Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (50 page)

In the scenario Marshall outlined to the President, Austin’s statement would be the first public announcement of the Truman administration’s reversal of its Palestine policy.

Truman’s reply to Marshall on 22 February was short and to the point. “Your working draft of recommended basic position for Security Council discussion received. I approve in principle this basic position.”
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Marshall was fully aware that if and when Austin was instructed to go public with the reversal of America’s policy, he, Austin, would become the prime target of a Zionist campaign of vilification and possibly worse. To give the ambassador the maximum possible in the way of comfort before the excrement hit the fan, Marshall sent him a remarkable message. It was the Secretary of State’s way of saying: “Whatever happens, trust me. I will stand by you no matter what.” The message was also a clear statement of Marshall’s own moral code. It said:

As far as I am concerned and the State Department is concerned, but particularly as far as I am concerned, in this highly emotional period of extreme bitterness and violent attacks, my intention is to see that nothing is done by the State Department in guidance for the action of its delegates to the UN in response to either military threats or political threats, one or the other, nothing whatever. My intention is to see that the action of the U.S. government is to be on a plane of integrity that will bear inspection and a common review and
that there will be no bending to any military or political threat so long as I am Secretary of State
.
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(Emphasis added).

Marshall’s message to Austin was supposed to have been private and secret, but some reporters got to know of it. When asked about the message Marshall said it should not be made public “because we’ve had enough trouble already.”
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On 2 March, Austin went through the motions of submitting a draft U.S. resolution calling upon the Security Council “to do everything it can under the Charter to give effect to the (partition) recommendation of the General Assembly.”
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At issue behind closed doors was whether or not the UN had the legal authority to use force to impose the partition plan. The Security Council was divided on the matter and decided on 5 March not to put it to a vote. With Truman opposed to the creation of an international force for Palestine the discussion was, anyway, academic.

Later that same day, and in accordance with the procedures Marshall had outlined to Truman, the President approved telegrams 107 and 108. They were to be sent by the State Department to Austin. They were his guidance on the kind of statement he would make to announce the U.S. policy reversal when it was clear beyond any doubt that the Security Council could not implement the partition plan. Austin was also instructed that he would not actually make the statement until authorised to do so by Marshall.

While Austin fine-tuned his statement and the text of the draft U.S. resolution for a temporary UN trusteeship of Palestine, he made one more attempt to find a way to implement the partition plan by peaceful means. Four of the five permanent members of the Security Council—the U.S., the Soviet Union, France and China—formed a committee to revisit every possible avenue. Britain refused to participate in this predictably futile exercise.

Meanwhile Dean Rusk was trying and failing (he could not have succeeded) to halt the escalating confrontation between the Zionists and the Arabs in Palestine.

With such vital American and Western interests at stake in the Middle East—at least so far as the U.S. Departments of State and Defence and one of the three Harry Trumans were concerned, Marshall was not intending to allow the committee of the four permanent members of the Security Council an unlimited amount of eleventh-hour time to discover that partition was not a runner. He might well have thought that only the Soviet Union was interested in dragging the futile process out because its leaders were hoping that Ben-Gurion, fearing that he was about to be let down by the U.S., might be ready to throw in his lot with the Soviet Union. There were people on the hard left around Ben-Gurion who were telling Moscow that it was by no means impossible that Israel, after its unilateral declaration of independence, would look to the Soviet Union and not the U.S. for superpower support.

On 16 March, when the committee had been getting nowhere for 10 days, Marshall sent a top secret cable to Rusk authorising the policy reversal statement to be made to the General Assembly “as soon as possible as Austin believed appropriate.” Marshall set the agreed policy reversal in motion “since no party to the Palestine problem believes partition can be carried out except by the use of force.”
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On 17 March, in secret telegram 306, “EYES ONLY”, Rusk from the UN indicated his agreement with the Secretary of State. “The (partition) plan proposed by the General Assembly is an integral plan which cannot succeed unless each of its parts is carried out. There seems to be general agreement that the plan cannot be implemented by peaceful means. This being so, the Security Council is not in a position to go ahead with efforts to implement this plan in the existing situation.”
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So there was, the Rusk message concurred, no alternative to the establishment of a temporary trusteeship for Palestine; and the need for Ambassador Austin to introduce the U.S. draft resolution on it was urgent.

Effectively the partition resolution was about to be vitiated. But... Before Austin made his statement on 19 March there was a breathtaking Zionist intervention—
chutzpah
at its magnificent best—that was designed to prevent a reversal of American policy.

In retrospect (and with the benefit of declassified documents) it can be seen that Marshall’s “URGENT AND SECRET” cable to Truman on 21 February was the beginning of the End Game to determine who would have the most influence on the President with regard to the future of Palestine—the U.S. Departments of State and Defence and the intelligence community or the Zionists.

Through their eyes and ears in the White House and, no doubt, the State Department and the UN, the Zionists were fully aware of what was happening. For them the events set in motion by Marshall’s cable to Truman on 21 February represented a crisis like no other before or since. They had clearly lost the political battle to influence Marshall’s State Department. So far as they were concerned, Marshall was saying “No” to a Jewish state. As the Zionists saw it, there was only one course of action open to them. They had to have a direct way of putting pressure on the President himself. Only he could prevent the reversal of American policy Marshall had prepared. The problem was that Truman had put the White House off limits to Zionist leaders. He was refusing to receive them or take their telephone calls.

In
Plain Speaking
, published in 1966, Merle Miller quoted Truman in taped conversations as saying the following about Zionism’s pressures on him: “Well, there had never been anything like it before and there wasn’t after. Not even when I fired MacArthur (who had wanted a nuclear strike on North Korea) there wasn’t, and I issued orders that I wasn’t going to see anyone who was an extremist in the Zionist cause, and I didn’t care who it was... I had to keep in mind that as much as I favoured a homeland for the Jews, there were simply other matters awaiting... that I had to worry about.”
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Eventually in
Memoirs
Truman said this:

The Jewish pressure on the White House did not diminish in the days following the partition vote in the UN. Individuals and groups asked me, usually in rather quarrelsome and emotional ways, to stop the Arabs, to keep the British from supporting the Arabs, to furnish American troops, to do this, that and the other. I think I can say that I kept my faith in the rightness of my policy in spite of some of the Jews.
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The weapon the Zionists decided to deploy against President Truman was their leader, Chaim Weizmann. By now he was elderly and ill but still a very, very persuasive gentleman. If anybody could convince Truman to stick with the partition plan it was Weizmann. For such a purpose Weizmann’s physical condition—his frailty and his illness—was a bonus. How could President Truman fail to be moved when an old and sick Weizmann made his pitch? David Lloyd-George, the tough British Prime Minister had confessed to being “completely won over” by Weizmann’s “charm, persuasiveness and intellectual power.”
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Truman would not be so tough a nut to crack and the prospect of him saying “No” to a meeting with the WZO leader was too small to be considered seriously. Or so the Zionists thought.

Weizmann was brought to America and installed in a suite at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. America’s Zionist leaders then put in a request for President Truman to receive him at the White House. And Truman said “No”.

The amazing and true story of how Truman was persuaded to change his mind about meeting with Weizmann might never have been known but for the publication in 1966 of a book written for a limited Jewish audience. Its title was
B’nai B’rith, The Story of a Covenant
. Its author was Edward G. Grusd. B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant) was a non-Zionist, conservative, assimilationist, fraternal Jewish order. Its President of the time was Frank Goldman.

Grusd wrote:

The word got out that the White House door was bolted against all Zionist leaders, and it is a fact that although many knocked, none were admitted. Meanwhile the United Nations halted all partition implementation measures. During this period, however, the President and Secretary of B’nai B’rith had an audience with Mr. Truman. It had no visible effect, however, and President Goldman called on lodges and chapters to express themselves by letters to Mr. Truman and the United Nations.

At this critical juncture, B’nai B’rith was able to make an important contribution which broke the log-jam. Dr. Chaim Weizmann, internationally famous scientist and head of the World Zionist Organisation, although he was over 70 and ill, came to the United States to make a personal appeal to President Truman. While he lay bedridden in a New York Hotel, American Zionist leaders again tried to make an appointment for him at the White House. But President Truman refused.

It came to Frank Goldman’s knowledge that one of the President’s oldest and dearest friends was an Eddie Jacobson of Kansas City, Missouri. He (Goldman) got in touch with A.J. Granoff of Kansas City, a prominent attorney and a past President of District No. 2. It turned out that Mr. Granoff was Mr. Jacobson’s attorney, and he gladly introduced his client to the President of B’nai B’rith. Mr. Jacobson told him he was not a Zionist and that B’nai B’rith was the only Jewish organisation to which he belonged. He had been Harry Truman’s close buddy in the Army during World War I, had served in the same artillery unit with him in France, and after the war he and Mr. Truman had been partners in a Kansas City haberdashery. He was so close to the President that all he had to do to see him in the White House was to come to Washington, call up, and immediately be invited to “come on over, Eddie.”
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Goldman reported his find to America’s Zionist leaders and from here on Harry’s friend Eddie was under Zionism’s control. But the first attempt to make use of the Jacobson-Truman friendship failed.

Jacobson sent a cable to Truman asking him to give Weizmann an audience. Truman did not respond.

In a memorandum Jacobson subsequently wrote, recalling his shock at the time, which was to find its way into the Weizmann Archives and the Harry S. Truman Library, he said: “I suddenly found myself thinking that my dear friend the President of the United States was at the moment as close to being an anti-Semite as a man could possibly be.”
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Then, on 13 March, while Ambassador Austin was awaiting the arrival of the top secret message from Marshall that would instruct him to make the statement to the General Assembly reversing U.S. policy on Palestine, Eddie telephoned Harry, expressing a desire to see him in the White House.

The President replied: “Eddie, I’m always glad to see old friends, but there’s one thing you must promise me. I don’t want you to say a word about what’s going on over there in the Middle East. Do you promise?”
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Eddie promised and made his way to the White House.

Just before he entered the Oval Office, Presidential Aide Matthew J. Connelly begged him not to discuss the Palestine question.

According to Truman’s account to Miller there came a moment when great tears were running down Eddie’s cheeks. The President looked at his oldest and best friend and said: “Eddie, you son of a bitch, you promised you wouldn’t say a word about what’s going on over there.”
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Eddie replied: “Mr. President, I haven’t said a word, but every time I think of the homeless Jews, homeless for thousands of years, and I think about Dr. Weizmann, I start crying. I can’t help it. He’s an old man and he’s spent his whole life working for a homeland for the Jews. Now he’s sick and he’s in New York and he wants to see you, and every time I think about it, I can’t help crying.”

Truman then said: “Eddie, that’s enough. That’s the last word!”

After that, Truman told Miller, “we talked about this and that, but every once in a while a big tear would roll down his cheek. At one point he said something about how I felt about old Andy Jackson, and he was crying again. He said he knew he wasn’t supposed to, but that’s how he felt about Weizmann.” (Andrew Jackson, 1767– 1845, was a military hero and the 7th President of the United States. As a major general of the Tennessee militia, he defeated the Creek Indians in 1814 and the British in 1815. He was the first American President to be elected by direct appeal to voters).