Caught in the Middle East: U.S. Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1945-1961 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Caught in the Middle East: U.S. Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1945-1961 Bruce J. Evensen (bio) Caught in the Middle East: U.S. Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1945-1961. By Peter L. Hahn. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xii + 398 pp. On the eve of Israeli independence, Chaim Weizmann, the man who would become the new nation's first president, observed that those who came from outside the Middle East always overestimated the role they could play in bringing peace to the region. Weizmann's warning seems particularly prescient in analyzing U.S. policy in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Peter Hahn's detailed description of this period castigates Washington for failing to achieve Arab-Israeli reconciliation "because of limits U.S. leaders imposed on their peacemaking" (276). The limits Hahn has in mind are the efforts to stop the spread of Soviet influence in an oil-rich region seen as central to postwar recovery. Reading Hahn's carefully crafted narrative, however, would seem to suggest that Weizmann had it right. The "unrelenting antagonism" between Israel and her Arab neighbors (1), and not the myopia Hahn alleges, may well have led these sovereign states to resist initiatives they did not consider in their national interest, thereby scuttling peacemaking "on U.S. terms" (231). Hahn, an associate professor of history at Ohio State University and the executive director of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, reconstructs the power vacuum reluctantly filled by the United States following the collapse of British influence in the Arab Near East after World War II. Hahn sees Truman as "unsteady" and reactive. Eisenhower is characterized as proactive and "more consistent." Both administrations, however, appeared to "privilege Cold War security concerns over peacemaking ventures" (3). Hahn argues this approach prevented a peace settlement on issues ranging from borders to refugees to water rights. The United States, he suggests, "refrained from taking steps that might have led to peace" (277). Those steps, in Hahn's view, should have included Washington's collaboration with Moscow in imposing "a multilateral settlement" to end the conflict (279). Hahn's conclusion assumes something he gives little evidence for, namely, that Stalin was interested in settling outstanding differences between the Arabs and Israelis and that the parties to the dispute could have been coerced to embrace an imposed settlement. Hahn acknowledges that throughout the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies there was "a deep reluctance of Arabs and Israelis to make concessions or compromises" that might have advanced the peace process (2). Franklin Roosevelt's efforts to straddle these differences left "an ambiguous legacy" for his successors (19). Truman's policymaking [End Page 129] on Palestine was further inhibited by divisions within his own administration. The White House staff, key members of Congress, and organized public opinion reinforced Truman's internal inclination to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This prospect was vigorously opposed by the Near East desk in the State Department and defense planners, who feared the outbreak of civil unrest in Palestine would destabilize the region and encourage Soviet meddling. Hahn is tough on Truman because of what he sees as Truman's vacillation between these two competing points of view. Truman embraces a two-state solution for Palestine in November 1947 only to favor a United Nations trusteeship four months later. Because Truman was "buffeted by public opinion" over Palestine, "ambivalence became a trademark of his policy" toward the region (32). Hahn believes that Truman becomes "more impartial" in his handling of Israel when he "refrains from overturning the handiwork of the State Department" in the post-independence period (68). Those initiatives on refugee resettlement and border disputes left U.S. officials "profoundly angry at Israel for its stubborn refusal to accept (American) counsel" (122). Hahn argues that President Eisenhower's international experience and practical "impartiality" in the ongoing Arab-Israeli dispute were critical in defusing the Suez-Sinai crisis in October 1956 (147). The decision of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to nationalize the Suez Canal in July 1956 provoked "strenuous attempts" by Washington to contain the conflict (192). While Eisenhower...