A Calculated Risk. Evan M. Wilson
of Truman's problem was the lack of real alternatives. The British had tried during the mandate to come up with proposals that would satisfy both Zionists and Arab nationalists. There simply seemed to be no middle ground. And the British decided in early 1947—under dire pressures to contract their overseas commitments—to throw the Palestine issue into the lap of the newly created United Nations. The United Nations, of course, was unprepared for this challenge. The partition plan that the General Assembly was barely able to agree upon in November 1947—after intense pressure from the United States on some very small and easily-manipulated member states—was never going to be implemented peacefully.
After the vote on partition, the question arose of how the resolution could ever be implemented. This led to a proposal, briefly endorsed by the United States, to support a transitional period during which Palestine would be place under a U.N. trusteeship. This might have postponed the moment of reckoning, but it won no support from either Zionists or Arabs. The truth is that both sides preferred to take their chances on the battlefield rather than to count on untested international institutions to resolve a conflict that was existential for each.
Given the speed with which the United States finally recognized the new state of Israel in May 1948, one might have thought that Washington would also have become Israel's major financial and military backer. But Truman was only willing to go so far. He did not authorize arms shipments to the new state, despite his sympathy for it. It is hard to remember that for the first twenty years of Israel's existence, the United States actually had a somewhat standoffish relationship, manifested most clearly in its unwillingness to give Israel either arms or a blank check. This was a residue of the strategic arguments that had been made, largely at the State Department, against too close an embrace of Israel for fear of providing openings to the Soviets and of undermining pro-Western Arab governments.
At the moment of writing this Foreword, a noisy debate is taking place in the United States about the influence of the pro-Israel lobby. What is striking about the period under review is that Zionists did indeed manage to have considerable, probably decisive, influence over Truman's decision, but there was hardly anything at the time resembling today's well-organized and well-financed lobby (most visibly, but not solely, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC). Instead, Zionists sought and managed to win access to the White House and to Truman through personal contacts. Truman's former business partner managed to get Weizmann in to see Truman at a crucial moment; Felix Frankfurter, a staunch Zionist, was a close friend of Truman and other leading Democrats. In the Senate, Robert F. Wagner played an important role. And the American Jewish community, despite its small size, had begun to organize and make its weight felt.
Zionists were persuasive for many reasons, but certainly one was that they were able to portray their cause in terms that resonated with many Americans. On one hand, the Jewish people had suffered on an unimaginable scale, and the full horror of the Holocaust was becoming well known in the immediate post-war years. For many, this gave Israel a moral claim to a secure homeland as a refuge for the remnants of European Jewry. In addition, European-born Zionists like Weizmann quite literally spoke the same language as the American establishment. Their worldview, their values, their historical reference points were all similar. And finally, they had powerful allies in the American Jewish community, including those organized groups like the American Jewish Committee and the American branch of the Jewish Agency. Personalities like Louis Brandeis, Stephen Wise and Abba Hillel Silver also played important parts.
While pro-Zionist views were often challenged from those within the bureaucracy who thought they were looking after America's long-term strategic interests, it is striking that voices from the Arab world were rarely heard in official Washington. Nor did the small Arab-American community count for much. Only one Arab leader seems to have made much of an impression. In February 1945, FDR met with King Abdalaziz (Ibn Saud). The King was strongly opposed to Zionism and the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. FDR apparently was impressed by his personality and some of his arguments. He later told colleagues that he learned more from that one meeting than from all the briefings he had had from the State Department. And he made a vague promise to the King, later repeated in endless diplomatic exchanges, that the United States would take no action on Palestine without first consulting the Arabs.
While the Saudi King may have made an impression on FDR, he was a man of another era and another ethic. He did not deny that terrible things had been done to the Jews in Europe. But his tribal view of how to compensate them—lay waste to part of Germany and let the Jews have their state there—was not likely to win many adherents in the United States. So there was really no dialogue with the Arab side of the argument. No one was very interested in the views of the new Arab leaders—King Faruq of Egypt, King Faisal II of Iraq, King Abdallah of Jordan, all beholden to Great Britain, or the rabble-rousing Mufti of Jerusalem, who had sided with Hitler in World War II. The Arab point of view simply had no resonance in official Washington, certainly not in comparison to that of the Zionists.
Sixty years later, much has changed in the politics of policymaking toward Israel/Palestine. But some things also remain the same. The White House is where the action takes place. Presidents do matter. All have supported Israel to one degree or another, but some, such as George W. Bush, have gone further in offering a virtual blank check. Public opinion remains generally pro-Israeli, and Congress is even more enthusiastic. The bureaucracy, stripped of most of its “Arabists”, still registers occasional dissents from straight-out support for Israel. There is still a concern for some degree of balance so that interests in the Arab world will not be placed at risk. And oil from the region is more important than ever. But strong support for Israel is now a sine qua non of American policy.
Gone is the fear of Soviet encroachment—a strong motivator for those who argued in the 1950s and ’60s that we should keep some distance from Israel. And there is the new phenomenon of extremist groups of Muslims such as Al-Qaida who are determined to strike directly at the United States.
But the Arab-Israel conflict is still there, unresolved, and familiar in its basic outlines to anyone who has read history. True, Egypt and Jordan have made peace. And President Bill Clinton came close to resolving the remainder of the conflict on his watch, but ultimately he failed.
The debate in Washington goes on, although less within the bureaucracy and more in the public arena. The Arab states are now better represented, some with very able spokesmen. The Arab-American and Muslim-American communities are better organized. The elite press is often fairly good in its coverage of issues, although there is still an obvious tilt in Israel's favor. And the pro-Israel forces, well-organized and well-endowed, have now been joined by significant numbers of Evangelical Christians who support Israel for religio-ideological reasons. The old notion that Democrats are more predictably pro-Israeli than Republicans has been demonstrated false by the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Being pro-Israel, especially in Congress, is one of the few issues on which Republicans and Democrats tend to agree.
With all that has changed since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, some of the lessons that we can draw from Evan Wilson's book are still relevant. The United States has important interests on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the best way to protect those interests is to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Unfortunately, those simple truths are at risk of being lost amidst the rhetoric of “transforming” the Middle East and pursuing the Global War on Terrorism. No President can expect to tackle the fundamentals of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without entering contested and controversial territory. That much we can learn from A Calculated Risk. But without a president willing to engage seriously with the complexities of the issues, and without strong American leadership, the conflict is likely to go on for many more years, poisoning the chances for a region of hope, of development, and of democracy. In a Middle East without peace in Israel/Palestine, American interests will remain at risk, much as Evan Wilson and his colleagues had feared.
PREFACE
It was in May 1942 that the leaders of the world Zionist movement met in a hotel in wartime New York City and set as their goal the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
It was in May 1948, only six years later, that a group of