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Mrs. Roosevelt still opposed a Jewish state. “The suggestion that the country be partitioned seems to me no answer to the problem,” she wrote in midsummer. She still had questions about Palestine’s absorptive capacity, and questions, too, about the number of Jews in Europe who wanted to go to Palestine. “Not all Jewish people want a nation and a national home,” she wrote a Zionist critic. “The greater part of the Jews throughout the world in the past have been nationals of the lands in which they lived, and they wanted only to be different as to their religion, just as Catholics or Protestants might be different.” It might be that Jewish attitudes had changed and “that like many other people, the Jews wish to establish and fight for the right to the land. I hope this isn’t so. . . .” At the end of 1946 she informed the correspondent for the Palestine paper Davar that of the six solutions for the future status of the Jews in Palestine that he listed—British mandate, Jewish state in the whole of Palestine, Arab state in the whole of Palestine, partition, federalization of Jewish and Arab cantons, and UN trusteeship—she preferred the last.26
So it was with delight that she hailed the British decision in February, 1947, to turn the Palestine problem over to the United Nations, although she was appalled that Bevin, in disclosing this decision to the House of Commons, said all might have been well if President Truman for domestic political reasons had not made agreement impossible by his insistence on the 100,000. An “extraordinary outburst,” Mrs. Roosevelt called it, “a fit of temper” which she hoped the president, whom she described as “a patient man,” will accept “with charity.” Her own sense of charity was taxed to the limit when, on the eve of the special assembly which had been convened at the request of the British government, its spokesman in the House of Lords said Britain would only carry out the decision of the assembly if it approved of it. The British attitude undermined the authority of the United Nations, she wrote. “The British Government is a Labor-Socialist government, but as far as the Empire and foreign affairs are concerned, it might as well be a Tory Government, because there is a similarity in the official pronouncements by every British government on these subjects.” Though there were “comparatively few people” involved in the Palestine agony, “the horror of their situation is what makes it tragic, because those who are being kept out of Palestine are the waifs and strays of horror camps.” She deplored terrorist tactics, “but I deplore even more the attitude of self-righteous governments.” The British were not to blame alone. “Our own Government’s position has never gone beyond pious hopes and unctuous words.”27
She was impatient when the special assembly, under U.S. leadership, decided to postpone grappling with the substance of the Palestine problem and set up a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to report to the regular session of the Assembly in September:
For two years now, displaced Jews have waited for the day of freedom and in many cases they are still behind barbed wires. The question of Palestine is as far from being settled as it was when the war came to an end.
Anglo-American interest in oil, she suggested, was behind the delay.
It seems to me, however, that this question cannot be settled on a commercial basis.
When we allowed the Jews to dream of a homeland and allowed many thousands of them to settle in Palestine—under the British mandate to be sure—we tacitly gave our support to this final conclusion. We are obligated today to see it through, giving every consideration, of course, to the rights of the Arabs, guarding their access to the religious shrines that are sacred to them, and seeing that from the economic standpoint whatever is fair is done.28
She respected General Marshall yet she wrote to him evidently complaining over the lack of firmness in the U.S. position in the Assembly. She was particularly concerned about Great Britain’s remaining responsible for the maintenance of law and order in Palestine while UNSCOP was preparing its report. He regretted her critical comment, Marshall replied. “It was our view that this session had been called for the procedural purpose of constituting and instructing a special committee to prepare the Palestine question for consideration at the regular session. . . .” Only in that manner would all the member states have a chance to study “this complicated problem” and the way be prepared for the widest possible support of world opinion” of UNSCOP’s conclusions.29
“I think that our Government will take a firmer attitude and I hope in the right direction when their report comes before us,” she wrote a correspondent. The right of the Jewish people to a homeland should have been considered and settled long ago, she continued. The United States, she felt, should support that right. She drew comfort from UNSCOP’s membership, made up as it was of smaller nations and excluding the great powers which were primarily concerned with the future of the oil fields.30
Her misgivings about allowing Britain to administer Palestine pending UNSCOP’s report were borne out when the British embarked upon a policy of interception of illegal immigrant ships, returning them to France and, when the passengers refused to disembark, ordering the ships to sail for Hamburg. It was easy to understand the refugees’ sense of despair, she wrote, adding, “They feel perhaps that death is preferable.”31 She received an imploring letter from Eva Warburg, sister of Ingrid with whom she had worked in 1940–41, to save political refugees from the advancing Nazi armies. Eva Warburg had settled in Palestine in the thirties. “I am writing you on behalf of the 1700 Jewish orphans living in the camps on Cyprus. . . .They are, all of them, survivors from death camps or children who were hidden somewhere five long years.” She described how they were held behind barbed wire, machine guns and searchlights trained on them. Could the women of the world not speak out against holding children as political hostages? Mrs. Roosevelt sent the letter on to President Truman, whose reply to her anguished telegram about the illegal immigrant ships called attention to the Jewish capacity to commit outrageous acts. “The British still seem to be on top and cruelty would seem to be on their side and not on the side of the Jews,” Mrs. Roosevelt commented. When the three shiploads of Jewish displaced persons docked in Hamburg, she wrote sadly:
The thought of what it must mean to those poor human beings seems almost unbearable. They have gone through so much hardship and had thought themselves free forever from Germany, the country they associate with concentration camps and crematories. Now they are back there again. Somehow it is too horrible for any of us in this country to understand.32
Much of the world reacted as Mrs. Roosevelt did. British policy made men ashamed. It even affected viewpoints in UNSCOP.33 Its report, issued just before the General Assembly convened in September, called for termination of the British mandate. It recommended that Palestinian independence should take the form of two separate states—Jewish and Arab—tied together in an economic union, with Jerusalem, a separate entity under the direct trusteeship of the United Nations. Although she had doubts about partition, she was even more dubious about the minority’s recommendation of a vague cantonal plan. If the United Nations was to exercise any influence over events in the Near East, where the Arabs were vowing defiance of any UN resolution that upheld the right of the Jews to a homeland in Palestine, it would be along the lines of the (UNSCOP) majority recommendations or not at all. Within the U.S. delegation she became a strong supporter of those recommendations.
Most of the career men in the State Department were opposed to the majority report. Their problem was to persuade General Marshall and President Truman. For weeks the struggle raged inside the government. Sandifer, Mrs. Roosevelt’s chief adviser, recalled Marshall saying at the end of all the discussion, “Here is a case where we have to do what is right. We have to do this as a matter of principle. We are obligated to support the establishment of a Jewish state.” Sandifer, who shared the doubts of his State Department colleagues, felt that “the case of the Arabs in terms of U.S. interests was inadequately presented in the U.S. delegation.” The presentation was made by Loy Henderson. “I’m sure General Marshall was influ
enced by the fact that there was not a clear simple presentation of the Arab case.” Mrs. Roosevelt’s firm attitude undoubtedly influenced the secretary. “She impressed me as having an open mind on every subject other than Palestine,” said Sandifer. “She was not open to persuasion on that issue.” All the department people were against Marshall’s position in support of the UNSCOP recommendations, Mrs. Roosevelt told friends shortly after the Assembly opened. “They tell him ‘no’ and put it in such a way that to stand by his support of the UNSCOP recommendations is to go against the advice of all the qualified experts in the Department.” But she thought Marshall would stand firm if the president did. She was fearful of the influence of Edwin W. Pauley, oil man and Truman intimate and powerful in the Democratic party. She had once cautioned Truman against Pauley:
I remember very well the pressure under which my own husband was placed and his agreement to name Mr. Pauley as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and then we had a long discussion about it because I was very much opposed to having Mr. Pauley in any position where oil could be involved. Franklin assured me that if he put Mr. Pauley in as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he would have nothing to do with oil because Mr. Forrestal would be over him and he would never be Secretary.*
Truman had turned aside her warning with the comment that he thought very highly of Pauley. It was now evident that Pauley had the ear of the president and, Mrs. Roosevelt feared, might tip the scale against Marshall. But Truman also came down on the side of partition and instructed the State Department to back it in the Assembly.35
Even after the United States announced its support of the majority report, its adoption by the General Assembly, requiring a two-thirds vote, was still doubtful and dependent in large measure on how strongly the United States campaigned. Henderson was authorized by Undersecretary of State Robert A. Lovett to assure Arab representatives that while the United States would vote for partition, it would not pressure other UN members to do so. At the same time, however, David Niles, an administrative assistant to the president, instructed Ambassador Warren Austin’s deputy at the United Nations, Herschel V. Johnson, to twist arms if necessary. As the showdown vote approached, Zionist pressures became almost frenetic, antagonizing even Mrs. Roosevelt. She withdrew as cochairman of a dinner of The Nation Associates when that group sent out a letter saying that “a gigantic doublecross” was in the making and that President Truman had decided to yield to the Arabs. She asked that her name be removed from the letterhead. “I do not feel I can be affiliated with a group which does such irresponsible things,” she wrote Lessing J. Rosenwald, a leading anti-Zionist who had called the offending passage to her attention.36
U.S. support of the majority plan was announced on October 14. “Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both,” she wrote in her column. What about justice for the Arabs, a critic responded. The Palestine situation had to be seen in historical context, she replied:
You must remember that Great Britain and ourselves, without any protest at the time from the Arabs, agreed that the Jews were entitled to a homeland in Palestine. In the interim years, 600,000 Jews have gone there and at the cost of many lives, have developed an arid country into a garden spot. Much of it was malaria country and many Jews died so that blood and sweat has literally gone into that land.
Now the Arabs have awakened to the fact that a change is coming over the type of life that some of their own people lead as a result of this Jewish homeland and that they are not quite sure they like it. It seems to me that that decision has come a little too late and that all of us must abide by the plan which has been offered by the majority of a commission of the United Nations.
It will not hurt the Arabs, in fact they will profit by it, but we do not always like what is good for us in this world.37
On November 29, amid intense excitement, the General Assembly approved partition by a vote of 33 to 13 with ten nations not voting. The Soviet bloc voted for partition. If it had not, partition would not have passed. “A real miracle,” commented Moshe Shertok of the Jewish Agency.
The Assembly’s adoption of the partition plan transformed the problem in Mrs. Roosevelt’s mind. Partition might not have been the best way to deal with the problem of a Jewish homeland, but no nation had suggested a better one, and now that it was endorsed by the United Nations it had become the first real test of the organization’s capacity to take a position and make it stick. Moved by compassion for the Jewish remnant as well as by the hopes that she had invested in the United Nations, she was ready to do battle with the president and secretary of state and secretary of defense to ensure that the United States stood firmly behind the United Nations as it proceeded to implement its resolution:
. . .it would be a blow to the prestige of the United Nations from which it would never recover, if they do not implement their decision, and if we do not do our share we will be responsible for sabotaging the only machinery we have for having peace today. This is, of course, neither in the interest of the Arabs or the Jews as far as I am concerned as I have never been to Palestine and have no personal feeling on the subject. But as to the preservation of the UN as machinery through which we may work for peace in the future, I have a great deal of conviction and I hope that other people will feel the same way.38
Troops of the Arab nations surrounding Palestine were on the move with the avowed purpose of nullifying the UN decision when the British left the country on May 15, 1948, as they had announced they would do. The Jewish Agency advised the United Nations that an international police force would be required to put the partition into effect. The UNSCOP did the same. But the United States, which had taken the leadership in the passage of the partition resolution, suddenly drew back. It did nothing to organize a UN peacekeeping force, and it imposed an embargo on the sale of arms to both Arabs and Jews, the effect of which, under the appearance of even-handedness, as in the case of the Spanish embargo, was to hamper and harass Jewish efforts to procure arms in the face of better-armed and more numerous Arab forces. And in Palestine the withdrawing British did their best to keep the Jews disarmed and defenseless.
The Palestine crisis came to a head at a moment of high tension with Soviet Russia. Because of the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and rising Soviet pressures in Germany, Washington officials, especially those in the Defense Department, thought war might come at any moment. The military, led by Secretary Forrestal and Adm. William D. Leahy, began to get a more attentive hearing for their argument about the strategic importance of oil and air bases, and the further argument that if the United States took the leadership in enforcing the Assembly decision, Arab hostility would be turned against it.39
Mrs. Roosevelt sensed the administration’s growing faintheartedness. She saw President Truman early in January, 1948, and told him people were worried over the increasing military influence in the government. “Now I know very well,” she wrote the president a few days later,
that the defense people and probably the oil people are saying we must not offend the Arabs, that we need the oil and will need it particularly if we are going to have trouble with Russia. I feel it absolutely essential that we do not have trouble with Russia but we can only prevent it by being cleverer than Russia and keeping her out from the places where we do not wish her to be without offending her. That means we move first and we have a definite policy.
Great Britain has been arming the Arabs and has cooked up much of the trouble in that area for the very simple reason that Great Britain knows that only two people will buy Arab oil—the United States and the United Kingdom. Russia will walk in and take it when she is ready. We have to out-think Great Britain as well as Russia and I am very much afraid that some of the people in the State Department and some people in the defense group are not thinking very far ahead and if the United Nations becomes a second League and disintegrates as it well may, if it gets no support in this situation, then another war is inevitable. On top of that a Republican election is inevitable.40
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br /> An article by James Reston in the New York Times added to her uneasiness. It spoke of State Department and Defense Department moves to weaken the influence of Zionist pressure groups with the president. Reston reported Forrestal’s “grave concern,” as he stated it to the House Armed Services Committee, over a “strategic oil shortage vital to the European Recovery Program” arising from “hostile Moslem response to the UN partition plan.” There was strong pressure from the State and Defense departments against any action by the United States that might antagonize the Arabs.41
On January 28, using the Reston article as a peg, Mrs. Roosevelt sent a forceful note to General Marshall. Since the United States had led in the adoption of the partition plan, it carried a responsibility to enforce it. The United Nations
can probably recruit a volunteer force among the smaller nations but they can not get the necessary modern equipment of war except from us. It would seem to me that the quicker we removed the embargo and see that the Jews and any UN police force are equipped with modern armaments, which is the only thing which will hold the Arabs in check, the better it will be for the whole situation.42
The next day she wrote even more vigorously to the president:
It seems to me that if the UN does not put through and enforce the partition and protection of people in general in Palestine, we are facing a very serious situation in which its position for the future is at stake.
She repeated the plea she had made to Marshall for U.S. support of an international police force. “If the U.N. is going to be an instrument for peace, now is the crucial time to strengthen it.”43
Truman replied promptly. He and Marshall were trying to work out an implementation plan. He agreed with her about Great Britain’s role in the Near East. The Labor government’s policy there was little different from Disraeli’s. General Marshall took longer to reply and was less acquiescent. Both Jewish and Arab elements were committing acts of terror and violence. He complained that “the political situation in this country does not help matters.” It was the American policy to approach the Palestine problem through the United Nations rather than unilaterally. “A decision by the United States, for instance, to permit American arms to go to Palestine and neighboring states would facilitate acts of violence and the further shedding of blood and thus render still more difficult the task of maintaining law and order. We are continuing, therefore, to refuse to license the shipment of arms to that area.”44