Slouching towards Jerusalem: The Truman Administration and the Palestine Question

Abstract

Although the amount of blood shed in the Arab-Israeli conflict has gradually declined during the past seventy years, the amount of scholarly ink spilled on the creation of Israel continues to rise. Irene Gendzier, a political scientist at Boston University who earlier authored a splendid biography of Frantz Fanon and a provocative analysis of American intervention in Lebanon, offers a revisionist account of Harry Truman’s policies toward Palestine. She concludes that, as early as 1948, Washington made a cynical decision to sacrifice Palestinian rights at the altar of Persian Gulf crude, with Israel regarded as a “strategic asset,” not as a diplomatic liability. “The choice facing policymakers was not oil versus Israel but rather oil and Israel,” Gendzier insists in her introduction. “In the years that followed, it was oil and Israel versus reform and revolution in the Arab world” (xviii). To make her case, Gendzier covers a great deal of well-traveled ground, recapping Truman’s shock when the Nazi death camps were liberated in 1945, his frustration with British diplomats and State Department bureaucrats during the battles over “trusteeship versus partition” in 1946 and 1947, and his susceptibility to pro-Zionist arguments delivered by members of his inner circle in 1948. Relying mainly on published material from the State Department’s Foreign Relations series and the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Documents on Foreign Policy volumes, she tells her story in such intricate detail and with so much thick description that even readers already familiar with the trajectory of American policy will feel their eyes begin to glaze over. Indeed, by the final chapters, I found myself skimming through Gendzier’s five-hundred-word quotations from policy planning documents and wishing that her book had included a bibliography listing all her sources in one place. Yet if one reads her introduction, her synopses of each of the book’s five sections (1, 55, 113–14, 181, and 241), and her conclusion, Gendzier’s overall argument emerges in sharper focus, and her two most important findings become crystal clear.