Wayne O'Leary

Reaping What’s Been Sown

With the resumption of war in the Middle East, for the umpteenth time it seems, one wonders whether President Harry S. Truman, were he around to see it, would have second thoughts about his decision to take the lead in recognizing the State of Israel in 1948 and endorsing a partitioning of what was then Palestine. The result has been a 75-year headache for all concerned.

Truman’s decision was an intensely personal one, arising from a longstanding friendship with Edward Jacobson, his onetime partner in the haberdashery business. Jacobson, Jewish and sympathetic to the Zionist cause of a homeland for the Jewish diaspora, sold Truman on the establishment of Israel on occupied Arab land, the issue then before the United Nations following the end of the British mandate (1922-47) over the region. Jacobson also introduced the president to the persuasive Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann.

In making his fateful decision, Truman overrode his own foreign-policy advisors, including Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal, and all-purpose diplomatic guru George F. Kennan. Their doubts, based on fears of turmoil in the Arab countries and the need for access to Middle Eastern oil, carried less weight with Truman than pure friendship. History often turns on small things.

Returning to the present and the Israel-Hamas confrontation, it should go without saying that murder and atrocities are unacceptable and must be condemned. This obviously applies to Hamas’ reprehensible tactics, but also to Israel’s response (indiscriminate air strikes and bombardments), which will kill many more civilians before the conflict is over, as it has in previous revolts or intifadas. (In the 2014 Gaza uprising, over 2,300 Palestinians died versus 73 Israelis.)

Having said this, it’s been apparent from the start that the US, as usual, favors the Israelis; we “have their backs,” as we have in every Arab-Israeli set-to since 1948. Such knee-jerk responses are perfunctory by now; the US has never been a neutral arbiter in the Middle East. In some ways, Israel is almost our 51st state. There are reasons for this protective attitude. Lingering guilt over the Holocaust is one. Though perpetrated by Germany, America’s failure to somehow prevent the catastrophe beforehand hangs over today’s policymakers.

Then, too, unlike most Palestinians, Israelis are culturally similar to us; they are westernized, predominantly middle class, speak fluent English, dress like Americans, often attend American schools, and hold dual citizenships, moving easily back and forth across the Atlantic. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself grew up in the US, was American-educated (MIT), and worked here as a business consultant, befriending both Mitt Romney and Fred Trump, Donald’s father. If he’d stayed, he would be a MAGA Republican.

A pro-Israel bias is painfully evident in American foreign-aid spending. Israel, which possesses a prosperous high-tech economy, nevertheless has received immense amounts of US money over the years, including (despite being a nuclear power with the most modern military in the region) an unending supply of armaments. American taxpayers provide Israel with $3-4 billion year-in and year-out, and that doesn’t include the massive outlay for its sophisticated Iron Dome defense shield. By comparison, this country gave the struggling Palestinians just $5.2 billion in humanitarian assistance during the 23-year period 1994-2017 — about what Israel has gotten every 12 months.

One of the oft-repeated rationales for the American largess is that Israel is the unjust object of anti-Semitism, especially from its neighbors. Arabs hate the Jews, the argument goes, simply because they’re Jewish. The reality is more complicated; primarily, it’s related to land. When Israel was created, it did not spring up on unoccupied territory. People were already there; the land belonged to someone else, but the powers that be ignored that fact.

The powers that be included Great Britain. British Zionist theorist Chaim Weizmann, who later knew Truman, also knew Prime Minister Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, George’s foreign secretary in World War I. Weizmann was a major influence in convincing the latter to issue his 1917 Balfour Declaration officially calling for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It was this paper, implemented after the Allied victory and breakup of the Ottoman Empire, that brought about extensive Jewish colonization of the region leading to partition and the creation of Israel 30 years later.

According to the late Palestinian-American scholar Edward W. Said (1935-2003), whose classic 1979 study “The Question of Palestine” remains the best introduction to the subject, the first Zionist settlers arrived in Palestine in the 1880s, but Jews continued to be a minority presence for decades, totaling only 175,000 (17% of the population) in 1931 and under 400,000 (28%) as late as 1936. On the eve of Harry Truman’s recognition of the State of Israel in 1948, Jewish settlers still comprised less than a third of Palestine’s population and owned barely 7% of the land.

The Israeli claims to Palestine rest on the existence of small Jewish kingdoms established there in ancient Biblical times, but these had disappeared by the second century A.D. The conquests of Saladin during the Crusades made Palestine permanently Arab and Muslim beginning in 1187. For 400 years, from 1516 to 1918, it was a province of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. This is the historical narrative 20th century Zionist colonizers sought to reverse.

They did so by expanding their presence through mass immigration and land expropriation (legal and illegal), using military force and, when necessary, terrorism. Zionists, wrote Said, saw themselves as civilizing pioneers in a backward, undeveloped land with a stagnant native culture; it was to be reclaimed and “redeemed.” The 1948 Arab-Israeli war affirming UN partition was the perfect occasion to begin the process; it continues today, with the Netanyahu government’s announced intention to formally annex Palestinian holdings in Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank, a third of which has already been taken.

Land seizures, an ironic variation of Nazi Germany’s Lebensraum (living space) policy, began with the 1948 war, when an estimated 800,000 displaced and dispossessed Palestinians were declared “absentee” property owners and denied title and access to their former homes. Those with means, including Said’s family, became exiles, creating a Palestinian diaspora. Those without means accepted second-class Israeli citizenship or became internal refugees.

This is the ultimate source of the antagonism that keeps the pot of hatred simmering in Israel. It doesn’t excuse Hamas, but it does explain its actions.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2023

Populist.com