3-31-2014 How Harry Truman learned to love Israel - Rod Such The Electronic Intifada

http://electronicintifada.net/content/how-harry-truman-learned-love-israel/13274

 

Harry Truman opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine early during his presidency, believing a state should not belong to any one people and that a religious state violated the principle of church-state separation.

 

In the end, however, Truman...capitulated to the pressures of a burgeoning Zionist lobby that was just beginning to flex its muscle within the Democratic Party.

That is a rough summary of the thesis put forward in John Judis’ Genesis: Truman, American Jews and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict (Farrar Straus Giroux)….

 

Judis...ultimately neglects Cold War calculations in accounting for US support for Israel after 1948. The State and War departments initially opposed partition and the creation of a Jewish state for fear that it would alienate Arab countries and potentially jeopardize US and European access to Middle Eastern oil...

After Israel became a fait accompli, however, both the Pentagon and the state department earnestly embraced Israel…

…Genesis ends [by] describing Israel as “one of the world’s last colonial powers” and declaring that “the main lesson of this narrative is that whatever wrongs were done to the Jews of Europe and later to those of the Arab Middle East and North Africa — and there were great wrongs inflicted — the Zionists who came to Palestine to establish a state trampled on the rights of the Arabs who already lived there. That wrong has never been adequately addressed, or redressed

 


Posted by Judith Ferster, AIME member

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