Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (49 page)

At the time the Zionists and their supporters in the U.S. Senate were bending the General Assembly to their will, Dean Rusk was the Director of the State Department’s Office of the United Nations. Months later, behind closed doors, he found exactly the right words to explain the implication of what had happened. He was addressing a meeting of American representatives from UN associations across the country. It really was true, he said, that the U.S. had “never exerted pressure on countries of the UN”, but “certain unauthorised officials and private persons violated propriety and went beyond the law.” As a consequence, Rusk told his audience, the decision of the General Assembly had been “robbed of whatever moral force it might otherwise have had.”
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The task now for the UN, without legal or moral authority, was to implement the partition plan.

Only one thing was certain. Britain would be out of Palestine by midnight on 14 May 1948. That, the General Assembly had determined, was when the British Mandate would end and the partition plan, assuming it could be implemented, would come into effect. What would actually happen in the six months between the General Assembly’s approval of the partition plan and Britain’s departure from the Holy Land was anybody’s guess.

The formal Arab rejection of the partition resolution was voiced by Prince Feisal in a statement to the General Assembly immediately after the vote. He spoke of the pressures that had been applied to secure the two- thirds majority and then said: “For these reasons, the government of Saudi Arabia registers on this historic occasion the fact that it does not consider itself bound by the resolution adopted today by the General Assembly.”
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Throughout the Arab world governments made a great investment in hope—hope that the partition plan could not and therefore would not be implemented because of the totality of Arab opposition to it.

Arab leaders would have been comforted if they had known that President Truman, in private, was beginning to entertain doubts about the sagacity and practicability of the partition decision. At least of part of him was recognising that Secretary of State Marshall and Defence Secretary Forrestal had been right when they argued that, given the opposition of the Arab and wider Muslim world, the creation of a Jewish state was not in America’s best interests.

On 2 December 1947 Truman hinted at his growing impatience with the Zionists in a letter to one of America’s most influential Jews, Henry Morgenthau Junior. Truman wrote:

I wish you would caution all your friends who are interested in the welfare of the Jews in Palestine that now is the time for restraint and caution in an approach to the situation in the future that will allow a peaceful settlement. The vote in the UN is only the beginning and the Jews must now display tolerance and consideration for other peoples in Palestine with whom they will necessarily have to be neighbours.
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It was nine days later that an angry Truman sent the memorandum to Lovett—the one in which the President said he knew that Haiti had changed its vote because its President had been threatened. But telling what he knew about Zionism’s dirty tricks to secure the two-thirds majority was not Truman’s main purpose in sending that particular memorandum. It, two weeks after the vote in the General Assembly, was to give an instruction that no one in his administration should express any preference on the Palestine question during the on-going discussions at the UN about implementing the partition plan. The extent of President Truman’s concern about the activities of the Zionists and their supporters can be judged from this sentence. “
It seems to me that if our delegation at the UN is to be interfered with by members of the United States Senate and by pressure groups in this country, we will be helping the United Nations down the road to failure.
”
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(Emphasis added).

On 21 January Lovett gave Forrestal sight of a draft of a paper being prepared by the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. Its conclusion was that partition was “not workable”. It also said the U.S. was under no commitment to support the partition plan if it could not be made to work without resort to force.

During the conversation they had on this occasion, the Defence Secretary expressed his awareness that the State Department was “seriously embarrassed and handicapped by the activities of Niles at the White House in going directly (on behalf of Zionism) to the President on matters involving Palestine.”

Defence Secretary Forrestal was concerned by the prospect of force to implement the partition plan. On the evening of 29 January he met with State Department officials. They said the vote of the General Assembly for partition amounted merely to a recommendation and was not a final decision of the UN. They also said that American support of the General Assembly resolution had been “predicated upon the assumption that it would prove just and workable.”

It was neither and Forrestal then asked the obvious question. “Is there not already sufficient evidence to support a statement that the un- workability of the proposed solution would justify a re-examination?”

Subsequently Secretary of State Marshall decided that the honest answer was “Yes”, and a re-examination of U.S. policy was underway. It was supposed to be conducted in secret but the efficiency of Zionism’s counterintelligence network, with Niles at its hub in the White House, would make that a mission impossible.

The first official indication that they were all on the road to failure came on 16 February 1948. On that day the United Nations Palestine Commission submitted its report to the Security Council, (the world body’s top decision-making authority which was controlled by the five Permanent Members—the U.S., Britain, France, the Soviet Union and China, each with the power of veto). The Palestine Commission had been appointed by the General Assembly to implement the partition plan.

In its blunt report to the Security Council the Palestine Commission said it feared that 15 May would usher in “a period of uncontrolled widespread strife and bloodshed.” There was no hope for a peaceful transfer of power from Britain to the proposed Arab and Jewish states of the partition plan. The implementation of it would therefore require “military forces of adequate strength.” In other words:
if the partition plan was to be implemented, it would have been imposed by force.

The immediate question arising was the one that Subcommittee 2 to the Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestine Question had wanted the Secretary General to refer to the International Court of Justice: Did the United Nations have the legal authority to impose the partition plan? And that begged an even more pertinent question. With or without legal authority, did the Security Council have the will to do so?

As we have seen, the Ad Hoc Committee had rejected by 21 votes to 20 the draft resolution instructing the Secretary General to seek the opinion of the International Court. On that occasion the matter was not pursued because it was politically too hot to handle—because it raised the prospect of the Truman administration having to say “No” to Zionism’s demand for a Jewish state. Now both questions had to be answered. And that set the alarm bells ringing throughout the U.S. Departments of State and Defence and the National Security Council (NSC).

The underlying question from here on was this: Would President Truman do what was legally and morally right and in the national interest, and also the wider Western interest: or would he surrender to Zionism, mainly for domestic political reasons but also, perhaps, out of the fear that Zionism, if it did not get the support it needed from the West, might throw in its lot with the Soviet Union?

On 19 February the intelligence agencies of the U.S. State Department, the Army, the Navy and the Air Force concurred with a report prepared by the CIA. It emphasised the strategic importance of the Middle East and its vast untapped oil resources. This report then became the basis of an assessment by the NSC which was submitted first to Defence Secretary Forrestal. The NSC’s assessment was that the turmoil in Palestine was “acutely endangering the security of the U.S.”
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At the same time the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under George Kennan, who would later become the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and a legend, had completed its own assessment. It emphasised the necessity of “preventing the area from falling under Soviet influence.”
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The full assessment included this:

If we do not effect a fairly radical reversal of the trend of our policy to date (support for the partition plan), we will end up either in the position of being ourselves militarily responsible for the protection of the Jewish population in Palestine against the declared hostility of the Arab world, or of sharing responsibility with the Russians and thus assisting in their installation as one of the military powers of the area. In either case, the clarity and efficiency of a sound national policy for that area will be shattered.
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On 21 February Marshall sent a detailed “URGENT AND SECRET” cable to Truman. At the time the President was on board the
Williamsburg
in the Caribbean.

In that cable Marshall set out U.S. policy options in the event of the Security Council being unable “to give effect to the General Assembly resolution on Palestine”, and if the Security Council was unable “to develop an alternative solution acceptable to the Jews and Arabs of Palestine.”
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There were, Marshall stated, three options:

(1) Abandonment of the partition plan.

(2) Vigorous support for its implementation including the use of force.

(3) Referral back to the General Assembly for a review of the entire question.

Marshall’s working assumption was that President Truman would go, had to go, for the third option. Why?

The first option—abandoning the partition plan—would require the President, unambiguously, to say “No” to an independent Jewish state. And that would provoke the mother and father of a confrontation with Zionism and its lobby. The outcome of such a confrontation was unpredictable but it would include the certain defeat of the President if he ran for a second term of office, and the defeat of many Democrats seeking election or re-election to both houses of Congress. This President just might be willing to commit political suicide, but he was not going to risk doing a great deal of damage to his party’s election prospects.

There was also the possibility that the Zionists in Palestine, if they convinced themselves that they had been betrayed by America, would play the Soviet card—either to create a bargaining position with the U.S. or for real. It was not too much of a secret that some of the Zionists in Palestine were in favour of dumping America and doing their business with the Soviet Union. It was a possibility the Truman administration at Executive level, gearing up for what was to become the Cold War, could not afford to ignore, all the more so because it was aware that the Soviet Union was wooing Ben-Gurion’s Jewish Agency.

Marshall knew that the second option—the use of force to impose the partition plan—was not on for several reasons.

One was that President Truman had given public assurances that he would not send American troops to Palestine. In theory he could get around that commitment if the troops were part of an international (UN) force to impose partition. But there were other considerations.

The unanimous opinion of the American military was that the U.S. was in no position to commit troops to an international force. The top brass had calculated that if more than 15,000 American troops (a division) were required for an international force, the President would have to declare a partial mobilisation.

And then there was the fact that President Truman himself was steadfastly opposed to the creation of an international force to impose partition in Palestine. For two strategic reasons. One was that it could not be done without the approval and participation of the Soviet Union; and there was no way Truman was going to invite the communist superpower into arguably the most strategically important region of the world. The second was that President Truman was opposed to any commitment that would tie down American troops in Palestine when doing so would leave him with insufficient forces to deal with Europe’s unresolved post-war problems if the need arose. (Truman’s resolve on this was to be reinforced by the communist coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia, which was followed by a Top Secret cable from General Lucius Clay, the U.S. Military Governor of Germany in Berlin. Clay expressed his fears that the Soviet Union might be preparing to make major mischief including war in Europe. Forrestal noted that Clay’s message “fell with the force of a blockbuster bomb.”)
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The third option—referral back to the General Assembly—would require the U.S. to take the lead with a proposal of its own. What should it be? If the Security Council was unable to implement the partition plan, “it would then be clear”, Marshall said in his cable of 21 February, “that Palestine is not yet ready for self-government.” In that event “some form of UN trusteeship for an additional period of time will be necessary.”

However it was dressed up, the third option was shelving the partition plan.

Marshall’s cable included a working draft of the procedures to be followed. They included a discussion in the Security Council which would be led by Senator Warren Austin, America’s Ambassador to the UN. If discussion proved that the Security Council was unable to implement the partition plan, the intention thereafter was that Austin, on instruction, would make a statement calling for the Palestine problem to be referred back to the General Assembly and introducing a draft U.S. resolution (to replace the shelved partition resolution) for “a temporary trusteeship for Palestine under the Trusteeship Council of the UN.”