The US, the USSR and the founding of Israel

President Harry Truman (l) receives a Torah scroll from Chaim Weizmann, President of Israel, May 25, 1948

Diplomatic historian Herbert Feis did a short book back in 1969 called The Birth of Israel: The Tousled Diplomatic Bed. One incident particularly caught my eye. On March 13, 1948, Eddie Jacobson, an old friend of Truman, met with him to win his continued support for what was known as the United Nations "partition" plan, i.e., establishing a separate Jewish state, and in particular to get Truman to meet again with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. Feis writes:

Again, according to Jacobson, after all argument had failed, he appealed to Truman to live up to his own idol, Andrew Jackson. And the President, after a long pause, had swung around and said, "You win, you bald-headed .... I will see him. ..."

Now that's bringing out the big guns!

One thing that a lot of people have probably forgotten is that on the question of statehood for Israel, the partition plan, the United States and the Soviet Union were agreed, while Great Britain under Clement Atlee's Labour government was opposed. As Feis writes:

The creation of Israel was, under the circumstances, an historical miracle. It was the one postwar international situation in which, at its climax, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were in accord; both sponsoring the birth, both eager to be recognized as well-wishing friends.

Palestine was still British territory at the end of the Second World War. But Jewish residents were ready for independence, and they were insisting on a much larger volume of Jewish immigration from Europe in the wake of the war and the Holocaust than British authorities would allow.

The Zionist campaign for independence was conducted not only by diplomatic and political means, but by armed militias like the Haganah (the main Jewish self-defense group), the Irgun Zvai Leumi and Lehi (aka, the Stern Gang). Writing about the immediate postwar situation in 1945, Feis recounts:

By this time the anger of the Jews in Palestine against British restraints was becoming strong and active. The Haganah (Hebrew for defense), the illegal Jewish armed force which had been formed to defend Jewish settlements against attacking Arab bands, had opposed the terrorists, until it became plain that the British Labour Government was going to resist - and possibly defeat - the Zionist cause. Then, despite Weizmann's vehement objections, most of the leadership of the Palestine Jews came to regard the methods of the terrorist elements as the only way to weaken British control. The underground units began to destroy radar installations, police stations, railways, and bridges. The Haganah sometimes shielded and helped the terrorist groups, sometimes suppressed them.

Given that we're now nearly seven years into the "global war on terrorism" (GWOT), it's a useful perspective to remember the types of activities that have long been a standard part of "partisan" guerrilla warfare, i.e., things like destroying "radar installations, police stations, railways, and bridges".

These activities are not good or bad in themselves. They are a technique of warfare, a technique that can be employed by many different types of groups.

Feis also relates a later assassination, that of Count Folke Bernadotte, who was acting as the UN's designated mediator in the Arab-Israeli war which immediately followed Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948. Bernadotte favored a peace plan that would have given territory designated for Israel in the UN partition plan to the Arabs. Feis writes that he was assassinated by "Jewish terrorists" on September 17 of that year. But this was an action that met with widespread disapproval among Israelis, as he relates:

Despite their opinion that Bernadotte was against them, virtually all members of the Jewish community in Israel heard the news of his assassination with horror. In the words of a contemporary observer, "everyone [in Israel] seemed to feel that the bullet that riddled the mediator's body had torn into the state's own precarious texture." Expressions of shock and sorrow poured in from everywhere. Arab regret was perhaps palliated by the sense that the event would hurt the Israeli cause; while the Zionists were anxious to dispel suspicion of moral - if not physical - complicity in the assassination. The perpetrators of the crime, despite a widespread search by the Government of Israel, were never caught, but were generally known to be members of a splinter group of underground extremists.

In a footnote, Feis explains that the reference is to Lehi: "Fighters for Freedom (generally called the Stern Gang). The heads of the group, of course, denied responsibility for the murder." Yitzhak Shamir, who was Likud Party prime minister of Israel 1983–84, 1986–90 and 1990–92, was part of the Stern Gang.

Feis speculates about possible Soviet motives for supporting Israel and the United States at a time when they differed about pretty much everything else. Both countries recognized Israel immediately after it declared its independence; Britain did not. Given today's close identification of the US and Israel - an unprecedented identification of policy has occurred during the Cheney-Bush administration - its odd now to think that as the time for partition/Israeli independence approached, the US maintained an arms embargo on Israel but arms came from Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia:

The Arabs of Palestine and the invading Arabs were sure to be well equipped with British arms, while the arsenal of the Jews was small. However, near the day of partition they received shipments of arms, not from the United States but from Czechoslovakia.

Why did the USSR back Israeli independence? Feis doesn't seem to consider that their Marxist-Leninist ideology might have influenced the decision, since it was a struggle of a colony against a colonial power, in this case a colonial power that was rapidly becoming a Soviet adversary.

Whatever role that may have had in actual Soviet decision-making, it's important to remember that at the time, Israel's struggle was widely seen as an anti-colonial struggle, which it was. Arab propaganda has long insisted that Israel was a colonial creation of the Western powers. But the British fighting against Haganah, Irgun and Lehi didn't perceive it that way in 1947-8.

One restraining factor on US support for the Zionist independence movement was fear of Soviet diplomatic inroads with Arab countries, including oil-rich Saudi Arabia, which could be facilitated by American backing of Israeli independence.

Britain had basically gotten tired of fighting the Zionist guerrillas and kicked the problem to the UN in 1947. Warren Austin for the United States presented a proposal to the General Assembly to set up a Special Committee on Palestine to come up with a solution to the situation in Palestine. Soviet Ambassador to the UN Adrei Gromyko surprised the Americans by agreeing. The Truman Administration believed they were trying to make mischief: "Soviet intentions, the American authorities had by then inferred, were sinister; Russia's purpose, it was thought, would be not to quiet trouble, but to excite it." They suspected the Soviets of trying to use the Jewish issue in Palestine to drive a wedge between the British and the Americans.

Presumably, the Soviet records which Feis mentions in the following have since become more available to scholars. But here is how Feis reconstructed it (partially) in 1969:

Few anticipated, until Gromyko spoke out on May 14 in the Assembly, that the Soviet Government would definitely favor the Jewish aspiration for a national home. Emigre Jews from Russia had been the torchbearers of the Zionist movement. But the Czarist authorities had ignored them, and although Jews had been prominent in the revolutionary and early Communist Government, Stalin was anti-Semitic and acidly anti-Zionist, morbidly seeing the hand of Jews in activities he disliked, and hateful toward the few he knew, among them his son-in-law and daughter-in-law. Why the Soviet authorities took up their course can only be inferred from the record of their past and current diplomacy, looking toward, always looking toward, the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. There can be little doubt that Gromyko was scheming in that direction when he said to the Assembly on this day that the ideal situation would be a dual Arab-Jewish state, but since that could not be wrought, the Soviet Government would support partition and the creation of two independent states.

A covey of conjectures crowd the mind when it seeks to reason why the Soviet Union—even its revolutionary Communist regime—while refusing to permit Jews in Russia to emigrate, exercised its influence in behalf of the creation of a Jewish state. Was it in the hope of causing a crack in the solidifying U.S.-British structure of cooperation that was forming? Was it foresight that even partition would not bring peace to the Middle East, that the Arabs would long continue to rage against the allocation of a part of Palestine as an independent Jewish state, and sooner or later would invite or enable the Soviet Union to acquire the influence Great Britain would lose? Or was it with the hope that if the plan ultimately developed, the Soviet Union would have, through the United Nations, a share in the direction of developments in Palestine? Or was it because of awareness that most of the people in the satellite countries, and perhaps in Russia also, were anti-Semitic and would be glad if the Jews went to Palestine? Such queries must await study by later historians of official records now held secret.

For whatever their reasons were, Soviet support for Israel continued through the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

In fact, before Count Bernadotte's assassination, "The Russian propagandists turned their guns on the United States - alleging that it was conniving in Bernadotte's tactics, which were designed to favor Trans-Jordan as a British puppet and hub of British plans to build a great Arab combination."

Israel was admitted as a full member of the United Nations in May 1949.

Sadly, Feis' statement in his epilogue in 1969 still sounds much too current:

The birth of Israel was in a tousled bed, circled by enemies who wished it to die. Time has proven how hardy it is. But alas, the hate of the Arab neighbors has lasted. A craving for reparations and vengeance still governs their spirits, incited by prophecies that Israel will yet be destroyed. American diplomacy in the Middle East cannot be deployed on the comfortable thought that the future of Israel is assured.

Today, we can considerably qualify the last thought. With by far the most powerful conventional forces in the region and several hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal, Israel is not subject to being overrun by conventional Arab forces. And if any of its Middle Eastern opponents acquired a nuclear arsenal, Israel also has more than sufficient deterrent capabilities.

But the occupied territories of the 1967 war remain a festering sore in Israel's security picture. No general long-term Middle East peace settlement is possible without the Israel-Palestine dispute being resolved.

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