2-5-2014 The Moment of Creation GERSHOM GORENBERG American Prospect

http://prospect.org/article/moment-creation

Do America’s current challenges in the Middle East trace back to Harry Truman’s 1948 missteps?  

...John Judis’s Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict, shows that the question of whether U.S. policy toward Israel is captive to a special-interest group has existed even longer than Israel has. The densely researched core of the book follows Truman’s decisions at the moment of creation—of Israel and of U.S. involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Judis shows how American Zionist leaders and sympathetic officials swayed the president to support partition of Palestine and establishment of Israel, against his preference for a single political entity for Arabs and Jews.

The author thus proves his explicit thesis: The lobbying efforts of American Zionists tilted American policy, to the detriment of Palestine’s Arabs. Yet the story also has additional, half-stated lessons about when a domestic pressure group can most influence foreign policy—when the president is indecisive; when none of the available policy options is attractive; when the best options require a greater investment than the president wants to make; and when the administration is distracted by challenges elsewhere. In this case, policy was further distorted by Truman’s misunderstanding of Zionism, a misunderstanding that colors American discourse about Israel even today and tints this book as well.

 

Posted by Judith Ferster, AIME member

 

 

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