President Truman's Palestine Policy - 1945 Part II

WARNING: Do not break the law before, during, or after reading anything I mention.


Another excerpt from my article on the Recognition of Israel.    

     On the same day that Truman announced the creation of the Palestine Committee, the White House made public a letter to British Prime Minister Attlee. In it, Truman stressed his contention that "granting of an additional one hundred thousand of such certificates would contribute greatly to a sound solution for the future of Jews still in Germany and Austria."40 Truman vigorously pressured the British to let Jews migrate to Palestine. "[N]o other single matter is so important," Truman fervently professed, then "for those who have known the horrors of concentration camps" to "be permitted to resettle" in Palestine.41 The letter was filled with dreary reminders of German atrocities - as if the Prime Minister was not aware of the horrific atrocities committed. "No claim is more meritorious," the President ardently proposed, "than that of the groups who for so many years have known persecution and enslavement."42 The Chief Diplomat was a strong and sympathetic advocate for minority rights and the future of Jewish resettlement in Palestine. The president's Wilsonian character was stern. It was not purely political, but politics were certainly intertwined with policy, as it usually is. Truman's policy on Palestine was formed and expressed well before any election. The president was either idealistically sincere, or cynically crafting a political issue to use in the elections of 1946 and 1948; the former should be given more weight than dissimulation on Truman's account.

     At the beginning of a press conference on November 20, 1945, the president announced a change in the Army command. During the conference, a reporter made the observation that there was peace "but it is still not peace."43 Truman had a lengthy answer for the reporter who then postulated, "[h]ave something for the people to shoot at?"44 "Well, it isn't a matter of being something for the people to shoot at," Truman pedantically replied, "[i]t is for the establishment of world peace."45 The prior week, Truman poignantly reminded the reporters, the conference took a momentous "first step toward implementing the United Nations Organization." This "will be the fundamental organization," Truman assured them, "through which we can get peace in the world."46 That democratic institution was a remaking of Wilson's initial League of Nations vision, which could be a proper venue for the Palestine question, and similar international disputes, to be peacefully resolved. On that same November day, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a letter to the president. In it, she astutely analyzed the Palestine situation and Jewish plight in general. Eleanor told Harry that she was "distressed that Great Britain has made us take a share in another investigation of the few Jews remaining in Europe."47 If only other nations had taken some refugees, Roosevelt paternalistically noted, "we would not have to continue to have on our consciences the deaths of at least fifty of those poor creatures daily."48 Mrs. Roosevelt's disdain for the British was clear. She shrewdly remarked, "I object very much to being used by them."49 Mrs. Roosevelt did make the crucial observation, though, that "[t]he question between Palestine and the Arabs, of course, has always been complicated by oil deposits, and I suppose it always will."50 Truman addressed Mrs. Roosevelt's concerns in a letter a few days later. Truman was "very hopeful" that something peaceful work out in Palestine that would "be of lasting benefit."51 He optimistically maintained "we expect to continue to do what we can to get as many Jews as possible into Palestine as quickly as possible, pending any final settlement."52 Mrs. Roosevelt and President Truman's sentiments were aligned, and both were deeply concerned about the future of displaced Jews, fully conscious of the intricate complexities surrounding, what Dean Acheson called, an "international puzzle."

40 Reid, Public Papers of the Presidents, 470.

41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 494.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Steve Neal, Eleanor and Harry (New York, 2002), 46.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 48.
52 Ibid.