Please refer to my previous posting (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20180403).(Lily)
Mosaic（https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/）
by Martin Kramer
April 2018
The May 1948 Vote that Made the State of Israel
I. November 1947–May 12, 1948
Tucked in a residential side street near the Habimah Theater in Tel Aviv is the Jewish National Fund House. Built in the late 1930s in the Bauhaus style, for the last 30 years the structure has served as an educational center and museum. It doesn’t appear in most guidebooks because it’s open only to groups. Most Israelis and tourists who want to learn about Israel’s beginnings never visit it, instead finding their way to a building, now known as Independence Hall, on Rothschild Boulevard. There, on May 14, 1948, the cameras would record Ben-Gurion’s solemn declaration of the state and the festive signing ceremony.
But before Israel could be proclaimed, it had to be born. That birth took place in the Jewish National Fund House. During the month prior to the state’s declaration, the building hosted the People’s Administration, the proto-cabinet, and the People’s Council, a kind of proto-parliament, both of them established by order of the Zionist Executive on April 12, 1948 in anticipation of the end of the mandate. It was exactly one month later, May 12, in a second-floor meeting room, that ten of the thirteen members of the People’s Administration met in a marathon session to decide upon a course of action.
Those around the table that day had witnessed too much Jewish history. They had seen the population of the yishuv grow tenfold in 30 years—but had also seen the Jewish people in Europe almost totally destroyed in fewer than five. And in the past year alone, history’s wheel had started to turn again. In February 1947, Britain announced that it would be leaving Palestine, and then handed over the question of the country’s future to the United Nations. In November, the UN General Assembly, by a two-thirds majority, passed the partition resolution.
Most of the yishuv rejoiced at November’s UN vote: since the time of Herzl, the creation of a Jewish state had been the dream and aim of political Zionism. Now it seemed within grasp. But Palestine’s Arabs, supported by Arabs elsewhere, rejected the resolution root and branch. From November onward, a civil war raged between Jews and Arabs even as the British prepared for their final departure, which they had set for the following May 15.
As the Jews began to gird themselves for a great battle, many in the international community grew alarmed at the intensified violence. Their alarm grew when Arab states announced that they would come to the aid of the Palestinian Arabs once the British left. A regional war now seemed likely, and no one could be certain how it might end. And so, by the spring of 1948, some of the governments that had supported partition began to backtrack.
By the spring of 1948, some governments that had supported the UN’s partition plan began to backtrack.
Of these, the most important was the United States. As early as November 1947, the CIA had estimated that even if the Jews might at first seem to be winning, eventually they would lose:
The Jewish forces will initially have the advantage. However, as the Arabs gradually coordinate their war effort, the Jews will be forced to withdraw from isolated positions, and having been drawn into a war of attrition, will gradually be defeated. Unless they are able to obtain significant outside aid in terms of manpower and matériel, the Jews will be able to hold out no longer than two years.
The fear was that, in this eventuality, the United States would come under political pressure to save the yishuv, an enterprise that according to the Pentagon would require at least 50,000 American troops. Would it not be better to forestall such an outcome by aborting the partition plan and putting the country under a “temporary” UN trusteeship, preceded by a UN-sponsored cease-fire? The mandate could thus be prolonged, and a Jewish state deferred. “With such a truce and such a trusteeship,” announced President Harry Truman in March, “a peaceful settlement is yet possible; without them, open warfare is just over the horizon”—and that warfare would “infect the entire Middle East.”
Right up to the eve of the British departure, therefore, the United States pressed the leaders of the yishuv, as well as its American Zionist supporters, to accept the trusteeship proposal, or at least the UN-sponsored truce. Most famously, on May 8, 1948, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, a skeptic on Jewish statehood, met in Washington with the shadow foreign minister of Israel, Moshe Shertok (later Sharett). Marshall began by acknowledging that the Jewish forces had won an initial string of victories—consolidating their hold on most of the territory allotted to the Jewish state and a few areas allotted to the Arab state as well—but dismissed this as but a “temporary success.” In the longer run, he warned Shertok, there was “no assurance” that fortune might not turn against the Jews.
“I told Mr. Shertok,” Marshall reported to President Truman,that they were taking a gamble. If the tide did turn adversely and they came running to us for help they should be placed clearly on notice now that there was no warrant to expect help from the United States, which had warned them of the grave risk which they were running.
Marshall’s message came through loud and clear: postpone your state, and accept a truce. (The Americans spoke of a three-month cease-fire.) If you roll the dice, and you lose, don’t expect salvation from us.
（To be continued.)
