government insisted that the possibility of haven in Palestine for European Jewry not even be discussed.
Germany’s final defeat laid bare the full horror of the Holocaust, but even this did not soften London’s attitude toward Zionism or the Jews. Labour’s Clement Atlee had replaced Winston Churchill as prime minister, with Ernest Bevin as his foreign minister. Both men were anti-Semites, especially Bevin. (Or, as the British Labour historian, Kenneth O. Morgan, put it: “Bevin was not . . . anti-Semitic. But, without doubt, he was emotionally prejudiced against the Jews.”9)
Nonetheless, British policy was shaped less by prejudice than by recrudescent realism. London did not want to “fly in the face of the Arabs,”10 explained Lord Halifax, Britain’s ambassador in Washington.
The issue at hand was the fate of the Jewish survivors in European displaced persons camps. Their situation was desperate; and this steeled the determination of the Zionists, exemplified by the fictional Ari Ben Canaan, to bring them to Palestine. London’s adamant refusal was exemplified by the fate of the Exodus, a real ship from which Uris took the title of his novel. Bound from France for Palestine with 4,500 refugees, it was intercepted by the Royal Navy, and its passengers were shipped back to Europe where they were incarcerated in the British occupation zone of Germany, under the watch, eerily, of “local” guards.
It was at this moment that a second figure stepped forward, as Arthur Balfour had, and placed idealism above realism in endorsing a Jewish state. This was U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who fumed that Attlee’s policies lacked “all human and moral considerations.”11 Truman’s decision to support the 1947 resolution of the UN General Assembly that partitioned Palestine between Jews and Arabs, and to recognize the Jewish state almost as soon as it had declared its existence, tipped the scales on this historic issue.
While a senator in 1941, Truman had joined the American Palestine Committee, a pro-Zionist group. He claimed his interest in Palestine “went back to his childhood,” write historians Allis and Ronald Radosh. “Raised as a Baptist, he had read the Bible ‘at least a dozen times’ before he was fifteen.”12 After the war, Truman received a report on the shockingly bad conditions in displaced persons camps housing European Jews who had managed to avert the genocide. Absorbing the grim details, he called their plight a matter of the “highest humanitarian importance” and fought with the British to allow them to go to Palestine.13
Roosevelt, too, had harbored Zionist sympathies. But Roosevelt had been warned sharply by the State Department that support for a Jewish homeland would compromise vital American interests with the Arabs. Roosevelt hoped he could square this circle through a personal meeting with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. But, as with Stalin at the wartime summit meetings, the president overestimated the effects of his own charm and powers of persuasion. Not only did Ibn Saud refuse to countenance a Jewish state in the Middle East, he opposed adamantly the entry of even a single additional Jew into Palestine. Following his meeting with the Saudi monarch, Roosevelt privately voiced his newfound conviction that “the project of a Jewish state in Palestine was, under present conditions, impossible of accomplishment.”14
During the Roosevelt and Truman years, public opinion sympathized with the Jews and thus supported Zionist aims, insofar as it was aware of them. This, however, flew in the face of America’s diplomats and generals. Government cables, revealed to a postwar commission examining the Palestine problem, showed that each time the White House had made promises to the Jews, the State Department hastened to tell Arab leaders to disregard them. And, after one Truman statement supporting further Jewish emigration to Palestine, senior American diplomat Loy Henderson went so far as to apologize to the British ambassador for the department’s inability to control the president.15
Needless to say, Truman was a politician, and there were more Jews in America than in Britain or any other country, especially after the annihilation of European Jewry by Hitler. But to ascribe Truman’s actions to political considerations is unconvincing. He had a stronger reputation than any other president in modern times for doing what he thought was right rather than what was expedient. And his support for Zionism began when he represented Missouri, a state where Jewish influence was negligible.
Throughout his presidency “the State Department and Truman were at loggerheads” on Palestine, write the Radoshes.16 The third of Truman’s secretaries of state, General George C. Marshall, began as a visceral Zionist sympathizer with scant knowledge of the issue, but by the time the department’s Middle East experts finished briefing him, he reversed his position completely. He became so adamant that once Truman decided to cast the American vote in favor of partition and to recognize Israel, he had to go to lengths to persuade Marshall not to resign in protest and oppose him publicly. This showed the toughness for which Truman was renowned, and which his predecessor did not share. David Niles, a White House aide who served both presidents, later wrote that he doubted Israel would have come into existence had Roosevelt lived out his fourth term.
Passage of the 1947 resolution in the UN General Assembly partitioning Palestine between Arabs and Jews required a two-thirds majority. The American decision influenced others but was not sufficient to ensure the outcome. Surprisingly, the Kremlin, never a friend to Zionism, decided also to support partition, calculating that the departure of the British from Palestine would enhance Soviet influence there. This constituted one of the rare instances when a state’s calculus of realpolitik worked to the Jews’ advantage.
In general, however, the UN vote was a moment when humanitarian considerations carried unusual weight in international deliberations. Apart from Truman’s predispositions, several other factors contributed to the outcome that made the birth of Israel possible. The first was the Holocaust itself. Although authoritative reports had reached the outside world during the war, almost no one grasped the immensity of the crime until the war was over. Jewish communities had been pillaged many times in many places, and people on the outside who had heard reports of atrocities from Nazi-occupied Europe pictured pogroms, a sad but familiar spectacle. The unprecedented reality of murder as a mass-production industry was something no one other than the Nazis themselves had imagined.
When Allied forces liberated those camps whose traces the retreating Nazis had not managed to erase, they found half-dead prisoners, corpses stacked for burning, and the maniacal machinery of death. The shock reverberated around the globe over the next few years as the astounding details were gathered and publicized. Although knowledge of the Holocaust did not cleanse the world of anti-Semitism, it created a reservoir of sympathy for the Jews wider and deeper than they had known over the millennia.
In contrast, the role of Arab leaders during the war earned no goodwill among Western governments or publics. As the Los Angeles Times put it: “The Arabs, on the whole, sided with the Nazis with whom they shared common hatreds.”17 According to German historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers, “Egypt’s King Farouk sent [Hitler] a message in the spring of 1941 saying that ‘he was filled with great admiration for the Führer and respect for the German people, whose victory over England he fervently wished for.’”18 Saudi Arabia’s King Ibn Saud declared that: “All Arabs and Mohammedans throughout the world have great respect for Germany, and this respect is increased by the battle that Germany is waging against the Jews, the archenemy of the Arabs.”19 Pro-Nazi military officers led by Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani seized Iraq in 1941, slaughtering two hundred Baghdadi Jews before their coup was put down by British forces. Gaylani and his co-conspirators enjoyed “widespread Arab Sympathy,” notes Cruise O’Brien, while there was little such support for the Allied cause.20
Gaylani and the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had come to Baghdad to aid the coup, escaped the Allied forces with the assistance of the Germans and Italians and made their way to Berlin.21 There, after a personal audience with Hitler, the Mufti began broadcasts to the Middle East on German radio about the “common battle against
