Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East by Irene L. Gendzier (review)

Irene L. Gendzier offers a detailed analysis of the Truman administration’s policy decisions with regard to the ethnic partition of the Palestinian mandate after WWII and dismantles the notion that Truman’s support for Israel threatened US interests in oil-producing Arab states. She demonstrates that the threat of an oil supply cutoff was a myth, and one to which Truman and his leading advisers did not subscribe (xx). To be sure, in the period leading up to the Israeli declaration of independence, the State Department, Joint Chiefs of Staff (jsc), and National Security Council (nsc) warned that the ethnic partition of Palestine could lead Arab oil-producing states to take retaliatory action against US interests. The biggest concern was that Saudi Arabia might cancel the aramco concession and endanger US access to Middle Eastern oil supplies.

However, as Gendzier shows, there was no rational basis for such a fear, and lobbyists working on behalf of the Jewish Agency (a precursor to the government of Israel) made this abundantly clear to the Truman administration. The key figure in this lobbying effort was Eliahu Epstein. In early 1948, he began circulating the contents of a Zionist policy paper that argued: “it is a patent fact that the Arab states have greater interest in yielding their oil to the United States than the United States has in exploiting it. The cow is more anxious to be milked than anybody is to milk it” (104). In meetings with Clark Clifford, Max Ball, and other key advisers to Truman, Epstein emphasized the security of US access to Saudi oil given Riyadh’s political weakness and economic vulnerability.

It is worth noting that US access to Middle East oil was never really at issue. The concessionary rights to Saudi oil supplies were held by a consortium of privately owned multinational corporations (aramco), and the principle markets for Saudi oil were in Europe and Asia. But Epstein’s larger point about Saudi leaders’ interest in yielding access to Saudi oil resources to global markets is valid. Saudi Arabia was entirely dependent on aramco for state revenue, and it would have been “suicidal” to cancel the concession that sustained the kingdom’s finances (100). As Epstein and others made clear, Saudi Arabia had very little leverage over US policy. The Truman administration could and did support Zionist aims in Palestine without endangering US capital investments in any way. On the contrary, Gendzier shows that US corporations were able to dramatically expand their concessionary rights during the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli War.

This basic fact raises a number of interesting questions that Gendzier’s book helps to answer. The first is that if there was no oil weapon, then why did so many in the State Department, nsc, and jcs believe there was? On this question, Gendzier offers only partial answers. She shows that many top-level policymakers, such as the jcs and Secretary of State George Marshall, were convinced by the demonstration effect of Zionist militias’ territorial conquests during the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli War. The jcs was particularly impressed by Zionist organizational capacity and military resources and saw the emergent Israeli state as a valuable military ally in the event of a regional war. This was especially the case after Zionist militias were able to expand Israel’s borders beyond those outlined by the UN’s 1947 partition plan without any retaliation from Saudi Arabia or other Arab states. From the jcs’s perspective it was abundantly clear that there was no Arab oil weapon with which the US had to be concerned.

Questions linger with regard to lower-level figures within the State Department. Gendzier shows that even after the president chose to recognize Israel and after the jcs became convinced of Israel’s power to do as it willed...