When God Almighty lost a war to a superior force, God COULD NOT be blamed. Historically, and Biblically – His children are to blame! I did not invent THE RULES!
John Presco
PURITANS AND ZIONISTS
By Henry Graff
- Dec. 25, 1983
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ISRAEL IN THE MIND OF AMERICA
By Peter Grose. Illustrated. 361 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $17.95.
THE history of America and that of the Jewish people have commingled for more than three centuries. The New Jerusalems and New Zions the Puritans aimed to build in New England attest to the fervid identification of these early settlers with the Old Testament. And the hectored Jews of Europe long beheld the new land as Canaan itself. Today, the United States and Israel are bound together in strategic cooperation, and the developments that led to their present relationship represent American politics at its best – and worst – as well as the resolve of a ravaged people to survive devastation.
Peter Grose, a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and its director of Middle Eastern studies, relates the American side of the tale with clarity and brio in ”Israel in the Mind of America.” It is difficult to do justice to the liveliness, intricacies and subtleties of this resplendent book, which is based on painstaking research. Sympathetic to the struggle to establish a Jewish homeland but never uncritical, Mr. Henry F. Graff , a professor of history at Columbia University, is the editor of the forthcoming ”The Presidents: A Reference History.” Grose confidently negotiates the history of the politics and diplomacy with a ready eye for quotation and anecdote. He is able to evoke in a paragraph or two the essence and foibles of the many principal actors, giving the book the quality of a pageant. The array of characters is colorful. There is, for instance, Cotton Mather, who in 1696 prayed earnestly for ”the conversion of the Jewish Nation, and for . . . having the happiness at some time or other, to baptize a Jew.” And there are the gentiles and Jews with other hopes. Two of the most notable are John McDonald, a Presbyterian pastor in Albany during the War of 1812, who beseeched all who would listen to him to help restore the Jews to their ancient homeland, and, a few decades later, Mordecai Noah of Philadelphia, a Sephardic Jew and sometime United States diplomat, who promoted through his newspaper a proto-Zionist dream of returning the Jews to the Promised Land.
At the middle of the 19th century, nevertheless, the possibility of re-establishing Zion seemed foolish fancy. Indeed, among American Jews – as among Jews everywhere – the traditional cry of ”next year in Jerusalem” remained the pious incantation it had been for nearly 2,000 years. Besides, to most of the 150,000 Jews in America on the eve of the Civil War, the possibility of a revived homeland in Palestine was of little interest. To the rest of the population, the subject was not even a matter of discussion. Jews were irrelevant in a nation whose people often preened themselves as the new chosen people. Although anti-Semitism existed (and exists) in America, Mr. Grose does not touch on the subject save in passing. Nor does he call attention to the Jewish community’s steady acculturation – the indispensable requirement for the American-Jewish interplay that proved essential for the ”return.”
But by the end of the 19th century, a small but growing roster of Jewish figures was beginning to have influence on the national scene, just as a new era in the resuscitation of Palestine as a Jewish homeland had opened in Europe. The utopian vision of Theodor Herzl seized the imagination of Jews in Russia and Poland, increasingly battered by pogroms – 300 of them reported in the American press between 1903 and 1906 alone. The hundreds of thousands of East European Jews who fled to the United States stirred anxieties in the older American-Jewish community. The insecurity of the established Jews about their own place in American society made them fiercely anti-Zionist, even as support for Zionism was rising among the new arrivals.
Henry Morgenthau, the father of the future New Deal Secretary of the Treasury, declared boldly that Zionism was ”wrong in principle and impossible of realization . . . an Eastern European proposal . . . which, if it were to succeed would cost the Jews of America most of what they had gained of liberty, equality and fraternity.” But Louis D. Brandeis, one of Morgenthau’s contemporaries and a legendary voice for social justice, became a missionary for Zionism. Before World War I ended, the ceaseless work in Europe of Chaim Weizmann had led to the Balfour Declaration – Britain’s pledge to help re-establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Mr. Grose’s review of the love-hate relationship between Weizmann and Brandeis speaks brilliantly to the place that historians must reserve for the individual actors even as they quest to grasp the forces of history.
Most of ”Israel in the Mind of America” deals with the story after 1940. While the Holocaust was greeted by American Jews with disbelief at first, the rest of America met the news mostly with indifference – a complex amalgam of ignorance, social anti-Semitism in the State Department and the immense gulf between national ideals and national will. Mr. Grose spares no one in assessing the American Government’s response to the plight of the Jews during World War II and after. He sees Franklin Roosevelt as a simplifier of issues, trimming his sails constantly to the winds he confronted – Arab or Jewish or bureaucratic. He sees Harry S. Truman as bent on doing the right thing – supporting the ideal of a Zionist state – but constantly wary of being taken in by the Jewish leaders who lobbied him incessantly. He regards Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long and some other public officials as anti-Semites, whose views were finally defeated in the play of forces within Truman’s White House.
MR. GROSE also recounts the contribution of David K. Niles, a Presidential assistant of Polish-Jewish background, whose work in pressing the case for the recognition of Israel in 1948 was Herculean. A holdover from the Roosevelt Administration, Niles is depicted as supplying the determinative argument that Clark Clifford, then a young Truman adviser, presented in a memorable confrontation with George C. Marshall, Robert Lovett and others in the State Department over the nagging issue of recognition. But Niles is only one of the figures whose work is spotlighted here. The roles of Samuel Rosenman, Benjamin V. Cohen and Truman’s army friend, Eddie Jacobson, have never been so fully elucidated. And the roles played by non-Jews, including particularly Maj. Gen. John H. Hilldring and Earl G. Harrison, are given their due.
Making significant use of documents in Israeli archives that have recently been published, Mr. Grose relates, with fresh details, the critical labors late in November 1947 to round up votes at the United Nations in support of the partition of Palestine. Every arm, it seems, was twisted. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, accompanied by his colleague Frank Murphy, paid a fruitful visit to the Philippine Ambassador in Washington. Niles, through a friend in Boston, worked on Spyros Skouras, the motion-picture magnate, to influence his friends in Greece (to no avail, it proved). Bernard Baruch, hardly a friend of Zionism, was also induced by Niles to pitch in. According to Mr. Grose, Baruch ”ended up by telling the French delegate to his face that a French vote against partition would mean the end of all American aid to France.” France voted for the partition resolution, which passed with only two votes to spare.
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When, soon after, pressure began to mount to retract the United Nations decision, an urgent meeting of prominent American Jews took place at the home of David Ginsburg, a Washington lawyer. Present also were representatives of the Jewish Agency, the unofficial government of the emerging Jewish state. The plans the group drew up and presumably implemented reached to the top of American policy making. As reported by Mr. Grose, Eleanor Roosevelt was to be solicited to call on Truman and Marshall. Abba Eban, of the Jewish Agency, and Ginsburg were to frame an importuning letter to President Truman which prominent people, including Baruch, John Foster Dulles and Henry L. Stimson, would be asked to sign. ”Wild” Bill Donovan, the wartime head of American intelligence, was to be enlisted to appeal to Marshall and to senior officials in the Pentagon.
The disclosure of some of the methods used by lobbyists for Zionism will arouse readers in different ways. For those satisfied with the story’s denouement, Mr. Grose’s presentation may seem an unfortunate lifting of the curtain that has shielded strategy and method from public view. To critics of America’s role as a midwife to the birth of Israel, the book will provide support for the argument that United States policy was manipulated through sleight-of-hand in Washington. But the deed is done, and it stands in retrospect as a triumph for American idealism..
Rosamond Press 
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