A Brief History Lesson

A Brief History Lesson

Excerpt from "United Nations The First Fifty Years", Meisler, 1995

“The long-range fate of Palestine,” President Truman told his aides, “was the kind of problems we had the U.N. for.” At the beginning, in fact, Palestine seemed like the only kind of problem that the U.N. could tackle. Free of Soviet-American bickering and tension, the Palestine conflict was powered by the enmity of three weaker antagonists: the Jews, the Arabs, and an imperial Great Britain in decline. The U.N. was midwife at the birth of Israel, and the hatreds and machinations of the Arab-Israeli conflict would occupy much of the time of both the Security Council and the General Assembly for most of the fist half-century. The good intentions f the U.N., however, would become suspect, especially to the Israelis, and when the Israeli government finally reached an accord with Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation organization in 1993, the U.N. would be no more than a distant observer. But the Jews and Arabs could not chase the U.N. out of their history.

During World War I, the British inspired and financed an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire and occupied Palestine and other Arab lands in a Middle East campaign designed to tie up enemy Turkish troops. Colonel T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) became the hero of this derring-do, and his popular books stamped the image of the romantic Arab on the minds of the British. But the British government also courted its own Jewish citizens a well. Since early in the century, Zionists led by the Vienna journalist Theodore Herzl had sought a Jewish state in the biblical lands of Palestine. In a letter to Lord Rothschild, the president of the British Zionist Organization, on November 2, 1917, Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour promised that “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievements of this objective”; the sentence, however, did not end there. Balfour added a subordinate clause as caveat: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…” Fulfilling both the promise and the subordinate clause would prove difficult and delicate, if not impossible.

After World War I, the British kept control of Palestine as a League of Nations mandate. The wording of the Balfour Declaration was endorsed by the league in the 1922 resolution creating the mandate. The British tried to keep hatreds in check but failed after World War II. The attempted genocide of that war made the conflict irreconcilable. The Jews believed that Britain could no longer justify failing to fulfill its promise of a homeland. In the eyes of the Arabs, however, that would amount to Christians giving the Jews Arab land to assuage European guilt. The Arabs thus looked on the Jews as European colonial oppressors.

The Nazi Holocaust-on top of killing six million Jews in Europe-had displaced hundreds of thousands of other Jews and left them destitute and desperate for a new home. Zionists wanted the British to open Palestine to these refugees of Nazism. Many Americans and Europeans-out of sympathy, horror, and perhaps a sense of guilt over the Holocaust-supported the Jewish campaign to open Palestine. But the Palestinian Arabs feared they would be swamped by massive Jewish immigration. Arab governments insisted that the British must block Jewish immigration. The British acquiesced and severely limited acceptance of Jewish refugees into the mandate. In the most-publicized incident the British turned back the ship Exodus at the port of Haifa in 1947, forcing it to return to Europe with forty-five hundred displaced Jews. The frustrated British grew weary of Jewish terror and the financial drain on its strapped budget. In July 1946, the underground Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, the future prime minister, blew up the wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem used by the British for their military headquarters, killing ninety-one people. In July 1947, the Irgun hung two British sergeants in retaliation for the execution of Jewish terrorists and left the bodies booby-trapped. “We repaid our enemy in kind,” said Begin. The Stern Gang, whose leadership included Yitzhak Shamir, another future prime minister, was regarded as even more notorious. The British decided to drop the whole issue of immigration and the future of Palestine on the United Nations.

In May 1947, the General Assembly named a Special Committee on Palestine of eleven ambassadors to study the issue and make recommendations. Secretary-General Trygve Lie appointed Assistant Secretary-General Victor Hoo of China as his representative to the committee and Ralph Bunche as Hoo’s special assistant. Bunche was impressed neither by Hoo nor by the ambassadors. He described them as pretty, vain, and “not infrequently either vicious or stupid.” They were “just about the worst group I have ever had to work with,” Bunche said. “if they do a good job it will be a real miracle.” The problem was so complex and the frustrations so inevitable that he told a friend, “I am now a Near East expert, completely befuddled.”

The Special Committee presented its report to the General Assembly three months later. A majority of seven ambassadors (representing Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, and Uruguay) proposed that “Palestine within its present borders, following a transitional period of two years from 1 September 1947, shall be constituted into an independent Arab state, an independent Jewish state, and the (international) City of Jerusalem.” The three political entities would remain within an economic union. In a minority report, three ambassadors (representing India, Iran, and Yugoslavia) instead proposed a single federal state. The Australian ambassador would not sign either report.

Bunche was cynical about the motivation of the majority. He described most of them as anti-Semites looking for “a means of dumping world Jewry on the Arabs.” Yet their conclusions paralleled the views of the governments of the world’s two most powerful countries. Both the United States and Soviet Union supported the creation of a Jewish state through partition. The Soviet Union, in fact, hoped that the Socialists leaders of the Jewish state might serve as a kind of opening wedge for Marxism in the Middle East. President Truman often endorsed the idea of a Jewish state and resented the condescending memorandums for the State Department that warned him about the adverse reactions from Arab governments if the United States ever recognized one.

Despite the Balfour Declaration, the British, with their imperial ties to the Arab lands of the Middle East, were worried about the consequences of a Jewish state and resented Truman’s endorsements, accusing him of pandering for votes. “There’s no Arab vote in America,” wrote Prime Minister Clement Attlee later, “but there’s a very heavy Jewish vote and the Americans are always having elections.” British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin even adopted Bunche’s cynicism about the motives of those who wanted masses of Jews to settle in Palestine. “I hope it will not be misunderstood in America,” he told a Labour Party meeting in 1946, “if I say, with the purest of motives, that [U.S. policy toward Jewish immigration into Palestine] was because they did not want too many of them in New York.”

In November 1947, the General Assembly, by a vote of thirty-three to thirteen (with ten abstentions), approved the majority report, thus accepting partition and a Jewish state. American lobbying assured the Jewish victory. The Jewish state would have 498,000 Jews and 468, 000 Arabs on fifty-five hundred square miles of land while the Arab state would have 800,000 Arabs and 10, 000 Jews on forty-five hundred square miles. Unlimited Jewish immigration, of course, would dramatically increase the proportion of Jews in the Jewish state. The vote was the legal foundation for the creation of the state of Israel. When the vote was announced in the General Assembly in Flushing Meadow, Zionists in the lobby were jubilant. “This is the day the Lord hath made, “ a rabbi shouted. Abba Eban, a witness who later became an Israeli foreign minister, wrote, “There were Jews in tears, and non-Jews moved by the nobility of the occasion. Nobody who ever lived that moment will ever lose its memory from the heart.”

But Arab governments decried the General Assembly vote and refused to accept the carving of a Jewish state out of what they insisted was their land. They vowed war if partition took place. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal warned the White House that, if war broke out, the Arabs would “push the Jews into the sea.” The British government announced that it would relinquish the mandate on May 14, 1948, but would play no part in trying to force partition upon the Arabs. That decision prompted some second thoughts. If the Arabs rejected partition and the British refused to impose it, how could it be carried out, short of war? Some Americans diplomats felt it was time to back off.



Much now depended on the steadfastness of President Truman. For the next six months, he was buffeted by American Jews who pressured him to support the establishment of a Jewish state and State Department diplomats-he called them “the striped-pants boys”- who warned him against antagonizing the Arabs. He resented the tone of the diplomats who were “in effect telling me to watch my step, that I didn’t really understand what was going on over there and that I ougth to leave it to the experts.” And he resented just as much the tone and persistence of the American Zionists. One Jewish leader pounded on Truman’s desk in the Oval Office and shouted at him. “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on earth, “ Truman told the cabinet, “so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck.”












I found this book to be very informative. I hope this excerpt entices you to check it out.



The following events occur:
….

State Department goes against Truman and asks for a trusteeship of Palestine.
The Provisional State Council in Tel Aviv issued the proclamation declaring establishment of the Jewish state on May14, 1948.

Truman (U.S.) and USSR recognize Israel.

Israel army Haganah (slowed down by a shipment of arms from Communist Czechoslovakia) defeats small makeshift Arab army of five thousand and captures more Palestinian land.

Dawn of Terrorism – An explosion on Yehuda Street leaves 52 dead in Jerusalem most Jewish. Irgun of Begun and Stern Gang of Shamir attacked the sleeping Arab village of Deir Yassin on a hill on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The terrorists dropped bags of dynamite inside homes killing 240 men, women, and children.

Count Bernadotte arrives representing first U.N. mediator. He is assassinated by the Stern Gang.

Full-scale fighting begins – 40, 000 Arabs troops against 65, 000 Israeli troops.

Bunche sent as new mediator, negotiates ceasefire, which lasts until the Sixth Day War in 1967.

….