Past Election-induced Folly Continues to Pay for an Occupied People’s Suffering
By Luke Peterson
Mar/Apr 2024
Truman’s Legacy
The U.S. presidential election of 1948 was a close one. In it, Strom Thurmond of the racist Dixiecrat Party competed against Thomas Dewey, a big business Republican from New York; and Harry Truman, a rural Democrat from Missouri and incumbent at the time of the election. Truman was pushed hard in the election by a well-funded Dewey who spearheaded a Republican Party desperate to regain power after 12 years of Franklin D. Roosevelt and an additional three years under Truman, FDR’s vice president during his last term.
Truman would win the popular vote in the country by just over 2 million votes, a margin so narrow that, in the days before the internet and accurate, up-to-the second polling data, several prominent newspapers heralded Dewey’s “victory” on their front pages before all of the electoral votes had been tallied. Truman’s victory meant an extension of the Democratic control of the White House and a tacit imprimatur of his new militant, post-World War II agenda. The United States had arrived with guns blazing into the Cold War.
For Palestine, Truman’s victory portended dark consequences. Entering the campaign season ahead of the 1948 election, Truman knew that the race would be close. He was also aware of the immense shadow within which he governed, having ascended to the presidency only after FDR, valiant conqueror of the Nazis and liberal hero of the 20th century, had died in office. The coarse and loose-talking Missouri Democrat had to get 1948 right, therefore, if he was to make an impression on American history beyond being the man who approved the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
To improve his political fortunes, Truman cultivated a famously close friendship with British Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, a frequent visitor to the Truman White House who, it is said, often interrupted presidential meetings to push the Zionist agenda with equal parts eloquence and vehemence. Weizmann convinced Truman that the Jewish voting bloc in the United States would be in lock step behind him during his campaign in 1948 if he supported the creation of the state of Israel within historic Palestine, offered official acknowledgement of that state, and then closed his eyes to Zionist tactics of ethnic cleansing and population transfer conducted during the Nakba (see also Peter Beinart, “Could Israel Carry Out Another Nakba?” IH. Sept./Oct. 2023).
A battle of wills then ensued between Truman and his Secretary of State, George C. Marshall of the Marshall Plan fame. Marshall was certain that steering Washington’s foreign policy in the direction of Weizmann’s will was folly and would cost the U.S. in political dealings with the Arab states in the years to come. Marshall was also aghast that Truman would use foreign policy to leverage domestic political advantage, informing the president: “If you [recognize the state of Israel] and if I were to vote in the election, I would vote against you” (June 1991; https://www.wrmea.org/1991-may-june/truman-adviser-recalls-may-141948-us-decision-to-recognize-israel.html).
But the president’s mind was already made up. Truman embraced the Zionist movement and in doing so, broke FDR’s promises to Arab leadership of non-interference in Palestine. His rebuff of Marshall and the State Department was made complete with his now-famous quip: “I have to answer to the hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents” (1994; www.wrmea.org).
On May 14, 1948, David Ben Gurion publicly accepted Britain’s colonial partition of Palestine to which the newly created United Nations had agreed. 11 minutes later, Truman made the United States the first country to offer official recognition to Israel, a move that legitimized Israel’s settler colonial project.
Washington Betrays the Palestinians
Truman’s abandonment of the Palestinian national movement in favor of Israel established a precedent of Washington’s commitment to the Zionist state that has been unwavering ever since. In 1962, during the height of Washington’s anti-communist obsession, the Kennedy administration granted the first weapons sale to Israel, thereby laying the foundations for the close connections between the U.S. “defense” industry and Israel that has accounted for billions of dollars in weapons exchanges and purchases up to the present day.
In 1966, the Johnson administration doubled down on Kennedy’s initiative selling long-range bombers and fighter jets to Israel, signaling a complete break with previous White House rhetoric concerning the prohibition of arms sales to active combatants in the Middle East. Tel Aviv immediately used this weaponry to devastating effect in As-Samu in the Palestinian West Bank (then administered by Jordan) where an unprovoked Israeli strike killed 18 and wounded 54 others. These U.S.-made weapons would help Israel conquer the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula in the June 1967 war.
From then on, a pattern began to emerge. Successive U.S. presidential administrations, under pressure from both a pro-Israel domestic constituency as well as organized pro-Israel lobbying groups, offered larger and larger aid packages to Israel. In part, this served Washington’s foreign policy aims during the Cold War which sought to exploit Israel as a counterbalance to those Arab states that had begun to fall under the sway of the Soviet Union. More immediately, though, during the second half of the 20th century, this aid was used to bolster war-dependent industries that had begun to flag after World War II.
As Frida Berrigan, Senior Program Associate in the Arms and Security Initiative of the New America Foundation noted: “Israel receives most of its U.S, military assistance through Foreign Military Financing, which are U.S. grants for weapons purchases… Israel is the only country allowed to use a substantial portion of its military aid to build its domestic military industry” (“Made in the U.S.A.: American Military Aid to Israel,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 38:3, Spring 2009). This mutually beneficial arrangement provides Israel with scores of millions of dollars to bolster their own military-industrial establishment while at the same time redirecting American tax dollars into the pockets of U.S. weapons manufacturers.
Through this reciprocal arrangement, the total amount of American money offered to Israel since 1962 has soared into the billions of dollars: “Expressed in 2009 dollars, official U.S. aid to Israel from 1949 to 2007 [rose to] more than double the generally cited amount of $101.2 billion. The true amount is over $206 billion.” (Richard Becker. Palestine, Israel, and the U.S. Empire. (San Francisco, CA: PSL Publications, 2009), 151). And unlike other recipients of Washington’s largesse, U.S. funding to Israel is guaranteed not to be appended with any conditions specifying terms of use, a fact that allows Israeli policymakers to ignore — without fear of any consequences — Washington’s calls for restraint or promises of peace.
These conditions render U.S. aid to Israel as unique within geopolitical relations. The utter lack of American oversight inherent within this most peculiar of international friendships gave rise to a now famous piece of off-handed analysis by one of the most hawkish Israeli generals of the 20th century, Moshe Dayan: “Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money and we take the arms; we decline the advice” (Walter Hixson, “Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2019).
This hands-off policy persists as status quo between Washington and Tel Aviv despite the 1997 passage of the Leahy Laws — congressional statutes specifying that recipients of U.S. military hardware can only use those weapons for defensive purposes and in accordance with fundamental human rights (https://findit.state.gov).
And yet, despite years of prolific documentation of Israeli human rights abuses of Palestinians — including, but not limited to, extrajudicial assassination, suspension of habeas corpus for Palestinian prisoners, the deliberate targeting of civilian populations, and the tacit encouragement of settler violence — no American official has ever mentioned the Leahy Laws in connection with U.S. aid to Israel. For all intents and purposes, then, there are simply no rules governing the continued provision of billions of American taxpayer dollars to Israel year after year.
Palestine’s America-Made Future
On October 7, 2023, a coalition of paramilitary units from the Gaza Strip infiltrated Israeli territory by air, land, and sea, reportedly killing more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers and citizens and capturing roughly 250 more. Tel Aviv’s military action in Gaza since this predictable response to Israeli occupation has been nothing short of genocidal, resulting in the deaths of more than 22,000 Palestinians, roughly 70% of them innocent men, women, and children. Yet still the vast majority of Congressional lawmakers remain in lockstep with Israel, an incurious and uncritical stance that is seen within the Beltway as necessary for maintaining political office in the United States in the 21st century.
This emphatic pro-Israel position persists, at least in part, because of the influence of aggressive pro-Israel lobby groups like the American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), a Washington-based committee with a staff of thousands and an annual budget of more than $80 million dollars. AIPAC boasts of being the country’s largest pro-Israel PAC while working exhaustively to direct money into the hands of federal and local political candidates based upon their uncritical embrace of Israel.
AIPAC’s mission, goals, and activities are neither clandestine nor are they illegal given that it works within American political finance rules to support targeted candidates. Moreover, AIPAC is but one of roughly two dozen pro-Israel PACs contributing millions to both mega-parties in the American political system in order to ensure a steady stream of Israel devotees at all levels of government.
The American-made bloodletting in Gaza has engendered a mass movement of civic organizations critical of the Israeli slaughter of innocents who are, as one, demanding an end to Washington’s unquestioned support of Israel. The decidedly tepid response to these demands emanating from the Biden White House threatens to topple Democratic control of government in November of 2024, ushering in another radical right presidency in the U.S. This outcome might be even more dangerous for Palestine. Either way, it remains clear that peace, justice, and self-determination for the Palestinian people will not be forthcoming from Washington regardless of which political party is in power.
Dr. Luke Peterson received his Ph.D. from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Cambridge – (King’s College). His new book, The U.S. Military in the Print News Media: Service and Sacrifice in Discourse is now available for preorder through Anthem Press and will be in stock with online booksellers in April, 2024.
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