James Forrestal, Harry Truman, and Israel

Alison Weir, the former journalist who heads up an organization aptly named, If Americans Knew, chose an equally appropriate title for her very popular 2014 book,  Against Our Better Judgment, The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.   The fact of the matter is that the better judgment of the United States was, unlike today, well represented by its foreign policy leadership in 1948 when Palestine was most inequitably divided into Jewish and Arab parts by the United Nations, and the Zionist leaders of the Jewish part announced the creation of the brand-new state of Israel.  President Harry Truman made his decision endorsing the partition over the solid advice he received by the experts in his own administration.  The following quote from the introduction to our book about the first secretary of defense, The Assassination of James Forrestal, sums up the situation:

The largest source of disquiet for Forrestal in his new position…was the controversy over Palestine.  Great Britain had been in control of the territory, formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, under a mandate of the League of Nations, established in 1923.  By 1947, Zionist terrorism against the British authorities caused them finally to throw up their hands and to dump the matter into the hands of the United Nations.

Forrestal, with his responsibility for supplying our armed forces during World War II, was keenly aware of the nation’s growing dependence on oil from the Middle East, and that Zionist aspirations were putting the nation on a collision course with the nations that supplied the oil.  He feared, furthermore, that the relatively tiny nation of Israel, which the Zionists intended to create, could not be sustained without the assistance of U.S. military force, endangering our access to oil and pushing the Muslim countries in the region into the lap of our primary geopolitical adversary, the Soviet Union.

Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the former Army general who had been Chief of Staff throughout World War II, shared Forrestal’s view as did most of the foreign policy establishment within the government.  Forrestal, however, was blunter and more outspoken on the question, and with his private-sector background, was more easily painted as simply a tool of the big oil companies who were worried about the threat to their profits.

Over Forrestal’s objections, the Truman government not only supported the United Nations vote on November 29, 1947, to partition Palestine but actively worked to pressure enough countries into supporting the measure for it to succeed.  Britain announced that its Mandate would terminate on May 15, 1948.  The Zionists proclaimed the creation of the new state of Israel in the part of Palestine that the UN had allotted to the Jews, and the United States immediately granted it recognition as a state.

In the meantime, Forrestal saw his treatment by the American media take a complete turn.  From being one of the heroes in the victory over the Axis Powers, he was turned into a money-grubbing villain.  The two leading voices in his vilification were the left-leaning “muckraker,” Drew Pearson, and the putative conservative, but FDR-admiring, primarily gossip columnist, Jewish arch-Zionist, Walter Winchell.  Their objective seemed to go beyond getting him out of the government.  Rather, it seemed that their purpose was to destroy his reputation for all time. (pp. xxx-xxxi)

Richard H. Curtiss, writing on May 16, 1991, for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs fleshes out the story of the decision-making process.  Here is a salient quote:

Most people who knew the Middle East at first hand opposed the partition plan, adopted by the United Nations on November 29, 1947. Patently unfair, it awarded 56 percent of Palestine to its 650,000 Jewish inhabitants, and 44 percent to its 1,300,000 Muslim and Christian Arab inhabitants.

Partition was adopted only after ruthless arm-twisting by the US government and by 26 pro-Zionist U.S. senators who, in telegrams to a number of UN member states, warned that U.S. goodwill in rebuilding their World War II-devastated economies might depend on a favorable vote for partition.

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Marshall and a majority of diplomats at the UN saw a direct UN trusteeship, succeeding the British mandate, as the only solution to halt the bloodshed. Otherwise, they knew, neighboring Arab states would send military units across the border into Palestine the day the British withdrew, in an attempt to reoccupy the Arab towns and villages seized by Jewish forces. The State Department urged Truman not to grant diplomatic recognition to the Jewish state when the British withdrew, but instead to side with rapidly growing sentiment in the United Nations in favor of trusteeship. Truman wavered and, for a time, both sides in a bitter battle for the president’s ear thought they had his support.

Forty-four years after these events, [Clark] Clifford, Truman’s principal domestic advisor, has produced his memoir. Written in two parts with Richard Holbrooke, the first part of the memoir was published in the March 25, 1991, New Yorker. It covers events from 1944, when Clifford, a 37-year-old lawyer and newly commissioned lieutenant, junior grade, in the naval reserve from St. Louis, MO, Truman’s hometown [sic], took up duties in the White House, through the decision to recognize Israel on May 14, 1948.

Astonishingly, it confirms the key role of Clifford, Truman’s inexperienced domestic political adviser, in overriding the wishes of General of the Armies George C. Marshall, the World War II chief of staff.

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Other implications of the story are still pertinent. Had General Marshall resigned the moment he realized President Truman was bent on his unwise course of recognition, the subsequent tragedies might have been averted. Too often leaders like General Marshall, who could have resigned without personal sacrifice, acquiesce in small evils in order to remain in office to fight larger ones. The small evils, however, become the larger problems that overwhelm their successors.

The US is once again the world’s only superpower, just as it was in 1947 and 1948 when it had the world’s only atomic weapons. Now, as then, it cannot afford to base foreign policy decisions on domestic political considerations without reaping a bitter future harvest.

One might think that the foregoing account of what took place with the approval process is somewhat biased on the side of the Arabs, but here we see it reinforced by the Jewish Mosaic magazine in an article entitled “How Harry Truman Crossed His Own State Department to Recognize Israel in 1948.”

The encounter turned out to be exceptionally nasty. Treated by Clifford to an impassioned plea for prompt U.S. recognition of the Jewish state upon termination of the British mandate, [Under Secretary of State Robert A.] Lovett launched a frontal, no-holds barred assault that decried any such proposed move as a transparent political ploy designed to procure Jewish votes in the looming November presidential elections. More substantively, he argued that recognizing a Jewish state prematurely would not only be injurious to the UN but would also be “buying a pig in a poke.” “How [do] we know what kind of Jewish state would be set up?” he asked, producing a pile of intelligence reports alleging that many Jewish immigrants to Palestine were in fact Communist agents working for the Soviet Union.

Marshall then took over from his deputy. “The counsel offered by Mr. Clifford was based on domestic considerations,” the department’s transcript of the meeting would record him as saying, “while the problem which confronted us was international.” If Truman were to follow Clifford’s advice, “the great dignity of the office of president would be seriously diminished”—with the consequence, warned the enraged Marshall, playing the ultimate card, that “if in the [November] elections I were to vote, I would vote against the President.”

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And thus when, at 6:11 p.m., White House spokesman Charlie Ross announced the president’s de-facto recognition of the state of Israel, the U.S. delegation to the UN was dumbfounded. “When I use the word pandemonium, I think I am not exaggerating,” [Assistant Secretary of State for U.N. Affairs Dean] Rusk would recall:

“I was later told that one of our U.S. mission staff men literally sat on the lap of the Cuban delegate to keep him from going to the podium to withdraw Cuba from the United Nations. In any event, about 6:15 I got a call from Secretary Marshall who said, ‘Rusk, get up to New York and prevent the U.S. delegation from resigning en masse.’ Whether it was necessary or not, I scurried to New York and found that tempers had cooled sufficiently so that my mission was unnecessary.”

As for Lovett, persuaded as ever that Truman and Clifford were motivated by crass electoral considerations (read: Jewish votes), he would sum up the episode in these cutting and embittered words:  “My protests against the precipitate action and warnings as to consequences with the Arab world appear to have been outweighed by considerations unknown to me, but I can only conclude that the president’s political advisers, having failed last Wednesday [May 12] to make the president a father of the new state, have determined at least to make him the midwife.”

As we can see, the U.S. State Department then was a very different place from that in which the Victoria Nulands and Stuart Seldowitzes play prominent roles.

For a bird’s-eye view of the give and take between the politically pressured Truman White House and his top foreign policy people, we return to The Assassination of James Forrestal.  This is from pp. 40-41, with a Wikipedia link to Robert Lovett added:

Robert Lovett is long dead, but fortunately he gave an interview to Alfred Goldberg and Harry B. Yoshpe of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Oral History Project on May 13, 1974 (Lovett was Secretary of Defense under Truman from September 1951 to the end of Truman’s term in January of 1953.).  We quote the relevant portions:

GOLDBERG: Another issue from this same period was raised with us by a number of people. It falls right into your State Department period. That was the Palestine problem. The Defense Department had very strong views on this, and the State Department did also.

LOVETT: I was the agent in State who had to take the rap in this thing and do most of the ground work so I’ve a lively recollection. Pick some particular question –

GOLDBERG; I really wanted to ask how State looked at the National Security aspects of the issue at that time. I know how the Defense Department was looking at it, and I’ve seen a lot of the State documents for the period, too, but we’re interested in hearing about it from your level and General Marshall’s.

LOVETT: Well, you remember the American position set forth by Senator Austin at the United Nations meeting. It was, in effect, that this small country of a million and one half people, surrounded by 40 million Arabs, was non-viable unless it could be assured of an umbrella of some sort. It was on that basis that the theory of the trusteeship was developed which would give them an independent country, but place them in the hands of a group of trustees until such time as they either matured into a viable nation or until some method of living could be worked out with the Arabs.

We were ultimately defeated on that. I say we, this country’s point of view did not prevail, and it didn’t prevail because it was fought vigorously by the Israelis. Now the atmosphere was embittered, and that was the thing which caused most of the attacks on Forrestal. In my view, it was one of the principal causes for his mental condition. The constant unrelenting attacks on Forrestal. I was less visible as a government official. They were bad enough, God knows, on me. I received telephone calls at 11 o’clock at night, with threats: “we’ll get you, you so and so.” And I got telegrams from every conceivable agency—Haganah, Hadassah, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver—everybody pressuring me to do this, that, and the other thing. Give these people independence. You give them independence and they get overrun—what do you do then? So it was a sense of conscience in this country, being willing to help them and not leading them down the garden path to utter destruction. It was a very serious problem. (end oral history excerpt)

Compared to Forrestal, Lovett, by his own account, was relatively out of the line of fire over the Israel issue, but that did not prevent him from receiving late night threatening telephone calls and tons of pressure from all quarters. Lovett was subjected to none of the public vilification that Forrestal faced, so one can only imagine what Forrestal had to put up with privately.

Forrestal had to have known that the “constant unrelenting attacks” upon him were hardly just idle talk.  The whole world had already seen the sorts of things of which the Zionists were capable.  Here’s what Wikipedia says about one of their major terror attacks in 1946:

The British administrative headquarters for Mandatory Palestine, housed in the southern wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, were bombed in a terrorist attack on July 22, 1946, by the militant right-wing Zionist underground organization the Irgun during the Jewish insurgency.  91 people of various nationalities were killed, including Arabs, Britons and Jews, and 46 were injured.

The hotel was the site of the central offices of the British Mandatory authorities of Palestine, principally the Secretariat of the Government of Palestine and the Headquarters of the British Armed Forces in Palestine and Transjordan. When planned, the attack had the approval of the Haganah, the principal Jewish paramilitary group in Palestine, though, unbeknownst to the Irgun, this had been cancelled by the time the operation was carried out. The main motive of the bombing was to destroy documents incriminating the Jewish Agency in attacks against the British, which were obtained during Operation Agatha, a series of raids by mandate authorities. It was the deadliest attack directed at the British during the Mandate era (1920–1948).

Before that, in 1944, the Zionists had assassinated Lord Moyne, the top British administrator for the Middle East.  Not known to the public—but probably known to Forrestal as we surmise in The Assassination of James Forrestal—is that they had sent letter bombs to the leading opponent of the Zionists within the British government, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, in an unsuccessful assassination attempt in 1946, and they had even sent a letter bomb to President Truman in 1947.  Later, in September of 1948, they would assassinate the man in charge of mediating the Arab-Israeli conflict, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden.  Most recently we have discovered evidence that the man who was potentially the strongest, most prominent advocate for the rights of the Arabs in Palestine, T. E. Lawrence, known for good reason as Lawrence of Arabia, died in 1935 not from a simple motorcycle accident according to the official determination but from an assassination.

Silver or Lead

The milder metaphor that we use in English for the means of persuasion, shall we say, is “the carrot or the stick.”  The one that originated with the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia with an alliterative ring is “plata o plomo,” silver or lead.  The message to the government official is clear, you take our money to go along with us, or you run the serious risk of being murdered, in this case by gunshot.

We should recognize it as the persuasion method of organized crime generally, not just as practiced by Latin American drug gangs.  At this point, a quote from our review of The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America by Sally Denton and Roger Morris is germane:

Trump, with his casino investments in Atlantic City is outside the scope of the Denton-Morris book, but it is full of clues as to why his likely underworld connections would be out of bounds for The [Washington] Post.  We begin with the authors’ use of the term, “Syndicate,” as opposed to “Mafia.” The focus on the latter term by the mainstream press, they say, is deliberate because it leaves the impression that organized crime is exclusively an Italian, mostly Sicilian-American enterprise.  To the contrary, they say, the older term “Syndicate” is more appropriate because the underworld of organized crime that they have seen in control of Las Vegas they estimate to be about half Jewish, a quarter Italian, and the rest of other ethnicities.  Among those other ethnicities, particularly involved in the financing of Las Vegas casinos, the Mormon Church and many of its devotees, like Harry Reid, loom large.

And for organized crime generally in the United States, except for the Mormons, we may say the same thing.  New York City’s Murder, Inc., after all, was largely a Jewish affair.  The Zionist element of Jewish society we might say then comes by its thuggish methods honestly.  It’s been a part of the culture for a long time.   We sum it up in the concluding chapter of The Assassination of James Forrestal, which we have made into a free-standing article with the name of “Israel’s Murder, Inc.”

Of course, the Zionists would prefer to use the much less messy “plata” method of persuasion, and there is evidence that that is what did the trick with Truman’s decision to defy the experts in his administration and hang this millstone of a new country around the necks of the American people.  In his article, “President Harry S. Truman and the Jews,” the late Texe Marrs repeats the often-told story that the Jewish lobbyist Abraham Feinberg had, months before, given Truman a $2 million cash bribe, saying that recently released FBI documents had confirmed it.  We have not read Marrs’s book, in which the charge is also made, and we see no mention of any such direct bribe in the 2011 press release on those FBI Feinberg documents.  Neither do we find it in his FBI File as published by the Israeli Lobby Archive, although it has lots of other incriminating material.  That does not mean that it did not happen.  We do find mention in the press release of Feinberg’s well-known funding of Truman’s crucial whistlestop campaign tour later in 1948, which one could well regard as a quid pro quo for his actions in the creation of the state of Israel.  Feinberg is quite candid about it, treating it as such in the 1973 oral history interview that he gave to Richard D. McKinzie of the Truman Library.

Feinberg’s use of money to bend America’s political leaders to Israel’s will has been the most obvious method that has been used in subsequent years.  The best description that we have encountered of how the use of concentrated and well-focused Jewish American money has turned the American Congress into the craven jumping jacks that we see in Buelahman’s video, “Falling to Pieces for Israel” is in the 1985 book by Illinois Republican, Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby.    Because the veteran lawmaker Findley had the temerity to advocate policies in the Middle East that put the interests of his own country above those of Israel, the full weight of the Jewish American lobby was brought down upon him.  He was vilified in the press and his opponent, the Democrat Dick Durbin, who went on to the Senate where he now wields quite a bit of power, was loaded up with Jewish cash.  Findley describes how the tactic was subsequently used again and again to rid the American Congress of similar America-first representatives such as Chuck Percy and Adlai Stevenson III, also of Illinois, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, and Pete McCloskey of California.  What remains is that pathetic lot of the Buelahman video supposedly representing the people of what is, in reality, a subjugated country.

Not stopping with the legislative branch, though, Findley also describes how the executive branch has been similarly taken over by disloyal Americans who are essentially employees of the Israelis.  Hardly any venue, either in the State Department or the Defense Department, is sufficiently private for an employee to offer even the mildest criticism of the policies of Israel, lest he find his career in jeopardy.  Furthermore, as Findley describes it, Jonathan Pollard was only the exposed tip of the iceberg when it comes to Israeli spying on the United States.  The general rule is that Israel’s agents just take what they want, unexposed and unpunished.  Compared with what we have now, the conscientious, patriotic professional class of the executive branch is unrecognizable.  Israel is in full control.

This flat-out subversion of the U.S. government by Israel-first, mainly Jewish Americans would seem to represent another category besides the “silver or lead” by which Israel works its will on the United States, but Findley also offers examples of how money-corrupted legislators have brought pressure upon the executive branch to transfer or get rid of functionaries deemed problematic when it comes to matters related to Israel.

Nor has the plomo method for getting their way been given up.  It is, out of necessity, just better concealed.  The most trenchant analysis of how the Zionists have used violence to work their will on the United States comes from the pen of the Frenchman, Laurent Guyénot.  With his 2021 book (expanded in 2023) The Unspoken Kennedy Truth, he very persuasively shows the Zionist hand behind the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy, Jr.  His 2018 article, “9/11 Was an Israeli Job,” shows how the Zionists have continued to use wholesale violent treachery for their nefarious political ends. For a Cliff’s Notes version of the Guyénot case, see Buelahman’s video of my poem, “Waxing Indignant over 9/11 Truth.”

The great patriot James Forrestal, whose assassination is also treated in Guyénot’s book, hardly knew the half of it when he resisted the 1948 creation of the ethnic-supremacist, gangster state of Israel.

David Martin