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4 The Recognition of Israel Clifford’s memoirs begin with his May 1948 showdown with George Marshall over the question of whether Truman should grant recognition to the soon-to-be-declared State of Israel. Clifford tells the story with a dramatic flair, almost in David and Goliath terms, pointing out that Truman regarded Marshall as “the greatest living American.” The implication is that Clifford’s stature paled in comparison to Marshall’s. While it is true that Marshall was a war hero revered by Truman, and indeed the nation, Clifford’s influence with Truman was at least equal to, if not greater than, Marshall’s. According to Clifford’s account, Truman and Marshall were on a “collision course over Mideast policy,” which threatened the viability of the administration, not to mention Truman’s reelection bid. Clifford represented the president’s position in favor of recognition, while Marshall represented the consensus of the senior people in the foreign policy bureaucracy, including Robert Lovett, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan, and James Forrestal. Their position sprang from pure geopolitical realism: 30 million Arabs on one side and 600,000 Jews on the other. Furthermore, the consensus was that it would be the height of folly to antagonize the Arabs, who were sitting on the largest petroleum reserves in the world. Clifford, however, had been asked by the president to argue the case for recognition. Truman favored recognition, Clifford argued, out of moral and humanitarian concerns. Only three years had passed since Allied troops liberated the survivors from Nazi concentration camps, and Truman was sympathetic to the Zionist cause of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.1 Although Clifford makes the case that Truman granted recognition for humanitarian and moral reasons, some historians have accused Truman of granting recognition to Israel in a blatant pander to Jewish votes in a presidential election year. Truman’s chances in 1948 were 90 CLARK CLIFFORD considered bleak at best, and the Jewish bloc, if energized, had the potential to be a crucial swing vote in some key states. Recognition of Israel could help to cement an important segment of the Democratic base and improve Truman’s chances that fall. Clifford’s playing a major role in the policy debate over recognition signaled to Marshall that domestic politics was the primary factor in the administration’s support of Israel. As the president’s key political advisor Clifford’s motives in this debate deserve close scrutiny, but to Marshall it was an open and shut case—Clifford was demeaning the presidency and threatening U.S. national security in a naked attempt to win votes. The Jewish vote was not numerically significant—Jews made up only 4 percent of the electorate—but it was concentrated in a few key states, particularly New York. Also contributing to the amount of influence the Jewish vote wielded within the Democratic Party, disproportionate to its numerical significance, was the fact that there were many affluent Jewish voters whom the Democrats counted upon as significant financial contributors.2 Furthermore, the Jewish vote could not be taken for granted in 1948. The Republican nominee for president , Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, was expected to target the Jewish voter with a strong endorsement of the Zionist cause. With the largest concentration of Jewish voters in New York, then the biggest electoral prize, and Dewey running as the home-state favorite, the Jewish voter was a particularly important constituency if Truman hoped to be elected in 1948. Complicating the matter was that Truman expected a third-party challenge from the left from Henry Wallace , who also planned an appeal to the Jewish voter on the basis of the Palestine issue. The concept of a Jewish state in Palestine had first been proposed by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour in 1917. The League of Nations had granted the British a mandate to rule Palestine following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. During the twenty years that separated the two world wars the British allowed Jewish immigration into Palestine, and the pace quickened with the onset of World War II. The Arab population did not welcome its new neighbors, and they were successful in pressuring the British to clamp down on Jewish immigration. Those who had already immigrated to Palestine were passionate in defense of their Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland, and they took up arms against both the British and the Arabs. Jews in the United States, to a large extent, supported the Zionist...

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