Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (35 page)

If Senator Truman’s words to Forrestal represented his real thinking, they suggest that the man himself had serious doubts about whether he was big enough for the job at this most critical time in the history of mankind. (A name from Truman’s past to remember is that of Eddie Jacobson. He was a non-Zionist Jew who served with Truman in World War I and became his partner in a Kansas City haberdashery store. As we shall see, Eddie, when his friend Harry was the President of the United States of America, would do something of the utmost importance for Zionism, something that was critical to Zionism’s success and which Zionism, incredibly influential though it was, could not do for itself).

Truman took the oath of office in the cabinet room of the White House at 6.45 p.m. on 12 April 1945, half an hour after Mrs. Roosevelt had given him the news of her husband’s death. While he was being sworn in, Truman failed to raise his right hand when he was repeating the oath with his left hand on the Bible. Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone intervened to tell Truman that he should raise his right hand to give the occasion dignity and firmness.

The new president had what the English call a short fuse and Americans describe as a “low boiling point.” He also had an inoffensive cockiness; but this apparent confidence in himself masked what others recognised as insecurity; and this caused some who were going to have to work with him to fear that President Truman would be very susceptible to Zionist lobby pressure.

Secretary of State Stettinus knew what the Zionists were thinking as the torch passed from Roosevelt to Truman. As Rabbi Neumann would later confess, the Zionists were confident that “the going would be much easier with Truman in the White House.”
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Truman, Rabbi Neumann would later write, “was a far less complex personality than his illustrious predecessor —less adroit and sophisticated, simpler and more straight forward. He accepted the Zionist line reluctantly and under pressure at first, but having accepted it, he followed through honestly and firmly. In the end he found himself in direct conflict with Britain’s Bevin. He did not shrink from the encounter, but, supported by popular opinion, he stuck to his guns and forced the State Department to acquiesce in his pro-Zionist policy.”
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But as we shall see, Truman’s commitment under pressure to Zionism was not nearly as firm as Rabbi Neumann suggested.

The position at the time Stettinus was writing his letter can be summed up like this: Zionism’s zealots were confident they could do on Truman’s watch what they did not do and could not have done on Roosevelt’s watch—oblige the President of the United States of America to call the policy shots in their favour. About Truman’s illustrious predecessor, Rabbi Neumann wrote: “To cross him, to offend him, to alienate his affection was to court disaster for the Zionist cause.”
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The private and confidential Stettinus letter delivered to Truman on his sixth day as President said this:

It is very likely that efforts will be made by some of the Zionist leaders to obtain from you at an early date some commitments in favour of the Zionist program, which is pressing for unlimited Jewish immigration into Palestine and the establishment there of a Jewish state. As you are aware, the government and people of the United States have every sympathy for the persecuted Jews of Europe and are doing all in their power to relieve their suffering. The question of Palestine is, however, a highly complex one and involves questions which go far beyond the plight of the Jews in Europe... There is continual tenseness in the situation in the Near East, largely as a result of the Palestine question, and as we have interests in the area which are vital to the United States, we feel that this whole subject is one that should be handled with the greatest care and with a view to the long-range interests of the country.
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Two weeks later Acting Secretary of State Grew followed up with a lengthy memorandum. (Stettinus had played a key role in the founding of the UN and had gone on to be the first U.S. delegate to the world body.) Grew’s memorandum briefed Truman in detail on the history of the relations between President Roosevelt and Arab leaders. Particular attention was drawn to Roosevelt’s assurances to Ibn Saud about prior consultation with the Arabs as well as the Jews and, most important, Roosevelt’s eyeball-to- eyeball pledge to the Saudi monarch, confirmed in writing, that he would “make no move hostile to the Arab people and would not assist the Jews against the Arabs.”

President Truman’s first action on Palestine was to reply to a letter sent to President Roosevelt by King Abdullah. It had gone unanswered because of Roosevelt’s death. (Abullah’s message had arrived later than those sent by other Arab leaders, as did one from Egypt’s Prime Minister, Mahmoud Nokrashy). Truman’s reply to Abdullah said: “I am glad to renew to you the assurances which you have previously received to the effect that it is the view of this government that no decision shall be taken regarding the basic situation in Palestine without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews.”
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This promise was also repeated by Truman in writing to Nokrashy.

Zionism had its own eyes and ears in the White House. By far the most important of them belonged to the previously mentioned David K. Niles. After the 1940 election, weighed down by his war responsibilities, Roosevelt had taken Niles into his inner circle as an Executive Assistant to the President for minority affairs. When Truman succeeded Roosevelt he gave Niles the Palestine problem to handle. Niles had a “passion for anonymity” (his own words) and was once described in a newspaper (
The Saturday Evening Post
) as “Mr. Truman’s Mystery Man”.

President Truman’s private confirmation in writing that he would stand by Roosevelt’s assurances to the Arabs provoked renewed and more intense Zionist lobby pressure on him and a threat to the State Department— that unless a forthright position was taken on Palestine, one by definition that would give Zionism all it was demanding, the “moderate” leadership of organised American Jewry would be replaced by a less accommodating and more extreme one. The meaning was that the uncompromising and fanatical Rabbi Silver would assume the leadership and the moderate and conciliatory Rabbi Wise and Dr. Nahum Goldman would be sidelined.

The threat of a more extremist leadership was a convenient cover for the fact that all was far from well in Zionism’s leadership ranks. By this time Wise and Goldmann were disillusioned with what the WZO had become; and Zionism’s zealots saw possible danger in the two of them continuing to play leading roles in the politics of presenting and pushing Zionism’s demands.

Rabbi Wise, for years the leader of organised American Jewry, had wanted Zionism to take the lead in organising an international boycott of Nazi Germany’s exports; and he had gone along with the
Ha’avara Agreement
policy of collaborating with the Nazis only to avoid a damaging and probably disastrous split in Zionist ranks. But his real disillusion with the WZO had its origins further back in time. At a conference in 1934 he attacked the in-Palestine Zionists for insisting that the creation of a Jewish state should have “primacy over all other factors in the equation in all circumstances.”
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He acknowledged that Palestine should have primacy, but he said, “
that primacy ceases when it comes into conflict with a higher moral law
,” (emphasis added).
⁴⁸

As Brenner commented, Rabbi Wise had “identified the rot in the WZO”. The rot being that the WZO’s Zionism was without morality and “saw the land of Eretz Israel as being more important than the condition and needs of the majority of the Jews of the world”.
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By the time Truman became President, Rabbi Wise was alarmed because it was clear that Ben-Gurion and his in-Palestine Zionists were setting the pace and that the WZO was blindly following their lead. I imagine Rabbi Wise was also deeply troubled by the fact that there were now in existence Zionist terrorist organisations committed to driving both the British and the Arabs out of Palestine by violence.

For his part Nahum Goldmann (who served as a President of the WZO) was disgusted by Zionism’s collaboration with the Nazis and the WZO’s policy of not even trying to resist Hitler. In his book,
Autobiography
, a contrite and remorseful Goldmann told of his own shameless role during the Hitler epoch.

He described a dramatic meeting he had with Edvard Benes, the Czech Foreign Minister. Benes was condemning the WZO’s abject failure to resist the Nazis. The Czech Foreign Minister, Goldmann wrote long after the events, was shouting. “Don’t you understand that by reacting with nothing but half-hearted gestures, by failing to arouse world public opinion and take vigorous actions against the Germans, the Jews are endangering their future and their human rights all over the world?”
⁵⁰

Goldmann added (emphasis added): “I knew Benes was right… In this context success (the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine) was irrelevant.
What matters in a situation of this sort is a people’s moral stance, its readiness to fight back instead of helplessly allowing itself to be massacred
.”
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On 16 June Assistant Secretary of State Grew warned Truman that he was about to be subjected to even more intense Zionist lobby pressure. At the time Truman was preparing for his Potsdam meeting with Churchill and Stalin, set for 16 July to 2 August. Grew advised Truman that when the Zionists turned up their heat on him before he set off for Potsdam, he should receive their materials with thanks; tell them that their views would be given careful consideration; and “reiterate that the matter of settlement (of the Palestine problem) would eventually come before the United Nations Organisation.”
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It was President Roosevelt’s intention to have the Palestine problem solved by the UN as the agency representing the will of the organised international community. Grew could not possibly have said such a thing to Truman if he was not speaking from a Roosevelt policy script.

Ben-Gurion himself was brought in to add to the pressure America’s Zionists were piling on the State Department. At a meeting with senior officials in the Department on 27 June, Ben-Gurion insisted that the Jews had to be allowed to get on with creating their state “without interference from outside elements.”
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That was Ben-Gurion’s way of saying Zionism objected to the fact that Truman was continuing with the Roosevelt policy of assuring the Arabs, all Arab leaders who mattered so far as the U.S. was concerned, that they would be consulted about the future of an Arab land. In the course of that conversation with State Department officials Ben-Gurion also said the Jews in Palestine would fight if necessary; and he let slip that he and his colleagues were confident they could deal with the Arabs if it came to war. He said he knew the Arabs well and predicted they would “not really put up any kind of fight.”
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On that, as we shall see, Ben-Gurion was proved to be more right than wrong.

The main point of Ben-Gurion’s contribution to the discussion was that the lifting of Britain’s restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine would not solve the problem of anti-Semitism. The only answer to that problem was “the immediate establishment of a Jewish state.”
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Ben-Gurion was aware that, if the member states were allowed to vote freely, there would not be majority support at the UN for the creation of Jewish state.

President Truman was not yet submissive enough to support the idea of a Jewish state but, under pressure, he was prepared to push Britain on the matter of Jewish refugees—those European Jews who had survived the Nazi holocaust but who had been uprooted and were homeless, festering in camps. When he met Churchill in Potsdam, Truman handed him a memorandum that said the U.S. was interested in Britain “finding it possible without delay to take steps to lift the restrictions of the White Paper on Jewish immigration to Palestine.”
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At a press conference after the Potsdam summit, Truman said the American view was that as many Jews as possible should be allowed to enter Palestine; but it was a matter “that would have to be worked out diplomatically with the British and the Arabs”; and it would have to be “on a peaceful basis as we have no desire to send half a million Americans to keep the peace in Palestine.”
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Truman also asked Churchill to send him his views on a settlement of the Palestine problem.

While they waited for Britain’s views and the answer to Truman’s request for the lifting of restrictions on Jewish immigration, top officials at the State Department prepared a detailed position paper that discussed four possible options for a solution to the Palestine problem. They were:

1. (1) An independent Jewish “commonwealth”—the term the Zionists were still using in public and which everybody knew meant state.
   

2. (2) An independent Arab state.
   

3. (3) Partition under UN trusteeship.
   

4. (4) A proposed trusteeship agreement to be reached by Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and if possible France, under which Palestine would be given special status as an international territory with Britain the administering authority.
   

The writer of the position paper was Loy Henderson, the Director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs. He ruled out the first option on the grounds that it was a violation of the wishes of a large majority of the local inhabitants, and would “jeopardise American economic interests including our oil interests in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.”
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Henderson predicted the probability of an Arab oil embargo. (When it happened 28 years later it shook the global economy to its foundations and was a huge setback for the development prospects of the poorest nations containing the majority of the human inhabitants of Planet Earth.)