President Truman's Decision to Recognize Israel

Israel at 60. The charge that domestic politics determined US policy on Palestine angered President Truman for the rest of his life. In fact, the President's policy rested on the realities of the situation in the region, on America's moral, ethical, and humanitarian values, on the costs and risks inherent in any other course, and on America's national interests. Israel was going to come into existence whether or not Washington recognized it. But without American support from the very beginning, Israel's survival would have been at even greater risk. Truman's decision, although opposed by almost the entire foreign policy establishment, was the right one - and despite complicated consequences that continue to this day, it is a decision all Americans should recognize and admire.

Sunday May 16, 1948 The State of Israel is Born

A nation that has freed itself

May 16, 1948:

There are days in the human record on which the night never falls. They shine forever; and in its rays the human race is able to pick its ways forward. The constancy of the Jewish people has brought the fecund day into being, until the bridge of their suffering between which spans two thousand years has become a luminous rainbow.

The hurt that remains is of another order. It is of the common lot of free men, and must continue until each people's pride in its own right gives way to pride in the right of all. This shining day will light up the road to that end, in which the door will be loose on the latch, and the coming and going of the people will be without let.

The Jewish nation has freed itself, and by the act has prised a guilt from the conscience of the world. It is a deed in which, at length, the bitter faggots which stoke fires of racial hatred may be turned into the green saplings of comradeship: in that uplifting measure, the rebirth of a free, independent and righteous Israel, will be of comfort to all men, and of universal fruition.

The deeper consequences must bide their time against present and urgent benefits. Men, women and children are passing, in these hours, through the gates. You can hear them singing. You can see the shine in their eyes. You can feel the straining spirit that would burst from freed bodies to be quicker in the land. The gates are opened by Cyprus, Italy, in Germany, Bulgaria: the walls of the ghettoes and the wires of the concentration camps are down. The people stride over them and along the road that will take them home, set them upon their own soil, under their own sun, beside their own temples, among their own kin. Never before has any people known so bitterly the years of detention or so joyously the moment of release. It is in a man's soul and behind his smarting eyes that the miracle is felt. A miracle it is: not only that a people has come to free Statehood; but that the Jewish people has come to it, whose moral, social and often physical serfdom, has been a burden on the civilized conscience.

In the circumstances of the nation's rebirth, the civilized conscience has added burden to its burden. The politics of great powers have provoked and connived at bloodshed: and the smoke of a needless war lies across the day like a vandal's stroke. The Arab people are impoverished and put upon the sterile road of strife to fulfil a vanity and preserve a tottering plan. The setting of one people against another is for the good of neither; and in the reckoning, the count of the Arab against the powers that proclaim their friendship to him will be more than the count of the Jew against those who have molested his path to freedom. Unless all the people of this land are made wholly free, none of them will be free; and the State of Israel will be strong only in the strength of both the free peoples of Palestine. And as it can be said that the subject Jew was an assurance of subjection for the Arab, it is right - it must be right - to say that the free Jew is a promise of freedom for the Arab. In that will lie a righteousness of the new State of Israel.

Men and women have done well and can turn to each other with a blessing. They have set their bodies as a shield harder than steel and their faith has been a striking force sharper than a wedge of tanks. They have been few and wonderfully brave. They are still few and they must still be brave; and the mother's son must go off at dark and the mother wait at the dawn. It is the heroism of a cause and of men who live it in their hands as well as in their hearts. They, and a leadership who, in this crisis, has been wholly of them and in their tenacious temper, have brought into being the State of Israel, which has been won on the soil of Israel and nowhere else. There is cause to thank these men and women and their leadership and to bear their deeds in honour for the rest of eternity. Theirs is the day upon which night falls.

The Palestine Post, Sunday May 16, 1948

The Palestinian Arabs and the Palestinian Jews were both residents of the Mandate of Palestine, from which the term "Palestinian" comes from.

Palestinian Arabs have no absolute, natural right to self-determination of their own country without the reciprocal absolute natural right of the Palestinian Jew.

The Palestinian Jew has the right to veto such "rights" of the Palestinian Arabs since Palestinian Jews had a prior right to create a national existence in the lands of the Mandate of Palestine, because the Palestinian Jews were there first.

Palestinian Jews were there first, in spite of the Muslim waqf having tried to destroy the archaeological evidence.

Moreover, the rights asserted by such Palestinian Arabs - to eradicate all Jews from all of Arabia - would pose the gravest of dangers to the prior rights of the State of Israel and trigger the absolute, natural right of self defense of the Palestinian Jews to preserve themselves by wiping out the challenge so that it does not ever arise again.

Sunday May 16, 1948:

STATE OF ISRAEL IS BORN

(May 16) -- The first independent Jewish State in 19 centuries was born in Tel Aviv as the British Mandate over Palestine came to an end at midnight on Friday, and it was immediately subjected to the test of fire.

As "Medinat Yisrael" (State of Israel) was proclaimed, the battle for Jerusalem raged, with most of the city falling to the Jews. At the same time, President Truman announced that the United States would accord recognition to the new State. A few hours later, Palestine was invaded by Moslem armies from the south, east and north, and Tel Aviv was raided from the air. On Friday the United Nations Special Assembly adjourned after adopting a resolution to appoint a mediator but without taking any action on the Partition Resolution of November 29.

Yesterday the battle for the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road was still under way, and two Arab villages were taken. In the north, Acre town was captured, and the Jewish Army consolidated its positions in Western Galilee.