Please refer to my previous postings (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20180403)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20180404). (Lily)
Mosaic（https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/）
by Martin Kramer
April 2018
The May 1948 Vote that Made the State of Israel
II. The Lore Surrounding 1948
According to the lore that would surround 1948, warnings like Marshall’s plunged some leaders of the yishuv into doubt. After all, until now the yishuv had faced only Palestinian Arab militias. If the Zionists declared a state, they would face invasion by Arab states like Egypt, Transjordan, and Iraq, fielding conventional military forces armed and trained by the British over many years. The prospect of such all-out war was frightening, and here the Americans were proposing a truce; would it perhaps be sensible to accept it?
The most prominent waverer, according to lore, was Shertok himself. Marshall had made him doubt the wisdom of declaring the state—so it was said—and he’d arrived back in Tel Aviv on May 11, straight from Washington, opposed to such a declaration. But (the story goes on) the resolute Ben-Gurion practically abducted him from the airport on arrival, got him behind a locked door, and made him promise to keep his opinion to himself lest his flagging infect others.
Did some yishuv leaders need to have their spines stiffened by a resolute Ben-Gurion? The story has an almost biblical ring to it.
The story has an almost biblical ring to it. Is it true? Supporting it is a supposed statement by Ben-Gurion many years after the fact. But the historical consensus today holds otherwise: the preponderance of evidence shows that Shertok’s resolve remained steady, and the story of his bending in the wind was exaggerated if not contrived by later opponents who sought to smear him as a man of little faith in his people. Indeed, on May 7, the day before their meeting, Shertok wrote to Marshall to clarify that “I see no prospect of an agreement which would preclude the setting up of a Provisional Government for the Jewish State.” In the next day’s meeting, without antagonizing Marshall by bluntly telling him “no,” he had been at pains to insist that there would be no retreat:
We stand on the threshold of fulfilling the hope of centuries, the culmination of an enterprise in which generations have sunk their efforts. This is within our grasp. For us to agree to any delay, without any certainty that this [state] would arise after the delay, would oblige us to stand in judgment before Jewish history, which we cannot do under any circumstances. . . . The process of territorial and functional taking-over was in full swing. Any leadership that tries to break this momentum would be swept from the stage.
Upon his return home, Shertok saw it as his duty to report Marshall’s warnings to Ben-Gurion and his colleagues, both in the Mapai party and in the People’s Administration. But he also made it plain that Marshall hadn’t banged his fist on the table. In Shertok’s telling, Marshall had flashed Israel not a red light but a yellow one, while other, friendlier figures in Washington were flashing green. The sum effect of his messaging was not to exacerbate any doubts that other yishuv leaders might have had but to ease them.
If this has been obscured in later years, it is because, as Ben-Gurion and Shertok grew apart, the story of the latter’s wavering, retailed by the former’s supporters, grew in the telling—causing Shertok no small amount of personal grief. “This lie,” he complained to his diary in 1957, “which resurfaces from time to time, pursues me all these years. What can I do? Deny again?”
But this pertains to the much later history of Israeli political rivalries. What is important is that on the morning of May 12, 1948, when the members of the People’s Administration took their seats around the table, Ben-Gurion and Shertok were broadly aligned.
(To be continued.)
