Genesis

It’s a central thesis of John B. Judis’s new Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict that there was a moment when the Arab-Israeli conflict could have been averted, but, under pressure from the Zionist lobby, the great powers, especially the US under Truman, failed to avert it. 

Judis writes, “if any agreement were possible, it would have had to be imposed by outside powers, and then enforced by them until the Jews and Arabs agreed to abide by it.” And, “The underlying problem remains the same: whether an American president and the American people can forthrightly address the conflict of Jew and Arab in the Middle East, or whether they must bow to the demands of a powerful pro-Israel lobby.” 

To make his case, Judis examines the development of the pro-Zionist lobby in the US, focusing on Louis Brandeis among others. As explained by NYTBR reviewer Joseph Dorman, Judis’s argument is that “Zionism became, for Brandeis, the perfect embodiment of his liberal ideals. Yet, in Judis’s eyes, Brandeis and those who came after him betrayed those ideals as they became advocates for a Jewish state. The same men who championed civil rights at home, he argues, were blinded by Zionism to the rights of Palestinian Arabs.”

Dorman acknowledges that Judis has a point, but thinks the charge “unfair” since it assumes possibilities that were never viable: “an American solution to the Palestine question was never realistic.” Judis’s “ideal seems to be the Anglo-American Morrison-Grady plan, which called for a federated Palestine with autonomous Jewish and Arab provinces, under continuing British oversight. The Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion accepted a version of the idea, though reluctantly, and the Arabs rejected it outright, as they rejected all attempts to divide the country. Truman, at the time, believed it could work, but it’s hard to see how, even with a long-term commitment of Western, most likely American, troops.” Besides, we now know how Western peacekeeping efforts work. They don’t.

In the end he thinks the that conflict was virtually inevitable, and that Judis is wrong to “assume a peaceful solution might have been found without the Zionist lobby’s influence overstates the case.”