Happy Birthday, USA! Thanks for Standing With Israel!
President Harry Truman played an important role in the rebirth of the modern State of Israel in 1948.
As the US President at the end of World War II, Harry Truman became well aware of the horrors of the Holocaust and of the plight of its survivors in European camps for displaced persons. He sent a personal envoy to Europe – Earl Harrison – who examined the camps up-close. Truman learned that many if not most of the Jewish survivors wanted to move to the British Mandate in Palestine. Truman saw that the Jewish people in the aftermath of World War II had no place to return to, no place to call home. This became an “humanitarian” goal for him. Truman urged British Prime Minister Clement Attlee to summarily issue immigration certificates to Palestine for 100,000 Jewish survivors, which Attlee did not do.
In 1947 the British gave notice that they were going to depart “Palestine” on May 14th of 1948 and no longer administer this land as they had been doing since World War I.
The question of the Jewish refugees and a Jewish homeland in Palestine became a major international issue and an issue in the USA as well. US Secretary of State George Marshall was against partitioning Palestine and granting a Jewish homeland. He favored caretaking of the Land by the United Nations. Marshall and others in the US government were adamantly opposed because they felt US support for an independent Jewish state would incur the wrath of Saudi Arabia with its great oil reserves, and because they thought (correctly) that outright war would break out as a result of the birth of the Jewish state.
President Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall
At the same time, President Truman was lobbied by American Jewish Zionists to endorse a Jewish state. Truman was exasperated by the tension. The day before the critical decision, Truman’s former business partner and close friend Eddie Jacobson persuaded him to give another hearing to the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. In the end, Truman decided to fully support the Jewish State.
The United States became the very first nation to recognize the new Israeli government, and that as the world’s foremost superpower in the wake of World War II
President Truman’s official recognition came just 11 minutes after David
Ben-Gurion declared Israeli independence on May 14, 1948:
2 comments:
I don't remember the Truman administration at all first-hand. However, from people who I have talked to who do remember and from what I have read I believe that Harry Truman was a very, very good man as well as a pretty damn good president. He had this very disturbing tendency to do what he thought was right rather than what was expedient.
As the newspaper headline states: “Zionists proclaim new state of Israel” The Rabbis speak out is an excellent book that explains that EVERY rabbi in occupied Palestine at the time, with the exception of Rabbi Kook ( may his name and memory be obliterated) Spoke out against the establishment of the Zionist state.
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