In 2008, Michael Oren was taken on a two-hour flight from Ben-Gurion Airport to somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea, landing aboard the USS Harry S. Truman, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier.
A historian later appointed Israel’s ambassador to the United States and then elected to the Knesset, Oren visited the ship to give a lecture on America’s involvement in the Middle East and its support for Israeli statehood.
The countries’ multifaceted alliance today began with one official act: President Truman’s granting diplomatic recognition to Israel on May 14, 1948, shortly after David Ben-Gurion proclaimed statehood. The U.S. thus became the first country to do so.
“We are thankful to President Truman for having acted promptly with courage and dignity on the day of Israel’s Liberation,” opined Detroit’s Jewish News. The Jewish Community Bulletin of Northern California reported that a telegram sent by the rabbi of a San Francisco synagogue to the White House read in part, “Your action, Mr. President, makes me proud to be an American.”
Before Oren’s lecture, his hosts showed him an exhibit on Truman, who occupied the White House from 1945 to 1953. It included a section on Truman’s statehood decision.
“The U.S. Navy recognizes Truman’s recognition of Israel as one of the president’s greatest accomplishments. Isn’t that interesting?” Oren said of the visit. “I think that’s what Truman is remembered for.”
Being aboard the ship “was one of the most extraordinary events of my life. I mean it,” Oren said.
The paper on which the short statement was typed and then signed by Truman is now housed at the National Library of Israel.
The document reads:
This government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional Government thereof.
The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel.
Harry Truman
Approved,
May 14, 1948.
6:11
The signed statement contains four more of Truman’s handwritten notations: two changes to the typed text, his affirming of the wording “Approved” and his recording of the time of day: 6:11, which he changed from 6:10 p.m. Washington time.
Another item in the Library collections is a formerly “Top Secret” typed cable sent by U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall to the American embassy in London to state that American recognition of Israel was forthcoming and should be conveyed to Marshall’s British counterpart, Ernest Bevin. Marshall sent the cable despite fiercely objecting to Truman’s decision to recognize the new state.
A related artifact is a pen, used by Truman to sign the de jure recognition of Israel, in January 1949. Accompanying the pen is a typed letter that Truman sent to his White House aide, David Niles.
Niles, who was Jewish, was one of the few members of Truman’s staff who supported the president’s decision, along with White House Counsel Clark Clifford. He was a low-profile figure, somewhat overlooked, but one whose influence should not be discounted. Abba Eban, at the time a top Israeli diplomat at the United Nations, wrote of Niles: “History will regard him as one of the decisive agents in the restoration of Israel’s sovereignty with American support.”
The path to American recognition of Israel was a long one, stretching back to the end of World War II, and fraught with obstacles laid by, among others, Marshall and other State Department officials, who opposed Jewish statehood. Truman himself vacillated regarding the options for supporting a Jewish homeland: international trusteeship, partition and, ultimately, statehood.
Things sometimes got nasty. Bevin, the British foreign secretary, intimidated by Arab opposition to Jewish sovereignty, charged that the president preferred that Jewish survivors of World War II be resettled in the Middle East because he, Truman, didn’t want them in New York. Truman sometimes criticized two American rabbis — Abba Hillel Silver and Stephen Wise — who lobbied him on Israel’s future, and disparaged American Jews broadly; in a July 29, 1946, cabinet meeting, related in a 2009 book by Allis and Ronald Harosh about the period, A Safe Haven, Truman said of Jews, “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was here on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck?”
Even Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s lifelong friend, who was Jewish, saw that side of the president. In his 1992 biography, Truman, David McCullough wrote that Jacobson secretly visited the White House on March 13, 1948, to persuade the president to support Jewish statehood. Truman complained of certain American Jews, presumably Silver and Wise, treating him disrespectfully on the matter. Jacobson said he thought then that “my dear friend … was at that moment as close to being an antisemite as any man could possibly be.”
The charge is wrong, since Truman “had a great aversion to antisemitism,” Oren said.
Still, Truman’s record was “a mixed bag,” Oren added.
Truman supported Zionism “out of a deep spiritual, biblical knowledge,” and helped bring Israel into being, but he also imposed a U.S. arms embargo on the vulnerable country — “the height of unfairness and cruelty,” Oren explained.
Truman “considered recognizing Israel one of the proudest moments of his presidency,” he said.
Pressures to accommodate British, Arab and Jewish demands over the Holy Land to America’s strategic interests occurred in the context of Truman’s monumental policy decisions. He gave the order for U.S. pilots to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, formulated the Truman Doctrine to confront Soviet expansion, oversaw the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, desegregated the U.S. military, co-established NATO and dealt with the Korean War.
In the Middle East, he was determined to be a force for good to advance Jews’ need for security after the Holocaust.
“He was hopeful, he desired, some sort of accommodation between Israel and the Arab states. He never considered this issue to be a priority issue for the United States of America,” said Melvyn Leffler, a University of Virginia history professor and author of a 1992 book, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, The Truman Administration, and the Cold War.
“He was sensitive to his military and State Department advisors who were very against it [Jewish statehood]. Ultimately, Truman was able to reconcile his humanitarian, religious and political interests with his own understanding of what was in the national security interests of the United States.”
Isaac Halevi Herzog, Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi and the grandfather of Israel’s current president, brought Truman to tears during a 1949 meeting by comparing him to ancient Persia’s King Cyrus in helping to restore the Jewish national home.
In his farewell address in January 1953, Truman bound the old and renewed Jewish states.
“The Tigris and the Euphrates Valley can be made to bloom as it did in the time of Babylon and Nineveh. Israel can be made into the country of milk and honey as it was at the time of Joshua,” he said.
Truman streets can be found today throughout Israel, and a moshav named for him, Kfar Truman, sits near Ben-Gurion Airport.
Truman planned to tour Israel with Jacobson in October 1955. The trip was cancelled when Jacobson died that month. The first head of state to extend diplomatic recognition to Israel would have been the first U.S. president or ex-president to visit.
The president’s legacy is appreciated by Herman Shelanski, a retired vice admiral, who captained the Truman at the time Oren visited.
“It was an amazing opportunity for me as a Jew, an American sailor, to be part of this history,” Shelanski said.
“It allowed me to tell the crew more about that, too — what it meant to Jewish people in general. … It was wonderful to create that understanding.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].
