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Making David into Goliath. Joshua Muravchik
Читать онлайн.Название Making David into Goliath
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isbn 9781594038464
Автор произведения Joshua Muravchik
Издательство Ingram
Throughout his presidency “the State Department and Truman were at loggerheads” on Palestine, write the Radoshes.16 The third of Truman’s secretaries of state, General George C. Marshall, began as a visceral Zionist sympathizer with scant knowledge of the issue, but by the time the department’s Middle East experts finished briefing him, he reversed his position completely. He became so adamant that once Truman decided to cast the American vote in favor of partition and to recognize Israel, he had to go to lengths to persuade Marshall not to resign in protest and oppose him publicly. This showed the toughness for which Truman was renowned, and which his predecessor did not share. David Niles, a White House aide who served both presidents, later wrote that he doubted Israel would have come into existence had Roosevelt lived out his fourth term.
Passage of the 1947 resolution in the UN General Assembly partitioning Palestine between Arabs and Jews required a two-thirds majority. The American decision influenced others but was not sufficient to ensure the outcome. Surprisingly, the Kremlin, never a friend to Zionism, decided also to support partition, calculating that the departure of the British from Palestine would enhance Soviet influence there. This constituted one of the rare instances when a state’s calculus of realpolitik worked to the Jews’ advantage.
In general, however, the UN vote was a moment when humanitarian considerations carried unusual weight in international deliberations. Apart from Truman’s predispositions, several other factors contributed to the outcome that made the birth of Israel possible. The first was the Holocaust itself. Although authoritative reports had reached the outside world during the war, almost no one grasped the immensity of the crime until the war was over. Jewish communities had been pillaged many times in many places, and people on the outside who had heard reports of atrocities from Nazi-occupied Europe pictured pogroms, a sad but familiar spectacle. The unprecedented reality of murder as a mass-production industry was something no one other than the Nazis themselves had imagined.
When Allied forces liberated those camps whose traces the retreating Nazis had not managed to erase, they found half-dead prisoners, corpses stacked for burning, and the maniacal machinery of death. The shock reverberated around the globe over the next few years as the astounding details were gathered and publicized. Although knowledge of the Holocaust did not cleanse the world of anti-Semitism, it created a reservoir of sympathy for the Jews wider and deeper than they had known over the millennia.
In contrast, the role of Arab leaders during the war earned no goodwill among Western governments or publics. As the Los Angeles Times put it: “The Arabs, on the whole, sided with the Nazis with whom they shared common hatreds.”17 According to German historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers, “Egypt’s King Farouk sent [Hitler] a message in the spring of 1941 saying that ‘he was filled with great admiration for the Führer and respect for the German people, whose victory over England he fervently wished for.’”18 Saudi Arabia’s King Ibn Saud declared that: “All Arabs and Mohammedans throughout the world have great respect for Germany, and this respect is increased by the battle that Germany is waging against the Jews, the archenemy of the Arabs.”19 Pro-Nazi military officers led by Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani seized Iraq in 1941, slaughtering two hundred Baghdadi Jews before their coup was put down by British forces. Gaylani and his co-conspirators enjoyed “widespread Arab Sympathy,” notes Cruise O’Brien, while there was little such support for the Allied cause.20
Gaylani and the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had come to Baghdad to aid the coup, escaped the Allied forces with the assistance of the Germans and Italians and made their way to Berlin.21 There, after a personal audience with Hitler, the Mufti began broadcasts to the Middle East on German radio about the “common battle against the Jewish danger” that united the Muslims to Germany.22
The Mufti was the leader of the Palestinian Arabs and, by some estimates, the most popular figure in the Arab world, so his countless incendiary broadcasts against the Allies and the Jews amounted to a significant psychological warfare asset for the Axis. In addition, in 1943, he traveled to Yugoslavia where he recruited Muslim volunteers to create a division of the Wafen SS. In 1946, he escaped Allied captivity and possible trial as a war criminal, making his way to Cairo where he was welcomed as a hero.
In short, the Arabs had mostly supported the losing side in the world war, whereas the United Nations had been founded as a kind of victors’ club. The very rubric, United Nations, had been the formal name that the alliance against the Axis had given itself, and it was now carried over to the new global body. And, indeed, the price of admission to the United Nation’s founding conference was to declare war on the Axis. Thus, the history of Jewish persecution and of Arab collaboration helped tilt the General Assembly.
So, too, did the contrast between the two sides in their attitude toward compromise. Both camps were divided within themselves, but among the Jews the advocates of accepting half a loaf prevailed, whereas among the Arabs the absolutists reigned supreme. Golda Meyerson (later, Golda Meir), the Zionist representative at the United Nations, expressed disappointment that the proposed partition would deny Jerusalem to the Jews, but she embraced the plan nonetheless, hoping the United Nations would “improve” it.23 In contrast, the Arab Higher Committee, which, with al-Husseini back at the helm, had regained its status as the voice of the Arabs of Palestine, was unyielding. The Arabs “would never allow a Jewish state to be established in one inch of Palestine,” vowed the group’s spokesman, warning that the effort to do so would lead “probably to a third world war.”24
Sixty-four years later, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, conceded in an interview on Israeli television that this refusal of compromise “was our mistake. It was an Arab mistake as a whole.”25 There were many reasons for this mistake and for the contrast in the stands of the two parties. The key one was that the Jews were desperate for a state in Palestine even “the size of a table cloth,” as David Ben Gurion famously put it, whereas the Arabs, including those of Palestine, had reached no consensus on what they wanted except that there be no Jewish state on even “one inch.” Some envisioned an independent Arab Palestine, whereas others preferred to see the land absorbed into a “greater Syria” or an enlarged Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Still others yearned for a pan-Arab state or a pan-Muslim caliphate. When the war of 1948 ended, all of the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip were in Arab hands, but not a finger was raised to create a Palestinian Arab state. That was the Palestinian tragedy, or Naqba, as it is called today.
Over the ensuing years, the Arab world seethed with recriminations, sparking the overthrow of incumbent regimes in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. International efforts to mediate the Arab–Israeli conflict proved futile, as Arab political discourse reverberated with the paramountcy of redeeming Arab honor, even while the strengthening Israeli state and army made this goal each day more unrealistic.
Then, with little warning, in the spring of 1967, the constant background noise of low-gauge confrontations and mutual threats swelled to a crescendo. For reasons that remain murky to this day, the Kremlin informed the Egyptian and Syrian governments falsely that Israeli forces were massing on Syria’s border for an attack. Israel denied this, and UN and Egyptian officials saw for themselves that there was no truth in it. But the tension did not dissipate.
On May 15, following meetings between Egyptian and Syrian military leaders, Cairo declared an emergency, and tanks were seen rumbling through the streets of the capital. A day later Radio Cairo broadcast: “the existence of Israel has continued too long. We welcome the Israeli aggression. We welcome the battle we have long awaited. The peak hour has come. The battle has come in which we shall destroy Israel.”26
Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser demanded that the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) be withdrawn from the Sinai where it had been stationed as a buffer under the terms that ended the 1956 Sinai War. Much of the world was dismayed at the alacrity with which UN Secretary-General U Thant complied with this request, and some analysts speculated that Nasser may have counted on more resistance.