with Netanyahu. You have to be willing to get tough, and I don’t think that the administration was willing to do that.

Part of the problem is the lobby in Washington, though in these particular negotiations they really stood back, preoccupied with Iran and not with negotiations. I think they were probably smarter than me, they probably figured that nothing was going to come of it. But nonetheless, there is a continuing blind spot in terms of the lobby, and I’m speaking mainly of AIPAC and the Conference not J Street or other organizations toward the Arab side. That goes back to the early twentieth century and the part of the book that I’m most proud of because it’s the most original but that reviewers have paid the least attention to, the part on the history of American Zionism. You get from the early twentieth century an incredibly distorted view of Palestine as an unoccupied desert that the Jews were coming to. Population estimates were just screwy, with two times as many Jews as Arabs living there in 1910. I’ve gone through the Maccabean, I’ve gone through the literature and even with the enlightened individuals like Louis Brandeis you get comparisons between the Jews and the Arabs as between the Pilgrims and the Indians. You get a kind of imperial mindset in viewing the situation. I was really surprised by Reinhold Lieber, a famous American liberal who testifies in 1946 before this British-American Committee meeting in Washington and recommends the idea of transferring the Arabs to Iraq as a solution to the situation. So on the liberal side there’s been this incredible blind spot that persists that’s part of the problem in terms of resolving the conflict. I think that it’s changing, among American Jews in particular. I think there’s much less enchantment with Israel and its government, and you would expect that given the history of the occupation and the kind of government that’s now in charge. But the donor community is still heavily weighted towards a position that doesn’t take the Arab side seriously.

From America, I don’t see in the next four to eight years any kind of serious push. I see Israel moving again towards a more intransigent position. So I’m very pessimistic, to conclude, about what’s going to happen there. I’m afraid that this situation that I described in 1920 is going to persist and get worse. Thank you.

 

John B. Judis is an American journalist. Born in Chicago he attended Amherst College and received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a senior editor at The New Republic and a contributing editor to The American Prospect. A founding editor of Socialist Revolution (now Socialist Review) in 1969 and of the East Bay Voice in the 1970s, Judis started reporting from Washington in 1982, when he became a founding editor and Washington correspondent for In These Times, a democratic-socialist weekly magazine. He has also written for GQ, Foreign Affairs, Mother Jones, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post.