Stalin, the USSR and Israel: 1947-49 (2017)

Who saved israel in 1947? The usual answer is Truman—but it could just as easily be Stalin

A truck with the faces of Soviet Communist leaders Lenin and Stalin stuck to it, at the labor day (1 may 1949) parade held in Tel Aviv. Wikipedia Commons

NB: On 29 November 1947, the partition plan for Palestine was voted upon in the nGeneral Assembly of the UNO. It received 33 votes in favour and 13 against with 10 abstentions. India and Pakistan voted against; and the USA, Great Britain and the USSR voted for. Interestingly, the USSR had three votes (the Russian, Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs). The Soviet Union was a staunch supporter of Israel at the beginning of its existence, and its assistance was not merely diplomatic, but military. It included arms shipments from Czechoslovak arms factories. David Ben-Gurion, primary founder and first Israeli Prime Minister, went so far as to say that these shipments saved the country, I have no doubt of that. DS

Martin Kramer

November 29 marks the 70th anniversary of UN General Assembly resolution 181, recommending the partition of Mandate Palestine into two separate Jewish and Arab states. On that day in 1947, millions of
listeners sat glued to their radio sets to follow the voting. The outcome set off spontaneous celebrations among Zionists everywhere, for it constituted the first formal international endorsement of a Jewish state.

To celebrate the anniversary, Israel’s embassy to the United Nations is restoring the hall in Flushing Meadows, New York— today the main gallery of the Queens Museum, then the meeting place of the
General Assembly—to its appearance in 1947. The announced plan is to reenact the vote, with the
current ambassadors of member states that voted “yes” recasting their ballots. The most conspicuous of the ballots cast will be that of the United States. Indeed, the vote and its sequel are set to be told as a largely American story. Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, has placed the celebration in this historical context:

From the moment President Truman became the first world leader to recognize the new Jewish state, Israel has had no better friend than the United States of America, and the U.S. has had no more steadfast ally than the state of Israel.

In keeping with this, the keynote speaker in New York will be U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence. Again and again, we are likely to hear how Harry Truman stood up to his State Department (and, perhaps less heroically, catered to Jewish voters) by saying “yes” in November 1947 and then by immediately recognizing Israel when David Ben-Gurion declared the state on May 14, 1948. And once again, we will be reminded of Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s Jewish business partner in a Kansas City haberdashery before the Depression, who famously traded on his old friendship to secure a critical meeting between Truman and the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in March 1948.

The rest of the story has been carefully burnished over the years, including by Truman himself. In 1953, when Jacobson introduced the former president to a Jewish audience as “the man who helped create the state of Israel,” Truman upped the ante by comparing himself with the ancient Persian ruler who restored the Jews to Jerusalem from Babylonian exile: “What do you mean ‘helped to create’? I am Cyrus.”

Historians, it is true, still debate Truman’s motives. But they also agree on one thing: Israel’s creation owed more to Truman than to any other world leader. “Without Truman,” write Allis and Ronald Radosh in their book on Truman and Israel, “the new state of Israel might not have survived its first difficult years, and succeeded thereafter.” Michael J. Cohen, in his earlier book on Truman and Israel, states that in 1947 and 1948, “Truman arguably played the decisive diplomatic role in the birth of the new state of Israel.” Michael Oren, in Power, Faith, and Fantasy, his bestseller on America in the Middle East, asserts that Truman’s comparison of himself with the Persian ruler Cyrus “was not entirely bluster.”

The problem here is simple: everything said about the contribution of Truman could be said
about that of Joseph Stalin.

I. Stalin, a Founding Father of Israel?
In a 1998 essay marking Israel’s 50th anniversary, the historian Paul Johnson addressed a “paradoxical aspect of the Zionist miracle, which we certainly did not grasp at the time and which is insufficiently understood even now.” That paradox, wrote Johnson, is that “among the founding fathers of Israel was Joseph Stalin.” Twenty years later, even fewer people grasp it. The Soviet Union is long gone, remembered by Israel and its supporters as the patron of Nasser abroad, the jailer and tormentor of Jews at home, the purveyor of vicious anti-Semitism everywhere. Nor did any Soviet leader himself ever claim the mantle of Cyrus. To the contrary: from the 1950s onward, the Soviet Union did its utmost to erase the fact of Soviet support for the creation of Israel from official history and from Arab memory.

Meanwhile, both in the United States and in Israel, an equal and opposite process has erased from memory the inconstancy of American support for Israel’s creation. Yes, the U.S. voted for partition in November 1947, but by the following March it had declared partition impossible to implement and proposed a “temporary” UN trusteeship in its stead. On the very eve of Britain’s official withdrawal from Israel the following May, America’s top diplomat was still warning Israel’s leaders against declaring independence….

https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2017/11/who-saved-israel-in-1947/

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