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| Illustration: Jordan Bohannon/The Guardian/Getty Images/White House |
Sun 2 Aug 2026 09.00 EDT
In 1948, with war raging in Palestine, Harry Truman found himself trapped.
On one side were Zionist lobbyists and the president’s domestic political advisers, who were urging him to support the establishment of a Jewish state in as much of Palestine as possible. On the other were his top foreign policy and national security officials, led by the secretary of state, George C Marshall. Their unanimous recommendation was to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, which they believed would trigger war in the Middle East and endanger the future of US relations with the Arab and Muslim world.
With the exception perhaps of George Washington, no diplomatic or military leader in American history had a reputation for patriotic virtue and skilled devotion to duty comparable to that of Marshall. Truman was in awe of the secretary of state, who, as chief of staff of the US armed forces, had been hailed by Winston Churchill as “the true organizer of victory” in the second world war. After the war, it had been Marshall who launched the plan named after him to rebuild Europe.
In the mid-1940s, Marshall pushed quietly but steadily against the Zionist movement’s proposals to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. He was concerned that American support would open opportunities for the Soviet Union to exploit Arab anger, put Middle Eastern oil supplies at risk in the event of a war between the Soviet Union and the United States, and require the deployment of unavailable American troops to prevent bloodshed and instability in Palestine. These were, indeed, the strongly held views of virtually all of Truman’s most important military and foreign policy advisers.
Truman was personally and deeply moved by the suffering of Jewish survivors of the Nazi “Final Solution”, but ... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/aug/02/pro-israel-lobby-presidents