But Americans on the ground in Moscow and at the White House could not believe that a weak China, however great her potential as an international power, would generate much pressure on Stalin to compete with a Chinese Communist government for U.S. favor. And the wider public in the United States was so intent on ideal arrangements abroad promising long-term universal peace, and so convinced that Communist ideology trumped national differences, that it rigidly opposed a Chinese Communist regime seen as wedded to Moscow. Few envisioned a Sino-American alliance that might, by contrast, be a counterbalance to Soviet power.
Although neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had a direct hand in the postwar fate of British-controlled South Asia, both watched developments there with concern for how India’s certain independence would affect their interests.
As World War II ended, it was clear to all but diehard imperialists that British rule in India was on its last legs. For some, like Churchill, who hoped that victory in the war might extend Britain’s hold on its empire, this was difficult to accept: after Lord Mountbatten, Britain’s last viceroy of India, put the finishing touches on independence in 1947, Churchill refused to speak to him for six years, telling him at a public reception, “What you did in India was like running your riding crop across my face.”
In the 1920s and ‘30s, as prospects for independence grew, India’s Hindus and Muslims entered into open warfare over rights and power in a free country. Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the independence movement and an advocate of passive resistance, warned that Hindu-Muslim divisions would tear the country apart and weaken its ability to achieve self-governance. A devoted advocate of nonviolence as the surest, most humane path to independence, Gandhi endeared himself to the Indian masses with his ascetic lifestyle, becoming a familiar world figure who commanded an army of followers eager to sacrifice themselves to a cause larger than any individual’s.
After a short time out of politics in the 1920s in protest against ongoing violence between India’s Hindus and Muslims, Gandhi returned in 1930 to insist on an end to British rule, temporarily unifying India’s factions against oppressive British economic policies that Indians believed sacrificed their needs to British interests. Although British leaders tried to find a means of uniting the country under a constitution promising shared power and fair treatment for both religions, the divisions were too great to overcome.
Churchill’s refusal to “quit India,” as Gandhi demanded during World War II, made the country’s Hindus a nominal ally of the Japanese during the Pacific conflict. Attlee’s assumption of the premiership in August 1945 opened the final phase of British rule in India. A British plan for preserving India as a unified but federated state with Hindus and Muslims enjoying considerable autonomy had acknowledged limitations, but the alternative was “violence, chaos, and even civil war,” which would be “a terrible disaster for many millions of men, women and children…. We appeal to all who have the future good of India at heart to extend their vision beyond their own community or interest to the interests of the whole four hundred millions of the Indian people,” the British proposal declared.
Gandhi embraced the plan as an excellent solution to India’s sectarianism and “a discharge of an obligation … the British owed to India, namely, to get off India’s back.” He described the proposed federation as containing “the seeds to convert this land of sorrow into one without sorrow and suffering.”
In July 1946 Jawaharlal Nehru, the head of the Hindus’ Congress Party, rejected the British plan. A Gandhi protégé and brilliant charismatic leader from a wealthy family that gave him the connections and talent to become India’s first prime minister, Nehru stubbornly refused to compromise with Muslim demands for equal representation and power in the emerging nation. The unbridgeable HinduMuslim divide touched off a year of civil war that took thousands of lives and ended in August 1947 with the division of the subcontinent into separate Indian Hindu and Pakistani Muslim nations.
Gandhi, however, refused to accept “the ‘vivisection’ of his ‘sacred Mother.’” Gandhi declared himself anguished at living in an India submerged in violence, but he could not prevent the brutality that consumed India as it split into two nations; nor could he anticipate the irony of his own assassination in January 1948 at the hands of a fanatical Hindu furious at a Gandhi campaign in support of reconciliation with Muslims.
Although Nehru would later regret his rejection of the compromise solution of a federated India that shared power between Hindus and Muslims, calling it one of the worst mistakes of his public life, he never explained why he had dismissed the proposed settlement. Was it a hatred of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, India’s Muslim leader and founder of Pakistan, that animated Nehru, as well as the irreducible intolerance of Hindus and Muslims for each other? As prime minister of an independent India, Nehru shaped a democratic state that worked toward expanding the nation’s economy to raise living standards for its millions of impoverished citizens, while promoting anticolonialism and peaceful solutions to international crises. Nevertheless, his role in splitting India left a legacy of hatred and bloodshed that haunts South Asia and the world to this day.
Nehru’s misstep was another instance of misguided leadership in a time of possibility. As with other leaders, governments, and populations in Europe and Asia, policy choices and popular passions in India fostered tensions and violence that would plague South Asia for decades to come. Even the desire to avoid bloodshed, misery, and the investment of resources in weapons of destruction was insufficient to calm religious or ethnic fervor and encourage compromises that might have changed the lives of millions of people.
In most instances, a larger, seemingly more powerful group—whether the Russians against the smaller countries of Eastern Europe, the Chinese Nationalists versus the opposition Communists, or the Hindus pitted against India’s Muslims—believed it could overwhelm or control the minority. Ideological illusions also drove less populous nations to assume that their superior technology or culture could allow them to best more populous foes—as witnessed in Hitler’s Germany defying Britain and France and then Britain, Russia, and the United States, or in Japan’s attacks on China and the United States. In 1945, the Soviet conviction that Russia’s revolutionary zeal in support of a superior system of social and political organization would enable it eventually to defeat the more militarily powerful and prosperous West joined with the conviction that the Americans and their allies were so intent on destroying communism that it had no choice but to opt for confrontation over compromise.
“The greatest menace to our civilization today,” the British historian Herbert Butterfield wrote in 1953, “is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness—each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked—each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.”
As the saying goes, pride often precedes the fall. But minorities spurred by national identity or convictions of cultural superiority have sometimes outlasted more powerful foes. The countries of Eastern Europe, overcoming more than four decades of Soviet domination, have been one example. Germany and Japan, for all their military dominance and belief in superior racial and governmental systems, were exceptions: their thorough defeat in the war convinced them that their enemies in fact had not only superior power but wiser economic, political, and social systems, which they felt compelled to embrace.
After World War II, the Middle East became another arena for tensions and conflict between majorities and minorities and the clash of civilizations—Jews and Arabs versus Britain, and Jews versus Arabs.
Tensions in the region between competing nationalities, religions, sects, and tribes were long-standing and fierce. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I had drawn Britain into the vacuum, where its control of Palestine was confirmed by a League of Nations mandate in 1922. That London had enlisted international Jewish support for its war effort with the Balfour Declaration in
November 1917, which promised a homeland in Palestine, incensed the Arabs, who having finally obtained freedom from Turkish rule now feared that they would face loss of territory and control over their fate at the hands of a European Jewish population. The result was a series of violent clashes between Arabs and Jews in the 1920s that produced British restrictions on Jewish migration to Palestine.
The Nazi persecution of Germany’s Jews in the 1930s gave growing appeal to a Zionist movement for a Jewish sanctuary in Palestine, the ancestral homeland of the Jewish tribes that had been dispersed throughout the Middle East, Europe, and America. At a world Zionist convocation in 1903, a majority of the delegates rejected a British offer for a homeland in Uganda in East Africa, voting instead for a return to Palestine.
The leader of modern Zionism was the Russian-born Chaim Weizmann. Trained as a chemist in Germany and Switzerland in the 1890s, Weizmann migrated to Britain, where he became a professor at Manchester University and won notoriety as the inventor of a synthetic acetone that aided the British war effort. His standing as one of the most respected and influential Jews in Britain allowed him to help shape Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour’s Declaration on Palestine. In early discussions on the declaration, when Balfour suggested an alternative homeland for world Jewry, Weizmann asked, “Would you give up London to live in Saskatchewan?” Failing to see the comparison, Balfour replied that the British had always lived in London. “Yes,” Weizmann said, “and we lived in Jerusalem when London was still a marsh.”
Nazi persecution spurred increased migration to Palestine in the 1930s, which resulted in renewed outbreaks of violent opposition from Arabs threatened with displacement. The Holocaust, which left a million displaced European Jews in 1945, created moral and practical demands on London to open Palestine to expanded Jewish migration and to honor Balfour’s Declaration by partitioning the country into Arab and Jewish states.
The inevitable violence spurred by increased Jewish migration to Palestine arguably should have raised questions about an alternate haven for displaced Jews. It was understandable that Zionists early in the century rejected a suggestion of Uganda as the future homeland. Jews had no connection to East Africa that might have made the territory an appealing homeland, even after the experience of the 1920s and ‘30s suggested that it might be a safer refuge than Palestine.
Surprisingly, no one seemed to think of annexing a part of Germany comparable in size to the small area of Palestine to make up the new state of Israel. It would certainly have been as compatible for the tens of thousands of displaced European Jews, who eventually made their way to Palestine. True, a refuge in Germany would not have had the same appeal as a return to sacred ground in the Holy Land, to which Jews traced their roots. But a Jewish state in Europe, where most of the settlers in the new homeland had been born, could have avoided the bloodshed that followed the displacement in the Middle East of Arabs who saw their claims on Palestine as at least equal to those of Europe’s persecuted Jews. Whatever resentment a Jewish settlement on German territory would have generated among Germans, they were in no position to resist, as demonstrated in their loss of East German territory to the new Poland.
In the end, the movement of Europe’s homeless Jews to Palestine became the prelude to an expanded series of clashes. For both older Jewish residents and newer migrants, the Holocaust hung over their every action; no one could escape the fear of a new catastrophe in another setting, dealt by another more populous race of anti-Semites. For the Arabs, who felt persecuted by outsiders eager to control their oil resources and deprive them of self-determination, the Jewish resolve to populate and annex all or even part of Palestine represented another chapter in the history of Ottoman and now Western domination. The expanding Jewish presence in Palestine was a call to Arab resistance that matched the Jewish conviction that only a militant response to Arab hostility would save them from another disaster.
In January 1919 Weizmann and the future King Faisal I of Iraq had signed an agreement committing them to peaceful shared development of Palestine. But the distrust between two persecuted peoples was too great to bridge. It is difficult to imagine that even the most skillful expert in conflict resolution could have overcome the tensions between Arabs and Jews in Palestine in 1945.
The United States, which had never played more than a peripheral part in the Middle East, now became a principal power broker in the region. It was an unwelcome but unavoidable burden. In the year and a half after he became president, Truman complained that “the Jewish and Arab situation in the Near East … has caused us more difficulty than any other problem in the European Theater.” Although he was openly sympathetic to the migration of 100,000 displaced Jews to Palestine, he resented the constant pressure from Jewish Americans to make it happen. “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was here on earth,” he rhetorically said at a cabinet meeting, “so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck?” Arab intransigence against what Truman saw as a historically justified and now moral claim on a homeland left him frustrated. He doubted that there was a solution to this conflict of wills, but he intended to seek one nevertheless.
Successive administrations over the next six and a half decades had much the same experience: though partial solutions, like President Jimmy Carter’s Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978, have bolstered hopes of arranging a broader settlement in the region, Arab-Israeli differences have repeatedly frustrated all comprehensive peace proposals.
Domestic political considerations partly shaped Truman’s support for Jewish aspirations in Palestine. The absence of a significant Arab population in the United States and the presence of an influential Jewish American community, especially in New York, was vital. Although a strong element in Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, New York’s Jewish voters had no such clear-cut loyalty to Harry Truman and could be alienated by White House foot-dragging on a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The president and his principal political advisers saw delay as potentially disastrous for him and his party in the 1946 congressional and 1948 presidential elections.
Several considerations, however, discouraged aggressive support for Jewish settlement and statehood in a predominantly Arab territory. An America favoring Jewish ambitions risked angering the Arabs, who could retaliate by withholding oil supplies and cozying up to Soviet Russia. But Truman took some reassurance from the understanding that Arab oil producers and their Western customers had shared economic interests: the Arabs needed the European and American markets, and the Europeans and Americans relied on Arab energy supplies to fuel their economies. The White House also assumed that agreements with atheist Communists would have little appeal to Muslim societies.
Nevertheless, if the United States pressed the case for opening Palestine to Europe’s Jews and Arab violence ensued, it would put pressure on the White House to send peacekeeping forces to inhibit the fighting. Truman, however, made clear that he had no intention of sending troops into so potentially volatile and possibly unmanageable a conflict. He rationalized the announcement by saying it would be the business of the new United Nations and the international community to assume management of the problem. Indeed, wasn’t this just what the UN had been created to do?
For some in the United States, like Ohio Republican senator Robert Taft, a potential rival for the White House in 1948, Middle East difficulties were a reason for America to return to prewar isolationism. He and others warned that involvement in this conflict and European and Asian tensions in general would drag America into endless international struggles that would become a standing drain on limited national resources.
Truman and a majority of Americans, however, believed that the United States, with its unprecedented power and influence, joined to an effective United Nations, was the world’s best hope for long-term peace. Moreover, Pearl Harbor had convinced most Americans that air force, with the capacity to strike anywhere, had deprived the United States of the earlier safety that geography had given it.
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Reflecting majority sentiment, Truman did not believe it possible for the United States to shun responsibility for involvement in overseas problems, including the Middle East, where most Americans favored a Palestinian homeland for Hitler’s Jewish victims. Besides, as Truman said later, the Middle East was “one part of the world that has always interested me…. The whole history of that area of the world is just about the most complicated and most interesting of any area anywhere, and I have always made a very careful study of it,” including the fact that “there has always been trouble there.” Unlike “a violently opposition Congress whose committees with few exceptions are living in 1890” and, Truman feared, could allow the world to fall into another war, he intended to do his “job,” which “must be done—win, lose or draw,” including keeping the Middle East from provoking a wider conflict. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1946, he declared, “I have about come to the conclusion that there is no solution, but we will keep trying.”
Sadly, he was all too right. In the fall of 1946, against State Department advice that continuing openly to support Jewish aspirations for a homeland would undermine U.S. national interests in the Middle East, the president endorsed a plan to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. He refused to be swayed by the risk of a threat to oil supplies from doing what he said was “right.”
But the moral argument hid his conviction that no aspirant for the White House in 1948, which he already was, could afford to lose New York’s electoral votes. Moreover, his likely opponent would be Tom Dewey, the state’s governor, and a Dewey presidency would produce U.S. backing for partition and make his opposition irrelevant. Since he believed he would lose the White House if he opposed partition and that a new administration would not only use his opposition against him in a campaign but also would support partition beginning in 1949, he saw both moral and political reasons to act as he did. A UN resolution in November 1947 supporting partition, and a British announcement that they would leave Palestine after it occurred in May 1948, left responsibility for keeping the peace to the UN.