The USA and the Birth of Israel

Abstract

The years 1947 and 1948 saw America’s decisive entry into Middle East affairs when Truman first ensured that the resolution for the partition of Palestine found the necessary two-thirds majority in the United Nations General Assembly and then extended de facto recognition to the State of Israel within minutes of its proclamation. These actions were the logical sequel to the Yom Kippur statement but they only became possible as the result of a chain of events which could not have been foreseen and after keen in-fighting in the Washington bureaucracy. At the end of 1946, Henderson and his staff tried to undo the damage which they believed the President’s statement had dealt to American interests. Although acknowledging that ‘the almost world-wide feeling of insecurity felt by Jews, results in something like a cosmic urge with respect to Palestine’, they argued that Zionist lobbying had led the administration to adopt an ill-defined policy of support for a Jewish state through partition. Unconvinced of the wisdom of this, they returned yet again to their proposal for a continuing form of British trusteeship under the United Nations, pending a satisfactory formula for Palestinian independence.¹ This stood no chance of satisfying the Zionists whose stance was, if anything, hardening.