Abstract
If proximity is conducive to illusion, so too is distance, and the long-term historical perspective can mislead. From the present, the emergence of Israel is often presented as almost inevitable, following the rise of Zionism and the horror of the Holocaust. Moreover, many critics of Israel have long criticized its creation as an imperialist gambit by the Western powers, with the Soviet Union responding by taking up the cause of the Palestinians. It is such conventional narratives that Jeffrey Herf seeks to overturn in his impressive study of the circumstances surrounding Israel’s birth.
As Herf persuasively demonstrates, what is striking about the creation of Israel was not its inevitability, but rather its contingency, depending as it did on a set of political alignments peculiar to the period after the Second World War and before the global alignments of the Cold War had quite crystallized. The 1947 United Nations Resolution partitioning the British Palestine Mandate into two states, one Jewish, one Arab, saw the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the US, vote together in support, a conjunction that did not recur until the First Gulf War.
An unusual set of conditions was behind this agreement. The Soviets, despite their past hostility to Zionism and notwithstanding Joseph Stalin’s personal antisemitism, belatedly swung around in 1947 to recognize the Jewish people’s indigeneity to Palestine, in the hopes that a Jewish state would weaken British imperialism in the Middle East and serve as an outpost of Soviet power. In the US, President Harry Truman and such key advisers as Clark Clifford were sympathetic to Zionist aspirations but faced persistent and intense opposition from within Truman’s own administration.
More broadly, there was intense resistance to the idea of a Jewish state among the foreign offices of the Western powers. In both London and Paris, there was a fear that creating Israel would undermine the British and French imperial positions in the Middle East, and with them their respective claims to great power status. In Washington, the State Department saw friendship with the Arabs as necessary to exclude Communist influence from the region and ensure the continued flow of Middle Eastern energy supplies. The fate of Jewry and the implications of the Holocaust were conspicuously absent from departmental deliberations. Any notion that the Western powers sympathized with Zionist goals out of a perceived need to atone for the Holocaust does not survive Herf’s painstaking examination of the pertinent documentation.
Where support for Israel did exist, it was largely on the left, among liberals, socialists, and even Communists who tended to see the creation of a Jewish state as the logical corollary of wartime anti-fascism. In the US, it was the elements of Truman’s Democratic coalition who were furthest to the left; in Britain, it was mainly those on the left of the governing Labour Party, and in France, it was also men and women of the left. Support for Israel was often part of a genuinely anti-colonial worldview, with Zionism understood as the national liberation movement of the Jews. Indeed, the cooler a French or British politician was to the retention of traditional imperial positions, the more likely he or she was to favour a Jewish state.
The passage of the partition resolution, of course, was far from the end of the story. The British foreign secretary, the tough trade unionist Ernest Bevin, remained determined to weaken Israel in its struggle with its Arab neighbours, and at one point proposed that Transjordan’s Arab Legion, commanded by the British lieutenant-general John Bagot Glubb (Glubb Pasha), become a belligerent in order to seize the Negev and ensure a less viable Israel deprived of access to the Red Sea. Truman’s State Department was headed by Secretary George C. Marshall, and the director of policy planning was George F. Kennan, the “father of containment,” both of whom had resisted partition and favoured conciliating Arab opinion out of a belief that the traditional elites were a bulwark against Communist influence. If it was too late for them to prevent Israel’s birth, however, they could still undermine it. And they did, trying to steer American policy back from partition towards a UN trusteeship, and maintaining (with Truman’s misguided acquiescence) a regional arms embargo that worked very much to Israel’s detriment. Indeed, one of the many surprises of Herf’s account is how much Israeli military success in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War owed to arms supplies from the Soviet bloc.
Needless to say, Israel’s moment was short-lived. Following the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, the Soviet Union, recognizing that Israel was firmly in the democratic camp, turned against the Jewish state and began noisily espousing the Palestinian cause. As for the Western powers, with the partial exception of France (which played a crucial role in enabling Israel to become an undeclared nuclear-weapons state), they remained cool to Israel until after the 1967 Six-Day War, and arguably beyond that.
In this context, a remaining question around Israel’s creation is whether an Arab response other than militant rejectionism was ever possible. It is here that Herf has a novel, if highly speculative, answer. He takes the case of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the leading Arab figure in Mandatory Palestine, who was a notorious propagandist for Hitler’s Reich during the Second World War and espoused the purest eliminationist antisemitism. At the war’s end he was in French custody, and Paris resisted American calls for him to be turned over for trial at Nuremberg. Eventually, he ended up in Beirut, where he died in 1974. Herf suggests that if al-Husseini had in fact been tried and convicted (the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, Justice Robert Jackson, concluded that the Nuremberg Tribunal lacked jurisdiction), the result would have been a more tolerant Arab leadership and a more peaceable region. This begs the question of whether an alternative Arab leadership would have been more reasonable, not a hypothesis that would command universal assent.
Yet on balance Herf has produced a coherent and convincing account, briskly and lucidly written. Students of American, British, and French foreign policy will already be aware of their subjects’ antipathy to Zionism in the late 1940s, but Herf has brought the whole story together, with extensive research in US, French, and UN documents as well as a mastery of the published literature. However, one does regret that he did not engage in equally extensive research in British archives. He reminds us of the contingency of historical events and provides a comprehensive refutation of many conventional views of Israel’s creation.