{"id":57474,"date":"2017-11-20T18:05:09","date_gmt":"2017-11-20T16:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=57474"},"modified":"2017-11-11T09:25:26","modified_gmt":"2017-11-11T07:25:26","slug":"20-05-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=57474","title":{"rendered":"Who Saved Israel in 1947?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Who Saved Israel in 1947?<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

MARTIN KRAMER<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The usual answer is Truman\u2014but it could just as easily be Stalin. In fact, thanks to Zionist diplomacy, it was both; and therein lies a lesson for the Jewish state today.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A truck with the faces of Soviet Communist leaders Lenin and Stalin at the labor day parade held in Tel Aviv on May 1, 1949. Pinn Hans\/Israeli Government Press Office.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

November 29 marks the 70th anniversary of UN General Assembly resolution 181, recommending the partition of Mandate Palestine into two separate Jewish and Arab states. On that day in 1947, millions of listeners sat glued to their radio sets to follow the voting. The outcome set off spontaneous celebrations among Zionists everywhere, for it constituted the first formal international endorsement of a Jewish state.<\/span><\/p>\n

To celebrate the anniversary, Israel\u2019s embassy to the United Nations is restoring the hall in Flushing Meadows, New York\u2014today the main gallery of the Queens Museum, then the meeting place of the General Assembly\u2014to its appearance in 1947. The announced plan is to reenact the vote, with the current ambassadors of member states that voted \u201cyes\u201d recasting their ballots.<\/span><\/p>\n

The most conspicuous of the ballots cast will be that of the United States. Indeed, the vote and its sequel are set to be told as a largely American story. Israel\u2019s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, has placed the celebration in this historical context:<\/span><\/p>\n

From the moment President Truman became the first world leader to recognize the new Jewish state, Israel has had no better friend than the United States of America, and the U.S. has had no more steadfast ally than the state of Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

In keeping with this, the keynote speaker in New York will be U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence. Again and again, we are likely to hear how Harry Truman stood up to his State Department (and, perhaps less heroically, catered to Jewish voters) by saying \u201cyes\u201d in November 1947 and then by immediately recognizing Israel when David Ben-Gurion declared the state on May 14, 1948. And once again, we will be reminded of Eddie Jacobson, Truman\u2019s Jewish business partner in a Kansas City haberdashery before the Depression, who famously traded on his old friendship to secure a critical meeting between Truman and the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in March 1948.<\/span><\/p>\n

The rest of the story has been carefully burnished over the years, including by Truman himself. In 1953, when Jacobson introduced the former president to a Jewish audience as \u201cthe man who helped create the state of Israel,\u201d Truman upped the ante by comparing himself with the ancient Persian ruler who restored the Jews to Jerusalem from Babylonian exile: \u201cWhat do you mean \u2018helped to create\u2019? I am Cyrus.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Historians, it is true, still debate Truman\u2019s motives. But they also agree on one thing: Israel\u2019s creation owed more to Truman than to any other world leader. \u201cWithout Truman,\u201d write Allis and Ronald Radosh in their book on Truman and Israel, \u201cthe new state of Israel might not have survived its first difficult years, and succeeded thereafter.\u201d Michael J. Cohen, in his earlier book on Truman and Israel, states that in 1947 and 1948, \u201cTruman arguably played the decisive diplomatic role in the birth of the new state of Israel.\u201d Michael Oren, in Power, Faith, and Fantasy, his bestseller on America in the Middle East, asserts that Truman\u2019s comparison of himself with the Persian ruler Cyrus \u201cwas not entirely bluster.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The problem here is simple: everything said about the contribution of Truman could be said about that of Joseph Stalin.<\/span><\/p>\n

I. Stalin, a Founding Father of Israel?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a 1998 essay marking Israel\u2019s 50th anniversary, the historian Paul Johnson addressed a \u201cparadoxical aspect of the Zionist miracle, which we certainly did not grasp at the time and which is insufficiently understood even now.\u201d That paradox, wrote Johnson, is that \u201camong the founding fathers of Israel was Joseph Stalin.\u201d Twenty years later, even fewer people grasp it. The Soviet Union is long gone, remembered by Israel and its supporters as the patron of Nasser abroad, the jailer and tormentor of Jews at home, the purveyor of vicious anti-Semitism everywhere. Nor did any Soviet leader himself ever claim the mantle of Cyrus. To the contrary: from the 1950s onward, the Soviet Union did its utmost to erase the fact of Soviet support for the creation of Israel from official history and from Arab memory.<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, both in the United States and in Israel, an equal and opposite process has erased from memory the inconstancy of American support for Israel\u2019s creation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, the U.S. voted for partition in November 1947, but by the following March it had declared partition impossible to implement and proposed a \u201ctemporary\u201d UN trusteeship in its stead. On the very eve of Britain\u2019s official withdrawal from Israel the following May, America\u2019s top diplomat was still warning Israel\u2019s leaders against declaring independence.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is a \u201cparadoxical aspect of the Zionist miracle,\u201d wrote the historian Paul Johnson, \u201cthat \u201camong the founding fathers of Israel was Joseph Stalin.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Yes again, Truman did immediately recognize Israel (de facto but not de jure). But he had already enforced an arms embargo on the Middle East, forcing Israel to scavenge for its survival.<\/span><\/p>\n

By contrast, not only did the Soviet Union under Stalin vote for partition, and also recognize Israel\u2014the first state to do so de jure, three days after independence\u2014it had come out in favor of a Jewish state well before the United States. Moreover, it had held firm in that support both before and after the vote, and had indirectly assured that the newborn state would have the war materiel it desperately needed to defend itself. According to Abba Eban, Israel\u2019s first UN ambassador, without the Soviet vote in favor of partition (together with the votes of four satellite nations), and without the arms provided by the Soviet bloc, \u201cwe couldn\u2019t have made it, either diplomatically or militarily.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, one might wonder: even if all this is true, is any contemporary purpose served by recounting it? That purpose certainly cannot be to \u201crehabilitate\u201d Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union. Although there is such a tendency in Russia today, few outside that country harbor any illusions about Stalin\u2019s horrific legacy. Nor can the purpose be to belittle the significance of American support for Israel since 1967.<\/span><\/p>\n

In what follows, my objective is otherwise: to show how, in the years just before, during, and after the establishment of the state of Israel, its leaders thought creatively about the postwar geopolitical order. Knowing that they had no steady friends, they presciently identified the Soviet Union as an emerging great power, and set about wooing Moscow. Soviet support then allowed them to parlay budding cold-war rivalries into even more American support. It was a masterstroke of Zionist diplomacy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stalin\u2019s decision is still shrouded in mystery, and it is by no means certain that Zionist overtures played the decisive role in the Soviet Union\u2019s surprising and highly consequential support for a Jewish state. But they might have done. Today, as Israel makes its way in a changing world, marked by the rise of new powers, there may be a lesson to be learned from this history.<\/span><\/p>\n

It all began with a forgotten speech.<\/span><\/p>\n

II. A Forgotten Speech That Shocked the World<\/strong><\/p>\n

read more:<\/span> Who Saved Israel in 1947?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Martin Kramer<\/strong> teaches Middle Eastern history at Shalem College in Jerusalem and is the Koret visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His most recent book is The War on Error (2016).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Who Saved Israel in 1947? MARTIN KRAMER The usual answer is Truman\u2014but it could just as easily be Stalin. In fact, thanks to Zionist diplomacy, it was both; and therein lies a lesson for the Jewish state today. A truck with the faces of Soviet Communist leaders Lenin and Stalin at the labor day parade […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57474"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57474"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57478,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57474\/revisions\/57478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}