America's Middle East Policy: Response to Reality or to Domestic Politics?

Abstract

Peter Hahn considers American policy toward the Palestinian-Zionist and then, after 1948, the Arab-Israeli conflicts from the onset of Harry Truman's presidency in 1945 to the end of the Eisenhower administration. There is no other scholarly monograph examining this subject specifically for this period, although there are books considering parts or all of the topic in varying formats, making this venture all the more welcome. Hahn's archival research is enormous and impressive. He has utilized Israeli Hebrew-language sources from the Israel State Archive, Jewish Agency, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry along with extensive collections of private papers found in either the relevant presidential libraries (Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson) or located in university collections, such as the Allen and John Foster Dulles archives at Princeton, as well as the U.S. National Archives and the British Public Record Office.1 Hahn divides his book into chronological sections that, after a brief survey of “the Palestine Conflict to 1945,” correspond to the presidential terms of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower: 1945–1949, 1949–1953, 1953–1957, and 1957–1961. Within each section, he isolates issues he defines as keys to the U.S. approach to the conflict for that period. This means that a section may consist of five to six chapters surveying the American effort over four years to deal with items such as the Holy Places in Jerusalem or efforts to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem for 1949–1953, and water allocation tensions and Arab-Israeli border clashes for 1953–1957 along with the 1956 Suez crisis. In the last section, 1957–1961, Hahn considers several problems principally within a Cold War framework.