Fifty is a time of reckoning and remembrance, for marriages, for birthdays, and so it is for the modern state of Israel as the shofar sounds throughout the land to mark its first half-century of independence.
No one who was present, as I was, during the tense and contentious debates in the fledgling United Nations that led to the birth on May 14, 1948, will ever forget the outburst of both joy and anger that greeted the reappearance of a Jewish state in Palestine nearly 2,000 years after Jews were dispersed to wander in hostile lands.
Fifty years on, Israel is firmly established. No longer is it a David fighting Goliaths; after five victorious wars, Israel itself is Goliath with the life insurance of nuclear weapons.
For Jews and many others, the anniversary is joy relived, but it also comes at a time of questioning and contention about Israel’s way forward and even about who is a Jew.
Looking back from the vantage point of 50 years can only rekindle our amazement at all that has happened and at the conflicting claims and emotions that it can still arouse.
But remember! In a brief ceremony in a Tel Aviv museum just after 4 o’clock on that May afternoon, David Ben-Gurion, born David Gruen in Plonsk, Poland, 62 years earlier, solemnly read the declaration of Israel’s independence that would take effect with the end of the British Mandate in Palestine at midnight. Except for a two-year hiatus, Ben-Gurion was to lead the Jewish state for the next 15 years.
Eleven minutes after midnight in Jerusalem, at 5:11 p.m. Chicago time, the United States announced its de facto recognition, decided by President Harry Truman against the advice of the State and Defense Departments and America’s ally, Britain.
The celebrations began, and so did the fighting, with Arabs determined to reverse what they saw as Jewish usurpation of Arab homes and a land in which they had been a majority for seven centuries.
Scarcely 54 years had passed since the day in January 1894 when Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist, witnessed the public humiliation in Paris of a Jewish army captain named Alfred Dreyfus, falsely convicted of treason. So moved and angered was Herzl at the anti-Semitism of the verdict that he founded the Zionist movement for a return to the land from which the Jews had been expelled in 70 A.D. The movement drew adherents primarily from Jews scattered across Europe, who had endured anti-Semitism on the continent for centuries.
During World War I, Britain, in the person of Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, had promised the British Zionists led by scientist Chaim Weizmann a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine with the condition that “it did not prejudice the right of the existing inhabitants.”
In fact, Palestine was a twice-promised land. While Balfour made his promise to the Zionists to gain Jewish support for Britain in the war effort, other British officials had made what amounted to contradictory promises to win the support of the Arabs.
After the war, the League of Nations granted Britain a mandate over the area that contained both an Arab majority and a Jewish minority. And when Zionists began to flow in from Europe, there were several Arab revolts. In 1920, 1929 and 1935-36, Britain had to put down riots and violence.
The rebirth of Israel in Palestine still might not have happened without a far greater crime than the conviction of Dreyfus: the Holocaust, during which Nazi Germany killed 6 million Jews only because they were Jewish, a genocide unique in modern history.
Once Hitler’s Germany was defeated in 1945, once the Jewish survivors emerged from the concentration camps, many if not most wanted only to flee from a Europe where they had failed to find a secure place. By now, they had the guilt-ridden sympathy of many who had averted their eyes during the Holocaust. After 50 years, some have finally begun to make amends: France, Switzerland’s banks and even the pope and the Catholic Church all have apologized to Jews for their respective conduct toward Jews during the war years.
In vain, Britain tried to limit the influx into Palestine. But Europe’s Jews had paid for their reborn state in advance and in blood.
Arab Palestinians, in contrast, felt that they, the innocents, were being made to pay for Hitler’s crimes. Confident that they could drive the Jews into the sea, Arab leaders refused all compromise. Theirs was a disastrous decision.
To cut through this controversy after World War II, the young United Nations named a Special Committee on Palestine. Courted by the Zionists and shunned by the Arab governments, its 11 members returned from Palestine with opposing majority and minority reports that led to the dramatic debates in the United Nations and, above all, in both daylight and shadows, a tug-of-war for the mind of Harry Truman.
The UN had its temporary offices in a converted part of the Sperry gyroscope factory at Lake Success on Long Island. As a junior reporter for the old United Press, I would ride the train from New York several times a week to Lake Success and sit there all day, listening and occasionally drowsing through the debates.
After five decades, many of these events have grown dim outside the history books, but they led to the birth of a new state and the years of on-again, off-again war from which Israel emerged victorious.
For the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency in those long-ago UN debates, the spokesmen were Moshe Shertok, later an Israeli prime minister renamed Moshe Sharett, and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland, chiefs of the sometimes rival Middle Eastern and American wings of Zionism. Working in the background was the young Abba Eban; when finally given a chance to speak to the General Assembly, he would set himself on the path to becoming Israel’s foreign minister.
Waiting in the wings, in this case the Waldorf Towers, was Chaim Weizmann, who would play the crucial role in winning American support and later become Israel’s first president.
For the Arabs, I can remember Camille Chamoun and Charles Malik, later Christian leaders of Lebanon, and old Faris al-Khoury of Syria. For the world’s Muslims, there was Sir Zafarullah Khan of Pakistan.
The Jewish spokesmen were outnumbered, but the Arabs were outgunned. Shertok and company argued for the majority UN panel’s report urging the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, even though they were despondent that it did not give them Jerusalem.
The Arabs argued against even the minority report, which called for a federal state of Jewish and Arab cantons. Basing themselves on history and the Palestinian majority, they wanted only an Arab state.
Most Americans in 1947, and I would guess most of us reporters, listened to the Zionist arguments with sympathy and approval; for all the inflated rhetoric and threats, the Arab argument hardly seemed to come across.
Weizmann, the grand old man of Zionism, had been dumped as leader of the Zionist organization at its congress in Basel, Switzerland, the year before as too moderate. But the new leadership of Ben-Gurion in Palestine and Silver in the U.S. nevertheless had the sense to enlist his prestige for the struggle in the UN.
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On Nov. 19, 1947, Truman secretly received Weizmann in the White House. Spreading his map on a table, Weizmann convinced the fascinated president of the importance of the Jews’ retaining the southern Negev desert in the partition. “You can bank on us,” Truman told him.
For once together in the United Nations, the U.S. and the Soviet Union favored partition. Yet on Nov. 27, when the General Assembly met for the vote in a former skating rink at Lake Success, the Jewish Agency leaders still feared it would fall short of the necessary two-thirds of the 57 UN members. A sympathetic assembly chairman, Oswaldo Aranha of Brazil, ignoring Arab protests, then put off the vote until after Thanksgiving the next day.
By the time the assembly met again on Nov. 29, the tide had turned, the U.S. having helped by persuading enough waverers, or knocking together enough heads, to put partition across. Now it was the Arabs who wanted a postponement, and Aranha refused. Partition passed on a 33-13 vote with 10 abstentions.
The United Nations had died, the Arab delegates said as they walked out. “No, not died,” Faris al-Khoury added. “Murdered.”
Aranha gaveled the public galleries into silence, but in the delegates’ lounge an excited rabbi cried, “This is the day the Lord hath made!” In the Jewish quarters of Jerusalem, even a few British soldiers joined in the noisy celebrations. The Arab quarters were ominously silent.
“What a torturous journey we had made,” Abba Eban would write in his autobiography. “At the beginning of 1947, the Jewish people’s hope of statehood had nowhere been recognized; it was being crushed by the convergence of British hostility and Arab violence. . . . Now, 11 months later, everything had changed. The Jewish people in Palestine were truly a nation, fighting for its patrimony under the momentum of international recognition. The war of independence was inevitable, but it would be fought in conditions far different from anything that could have been predicted a few months before.”
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The new state of Israel would have to fight to establish itself on the ground, but another crucial struggle took place in the United States, which would become the midwife.
In his memoirs, Truman wrote that U.S. policy was to bring about, peaceably, the “establishment of the promised Jewish homeland and easy access to it for the displaced Jews of Europe.”
Fine words, but it would not be all that simple, for no one could find a compromise between the Zionist determination for independence and the determination of the Arab states to prevent it.
“Not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before but the White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage,” Truman wrote. “I do not think I ever had such pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders–actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats–disturbed and annoyed me.”
What they threatened was the loss of the Jewish votes in the large cities if Truman failed to fall into line. For Silver, who had pounded on his desk in the Oval Office and shouted at him, Truman developed a cordial dislike.
Even after the UN vote accepting partition, its opponents inside and outside the American government did not give up. Arab protests continued from abroad. At home, the political pressure on Truman increased, so much so that he gave orders that he would see no more “spokesmen for the extreme Zionist cause.” He refused even to receive again Weizmann, whom he respected and who had been brought back from London posthaste to try to break through the ban.
What happened next has become a famous anecdote in history.
One of Truman’s World War I buddies and Kansas City friends was Eddie Jacobson, who was Jewish, but not then a Zionist. They had once been partners in a haberdashery that had failed. Jacobson was prevailed upon to write Truman asking him to see Weizmann.
Truman said no, but Jacobson walked unannounced into the White House to see the president on Saturday, March 13.
They talked about friends and families until Jacobson brought up the forbidden subject. Truman was annoyed, but he grimly heard his friend out. And as Truman would recount, Jacobson waved toward a small statue of Andrew Jackson in the office.
“Harry, all your life you had a hero. . . . I, too, have a hero, a man I never met, but who is, I think, the greatest Jew who ever lived. You yourself have told me that he is a great statesman and a fine gentleman. I am talking about Dr. Chaim Weizmann. He is an old man and a very sick man. He has traveled thousands of miles to see you, and now you are putting him off. That isn’t like you.”
As Jacobson recounted, Truman swung around and said: “You win, you bald-headed son of a bitch. I will see him.”
And he did, again secretly, on March 18. They got along as well the second time as they did the first. “I told him, as plainly as I could, why I had at first put off seeing him,” Truman wrote. “He understood. . . . And when he left my office, I felt that he had reached a full understanding of my policy and that I knew what it was he wanted.
Truman had repeated his support for partition. But the story gets even more dramatic, for struggle over Palestine was taking place against a larger background of the steadily intensifying Cold War with the Soviet Union. It preoccupied both the Defense and State Departments far more than did Palestine.
For Britain, the Palestine mandate had become nothing but trouble. Along with having to put down Arab revolts, it was also faced with the terrorism of Jewish extremists who between May 1945 and October 1947 had killed 127 British soldiers and wounded 331.
In 1944, the Stern Gang had killed Lord Moyne, Britain’s resident minister in Egypt. In July 1946, Menachem Begin’s Irgun Zvai Leumi had blown up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people, Jews as well as Britons and Arabs. In September 1948, the Stern Gang would assassinate Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator.
Mainstream Zionists deplored those killings, but the killings also demonstrated again that one man’s terrorist was another’s freedom fighter. In 1947, Britain decided to hand the mandate and the whole issue back to the UN.
The State Department, the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the new Central Intelligence Agency all believed that national security required giving first priority to assuring the availability of Arab oil in case of war with the Soviet Union. All advised against partition. For them, it was oil and the national interest against partition and special-interest domestic politics.
The day after Truman’s second assurances to Weizmann, former Sen. Warren Austin, U.S. ambassador to the UN, announced that the U.S. favored substituting a temporary UN trusteeship over Palestine for partition in order to let the controversy cool down.
The cry of “betrayal” was immediate and loud, and not only from Jews. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a letter resigning as a U.S. delegate to the UN; Truman refused it.
The one exception to the protesting Zionists was Weizmann. And when Truman himself read about the Austin statement in the morning newspapers, he was incensed. He had asked to see in advance what Austin would say, and he hadn’t. But neither did State know of his meeting with Weizmann.
On his calendar on March 20, Truman wrote: “This morning I find that the State Department has reversed my Palestine policy. . . . I am now in the position of a liar and a double crosser. . . . There are people in the third and fourth level of the State Department who have always wanted to cut my throat. They’ve now succeeded in doing it.”
In April, Truman assured Jacobson that he meant what he had told Weizmann, and furthermore would recognize the Jewish state. But still the argument wasn’t quite over.
Two days before Israel’s declaration of independence, Secretary of State George Marshall and his State Department team met with Truman and his staff in the White House. Presidential aide Clark Clifford had been prompted to present the case for recognizing Israel. As he did, Marshall got redder and redder.
“This is just straight politics,” he objected. “. . .This is not a political meeting.”
To Truman, Marshall was the greatest living American, and Marshall seemed to have the same regard for Truman. But Truman’s biographer reported that Marshall looked directly at the president and said that if Truman were to follow Clifford’s advice, he would vote against the president the following November.
That stopped the meeting. Afterward, Truman insisted on believing Marshall only needed more time. And on May 14, Marshall telephoned the president to tell him that while he could not support Truman’s position, he would not oppose it publicly.
When the White House then announced de facto recognition of Israel, 11 minutes after independence, the U.S. delegation at the UN was stunned. Marshall had to send Dean Rusk, later President John Kennedy’s secretary of state, to New York to dissuade the U.S. delegates from resigning.
“The old doctor (Weizmann) will believe me now,” Truman was quoted as murmuring. And when Israel’s chief rabbi, Isaac Halevi Herzog, later told Truman that “God put you in your mother’s womb so you would be the instrument to be the rebirth of Israel after 2,000 years,” tears ran down Truman’s cheeks.
Truman always maintained that politics had nothing to do with it. His daughter Margaret, in her book, pointed out that he then resisted insistent demands by American Zionists for de jure recognition before the November presidential election, partly to assure Israel’s “good behavior” toward its Arab citizens.
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When Israel, France and Britain attacked Egypt in 1956 after Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, I was the only Western reporter lucky enough to talk my way overland from Cairo to Port Said–and I think the only one left behind when the British and French left. For four years thereafter, I covered the Arab Middle East.
In the early 1970s, I traveled in Henry Kissinger’s plane as he shuttled between Israel and its Arab neighbors. And in 1977, I watched Anwar Sadat step from his plane onto the soil of the Jewish state to be greeted by Israel’s leaders, still almost stunned by his sudden decision to come.
No one who was in Jerusalem will ever forget the wild joy that week at the dramatic breach of the Arab wall around Israel. It almost seemed to be independence all over again.
The next year, I traveled back and forth between Washington and Camp David while Sadat and Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister, worked out the resulting peace agreement between Israel and Egypt.
After Israeli troops invaded Lebanon in 1982, I was there a time or two also. Several times in the late 1980s, I covered the intifada, or uprising, of Palestinians who threw rocks into the teeth of Israeli guns on the occupied West Bank.
Joy erupted still again on Sept. 13, 1993, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the victorious Israeli general of 1967, shook hands with PLO leader Yasser Arafat on the South Lawn of the White House, sealing an interim peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. It led to another peace agreement with Jordan.
Yet no breakthrough toward peace in the Middle East ever seems to go unpunished. Islamic extremists assassinated Sadat for his efforts in 1981. A Jewish extremist assassinated Rabin for his in 1995.
Finally, I covered the Israeli elections in 1996 when voters, shell-shocked by the terrorist bombings by Palestinian extremists, gave victory to the right-wing opponents of the Oslo peace accords. Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, lost by fewer than 30,000 votes to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Since then, hope for the Rabin-Arafat agreements has all but died. Peacemakers face an unlikely, unholy alliance of extremists on both sides.
At age 50, the existence of an independent Jewish state in the Middle East remains a unique achievement, again a time for joy–but perhaps also for reflection about why, for all Israel’s progress and prowess, real peace eludes it.