Press Release Announcing U.S. Recognition of Israel

Context

U.S. recognition of Israel took place amidst complex historical circumstances. Global, regional, domestic political, religious, and perhaps even personal factors figured into Truman's decision to recognize the Jewish state without fully consulting or informing numerous key individuals in the State Department or at the United Nations. To fully appreciate the context of Truman's decision, each of these areas needs to be considered individually and collectively.

The end of World War II was accompanied by massive changes on the global political landscape. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had been compelled to accept unconditional terms of surrender. Germany was divided up among the victorious Allies in the West and fell under Communist control in the East. Japan was occupied and stripped of all military capacity. On the Allied side, France and the United Kingdom, though victorious in war, began to lose their colonial empires and were rapidly replaced by two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and by conflicting Arab and Jewish nationalisms at the regional level in the Middle East.

For the United States, the major concern in its general conduct of foreign policy in the postwar era was the need to contain the Soviet Union from expanding its influence around the world, including the Mediterranean basin. The State Department and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the U.S. military did not see a future Jewish state as an asset in America's effort to counter the Soviets. In their view, a Jewish state was probably not defensible against the Arabs and would require significant, on-the-ground American military protection. Moreover, the Arabs, who all but universally opposed the establishment of Israel, sat on the world's largest-known oil reserves, which were vital to American interests. The predominance of Jews of Russian origin who embraced socialism as an economic, if not a political ideology was also of some concern.

Reasons not to recognize Israel, on the other hand, were counterbalanced by other factors and arguments. The Nazi annihilation of six million Jews as well as the survival of several hundred thousand European Jews, including a significant population of stateless refugees, had created a morally charged political environment inside the United States, despite Jewish terrorism against the British in Palestine. Grassroots American sympathy for the Jewish people had resulted in a broad transformation of grassroots and elite anti-Semitism into an increasingly pro-Israel viewpoint, amplified by an emerging Christian Zionism in the United States. Truman himself had been moved by a special report “on the Treatment of Displaced Jews” authored by a special American envoy, Earl G. Harrison, in September 1945. This report was sharply critical of America's handling of the thousands of stateless Jews under Allied protection in postwar Europe. At different times in 1945 and 1946, Truman publicly advocated settling 100,000 displaced Jews in Palestine and 200,000 in the United States.

In the American Jewish community, Zionism, the global Jewish nationalist movement organized by Theodor Herzl at the end of the nineteenth century, had already emerged as a predominant ideology by 1942. Demands for Jewish statehood in Palestine overwhelmingly outweighed a counterthrust of anti-Zionism among some elite American Jews. The heavy concentration of Jews in New York as well as in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and other key states possibly had a bearing on Truman's reelection in November 1948. The matter left the president, who had been sworn into office because of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt just before World War II ended, open to charges by his Republican opponents that he was playing politics with American foreign policy. By contrast, neither the Arab states nor Muslims in general had a strong political base in the United States.

By contrast, during the 1930s the Arab countries and the Arabs of Palestine slowly gained a tactical advantage in the Middle East over the Jews of the British Mandate for Palestine. In 1917, the United Kingdom issued the Balfour Declaration, stating that the British government favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” During World War I, British armies defeated the Ottomans in Palestine. In 1922, the British established its Mandate in Palestine west of the Jordan River. To the east, the larger territory under British control was named the Transjordan, which became the independent Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Despite local anti-Jewish Arab violence in the 1920s and 1930s, the Jewish presence in Palestine grew steadily both in outlying areas and in the major cities. But with the rise of Nazism in Germany and the further intensification of Arab resistance to Zionism, London began to change course until it finally issued the White Paper of 1939. This statement essentially choked off Jewish immigration and assured the preservation of an Arab majority in the Mandate. However, British appeasement of the Arabs not only failed to weaken the resolve of the Jews in Palestine but actually intensified their desire to create a state of their own. Following the war, a joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry was formed to address the need to find a home for the Jewish displaced persons trapped in Europe after the war. It also addressed the deteriorating situation in Palestine. Its recommendations were largely rejected by the British government under Prime Minister Clement Attlee, the Arabs, and the Jews.

The United Kingdom was fatigued by the failure of all diplomatic efforts and the escalating fighting in Palestine. It was further frustrated by other postwar colonial problems, particularly in India-Pakistan. Thus, the British were determined to leave Palestine and turn over the administration of the Mandate to the United Nations. In May 1947, an eleven-country United Nations Special Committee on Palestine was formed to develop a plan for post-British Palestine. Six months later, in November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, which called for the partition of British Palestine into three zones: Jewish, Arab, and an international zone with Jerusalem functioning as what the United Nations called a “corpus separatum,” or “separate body.”

The Jews quickly accepted the plan, despite their unhappiness with the international status of Jerusalem and with other border issues, particularly in the Mandate's southern desert. On the other hand, the Arabs rejected the entire plan and from November 1947 to the following May intensified the use of irregular troops in their attempt to destroy the Jewish state. This was followed by a massive invasion of the area by Arab armies from a number of neighboring states. As the eleventh hour drew near, Truman, weary of the constant lobbying by different groups both within and outside his government to influence his thinking, made the historic decision to grant Israel tentative recognition. For the Jews, it was a spectacular victory. For the Arabs, it was a bitter moment resulting in hard feelings against the United States despite continued American oil interests in the Middle East.

In the last analysis, Truman made his decision to recognize Israel because he believed it was in the best interest of the United States to do so. As the American commander in chief who had already made the controversial decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman was capable of making the toughest decision any leader might ever be compelled to do. While his closest advisers were deeply split over what position the president should take on Palestine, he alone determined his course of action. Unwilling both to give the Soviet Union an edge in the Middle East and to leave the 600,000 Jews of Palestine to a sure destiny of destruction at the hands of the Arab armies perched on the borders, he took decisive action.

Truman continued to harbor deep sympathy for the survivors of the Holocaust and apparently had a sense that, like Cyrus the Great, the great Persian emperor of the sixth century BCE, he would be able to play a personal role in the restoration of the Jewish people to Zion. His friendship with his Jewish business partner and war friend, Edward Jacobson, also probably figured in his decision, though he often resented the constant high-powered lobbying by American Jews and Jewish organizations. On occasion, he was not beyond using anti-Semitic epithets or vulgar language to express his displeasure.

With an American endorsement in hand and a Soviet statement of recognition just a few days away, the new state of Israel successfully defended itself against an array of Arab armies. At the same time, Israel immediately began gathering Jewish exiles around the world to its now open harbors. Truman, however, did not give Israel carte blanche, and an unpredictable relationship between Israel and the United States began to emerge until years later, when America began to see Israel both as a strategic partner and a democratic ally. For the time being, a tiny document containing only forty-two typed words linked the fate of the new Jewish state to a great but sometimes ambivalent American superpower, thereby launching a new era in the history of the United States, the Jewish people, and the Middle East.