There have been many heroes who enabled the establishment and the success of the State of Israel. One person who does not receive enough credit for the integral role that he played in Israel’s establishment is Clark Clifford.
Who, you ask?
We will get back to Clark Clifford soon.
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While the United States has been Israel’s greatest international ally, this wasn’t a given in the spring of 1948. As the leaders of the future state of Israel were deliberating whether or not to declare a state as the British Mandate was coming to an end, the US State Department led by Secretary of State George Marshall, was doing everything in its power to stop Israel from declaring its independence.
Marshall was not the first secretary of state to be against the establishment of a Jewish state in the Holy Land. Robert Lansing, secretary of state for President Woodrow Wilson told the president that the United States cannot support “turning the Holy Land over to the absolute control of the race credited with the death of Christ.” The State Department even fought against a 1922 joint resolution in the US Congress expressing support for the “establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.” State Department officials even tried to torpedo the United Nations Partition Plan in 1947 and, once they realized it would pass, they tried to cut Israel’s territory in half by taking the Negev desert region out of the plan’s allotment for the Jewish state.
Related reading: Unspinning the UN Partition Plan That Created Israel
Even once the Partition Plan passed on November 29, 1947, State Department officials tried to replace it. Warren Austin, the United States representative to the UN, raised an idea on March 19, 1948 suggesting that the UN take a step back from partitioning Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state and instead place the Holy Land under the auspices of the United Nations “to maintain the peace and to afford the Jews and Arabs of Palestine, who must live together, further opportunity to reach an agreement regarding the future government of that country.” They did so despite the fact that the US Consulate in Jerusalem reported that in their opinion “both Arabs and Jews regard trusteeship scheme undesirable and most observers feel bloodshed will now increase tremendously.”
President Truman was incensed with this. He recorded the following words in his diary:
This morning I find that the State Dept. has reversed my Palestine policy. The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn’t that hell? I’m now in a position of a liar and a double-crosser. I never felt so in my life. There are people on the 3rd and 4th level of the State Dept. who have always wanted to cut my throat. They are succeeding in doing it.
But Truman also remained silent at this point. Secretary of State Marshall was a powerful force in Truman’s cabinet and Truman wrote that the trusteeship idea was just temporary to deal with the emergency created by the British leaving the region on May 15, 1948.
As Israel moved closer to announcing independence upon the British departure, the State Department took further steps to try to prevent it. Dean Rusk, Assistant Secretary of State, worked towards a proposal to give most of Palestine to the Arabs while in his words “leaving the Jews a coastal state running from Tel Aviv to Haifa” (a fraction of the area given to the Jewish state in the Partition Plan.) At the same time, UN representative Austin proposed a new UN resolution that would condemn Israel for declaring independence. Marshall went as far as telling Jewish leaders that not only would the United States not support a new independent Jewish state, but they would not provide any military support if that new state was in need of it in the face of Arab attacks.
On May 12, just three days before British forces and officials were to leave Palestine, Marshall held a fateful meeting with Truman. Marshall, who was America’s highest- ranking uniform officer during World War II was not the only one arguing against US recognition of the Jewish state. Defense Secretary James Vincent Forrestal and Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett joined the meeting and strongly urged the president not to recognize a new Jewish state if it were to be declared.
Lovett suggested that recognizing a Jewish state was nothing more than an attempt to win Jewish votes in the upcoming November 1948 presidential election. He also suggested that the new Jewish state would be filled with Jewish immigrants who were in fact communist agents working for the Soviet Union.
But there was one more person in that meeting – White House Counsel Clark Clifford, a close friend and adviser to the president. Clifford argued that a new state committed to democracy would do wonders for the chaotic Middle East. In Clifford’s memoirs he relates that Marshall was “red with suppressed anger as I set forth the case for the immediate recognition of the Israeli state.” Marshall told the president that if he followed Clifford’s advice, then “the great dignity of the office of president would be seriously diminished.” He went as far as saying that if the president supported the new Jewish state then in the November election, “I would vote against the President.”
Clifford further wrote that “When I finished, he (Marshall) exploded, ‘Mr. President, I thought this meeting was called to consider an important, complicated problem in foreign policy. I don’t even know why Clifford is here.’” According to Clifford, Truman replied, “Well, General, he’s here because I asked him to be.”
In the end, Truman recognized the newly declared Jewish state minutes after it was declared on May 15, 1948. It is clear that he did so based on his deep belief in the Bible which promises the Holy Land to the Jewish people. In fact he later said:
I had faith in Israel even before it was established, I knew it was based on the love of freedom, which has been the guiding star of the Jewish people since the days of Moses. I believe it has a glorious future before it, not just as a sovereign nation but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.
But, with his most important cabinet members being strongly against this recognition, Truman needed the voice of a trusted friend arguing that supporting a democratic Jewish state in the biblical and ancestral homeland of the Jewish people would create a beacon of light and stability in the Middle East, and that this was in America’s best interest.
And Clark Clifford was the right man in the right place to make that happen.
United States recognition of Israel was critical to its survival in the face of worldwide criticism and condemnation.
And that makes little-known Clark Clifford a hero of Israel.
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