During the 1940s, America’s Arab “allies” were angered by
what they viewed as President Franklin Roosevelt’s pro-Zionist policies. The
State Department held the naive belief that the king of Saudi Arabia and other
Arab leaders could be persuaded to either support America’s pro-Zionist
policies or at least minimize opposition to them.
In May 1943, Saudi King Ibn Saud first made his views clear on the subject after viewing with alarm the
Roosevelt administration’s drift toward support for the establishment of a
Jewish state. “Jews have no right to Palestine,” he wrote the president. “God
forbid . . . the Allies should, at the end of their struggle, crown their
victory by evicting the Arabs from their home.”[1]
A few weeks later he wrote another letter in which he
insisted that Palestine “has been an Arab country since the dawn of history and
. . . was never inhabited by Jews for more than a period of time, during which
their history in the land was full of murder and cruelty. . . . [There is]
religious hostility . . . between the Muslims and the Jews from the beginning
of Islam . . . which arose from the treacherous conduct of the Jews towards
Islam and the Muslims and their prophet.”[2]
The Saudis had not yet achieved the fabulous wealth they are
now known for; in fact, they constantly needed American cash, and their oil reserves were not yet viewed as vital to American security, but government
officials feared losing access to the oil fields and the prospect of another
government, notably the British, gaining influence in the kingdom. The State
Department subsequently backed the king’s warnings by suggesting that support
for the Zionists would undermine America’s economic, commercial, cultural and
philanthropic interests throughout the Arab world. This would become the mantra
of State Department Arabists, which persists to the present day.
Some diplomats held out hope that
Saud’s support for partition could be bought. In 1942, the British tried to
arrange a deal where they would make him the leader of the Arab world
(something the State Department would later try as well) if he would work out a
deal with Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, who would also arrange for Jewish
funds to help him pay off his debts, which at that time were primarily owed to
the British. Wallace Murray, an anti-Semite who headed the State Department
Near East Division, was convinced the only way Saud would accept such a deal
would be if a single binational state was created that would effectively deny
Jews the homeland promised by the Balfour Declaration, so he hoped to set up a
situation whereby the U.S. would get credit in the Arab world if Weizmann
compromised and basically sold out the Zionist program and could blame the
British if anything went wrong. Max Thornberg,
an oil company executive serving as a consultant to the State Department at the
time, favored the approach. He was convinced that ibn Saud was not really anti-Semitic, but was only saying what the British wanted
him to.[3] Undersecretary of state Sumner Welles also believed
the idea had a chance of success based on the precedent of meetings held
between Weizmann and the Arab leader Emir Faisal after World War I. Roosevelt
subsequently agreed to send Harold Hoskins as an emissary to ask Saud whether
he would be willing to meet with Weizmann or other representatives of the Jewish Agency to discuss a solution to the dispute.
The king’s reaction was hostile. He told Hoskins that he was
“prepared to talk to anyone, of any religion, except a Jew” and that he specifically
disliked Weizmann because Saud claimed the Zionist leader had tried to bribe
him. The State Department thought the entire exercise had been an embarrassing
waste of time whose failure was predictable.[4]
Roosevelt decided to meet with Saud and discuss the issues
face-to-face. Following his meeting with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta in
February 1945, Roosevelt traveled to the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal
and met Saud, who was making his first trip outside his kingdom, aboard the
U.S. cruiser Quincy. The translator
for Roosevelt was William Eddy, the U.S. minister in Jidda and one of the
pioneer Arabists in the State Department.
When the king arrived on the ship, he was offered the
commodore’s stateroom, but insisted on sleeping outside in a tent. His aides
also rolled out rugs so he would not have to step on the deck. The king believed
that good Muslims eat only freshly killed meat, so he brought a flock of sheep
that were kept in a corral at the stern. The king’s retinue would slaughter the
sheep and cook them on charcoal pots on deck. Saud would only eat or drink
after someone first tasted the food.
When the king met Roosevelt, the president was sitting in
his wheelchair. The king, who was elderly and walked with a cane, mentioned
that Roosevelt was lucky to have something to help him move around. Roosevelt
had an extra wheelchair and gave it the king. The American delegation also gave
him an airplane, but the king was especially fond of the wheelchair, which he
showed off to visitors as a symbol of his friendship with the president.[5] The Saudis handed out gifts to the crew, including cash, headdresses, leather
sandals, ivory-handled sabers and Swiss gold watches.[6]
The exchange of gifts and warm feelings between the two
leaders did not bridge the gulf between the two leaders regarding the Palestine
issue. Roosevelt made plain his support for the Jewish survivors of what was
not yet called the Holocaust. He also expressed his admiration for the Jews who
fought against the Nazis and who had developed Palestine, and asked the king to
support his idea of establishing in Palestine a free and democratic Jewish
commonwealth. Saud would have none of it, arguing deceitfully that it was the
Arabs and not the Jews who had fought against the Germans, and that it was the
British and not the Jews who made the deserts bloom. The king adamantly opposed
allowing Jews to go to Palestine or establish their own state and suggested
that they be given the homes of Germans instead. When Roosevelt said that three
million Jews had been slaughtered in Poland alone, Saud replied that there must
now be room there for three million more.[7]
Roosevelt was shocked by the vehemence of the king’s
reaction. He should not have been, given Saud’s
previous uncompromising statements, including his remark on the eve of the
Yalta Conference that Palestine would be drenched in blood, and that the United
States must choose between the Zionists and the Arabs.
Roosevelt argued that
Palestine
was such a small part of the Middle East that the Arabs would not be harmed by
the creation of a Jewish state, and he was prepared to guarantee that “the Jews
would not move into adjacent parts of the Near East from
Palestine.”[8] But he seemed to backtrack by the end of his meeting, promising the king that
the United States would not take any position on Palestine without first
consulting him and other Arab leaders, and would not do anything for the Jews
at their expense. This was the same promise he had made in May 1943: “No
decision altering the basic situation of Palestine should be reached without
full consultation with both Arabs and Jews.”
After returning home, Roosevelt sent another
letter to the king, in response to one he had received from Saud, in which the
president repeated the views he had expressed during their meeting and again
tried to reassure the king that the United States would take no measures that “might
prove hostile to the Arab people.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, who supported the Zionist cause, wrote to
her friend Joseph Lash that the president was frustrated that he did not
convince the king to change his uncompromising position on the Palestine issue.[9]
While historian Michael Oren has called the meeting notable
because “the leader of the world’s most powerful democratic nation had in fact
bowed to the dictates of an Arabian chieftain,” he added that Roosevelt saw it more
as a “source of exotic entertainment” than a diplomatic landmark.[10] Nevertheless, the meeting clearly had its effect. Roosevelt told a joint
session of Congress on March 1, 1945, “I learned more about the whole problem,
the Moslem problem, the Jewish problem, by talking with ibn Saud for five minutes than I could have learned in an exchange of two or three
dozen letters.” The Zionists were horrified, and feared he had reneged on his
pledge of support for a Jewish state.
Privately, Roosevelt expressed conflicting opinions. He had
told Harold Hoskins, who had been Roosevelt’s emissary to the Middle East,
that, given the size of the Arab population, a Jewish state “could be installed and maintained only by force.” Before his meeting with
Saud, however, he told undersecretary of state Edward Stettinius, “Palestine
should be for the Jews and no Arabs should be in it.”
After his speech to Congress, Roosevelt wrote to reassure
the American Jewish leader Stephen Wise that he supported unrestricted
immigration to Palestine and a future Jewish state. Roosevelt told Wise he had
arranged the meeting with Saud to make the Zionist case, but admitted, “I have
never so completely failed to make an impact upon a man’s mind as in his case.”
The Arabists, meanwhile, continued to reassure their friends
in the Middle East that the United States would not act without consulting
them, as Roosevelt had promised Saud. When the Arabs tried to suggest they had
received a different commitment from Roosevelt, Wise released the letter from
the president.[11]
Roosevelt was the consummate politician, telling partisans
on both sides what they wanted to hear either directly or through his minions.
As Jews would do after the war, Wise defended Roosevelt and excused his
indiscretions as the result of being misled by “some supersubtle counselors in the State Department.”[12]
The president died before any decisions had to be made on
the future of Palestine. Still, it is one of the great ironies of history that
American Jews would revere him and developed a strong attachment to the
Democratic Party as a result, despite the fact that Roosevelt failed to take
steps before and during the war that could have saved thousands of European
Jews, and that most of his actions with respect to the Zionist program were
unhelpful.