Our American Israel 1 LANDS OF REFUGE

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CONTENTS

0 Introduction
1 Lands of Refuge
2 Founding Israel in America
3 Invincible Victim
4 “Not the Israel We Have Seen in the Past”
5 The Future Holocaust
6 Apocalypse Soon
7 Homeland Insecurities
8 Conclusion
9 NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
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1 

 

LANDS OF REFUGE 

 

IN THE 1947 Oscar-winning film Gentleman’s Agreement, a journalist played by Gregory Peck decides to pose as a Jew to 

gather material for a story about anti-Semitism in America. At a cocktail party he awkwardly approaches a famous Jewish physicist, 

played by Sam Jaffe as a thinly veiled Albert Einstein, suggesting that the two “hash over some ideas”: 

 

“What sort of ideas?” 

“Palestine, for instance. Zionism.” 

“Which? Palestine as a refuge … or Zionism as a movement for a Jewish State?” 

“The confusion between the two, more than anything.” 

“If we agree there’s confusion, we can talk. We scientists love confusion.” 

 

Smiling at his earnest listener, the scientist rambles through a thicket of ideas about Jewish identity, questioning whether Jews con- 

stitute a religion, a race, or a nation. He pokes fun at the logic of each; to a secular Jew, religion seems irrelevant; to a scientist, race is 

unscientific; to a worldly refugee, nationalism is suspect. The confusion he sows about Jewish identity underscores the questions he 

first raised about the nature of Zionism.¹ 

This Hollywood banter reflected serious questions that were being asked about the meaning of Zionism after World War II. Some 

Americans viewed the movement to settle Jews in Palestine as a humanitarian cause, one that would provide refuge for the homeless 

survivors of Nazi extermination camps in Europe. Others viewed Zionism as a political movement to establish a sovereign state in 

Palestine for Jews from around the world. Many blurred the distinction between these two ideas, while others found them irreconcilable. 

It is often presumed that the revelation of the Holocaust led Americans to embrace the Zionist cause. A Jewish state, however, was 

by no means a universally applauded or uncontested idea in the aftermath of the war. Sympathy for the suffering of European Jews did 

indeed motivate many Americans to support their emigration to Palestine. But humanitarian sympathy often foundered on the political 

notion of a state based on an exclusive ethnoreligious identity. This notion struck some Americans as counter to their democratic val- 

ues, especially in a postwar world recovering from the devastating outcome of virulent nationalism. The idea of a Jewish state in a land 

inhabited by an Arab majority alienated others who understood democracy as majority rule. A religious basis for national identity ap- 

peared foreign to those who believed that citizenship—irrespective of creed—should provide the basis of national belonging. Such 

reservations and ambivalences were widely expressed in the mainstream press, within Jewish organizations, and in government com- 

missions. 

These debates about Zionism have virtually disappeared from the American memory of the founding of Israel. Historians have fo- 

cused on the political struggle between representatives of Zionist organizations and State Department diplomats for the heart of Pres- 

ident Harry Truman, viewing it as a conflict between domestic electoral pressure and national geopolitical interests. They have also 

highlighted the interplay of other geopolitical and domestic factors: big power rivalries, the founding of the United Nations, Arab na- 

tionalism, oil politics, the rebuilding of Europe, and the status of Jews in the United States.² 

But for the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine to achieve widespread acceptance, more was needed—the idea had to be Americanized. 

Its proponents attributed New World meanings, symbols, and mythologies to a European movement to establish a Jewish polity in the 

Arab Middle East. They drew parallels between Mayflower Pilgrims and Jewish pioneers in the familiar landscape of the biblical 

Promised Land, and they presented Zionist settlement as enacting American ideas of modern development. This project of American- 

ization took on particular urgency in the post–World War II effort to establish a Jewish state, and it had to grapple with all the ways in 

which Zionism appeared misaligned with American values. 

In the 1940s, American liberals enthusiastically championed this project. The most powerful arguments on behalf of Zionism ap- 

peared in left-leaning publications, such as The Nation, the New Republic, and PM—not in the New York Times, Commentary Magazine, 

or Life, all of which took skeptical or noncommittal stances toward the Zionist movement. Liberal journalists, activists, and politicians 

fused humanitarian and political understandings to create an influential and enduring narrative of Zionism as a modern progressive 

force for universal good. Their way of narrating the founding of Israel was not a historical inevitability, but rather the outcome of a strug- 

gle in which the stories we are so familiar with today prevailed over others. 

 

Contested Narratives 

 

The United States first confronted the question of Palestine in the displaced persons camps of occupied Germany. At the end of the 

war, the army was holding tens of thousands of Jewish concentration camp survivors in the American sector. Haunting images of gaunt 

refugees behind barbed wire—some still wearing prison garb—filled newspapers and newsreels for months after the liberation of the 

death camps. President Truman appointed attorney Earl Harrison to lead an investigation, and his report on the crowded, unsanitary, 

and dismal conditions in the camps concluded chillingly: “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we 

do not exterminate them.” Harrison recommended that one hundred thousand displaced persons (DPs) be permitted to settle in Pales- 

tine immediately. Truman agreed and called on Great Britain to end its restrictions on Jewish immigration, which had been in effect 

since 1939.³ 

British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin responded by inviting Truman to convene a joint commission to investigate the impact of mass 

immigration on the inhabitants of Palestine and its governance. Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Britain had ruled 

Palestine under a mandate endorsed by the League of Nations in 1922. The mandate incorporated the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which 

expressed British favor for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home of the Jewish people” with the caveat that “nothing shall 

be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” From the start, the mean- 

ing of the declaration had been open to interpretation and criticism—and it continues to be controversial today. The Zionist movement 

welcomed it as the legal foundation of the right to statehood, while Arab spokesmen denounced it as an imperial imposition with no 

legal standing. The British government considered that it had fulfilled its obligation by facilitating the creation of a home for those Jews 

who settled in Palestine, without regard to statehood. 

Formation of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry represented a last-ditch effort by the British to maintain a foothold in their in- 

creasingly vulnerable empire in the Middle East. For its part, the United States was now, for the first time, officially participating in pol- 

icymaking for Palestine. Each government appointed six members, selected for their supposed impartiality (that is, they could not be 

Jews, Arabs, Muslims, experts in the field, or women). Federal Judge Joseph Hutcheson, a Texas Democrat, chaired the American dele- 

gation, which included Frank Aydelotte, director of the Institute for Advanced Study; Frank Buxton, editor of the Boston Herald; Bartley 

Crum, an attorney from California; William Phillips, a career diplomat; and James G. McDonald, who was the League of Nations high 

commissioner for refugees from Germany in the 1930s and would later be appointed the first U.S. ambassador to Israel.⁴ In the first 

four months of 1946, the committee held public hearings in Washington, D.C., London, Cairo, and Jerusalem, and members visited DP 

camps in Europe, as well as Arab capitals throughout the Middle East. 

The committee focused primarily on the problem of resettling Jewish refugees, and secondarily on the consequences of this reset- 

tlement for Arab inhabitants of Palestine. The final report recommended the immediate immigration of one hundred thousand Jewish 

refugees on humanitarian grounds, but it rejected the political establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.⁵ The report antagonized both 

Arabs and Zionists, and the United States and Great Britain never agreed on its implementation. Escalating violence by Jewish militias 

made the British Mandate increasingly unpopular and costly to a nation recovering from a devastating war. In 1947 the British govern- 

ment decided to end the mandate and to place the question of Palestine’s future in the hands of the newly founded United Nations. 

 

 

The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry at the Jerusalem train station, 1946. 

 

Although the Anglo-American Committee ultimately failed to direct policy, its proceedings remain invaluable today. They offer a kalei- 

doscopic perspective on the passionate debates about what the Christian Science Monitor called “the explosive, nettlesome, Gordian 

knot—call it any of these—of the Palestinian problem.”⁶ The committee’s public hearings provided an international stage on which al- 

most every major actor in the struggle over Palestine played a role. An avid press covered testimonies by leaders of the Zionist move- 

ment, representatives from Arab organizations, refugees in the DP camps, British officials, demographers and agricultural specialists, 

and celebrity intellectuals. 

Two notable committee members, one American and one British, published books about their experiences. Bartley Crum, an ambi- 

tious civil rights attorney from San Francisco, wrote Behind the Silken Curtain: A Personal Account of Anglo-American Diplomacy in Pales- 

tine and the Middle East. Richard Crossman, a socialist Labour Party MP with an Oxford PhD, wrote Palestine Mission: A Personal Record. 

Published in 1947, the two books offer more than insider accounts of the committee’s travails. Through a combination of travelogue 

and memoir, political meditation and polemic, both authors convey the personal reckoning that led them to champion the cause of an 

independent Jewish state. Crum and Crossman were the youngest and most progressive members of their national delegations. They 

were the only committee members to argue for Jewish statehood, although they disagreed about the impact of Zionism on the Arab 

inhabitants of Palestine. Written from a critical stance on the waning British Empire, Crossman’s book provides a valuable contrast with 

the views of his American colleagues, whose nation was becoming a greater power in the Middle East. Even though their stance on 

statehood was a minority position within the committee, their writings presage views that would become dominant in the United King- 

dom and the United States. 

The last American to be appointed to the committee, Bartley Crum was promoted by David Niles, Truman’s liaison with labor and 

minority groups and his intermediary with Zionist organizations. The State Department tried to block Crum because of his left-wing af- 

filiations, which earned him the moniker “Comrade Crum.” As an attorney, he had campaigned against discrimination toward black em- 

ployees by southern railroads, and he had served as counsel at the founding of the United Nations. At the time of his appointment, he 

was preparing to leave for Spain to defend two members of the anti-Franco underground. While writing his book after the committee 

disbanded, he joined Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois in endorsing the American Crusade against Lynching. 

A journalist traveling with the committee described Crum as a liberal playboy of sorts, “serious, courageous, and prepared like a 

trained prizefighter to battle for his convictions. He preferred drinking to eating and was so good looking that the people often turned to 

stare at him on the German streets.” Richard Crossman eyed him as cynically angling for a political career “which could be made or 

marred by the attitude he adopted toward the Jewish question.” Because of Crum’s White House connections, committee members 

would avoid speaking freely in front of him, and his contacts sometimes worried that his overzealousness marred the reliability of the 

information he passed on to them.⁷ 

A story of political and spiritual awakening, Behind the Silken Curtain shows how an American progressive, a liberal Catholic with lit- 

tle knowledge of the Middle East and no experience outside the United States, confronted manifold arguments about Zionism from 

points of view he had never before encountered. Crum describes in detail how he listened to multiple Jewish and Arab testimonies, only 

to be convinced of the justice of the Zionist cause. Crum played a noteworthy role in the Americanization of Zionism precisely because 

he was not a government official or a Jewish member of a Zionist organization, although he interacted with major figures in both 

groups. His story exemplifies the synergy between an early Zionist lobby seeking to galvanize U.S. public opinion and the larger Amer- 

ican culture in which it operated. His views can neither be reduced to pure pandering nor attributed to independent thinking alone. He 

understood Zionism as a liberal cause, and he made it a personal one. 

In 1940, Crum had served as a close advisor to the presidential campaign of Wendell Willkie, who was running as a liberal Repub- 

lican. One World, Willkie’s 1943 runaway bestseller, became Crum’s guidebook for his first trip abroad with the committee. Willkie’s 

popular book described his world tour at the behest of President Franklin Roosevelt to muster support for the war and to counter isola- 

tionist sentiment in the United States. Willkie’s internationalist vision linked the wartime battle against fascism to the fight for social 

equality at home and the struggle against colonialism abroad. He tied future international stability to economic improvements in the 

global standard of living, which would remake the world in the image of modern, middle-class America. Crum relished Willkie’s utopian 

ideal of ameliorating social inequality without social conflict. 

Crum’s “one world” ideal contrasted with the conflict-ridden worldview of his British colleague Richard Crossman. On his plane ride 

across the Aegean on the way to Cairo, Crossman pondered the difficulty of fulfilling the committee’s charge: “We are trying to link up 

five different worlds in one solution: Washington, London, Vienna, Cairo, Jerusalem. It can’t be done.”⁸ Crossman’s tragic vision of the 

irreconcilable differences between colliding worlds was rooted in his commitment to democratic socialism and his awareness of the 

consequences of British colonialism. 

On January 4, 1946, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry opened its hearings in Washington, D.C., where witnesses presented 

divergent and incompatible perspectives on the fate of Palestine and the desirability and feasibility of a Jewish state. From the start, Jew- 

ish organizations took center stage, though they by no means presented a united front. 

At the end of World War II, the Zionist movement—founded in 1897 by Theodore Herzl in Basel, Switzerland—consisted of many or- 

ganizations both inside and outside Palestine. The Jewish Agency for Palestine, headed by David Ben-Gurion since 1935, had respon- 

sibility for all aspects of Jewish settlement, including immigration and defense, and it conducted many state-like functions, including 

posting representatives abroad and running a press agency. Outside Palestine, the onset of World War II had shifted the center of Zion- 

ist advocacy from Europe to the United States. In 1942, in response to emerging reports of the mass murder of Jews, American Zionists 

held an emergency conference at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, which became a political watershed for the movement. Rejecting 

the gradualist efforts of the past, delegates from around the world unanimously called for unfettered Jewish immigration to Palestine 

and demanded that “Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.”⁹ 

The leaders of the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC), the group that coordinated political advocacy in the United States, 

distrusted the Anglo-American Committee. They regarded the establishment of a Jewish state not as a question to investigate, but as an 

international commitment to fulfill with all due haste.¹⁰ Although the outspoken head of AZEC, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, refused to par- 

ticipate in the committee’s Washington hearing, two well-known representatives of the group did testify. Rabbi Stephen Wise, the sev- 

enty-two-year-old veteran leader of American Zionism, moved the audience to tears. Wise, whom Crossman described as “speaking and 

looking like the prophet Micah,” recounted the history of Zionism as a heroic response to modern anti-Semitism, from Tsarist Russia to 

Nazi Germany. He called on Christians worldwide to set right their historical guilt for Jewish suffering by guaranteeing that “Palestine 

shall be yours.” Emanuel Neuman, the official representative of AZEC, argued from legal rather than moral grounds, “not to plead a 

favor, but to assert a right” of the Jewish people to “rebuild their national existence.” To fulfill the goal of achieving a Jewish majority, 

Neuman proposed a population exchange that would entail transporting Jewish refugees to Palestine while transferring the Arab inhab- 

itants of Palestine to other Arab countries.¹¹ 

Leaders of non-Zionist Jewish organizations also testified. Without addressing the issue of statehood, the director of the American 

Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Judge Joseph Proskauer, made an urgent humanitarian plea for the immediate transport of the dis- 

placed persons “to the only available haven, Palestine.” The difference between the Zionists and non-Zionists, as Crum explained, was 

that the former “defined the Jewish case for Palestine as more fundamental than an answer to refugeeism.” The political demand for a 

state included all of world Jewry, and “it involved the security of the position of Jews in a world composed of nationalities each with 

territorial centers.” In the postwar world order, this view implied, only a nation-state could guarantee full human rights and freedom 

from oppression.¹² 

To the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, founded in 1942, the idea of Jews as a nation—rather than a religion—was an 

anathema that would only provoke anti-Semitism and charges of dual loyalty. The president of the organization, Lessing Rosenwald, re- 

jected the “Hitlerian concept of a Jewish state” and warned of the dangers of “Jewish nationalism.” He proposed that the refugees lan- 

guishing in DP camps emigrate to a variety of countries that were members of the newly established UN. This minority view raised such 

hostility at the hearing that Wise interrupted Rosenwald from the floor, and Crossman felt the “mental daggers in the audience behind 

him.” Nonetheless, the American co-chair, Judge Hutcheson, agreed with Rosenwald that a Jewish lineage no more determined nation- 

ality than did his own Scottish heritage.¹³ 

In a more popular appearance, Albert Einstein took the stand with flash bulbs going off and “adoring women gazing up at him like 

Gandhi.” The audience cheered his condemnation of British imperialism for its divide-and-conquer colonial strategy. He insisted that 

when freed from this yoke, Arabs and Jews could live together, and he opposed the idea of a Jewish state. “The State idea is not accord- 

ing to my heart,” he testified. “It is connected with narrow-mindedness and economic obstacles. I believe it is bad. I have always been 

against it.” He criticized the idea of a Jewish commonwealth as “an imitation of Europe” and said that recent history proved that “the 

end of Europe was brought about by nationalism.” Questions of whether Jews were a nation or a religion troubled the committee 

throughout its deliberations, as did Einstein’s warnings about the dangers of nationalism.¹⁴ 

At the hearings later that day, another famous American intellectual refuted Einstein’s views. Reinhold Niebuhr, a renowned liberal 

Protestant theologian, represented the Christian Council on Palestine. He based his case not on the biblical covenant, as other minis- 

ters from the council did, but on the ravages of Nazism. Only national sovereignty, he argued, could protect world Jewry from perse- 

cution, as well as from the potential “racial suicide” of assimilation in the United States. As a realist, he recognized the injustice of any 

political solution, but he agreed with Neuman that the Arab population could be transferred to the “vast hinterland of the Middle East” 

in order to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.¹⁵ 

The prospect of resettlement was contested by representatives from the Institute for Arab-American Affairs who spoke before the 

committee. Philip Hitti, professor of Semitic literature at Princeton University, testified that the Arab claim to Palestine rested on the 

“very simple fact” of “continued and uninterrupted physical and cultural association between land and people.” Rejecting the humani- 

tarian argument for Jewish immigration as “an attenuated form of conquest,” he added that “in the mind of the Arab, every Zionist com- 

ing in is a potential warrior.” According to Crum, Hitti and his colleagues “asserted that Zionism was indefensible and unfeasible on 

moral, historic, and practical grounds”—that it was an “imposition on the Arabs of an alien way of life which they resented and to which 

they would never submit.” To Crum, Hitti was substituting Arab nationalism for Zionism when he rejected the legal premise of British 

and international promises to the Jews as devoid of “moral validity since Palestine is inhabited by an Arab majority and therefore, ought 

to become an Arab state.”¹⁶ 

The testimonies of Hitti and his colleagues rattled Crum. “Were the committee instructed to determine the composition and wishes 

of Palestine’s present population,” he speculated, “the Arab case might have been unanswerable.” This “unanswerable” question, how- 

ever, haunted the committee throughout its investigation. How could the desires of a minority—no matter how morally compelling—be 

imposed on a majority, other than as a form of domination? The “fair-minded Americans” on the committee became worried, wrote 

Crossman, when the Zionists expressed less interest in saving Jews than in establishing a state throughout the entire land of Palestine 

at the cost of its Arab inhabitants: “As democrats they are shocked.”¹⁷ 

The idea of a Jewish state ruling a land with an Arab majority may have offended the democratic sensibilities of some of Crossman’s 

American colleagues, but not all Americans shared this concern. On his first visit to the United States, Crossman was surprised to find 

widespread enthusiasm for the Zionist cause among the American public, and he attributed this sentiment to the “frontier mentality.” 

“Zionism after all,” he wrote, “is merely the attempt by the European Jew to rebuild his national life on the soil of Palestine in much the 

same way as the American settler developed the West. So the American will give the Jewish settler in Palestine the benefit of the doubt, 

and regard the Arab as the aboriginal who must go down before the march of progress.” Crossman found this attitude typical of all set- 

tler societies: “The American, like the Australian and South African, has opened up a virgin country and conquered it for the white man. 

In so doing, he has had to fight a long battle against the aboriginal. He knows by bitter experience what such a battle means.”¹⁸ 

Remarks by Crossman’s committee colleague Frank Buxton, Pulitzer Prize–winning editor of the Boston Herald, supported Cross- 

man’s observations. In the committee’s final deliberations, Buxton not only likened Jewish settlement to the American “conquest of 

Indians” and the “inevitable giving way of a backward people before a more modern and practical one,” but he also claimed that “there 

was such a thing as an international law of eminent domain” and that “ultimately the worthy, the enterprising, the improvers, were 

bound to displace the backward folks.”¹⁹ Thus, he imagined a violent act of conquest as a step in the inevitable march of progress, in 

which the Arabs played the role of the “vanishing Indian.” 

The argument against Zionism threatened to unsettle this American narrative by awakening the possibility of an alternative past. Any 

proposal to halt Jewish settlement in favor of the Arab inhabitants would challenge the hallowed belief of Americans like Buxton that 

their nation demonstrated the unstoppable march of progress and civilization. Even though “the few surviving red Indians are now care- 

fully protected in reserves,” wrote Crossman, “America knows that if an imperial power had espoused the cause of the red Indians and 

argued that no settlement could be permitted, which was damaging to their rights, and that the development of the West could only be 

permitted according to the economic capacity of the country, half of the United States would still be virgin forest today.” The same argu- 

ment on behalf of the indigenous Arabs could have been made on behalf of Indians. “Because our own history conditions our political 

thinking,” concluded Crossman, “Americans, other things being equal, will always give their sympathy to the pioneer and suspect an 

empire which thwarts the white settler in the name of native rights.”²⁰ For Crum or Buxton to face seriously the “unanswerable ques- 

tion” of Arab self-determination was as unthinkable as it would be to espouse the original “cause of the red Indians.” 

After the meeting in Washington, the committee held hearings in London, where it heard similar arguments with more input from 

British Mandate officials. Then the members split up to visit DP camps in different European countries. The arguments in Washington 

and London did not prepare any of the committee members for the visceral immediacy of the suffering they witnessed in Germany and 

eastern Europe. On a nightmarish journey into the underworld, as Crossman described it, they “smelled the unique and unforgettable 

smell of huddled homeless humanity.” They saw for themselves what it meant to be “the isolated survivor of a family deported to a Ger- 

man concentration camp or slave labor.” Appalled by the squalid, overcrowded camps, they agreed that Jews had no viable present or 

future in eastern Europe. Unlike millions of other displaced persons, they could not be repatriated to their countries of origin; their 

homes and entire communities had been savagely destroyed and their property stolen, and anti-Semitism had even intensified after the 

war.²¹ 

In each camp, the committee members were greeted by DPs holding photographs of Theodor Herzl and placards reading “Open the 

Gates of Palestine!” In dramatic hearings, refugees of all ages expressed their fervent conviction that only in a Jewish state could they 

build a home free of persecution. They believed that “their one escape from Hell was Palestine,” and they claimed that they would rather 

die fighting Arabs as “members of a Hebrew nation” than “rot away” in “assembly centers in Germany run by British and Americans 

who talked of humanity but shut their doors to human suffering.” In a questionnaire asking for their second choice, if Palestine was un- 

available, hundreds wrote “Crematorium.”²² 

In the face of such emotional evidence, the committee tried to ascertain whether the DPs sincerely wanted to go to Palestine, or 

whether the idea was “the result of Zionist propaganda.” Historians have shown that both factors were at play. Representatives from the 

Jewish Agency for Palestine infiltrated the camps to exert pressure on the refugees, from filling out questionnaires for them, to coaching 

potential witnesses, to coercing their enlistment in the Haganah, the major paramilitary organization of the Jewish settlement in Pales- 

tine. A poll showing that 96 percent of the DPs preferred Palestine over any other destination surprised even the Zionist organizers 

themselves.²³ Manipulated or not, many refugees did find renewed purpose by participating in Zionist activities, which gave meaning to 

their shattered lives and discipline to everyday chaos. Crossman and Crum both marveled at the high morale among DPs preparing for 

a future in Palestine, and Crossman contended that even “if there had not been a single foreign Zionist or a trace of Zionist propaganda 

in the camps these people would have opted for Palestine.”²⁴ 

As far as Crum was concerned, the committee could have concluded its work in Europe without setting foot in Palestine, and he lob- 

bied unsuccessfully for an interim report demanding the immediate transport of the DPs to Palestine. Crum was especially alarmed by 

the evidence of resurgent anti-Semitism plaguing postwar Europe. As a practicing Catholic, he was shocked to hear bishops in Vienna 

voice blatant anti-Semitic views. This experience made him reflect on his own “early conditioning” and his enlightenment as a teenager 

by a liberal priest—who had been rejected by the Church hierarchy—that “every Catholic is spiritually a Semite.” He related this reli- 

gious insight to Wendell Willkie’s belief that all racial or religious prejudice was a “sickness affecting civilization itself.” By rescuing 

Jews from Europe, Crum was trying to purge his own anti-Semitic upbringing. He believed that in leading the charge to help Jews 

abroad, he had discovered a cure for the racism infecting the culture he had been raised in.²⁵ 

The problem of anti-Semitism suffused the committee’s debates about the establishment of a Jewish state in ways that may seem 

surprising today. Even advocacy for Zionism often had anti-Semitic overtones, a connection that has now been largely obscured by the 

mainstream story that in championing the Jewish state, Americans like Crum were rejecting anti-Semitism and trying to make amends 

for the Holocaust. In Palestine Mission, Crossman discussed this seeming paradox, calling attention to the ways that anti-Semitism 

could fuel pro-Zionist arguments. Although he agreed with Crum that the Jewish DPs had no place to go but Palestine, he saw this 

destination as a symptom of, rather than a solution to, the problem of Western anti-Semitism. “Nine months after V-E Day,” he wrote, 

the Jews in the camps saw that “their British and American liberators made no move to accept them into their countries” and knew 

“they were not wanted by the Western democracies.” Crossman castigated Americans as hypocrites for advocating that the gates of 

Palestine be opened to the same people who were barred at the gates of America. He underlined the “legitimate Arab objection that 

democracies should practice humanity as well as preach it to Moslems” and warned of the unseemly appearance of demanding that 

“one hundred thousand Jews should enter Palestine, while refusing to modify the American immigration laws.”²⁶ 

But this is exactly what the committee did demand. Crum and McDonald successfully urged Truman to upstage the report’s official 

release by publicly accepting this single recommendation. British foreign secretary Bevin responded cynically: “Regarding the agitation 

in the United States, and particularly in New York, for 100,000 to be put into Palestine. I hope it will not be misunderstood in America if 

I say, with the purest of motives, that that was because they do not want too many of them in New York.” Bevin’s remarks created a 

scandal, with newspapers deriding his “outright anti-Semitic outburst.” Bevin did hit a raw nerve; as Commentary magazine put it, “the 

readiness of the United States to tell others what they ought to do, while doing little or nothing itself … had long been one of its less en- 

dearing characteristics in the eyes of other nations.”²⁷ 

Public sympathy for the DPs did not translate into welcoming them to the shores of America. When a Gallup Poll conducted in 

December 1945 asked whether more persons from Europe should be permitted into the country than before the war, only 5 percent 

agreed. In reaction to a 1947 congressional bill proposing to admit four hundred thousand DPs into the United States over four years, 

citizens bombarded their representatives with demands to keep out the “riffraff” and “scum of Southern and Eastern Europe.” In favor 

of the bill, Eleanor Roosevelt warned that “every representative in Congress” told her that “the general feeling is that they wish to stop 

all immigration.” In letters and congressional hearings, the threat of foreigners to “our way of life” merged with fears of communist 

infiltration. There was a widespread belief that most of the DPs were Jews, and that most of these Jews were communists. Home- 

lessness made Jewish DPs an object of sympathy. But the degrading conditions stemming from homelessness—impoverishment, dis- 

ease, the inability to work—were often attached to Jews as racialized character flaws and used as evidence of their inability to be at 

home in America.²⁸ 

When Congress finally passed a DP bill in 1948, it discriminated against Jews in “callous fashion,” as Truman stated upon reluctantly 

signing the bill. It restricted the eligibility of Jewish DPs, even as it privileged some Nazi collaborators who were refugees from commu- 

nist regimes. Support for the bill was bolstered by the promise that most Jewish DPs would go to Palestine and not the United States. In 

1945, when Truman had sought to make it easier for refugees to enter the United States under existing quotas, a poll found that 72 per- 

cent of respondents disapproved. A year later, when he announced his approval of the committee’s recommendation to let one hundred 

thousand Jews immigrate to Palestine, 78 percent of those polled approved. Throughout the congressional hearings on the DP bill, 

Palestine cropped up as a safety valve for unwanted Jewish immigrants. Witnesses in favor of the bill repeatedly testified that only 20 

percent of all DPs were Jewish and that more than 90 percent of those would rather emigrate to Palestine than to the United States. 

After a tour of the DP camps with the House Foreign Relations Committee, a Republican congressman declared, “If the Jewish facet of 

the problem could be cleared up, the solution of the remainder of the problem would be greatly facilitated. The opening of Palestine to 

the resettlement of Jewish displaced persons would break the log jam.” Only after the conservative American Legion became convinced 

that most Jewish DPs in Europe would go to Palestine did the influential organization end its staunch opposition to the bill. Passage of 

the DP bill depended on reassuring many groups that the country wouldn’t be “flooded with Jews.”²⁹ 

In contrast to conservatives, who were concerned with keeping out Jewish refugees, pro-Zionist liberals, including President Truman, 

did call for opening the gates of both the United States and Palestine to European Jews. Presidential candidate Henry Wallace, of the 

Progressive Party, declared that Palestine alone couldn’t solve the refugee problem and America needed to do its part: “Once the United 

States was looked on as a haven of refuge for the oppressed of the world. Today we are earning a reputation as the smug center of 

reaction.”³⁰ 

It is easy to assume today that support for a Jewish state among non-Jews expressed philo-Semitism and that anti-Zionists harbored 

anti-Semitic sentiments. Indeed, at the time, advocates of Zionism did accuse their opponents of anti-Semitism, especially when criti- 

cizing those State Department members who showed sympathy to the Arab cause and had reservations about the geopolitical conse- 

quences of a Jewish state in the Middle East. Yet the reaction of those Americans who opposed Jewish immigration to the United States 

shows how anti-Semitism played a role in some pro-Zionist attitudes. The desire to bar Jewish immigrants from the United States was 

one of the factors behind support for sending those same Jews to Palestine. 

The postwar period marked a turning point in the history of anti-Semitism in the United States, at the same time that Zionism be- 

came part of the American political agenda. After virulent populist campaigns against Jews before and during the war, the postwar pe- 

riod saw the end of discrimination in employment and housing, the abolition of quotas in higher education, deeper integration of Jews 

into American life, and the decline of anti-Semitic stereotypes in popular culture. But anti-Semitic attitudes did not automatically disap- 

pear as a result of their association with Nazism. While many non-Jews did accept the assimilation of Jews into the mainstream, en- 

trenched suspicions of Jewish foreignness continued. Support for Zionism allowed some Americans to have it both ways: they could 

support rescuing the suffering victims of the Nazis while keeping their distance from the same people. They thus preserved an image of 

their own nation as a force for freedom, as the liberator of Europe. Americans could see their own values reproduced abroad in a new 

land of refuge that would embrace the huddled masses from Europe—without having to embrace those masses at home. 

In its final report, the Anglo-American Committee respected the United States’ unwillingness to take in Jewish refugees. Beyond a 

vague acknowledgement of common responsibility for all displaced persons, the report did not suggest that any nation alter its immi- 

gration laws. Mandate-ruled Palestine was the exception. After witnessing Jewish survivors of Nazism still languishing in stateless 

limbo, the twelve committee members left Europe with unanimous moral clarity. Their harmony, however, was short-lived; it did not 

outlast the testimonies they heard in Cairo and Jerusalem. From Europe, Palestine beckoned as a humanitarian refuge for homeless 

Jews. In the Middle East, the committee encountered conflicting political claims from Arabs who were already living there. 

Crum responded to those claims with a narrative of Zionism as modernization. When the committee arrived at its luxury hotel in the 

shadow of the pyramids, Crum was horrified by the gulf between elite wealthy Egyptians and the exploited masses, who subsisted on a 

level of poverty he had never before witnessed. The streets of Cairo assaulted him with the sights and smells of “human degradation,” 

where he could not free himself from the impression of being “stalked by disease.” He indicted British colonialism for exacerbating 

class divisions by bolstering the power of a feudal aristocracy, and he believed that Zionism, as a model of modern development, of- 

fered the solution to poverty and backwardness throughout the region. When he heard Egyptian protesters chanting, “We want Egypt for 

the Egyptians and not for the British,” he thought they wouldn’t mind having the Jews stay in Palestine, because the Jews had done 

more to improve the Arab standard of living than the British had.³¹ 

At the committee hearings in Cairo, which took place at the Mena House Hotel on the outskirts of the city, Crum faced a powerful 

challenge to this view in the testimony of Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam. The Egyptian secretary-general of the eight-month-old Arab 

League, Azzam addressed the committee while flanked by representatives from Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Both Crum and Cross- 

man were moved to quote at length from his speech in their books. Azzam Pasha, as he was called, referred to Jews in familial terms, as 

“our brothers” and “our cousins,” and he rejected the tarring of Arab opposition to Zionism as anti-Semitic. He told a story of Jews 

abandoning their kinship with Arabs by becoming European and then returning to the Middle East to implant Western ideas of imperi- 

alism. They were supported first by British and then by American pressure, enabled by their own “terrorism.” According to Azzam 

Pasha, 

 

The Zionist, the new Jew, wants to dominate and he pretends that he has got a particular civilizing mission with which he returns to a 

backward, degenerate race in order to put the elements of progress into an area which has no progress. Well, that has been the pre- 

tension of every power that wanted to colonize and aimed at domination. The excuse has always been that the people are backward 

and that he has got a human mission to put them forward.… The Arabs simply stand and say “NO.” We are not reactionary and we 

are not backward.… We have a heritage of civilization and of spiritual life. We are not going to allow ourselves to be controlled either 

by great nations or small nations or dispersed nations. 

 

Rejecting the establishment of an exclusively Jewish state, he proposed instead an autonomous Palestine that would respect the will of 

the Arab majority and safeguard the equality of Christians, Jews, and Muslims.³² 

Crum and Crossman offered radically different interpretations of this speech. No matter how deeply Crossman came to believe in the 

justice of Zionism, he understood the opposing perspective that “Jewish colonial settlement in Palestine from the Arab point of view is 

simply another variant of the Western imperialism which they are determined to discard.” In the testimonies that followed, Crossman 

heard Arabs speaking the language of the Four Freedoms for which World War II had been fought, and making universal claims based 

on the Atlantic Charter, which promised the right to self-determination for all.³³ 

Crum, on the other hand, adamantly rejected Azzam Pasha’s answer to the “unanswerable” question he had first heard in Wash- 

ington. He voiced his rebuttal using the exact discourse of the civilizing mission that Azzam Pasha decried. Crum’s version of this dis- 

course might be described as Orientalist progressivism. Crum found the basic tragedy of the Middle East to be that Arabs’ “antipathy 

was toward Westernism,” which he defined as progress rather than domination—“opening the door to some measure of freedom and 

happiness to the forgotten men and women of this area.” Arab nationalism was only skin deep, as Crum saw it—it was a sentiment 

manipulated by representatives of a feudal aristocracy to maintain their power over the toiling Arab masses. Crum could not imagine 

Arab leaders truly representing their benighted people, and so he spoke on their behalf: “I felt there could be no real conflict between 

the deepest aspirations of the Jew, as expressed in Palestine, and those of the Arab peoples. The Jewish ideal based upon the philos- 

ophy of the European West seeks a way of life in which man achieves dignity and a measure of fulfillment of his deepest needs.” West- 

ern ideas promised to cure the social evils of the East by offering a “chance for a decent life as free as possible from squalor, disease, 

corruption, exploitation.” Crum defended these values by quoting from the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “ ‘life, liberty and the pur- 

suit of happiness,’ which we hold as the inalienable rights of every man—surely these Western ideals are not evil.” Crum saw Zionism 

as a form of Westernism and painted both in distinctly American hues, as following a universal model of social progress.³⁴ 

Crum thus viewed Arab nationalism not only as opposing Zionism but also as rejecting modernity itself. Even though Azzam Pasha 

explicitly rejected the stereotype of Arab backwardness, Crum saw Arab society though an Orientalist lens, as mired in an ancient past 

where the ideals of the French and American revolutions “had not penetrated the citadels of Islamic authoritarianism.” Why, he asked, 

“had this entire area, only one day by plane from London and two from New York, simply dropped out of existence as far as modern 

man was concerned?” Crum concluded that young Arab intellectuals longed for liberation, to throw off “the veil, the fez, the sickness, 

the filth, the lack of education,” but that their “wily” elders deluded them into identifying Zionism as “foreign domination.” They did not 

yet realize that “Zionism was probably the only force within sight which would help to release them.” Crum rendered Zionism as an 

American-style rescue mission that could liberate Arabs from the twin evils of Islamic backwardness and British colonialism.³⁵ 

Crum eagerly embarked on the train from Cairo to Jerusalem. He described the changing geography as a kind of time travel—from 

decaying past to burgeoning modernity. He felt himself liberated from Egypt’s “desert scenes—the mud hovels; the faceless children, 

or so they appeared wrapped up in the same nondescript robes as their parents: the slow, painful miserable existence.” As soon as the 

train reached the Jewish settlements in Palestine, he wrote, “the tempo and color of life changes sharply. Things seemed to quicken, to 

become more alive; children suddenly were no longer tiny bundles of rags, but youngsters, wearing shorts, with sturdy arms and legs 

and open smiling faces and bright eyes—alert and human again.” Crum’s choice of words says more about his own point of view than 

about different costumes: he saw Arab children as foreign objects, and Jewish children as familiar human subjects. The landscape 

echoed this contrast: “After the vast expanse of desert and mud flats, it was a treat to see man’s order upon earth again: green field, 

regularly plowed, brown trees and green foliage. That was my first impression of the Holy Land.” His first panoramic view of Palestine 

offered an antidote to the disorder and decay that repelled him in Egypt. Even though this was his first visit, his use of the word “again” 

expressed his sense of returning home to a familiar environment.³⁶ 

Like many American travelers to Palestine since the nineteenth century, Crum and his colleagues approached the landscape through 

two mental guidebooks: the Bible and images of the American west. As the train rolled through Gaza, Crum recalled the story of Sam- 

son, while the landscape reminded him of “country between San Francisco and Los Angeles.” Judge Hutcheson, the American com- 

mittee co-chairman, was relieved to find: “This is Texas.” Crossman made note of these responses, wondering why “Americans feel at 

home here whereas we feel ourselves utterly remote from England.”³⁷ 

Why did Palestine feel so familiar to the American visitors? It had to be more than geographical formations. Americans viewed geog- 

raphy through the lenses of biblical and national narratives that made the land appear at once ancient and modern. They projected onto 

Jewish settlements mythic images of a pioneering past and nostalgia for the dawn of their own modernity. Marveling at Tel Aviv as “the 

youngest metropolis of the world,” Crum exclaimed: “Here before your eyes is proof that Palestine Jewry is bringing civilization to the Middle 

East.” The city stood out against the backdrop of generic Arab backwardness. In the “overgrown Arab village” of Jaffa—a major port city 

that had been at the center of trade and cultural exchange for centuries—Crum only saw “streets of squalor and a population diseased 

and beaten by life.” In the “thoroughly civilized community” of Tel Aviv, by contrast, Crum marveled at the “tree-shaded boulevards, 

with opera and theaters, with playgrounds and modern schools, with busses and apartment houses.” Everywhere in the city, “you could 

stand on the street corner and say: ‘this might be any American town.’ ”³⁸ 

If Tel Aviv resembled contemporary America, the kibbutz—a collective agricultural community central to the history of Jewish 

settlement and to the Zionist imagination—evoked idealized images of America’s pioneer past. A settler from New Jersey expressed to 

Crum a feeling “akin to what the early settlers in the Western states must have felt: a sense of ever-expanding horizons, a challenge of 

worlds to conquer.” Crum applauded the kibbutz as a “striking contribution to modern life” through its social and agricultural experi- 

mentation, and he saw its members as reliving the past of “genuine pioneers.” Crum described his New England colleague, Frank Bux- 

ton, welling up with tears after visiting a kibbutz. “I felt like getting down on my knees before these people,” Buxton exclaimed. “I’ve al- 

ways been proud of my own ancestors who made farms out of the virgin forest. But these people are raising crops out of rocks!” In their 

adoration of the kibbutz, these Americans merged collectivism and individualism in the recovery of a mythic frontier past.³⁹ 

Crum repeated a central tenet of Zionism, that working the land would bring forth the New Jew. By reclaiming the land from “desert 

and swamp,” Jews were redeeming themselves from their Old World past. This creed resonated with American narratives of the fron- 

tier’s transformative power. Shedding memories of Hitler’s Europe and “the ancient story of Jewish persecution,” wrote Crum, the pio- 

neers became “a new generation of Jews rising free from the stigma of the ghetto, free from the self-consciousness of ‘differentness.’ ” 

Working the land in Palestine stripped away the New Jews’ European otherness and made them appear more like Americans.⁴⁰ 

 

 

Children from Kibbutz Hulda, Israel, 1948. 

 

Crum found evidence for this transformation of eastern European Jews in a “strange phenomenon” that made their offspring raised 

in Palestine not only stronger from working the land, but also whiter and more Western than their parents: 

 

Many of the Jewish children I saw were blond and blue-eyed, a mass mutation that, I was told, is yet to be adequately explained. It is 

the more remarkable because the majority of the Jews of Palestine are of east European Jewish stock, traditionally dark-haired and 

dark-eyed. One might almost assert that a new Jewish folk is being created in Palestine: the vast majority almost a head taller than 

their parents, a sturdy people more a throwback to the farmers and fishermen of Jesus’ day than products of the sons and daughters 

of the cities of eastern and central Europe.⁴¹ 

 

Crum offered a Christian point of reference for the New Jew in Palestine, who paradoxically reverted to biblical prototype and evolved 

into a type of white Westerner. By returning to the ancient homeland, the stooped ghetto Jews, bowed by exile, were restored to their 

roots as brawny and muscular workers of the land. At the same time, they came to look more like white Americans. 

Crum was not the only one to remark upon this “mutation.” In 1948, James McDonald, one of the members of the Anglo-American 

Committee, visited an Orthodox synagogue in Jerusalem. While listening to the prayers of two hundred young boys, he was “struck 

once more by the variety of the faces of the boys. Had I not know where I was, or heard the Hebrew words, I would have sworn that 

most of them were of Irish, Scandinavian or Scotch stock, or at any rate of the ordinary mixture of the American middle west. Only here 

and there was there a face even remotely resembling the ‘Jewish type.’ ” He concluded that “Israel’s young Jews had no distinctive 

‘racial attributes.’ ” In 1951, journalist Kenneth Bilby described a parade of kibbutz children in similar terms: “They were even featured, 

sturdy, bleached by the sun. I would have defied any anthropologist to mix these children with a crowd of British, American, German 

and Scandinavian youngsters and then weed out the Jews.” He viewed them as becoming less like “their Semitic cousin in the Arab 

world.” In the eyes of these visitors, as European Jews in Palestine became whiter—and more civilized—the Arabs among whom they 

settled appeared darker and more primitive.⁴² 

Whiteness was a familiar sign that helped Crum cognitively navigate a land populated by approximately 1,300,000 Arabs and 

600,000 Jews. As he and his colleagues traveled through Palestine and listened to hours of hearings, they would not have been able to 

maintain the myth that the land had been empty or uncultivated before Jewish settlement. Crum argued that Jewish settlements were not 

encroaching on Arab lands and villages, and that if left alone by imperial powers, Jews and Arabs would live together harmoniously with 

the aid of Jewish improvements. He saw the kibbutz not as a foreign outpost or a land grab, but as blending harmoniously into the 

landscape. In one location, he noted “how smoothly Palestine Jewry fits into the life of Palestine. Nearby was a monastery, and not far 

was an Arab village.” When Crum asked kibbutz members if they had “experienced any trouble with the Arabs,” they answered that 

neighboring Arabs were the first to draw water from the kibbutz’s newly drilled well. He witnessed one kibbutz member, a former Berlin 

lawyer, adjudicating a dispute between two Arabs. At the end of his travels through Palestine, Crum found “no conflict of interests” and 

concluded that Jews had nothing but good to offer local Arabs: “the basic truth of Arab-Jewish life in Palestine” was that “political conflict 

on high levels does not affect the relations among the men on the street.” Only Arab “kings, sheiks, and effendis” considered “Zionism’s so- 

cial and technical innovations” to be a threat, “because they mean lifting the masses from their ignorance.”⁴³ 

Crum’s vision of harmony is set into sharp relief when contrasted with Crossman’s view of the conflict at the heart of Jewish expan- 

sion into Arab lands. The socialist ethos of the kibbutz movement captivated Crossman, and he deeply admired the Labor Zionist 

movement as “something which will develop into the finest piece of Western socialism since Vienna.” Yet, he added, “no one suggested 

that the Vienna socialists should go out and occupy the mountain homes of the Greeks in the Peloponnesus.” He similarly debunked 

the idea that Palestine was a despoiled land suffering from centuries of neglect. The stony hillsides near Nablus reminded him of 

Greece and southern Italy, “with white bare rock tops, partly terraced from top to bottom with olive groves, vineyards and crazy corn- 

fields [wheat fields] six yards across.” In rural Arab communities, Crossman saw not a barren landscape, but one created by human 

cultivation and shaped by ongoing habitation. Nor did he see a relic of times past, for “everywhere there is astonishing evidence of in- 

creased cultivation and better cultivation.” The local Arabs, according to Crossman, suspected Jewish land purchase was “penetrating 

like an advanced guard … to break up a mountain way of life, in which a man has the right to leave a hillside full of stones if he wants 

to.” Crossman concluded: “If I was a mountain Arab I would want to shoot any Jew who came to Nablus.”⁴⁴ 

After traveling throughout Palestine, the committee convened hearings at the Jerusalem YMCA under armed guard and amid mount- 

ing violence by Zionist militias against the British army. Here Jewish and Arab leaders made their most impassioned arguments about 

immigration and statehood in Palestine. The first witness was seventy-four-year-old Chaim Weizmann, the venerated head of the World 

Zionist Organization who would become Israel’s first president. His four-hour testimony both alarmed and reassured the committee 

members. As reported in the New York Times, his advocacy of a Jewish state relied on the influx of one million Jews over ten years, in 

order to secure a Jewish majority. Instead of offering a compromise with the Arabs, he made an eloquent appeal for the Jewish Agency’s 

proposal “to transfer to Palestine from Europe, the Orient, and other parts of the world, the largest possible number of Jews in the 

shortest space of time.”⁴⁵ Weizmann viewed immigration as a political vehicle for state building. 

Although Weizmann went beyond the humanitarian argument for refugee resettlement, he nonetheless impressed some committee 

members with his moderation and honesty. Crossman, for one, was relieved by Weizmann’s admission that the issue was “not between 

right and wrong but between greater and lesser injustice. Injustice is unavoidable and we have to decide whether it is better to be unjust 

to the Arabs of Palestine or to the Jews.” For Crossman, this question presented a moral dilemma, but for Crum it offered moral clarity. 

The “least injustice in determining the fate of Palestine” was clear to him: “European Jewry cannot be expected to resettle on soil 

drenched with Jewish blood. Their only hope for survival lies in the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.” To emphasize the compar- 

ison with America, he quoted Weizmann’s resonant analogy: “the leaky boats in which our refugees come to Palestine are their Mayflow- 

ers, the Mayflowers of a whole generation.”⁴⁶ 

At the hearing in London, Crum had raised the issue of nationalism with Weizmann: “We’ve had many difficulties with the words 

‘Jewish state,’ ” Crum observed, adding that “Judge Hutcheson feels it suggests a narrow nationalism, which he and, I think, many of us 

find abhorrent.” In the immediate aftermath of World War II, “narrow nationalism” evoked the specter of parading brown shirts and fas- 

cist salutes. Weizmann responded with a rhetorical question: “Surely the world does not think that the Jewish people, who have suffered 

so much from narrow nationalism, would themselves succumb to it?” Crum ultimately rejected the idea that a Jewish state would be 

chauvinistic or racially biased. In support of this view, he quoted the assertion of Golda Myerson (later Golda Meir) that “we don’t want 

to be a master race.”⁴⁷ Crum agreed with her and Weizmann that the experience of persecution inoculated Jews from the darker associ- 

ations of nationalism. Yet the committee’s final report expressed concern about the efflorescence of Jewish nationalism in Palestine, 

finding “many signs that fanaticism and nationalist propaganda are beginning to affect detrimentally the Jewish educational system.”⁴⁸ 

Nationalism was also rejected by one of the most moving witnesses, Judah Magnes, the American-born president of the Hebrew 

University of Jerusalem. During World War I, his pacifism had led him to renounce his pulpit as a rabbi in New York and move to Pales- 

tine. Magnes had long advocated a binational state; he proposed limiting Jewish immigration so as to equalize the population between 

Arabs and Jews, and he called for equal representation in government and civic society. He was one of a small group of intellectuals 

who testified before the committee, including the philosopher Martin Buber. Magnes’s ideas had a strong moral appeal for the com- 

mittee members, who were “visibly stirred” by his quiet rhetoric and his ethical commitment to fair play, cooperation, and self- 

determination for both Arabs and Jews.⁴⁹ 

While some committee members harbored doubts about a Jewish state, they were even more skeptical of the idea of an Arab state in 

Palestine. The Arab movement for independence did not seem to meet the bar of legitimate national aspirations. Crum discredited Arab 

nationalism as an elitist ploy. He ridiculed the pan-Arab movement and the very idea that Muslims and Arabs from as far away as Iraq 

would have an interest in the fate of Palestine (though Jewish attachment to Palestine from as far away as the United States did not 

seem strange to him). The greatest weapon Crum wielded against Arab nationalism was his belief that the leader of the Palestinian 

Arabs had been allied with Hitler. The grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had taken refuge from the British in Berlin dur- 

ing the war and supported Hitler’s policy to exterminate Jews. Crossman, too, expressed concerns; he created a sensation in the 

Jerusalem hearings when he displayed a photograph of al-Husseini saluting S.S. troops and demanded an explanation for this “unholy 

alliance.” Crossman nevertheless acknowledged that there might be reasons why an “Arab patriot could not help being indifferent” to 

the British war cause and might hedge his bets, in case the Germans won. Crum’s view was uncompromising; for him, the mufti’s 

wartime alliance invalidated Arabs’ claims and proved that their objections to Zionism were anti-Semitic.⁵⁰ 

There was one Arab witness, however, whom Crum could not so easily dismiss. Albert Hourani, director of the Arab Office in 

Jerusalem, had served in the British intelligence service during the war and studied at Oxford; later, he would become a renowned histo- 

rian. Hourani argued for the “establishment of Palestine as a self-governing state with an Arab majority, but with full rights for its Jewish 

citizens.” He rejected the charge that Arab nationalists were anti-Semitic, explaining that if “the Palestinian state is to be an Arab state, 

that is not because of racial prejudice or fanaticism, but because of two inescapable facts: the first that Palestine has an Arab indige- 

nous population, and the second that Palestine by geography and history is an essential part of the Arab world.”⁵¹ 

Hourani challenged the fundamental assumptions on which the Anglo-American Committee was constituted. He argued against 

treating the question of immigration “simply on humanitarian grounds” because it could not be divorced from “its general political 

framework.” Not only did he expose the hypocrisy of Western nations, which were forcing Arabs to take in the same refugees that they 

would not accept into their own countries—he also claimed that Zionists were not aiming to “solve the refugee problem for its own 

sake, but to secure political domination in Palestine,” and that “their demand for immigration is only a step towards dominating Pales- 

tine.” As evidence, Hourani cited Ben-Gurion’s testimony to the committee: “he was asked whether he would save the lives of 100,000 

German Jews at the cost of giving up his ideal of a Jewish state, and he said no.”⁵² 

Hourani claimed that the humanitarian argument was connected with the imperialistic outlook that the United States and Great 

Britain shared. Rather than adjudicating the “conflict of two races and two nationalisms,” they were instead imposing a foreign state on 

Palestine, and thereby denying its people their homes and the right to self-determination. Hourani charged that the two governments 

were deluding themselves in thinking that they were operating as “impartial peacemakers and judges in no way involved in the conflict, 

but holding the two antagonists apart and doing justice between them.” Hourani predicted that “there can be no settlement” in Pales- 

tine “until the Zionists realize that they can never hope to obtain in London or Washington what is denied them in Jerusalem.”⁵³ That is, 

the existence of the committee itself revealed that a Jewish state in Palestine could only be established by force under the aegis of impe- 

rial power. 

In the final deliberations in Lausanne, Switzerland, the committee rejected Hourani’s argument and recommended that “100,000 

certificates be authorized immediately for the admission into Palestine of Jews who have been the victims of Nazi and Fascist perse- 

cution.” It did not, however, recommend the establishment of a Jewish state. The American co-chairman, Judge Hutcheson, expressed 

the strongest reservations about the compatibility of an ethnoreligious state with the practice of democracy. From the outset, his opin- 

ions worried a representative of the Jewish Agency who was monitoring the committee. He described Hutcheson in a memo as “a man 

with a heart of gold, simple, solid, and of great common sense. The chief difficulty—his formalistic conception of liberal democracy.” 

This conception made Hutcheson suspicious of the plan to establish a state only after a Jewish majority had been achieved. It appeared 

to him like a rigged vote. He asked why religious identity rather than territory should determine the nature of the state: “Why then in 

Palestine should we have a Jewish state? Why don’t you have a Palestinian state?” Hutcheson wanted to know how any group could “ex- 

pect to come into a land which they do not populate in anything like the majority (in fact, it was begun in a very small minority) and de- 

mand that their characteristic and their point of view shall be enforced upon the others.” Ultimately Hutcheson could not agree to a 

plan to “import people into a country for the deliberate purpose of creating there a majority in order to dominate the country and take 

control away from its inhabitants.… We could not have made ourselves parties to such a scheme of creeping conquest by 

colonization.”⁵⁴ 

Thus in the final report, the Anglo-American Committee rejected the political establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine on the 

grounds that “Jew shall not dominate Arab and Arab shall not dominate Jew in Palestine,” and that “Palestine shall be neither a Jewish 

state nor an Arab state.”⁵⁵ But the committee could not recommend a sovereign structure in which this non-domination would materi- 

alize. Instead it recommended deferring the question of Palestine’s independence by continuing the British mandate as a UN Trustee- 

ship. 

Crum and Crossman were the only two members to argue for the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The 

books they published in 1947 constituted a kind of minority report. Their political solution would eventually triumph in the momentous 

United Nations vote for partition at the end of 1947. In making the case for an autonomous Jewish state, both Crum and Crossman re- 

solved the tension between the political and the humanitarian by representing the Zionist cause as transcending politics, as something 

nobler than nationalism and less heavy-handed than colonialism. They each asserted that the establishment of a Jewish state in Pales- 

tine would ultimately not harm its Arab inhabitants. 

Both men concluded their books by describing the personal appeal of Zionism to their progressive ethos. Expressing reservations all 

the way through, Crossman wrote that he might not have endorsed the partition of Palestine “if the national home [for Jews] had merely 

been a national home.” Instead, “in Palestine I had come to realize that it was something more, a socialist commonwealth, intensely 

democratic, intensely collectivist.” He believed that “no Western colonist in any other country had done so little harm, or disturbed so 

little the life of the indigenous people,” and he hoped that “Jews had set going revolutionary forces in the Middle East, which in the long 

run, would benefit the Arabs.”⁵⁶ 

Crum described his embrace of Zionism as the culmination of a spiritual journey. In his final walk through the Old City of Jerusalem, 

he came face to face with the principles of Jesus Christ, which conjoined his religious and political beliefs. “The brotherhood of man, 

the community of work by all for the good of all” he found practiced “by the Jews of Palestine.” Crum dedicated his book to the memory 

of Wendell Willkie, and he had no doubt that the Zionists had already created “ ‘one world’ in microcosm”—“a new and valid 

civilization … in which the hopes of the Jews and the rights of the Arabs will be reconciled.”⁵⁷ 

Crum approached Zionism in the same spirit as he did other causes advocating liberation from oppression; he also worked against 

racial discrimination and lynching in the United States, against Franco’s fascism in Spain, and for fair employment and the UN charter. 

He did not see the Jewish claim to Palestine as a matter of “special pleading,” but as part of an international struggle for freedom with a 

distinctly American cast: 

 

I have written this book because I believe so strongly, and because I want my fellow Americans to share my belief, that Palestine is an 

essential part of this stand for freedom. If you are a Catholic, perhaps Irish by background, you need only to read County Mayo for 

Rehovoth; if you are a Negro, you need only substitute for the concentration camps of Cyprus and Eritrea a county in Mississippi; if 

you are Protestant, or an “Okie,” you will understand the struggle. What our American forebears fought for in the eighteenth century, 

the Jewish pioneers are fighting for today.⁵⁸ 

 

The Liberal Consensus 

 

Behind the Silken Curtain articulated the manifold appeal that made Zionism a popular cause for American liberals in the aftermath of 

World War II. Crum joined forces with a diverse group of journalists, politicians, and intellectuals, some of whom had begun advo- 

cating for a Jewish state before the war ended. They crafted narratives that merged the humanitarian idea of a haven for refugees with 

the political goal of national sovereignty, and they championed Zionism as one among a number of progressive movements for liber- 

ation and social justice. Although they were aware of Arab objections, they found various ways of imagining that a Jewish state in Pales- 

tine would do more good than harm to the Arabs living there. 

During a time of disillusionment and disarray that beset many left-leaning liberals at the end of World War II, Zionism promised to 

renew their faith in progressive American values. With the death of Roosevelt, they mourned the end of the New Deal’s commitment to 

social equality. As internationalists, they welcomed the formation of the United Nations but feared that the developing Cold War would 

hijack global cooperation, and some criticized Truman for propping up British imperialism. As they fought among themselves about the 

power of communism at home and abroad, some saw reactionary forces in the United States as a greater threat than communism, and 

many were targeted by anticommunist campaigns. The struggle for a Jewish state restored moral clarity. It revived the fight against fas- 

cism when shifting alliances made it appear that the United States was eager to rehabilitate former Nazis. In the Zionist experiment in 

collective agriculture, liberals imagined New Deal–style public projects bringing social equality to the Middle East. The UN’s vote for 

partition upheld the internationalist ethos of this new yet fragile experiment in international governance. And in defending the Jewish 

armed struggle against the British Empire, some leftists rode the wave of contemporary anticolonialism and harked back to the United 

States’ own revolutionary heritage. 

Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, fiercely championed Zionism. The iconoclastic journalist I. F. Stone wrote pro-Zionist articles 

in the New York Post, The Nation, and PM, the progressive New York newspaper (which Crum purchased before it folded), and he pub- 

lished two books about his experiences in Palestine. Kirchwey and Stone both visited Palestine, as did Henry Wallace, the 1948 presi- 

dential candidate for the Progressive Party and editor of the New Republic. Other well-known progressives who spoke out on behalf of 

Zionism included Eleanor Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sumner Welles, and Dorothy Thompson.⁵⁹ 

These journalists and activists constituted an informal network rather than an organized group. They shared ideas, citing one another 

and writing prefaces and reviews of one another’s books, and crossed paths not only in Palestine, but also in progressive venues in the 

United States. Some were aided directly by the Jewish Agency and the American Zionist Emergency Council, organizations that invited 

journalists to Palestine and helped fund and publicize their research and books. The Nation, for instance, received a $50,000 grant from 

the Jewish Agency for “conducting research and publishing articles and reports, and promoting the Zionist cause among American lib- 

erals and foreign delegates to the United Nations.” Fueled by this support and her own political enthusiasm, Kirchwey worked closely 

with the Jewish Agency to lobby for partition, and she submitted a 130-page memorandum to the United Nations on behalf of The 

Nation.⁶⁰ 

The mainstream press was less enthusiastic about the Zionist movement. The New York Times expressed the most skepticism, and 

its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, was a member of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. Henry Luce, editor of Life, as well as 

influential commentators such as Walter Lippmann, James Reston, and Joseph Alsop, urged caution about supporting a Jewish state 

out of concerns that the United States could be drawn to intervene militarily and would alienate the Arab nations, a source of oil and 

anticommunist sentiment. Many left-leaning pro-Zionist writers would come under attack by anticommunist campaigns, and officials of 

the new state would heartily welcome their visits after they were marginalized at home. But that would come later. In the late 1940s, pro- 

gressive politics aligned with Zionism to create a powerful narrative about Israel as a liberal project, one that would capture the Amer- 

ican imagination for decades to come. 

For Freda Kirchwey, a secular intellectual from a Protestant background, advocating for a Jewish homeland renewed her wartime cru- 

sade against fascism and anti-Semitism as part of a broader struggle against racism and prejudice. During the war, writers at The Nation 

and the New Republic had been among the first to publish the horrifying news about the Nazi extermination camps. Kirchwey reversed 

The Nation’s long-standing commitment to pacifism to lobby President Roosevelt to enter the war. The liberation of Europe, however, 

appeared incomplete as long as displaced persons remained behind barbed wire. Nor did the defeat of Hitler spell the end of fascism, 

which remained alive in Franco’s Spain, in Latin American dictatorships, and in right-wing tendencies in the United States. Kirchwey 

feared that fighting fascism would take a back seat to rivalry between superpowers. 

For Americans like Kirchwey, who viewed fascism as the main enemy of freedom in the postwar world, supporting the victims of fas- 

cism became paramount. As a matter of justice, those Jews who had survived the Nazi effort to exterminate them had a right to a state 

of their own. Kirchwey thought that Zionism was immune to the pitfalls of nationalism because she saw the Jewish victims of Nazi 

atrocities in universal terms, as a “flaming symbol to all the world of humanity and freedom.” They represented everything the fascists 

were trying to annihilate: “the spirit of humanity, of free inquiry and tolerance, of reason as opposed to blind will.… The values the Jew- 

ish people symbolize belong in the end to all men and women of good will everywhere.” By extension, a Jewish state represented more 

than the national aspirations of a particular religious group. Reporting on her 1946 visit to Palestine, she wrote that Jewish settlements 

taught “a lesson in cooperative democracy planning … a lesson not for the Jewish people alone but for the world.” The issue was “not 

simply justice for the Jews, but that justice for the Jews means peace in the Middle East and a more democratic development in that 

whole area.” Democracy did not refer to the practice of majority rule, as it did for Judge Hutcheson. For Kirchwey, a democratic ethos 

attached to Jews because they embodied those political values that Nazism had failed to defeat.⁶¹ 

In Kirchwey’s mental map of Palestine as the front line in the postwar fight against fascism, opponents of Zionism stood squarely on 

the other side. She dismissed Arab claims to Palestine as contaminated by Nazi collaboration. In her memorandum to the UN, the long- 

est of the twenty-eight chapters is titled “The Role of the Grand Mufti in World War II.” She was determined to prove that the mufti did 

not merely join an alliance of convenience against the British, but was an anti-Semite and a fascist both before and after the war. Quot- 

ing several pages from Crum’s book, she accused the mufti of being “responsible in large part for the Nazi program of extermination of 

the Jews.” Kirchwey’s vastly exaggerated narrative of the mufti’s responsibility for the Final Solution would grow in importance decades 

later when the Holocaust came to play a greater role in America’s relationship with Israel.⁶² 

Not all left-wing journalists who traveled to Palestine vilified Arabs as Nazis. On his first visit in 1945, I. F. Stone, a secular Jew, felt 

“immensely attracted” to the “one place in the world” where the “Jews seemed completely unafraid,” and he thrilled to the experiments 

in socialism and the “exhilarating atmosphere of a great common effort.” Nevertheless, he understood the Arab opposition to Zionism 

as a political response and not an expression of anti-Semitism. “The Arab does not hate the Jew,” he concluded, “but he fears being 

dominated by him.” He worried that Jewry was stuck in a “blind alley” as long as it demanded an exclusive Jewish state. To illustrate this 

blindness, Stone used a common American analogy, but with an uncommonly negative twist: “The closest parallel in American expe- 

rience is Puritanism, and Palestine is indeed much like the frontier in our own country, both in colonial times and the West.” He decried 

the defects in both settler societies, reflected in the Zionist “failure to take into account the feelings and aspirations of the Palestinian 

Arab.” Exhorting Jews not to be the beneficiaries of British imperialism, Stone endorsed Judah Magnes’s binational proposal for Jews 

and Arabs to “live together on an equal basis,” a “nobler and politically sounder goal than any narrow Jewish nationalism.”⁶³ 

Despite their different views of Arab opposition to Zionism, Kirchwey and Stone shared the perspective of Orientalist progressivism. 

Most American liberals who wrote about Palestine were enthralled by one development plan in particular, a proposal to create an irri- 

gation project in the Jordan River Valley. Walter Clay Lowdermilk, a soil conservation specialist in the Department of Agriculture, had 

first come up with the plan. In 1939, Lowdermilk led an expedition to survey land use in the Near East, North Africa, and Europe, to 

glean knowledge that could help Americans reverse the calamitous effects of the Dust Bowl. A Methodist from North Carolina, he wrote 

of his automobile trek across the Egyptian desert as a modern two-day reenactment of the forty-year journey of the ancient Jews wan- 

dering in the wilderness. In Palestine, he discovered a depleted land in decline from its fertile condition in biblical times and in antiq- 

uity, when it functioned as the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. To his delight, he discovered that Jewish colonists were applying 

scientific agricultural methods to restore these wasted lands. Lowdermilk proposed to exponentially increase the availability of arable 

land by means of a large-scale project called the Jordan Valley Authority (JVA), which was modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority, 

the signature New Deal public works project. Lowdermilk confidently predicted that his design would develop the entire region on both 

sides of the Jordan River; it would thus serve indigenous Arabs as well as making room for at least four million more Jewish 

immigrants.⁶⁴ 

The American Zionist Emergency Council was thrilled to discover in Lowdermilk an “objective, scientific, non-Jewish observer,” and 

they helped publish his 1944 book Palestine: Land of Promise. Filled with biblical and American tropes, the book grafts a scientific story 

of soil reclamation onto a racialized story of Arab degeneration and Jewish regeneration. Lowdermilk dates the beginning of the land’s 

decline in fertility to the seventh-century Arab invasion, claiming that “nowhere has the interrelation between the deterioration of a land 

and the degradation of its people been so clear as in Palestine.” The image of a desolate Holy Land had a long pedigree among Western 

travelers. Lowdermilk refurbished this image in his invention of what he called the Eleventh Commandment, which he broadcast on the 

radio in Jerusalem and used as the epigraph to his book: “Thou shalt inherit the holy earth as a faithful steward conserving its resources 

and productivity from generation to generation.” He praised Jewish settlers for fulfilling precepts to protect the land from erosion, over- 

grazing, and deforestation, and he warned that those who failed in this stewardship doomed their descendants to “live in poverty or per- 

ish from off the face of the earth.”⁶⁵ 

Lowdermilk’s book offered a technocratic fantasy that American progressives heartily embraced. The JVA project would use the 

American tools of scientific engineering to create new land to accommodate millions of Jews without disrupting Arab inhabitants, and it 

would quell resistance by providing the Arabs with the capacity for modern development. The Lowdermilk plan promised to resolve a 

contradiction at the heart of Zionist claims about indigenous Arabs: Jewish settlement would not interfere with the Arab way of life, even 

as it would modernize Arab society. It would allow development without domination. 

Lowdermilk’s writing re-created Palestine in the image of the American wilderness. “Colonization in America was like the colo- 

nization of Palestine,” he wrote, with one key difference. Settlers in Palestine had to cultivate old and impoverished soil rather than the 

“virgin land” of the New World. The combination of advanced methods already employed by enterprising Jewish colonists with New 

Deal–style public works would transform Palestine into a “new and bountiful land.”⁶⁶ 

The JVA appealed as a socioeconomic resolution to the intractable political conflict between Zionists and Arabs, mitigating liberals’ 

concerns about colonial dispossession. Henry Wallace credited Lowdermilk with introducing him to the justice of the Zionist cause. 

Lowdermilk had presented the scientific case for Palestine’s “absorptive capacity” before the Anglo-American Committee, and I. F. 

Stone concluded his Nation review of the committee report by locating the “key to the future” in the large-scale rehabilitation of the Jor- 

dan Valley to “benefit both Jews and Arabs.” Although the final report mentioned the JVA only briefly, as a remote possibility, Crum 

wrote an enthusiastic chapter about it in his book, in which he chastised the British members for skipping a meeting in Jerusalem with 

two American engineers who had worked on the TVA and the Boulder Dam. For him, American engineering promised to elevate Zion- 

ism beyond petty political conflicts between Jews and Arabs to a grand project of modernization. Kirchwey also showcased the JVA pro- 

posal in her memorandum to the United Nation in favor of partition.⁶⁷ 

At a time when America’s large-scale rebuilding efforts were shifting to the Marshall Plan in Europe, the Zionist project offered a 

potential reprise of the New Deal ethos. It reanimated the dream that public works could alleviate the misery of the “common man.” In 

the liberal version of Israel’s early development, Americans’ dreams of modernization doubled as nostalgia for their own recent past. As 

Eleanor Roosevelt put it in 1953, “the democratic socialism of the labor-Zionists might indeed become the model state that would pro- 

mote an international New Deal.”⁶⁸ 

Most liberals who embraced Zionism as a New Deal for the Middle East were internationalists who enthusiastically welcomed the 

founding of the United Nations. Their lofty hopes deflated, however, as the organization threatened to become a forum for managing 

big power rivalries rather than a more comprehensive world government. The UN vote on the partition of Palestine renewed their faith 

in the young organization as a symbol of international cooperation, despite the complicated process that went on behind the scenes. 

The lobbying was intense, the close vote had no legal binding, the outcome was contested, and the plan was ultimately unworkable 

without military force. None of these conditions detracted from the moral luster of internationalism, however. The fact that both the 

United States and the Soviet Union voted for partition buoyed the faith of some liberals in international cooperation across hardening 

Cold War lines. The memorandum Kirchwey submitted to the General Assembly linked the fate of Palestine to the “honor of the United 

Nations, its capacity to maintain peace, and its willingness to extend the area of human rights and dignity.”⁶⁹ 

The UN partition plan bestowed on the Jewish state an internationalist imprimatur. Even though the Arab nations vehemently op- 

posed partition and condemned what they saw as an unfair process, Americans could feel that they had supported a fair compromise 

that gave both Arabs and Jews less territory than they had demanded. Eleanor Roosevelt, who had once harbored reservations about the 

undemocratic nature of a Jewish state, believed that “the integrity of the United Nations and its internationalist principles” were at stake 

in upholding the decision. As a UN delegate, she later became annoyed with Truman for sidestepping the organization to recognize the 

State of Israel directly instead of going through the delegation. Henry Wallace wrote that partition would “strengthen the UN and in- 

crease the hopes of those who work for world peace” and that it would give stateless Jews representation in the world assembly, where 

they were outnumbered by Arab nations. Without correcting this imbalance, the UN, he warned, would fall into “moral bankruptcy.” On 

the day after the partition vote, the editors of the New York Times declared that the UN vote erased their long-standing “doubts con- 

cerning the wisdom of erecting a political state on a basis of religious faith.” The UN shifted this basis to a kind of international demo- 

cratic process, which seemed a more legitimate grounding than religious identity.⁷⁰ 

The vote for partition on November 29, 1947, ignited widespread violence in Palestine between Arabs and Jews. In response, the fol- 

lowing March, the United States introduced a proposal to rescind partition. Zionist supporters denounced this proposal, rallying 

around the imperative of upholding the authority of the UN. Sumner Welles, former undersecretary of state, wrote an entire book, We 

Need Not Fail (1948), to make this point. In high-flown rhetoric he warned that not only would the UN determine the future of Palestine, 

but the fate of Palestine would determine the future viability of the UN: “To those who believe that the future of humanity depends upon 

the achievement of collective security as envisaged in the Charter of the United Nations, the imposition of a just and lasting solution of 

the Palestine problem has long since seemed an imperative necessity.”⁷¹ Those who defended the integrity of the UN, however, felt no 

compunction about criticizing decisions that went against the new State of Israel’s most extreme demands. In September 1948, when 

the UN mediator in Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, called for the right of Arab refugees to return to their homes, The Nation criti- 

cized him for betraying the principles of the United Nations itself.⁷² 

American liberal narratives of Israel’s founding matched praise for the UN’s internationalism with denunciations of British imperi- 

alism. In this context, they understood Jewish paramilitary organizations to be fighting a revolutionary war against colonial rule in Pales- 

tine, akin to the one fought by Americans in 1776. “Just as the British stirred up the Iroquois to fight the colonists,” wrote Henry Wal- 

lace, “so today they are stirring up the Arabs.” At the same time, headlines from Palestine told of bombings and assassinations by 

underground Zionist militias, and editorials in U.S. newspapers raised concerns that Jewish terrorism was plunging Palestine into a spi- 

ral of escalating violence. Indeed, the figure of the terrorist threatened to overshadow that of the refugee in the international Zionist 

campaign for public opinion. In the United States, references to 1776 served to differentiate legitimate from illegitimate violence. In a 

Nation article, “Gangsters or Patriots,” I. F. Stone lambasted a New York Times characterization of the Haganah, the oldest and major 

military arm of the Jewish settlement, as “vigilante” in origin and as an “underground gangster group … which prides itself on its 

conservative terrorism.” Stone described the Haganah as “a democratic militia”—the “People’s Army of Palestine Jewry.” He praised the 

Haganah for its limited military objectives: to defy the British restriction on immigration and to “settle on forbidden land.” Stone distin- 

guished this group from two right-wing paramilitary groups, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, which were affiliated with the extremist Revi- 

sionist faction of the Zionist movement. To Stone, these groups were aberrations, not Zionists but “quasi-fascist terrorists,” even 

though they banded together with the Haganah to form the Jewish Resistance Movement. To distinguish anticolonial resistance from 

terrorism, Stone concluded that members of the Haganah “are no more gangsters than were the men of Concord or Lexington,” those 

iconic sites of the American Revolution.⁷³ 

In 1946, at the invitation of the Haganah, Stone became the first American journalist to accompany a ship that was transporting Jew- 

ish refugees from Europe to Palestine, in defiance of British Mandate restrictions. He wrote a popular series for the newspaper PM, 

filled with lively tales of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, wrenching portraits of loss and survival, and inspiring testimonies to the zeal for 

Eretz (the Hebrew term for the land of Israel). Stone vividly humanized the “displaced persons,” a term he rejected, describing it as a 

“model of detached and frigid understatement.” Later he gathered the popular series together into a well-received book, Underground to 

Palestine. 

Stone’s book included the major tropes of the narrative that progressive Americans told about Zionism in the years following World 

War II. His personal discovery of kinship with the Jews of Europe added poignancy: he realized that if his parents hadn’t emigrated from 

Russia to America, he might have gone to the gas chambers or ended up a “ragged and homeless” refugee. As he drew closer to his 

Jewish “brothers,” he recorded their plaintive Yiddish songs, which expressed longing for a world lost to catastrophic violence. At the 

same time, he narrated their journey in resolutely American tones, as a story of rebirth in the transformative voyage from Old World to 

New. In contrast to the “defeatist spirit” hovering over a shattered Europe, he was amazed by the “tremendous vitality” of the refugees 

and by their determination to build a new life in a new land.⁷⁴ In his book, Stone focused on the journey and not the arrival, chronicling 

the dream of a Jewish homeland uncluttered by Arab realities that disrupted these dreams—realities that he had noted in his earlier re- 

ports from Palestine. 

American analogies abound in his story. The chapter title “The Underground Railroad” linked the illegal immigration to the struggle 

against slavery. The society formed on board the ship mirrored the American melting pot, reminding Stone of the riotous diversity of 

people found at “Orchard Beach or Coney Island on a hot Sunday … packed with people in every possible costume.” As a microcosm of 

the new Jewish society, “linguistically the ship was a floating Babel.” The only common language that transcended national differences 

was the voyagers’ fervent desire to reach Palestine and start anew. As they severed their ties to a defeated Europe that had violently re- 

jected them, Stone saw them not as representing an ancient birthright but as creating a modern identity in a land of immigrants. He 

drew parallels with the capacious vision of the New World frontier as an open space of freedom, where Europeans of different cultures 

had been transformed into independent Americans. In his epilogue, Stone called on Jews and Christians alike to support the “so-called 

illegal immigration” to Palestine as a moral obligation. “And if those ships are illegal,” he concluded, “so was the Boston Tea Party.”⁷⁵ 

Stone presented the immigrants not as helpless victims, nor as people reclaiming a biblical heritage, but as revolutionaries in the 

American mold, fighting against the British Empire. In an enthusiastic review in The Nation, Bartley Crum wrote that support for a Jew- 

ish national home would “restore the moral prestige which the Western democracies have forfeited” in their association with imperi- 

alism, “for colonial peoples everywhere in the world are on the march toward freedom. In the vanguard of that march are the Jewish pio- 

neers.” Even though Stone and Crum disagreed about binationalism, to both of them, Zionism promised more than a particular na- 

tional homeland; it was an essential step in the global struggle for freedom.⁷⁶ 

Stone’s initial articles in PM about his clandestine voyage made him a darling of the Zionist movement, which showered him with in- 

vitations to speak and called on him to persuade unconvinced Jews of the justice of the cause. But his acclaim was short-lived, accord- 

ing to an essay he would publish thirty years later in the New York Review of Books, “Confessions of a Jewish Dissident.” As Stone re- 

called in that 1978 essay, while he was thinking about turning his PM articles into a book, friends in the Zionist movement, including “a 

partner in one of the topmost advertising firms in America,” took him out to lunch and “outlined a $25,000 advertising campaign to put 

the book across.” This proposal, however, had strings attached, as he remembered: “But then came the awkward moment. There was 

one sentence, I was told, just a sentence or so, that had to come out. I asked what it was. It was the sentence in which I suggested a bi- 

national solution, a state whose constitution would recognize, irrespective of shifting majorities, the presence of two peoples, two na- 

tions, Arab and Jewish.” Stone refused to take out the offending passage, and “that ended the luncheon, and in a way, the book. It was 

in effect boycotted.”⁷⁷ Stone did go on to publish Underground to Palestine, choosing the progressive publishing company Boni and 

Gaer, which advertised it with a ringing endorsement from Albert Einstein. 

Stone’s views of Israel went through many changes in those thirty years. At the time of his trip to Palestine, his attachment to bina- 

tionalism did not quench his enthusiasm for the Zionist project. A firmer commitment to a just solution for two peoples would emerge 

more strongly after 1967. But in 1948, neither he nor his fellow liberals predicted that the UN vote to partition Palestine would create a 

violent and irreparable rupture. They had imbued a nationalist movement with the moral urgency of a humanitarian mission, and they 

imagined that a Jewish state—whether alone or in federation with an Arab state in Palestine—would benefit and not dominate the Arabs 

living there. These liberal narratives blinded them to the violent dispossession that created a new refugee crisis and would lead to the 

revival of the Palestinian nationalist movement. 

 

The Presence of Absence 

 

In 1948, I. F. Stone and Freda Kirchwey both took trips to the new State of Israel while it was still at war. They expected to find a nation 

like the one they imagined, one that fulfilled their progressive visions of Zionism as antifascist, anti-imperialist, and internationalist. 

They were not prepared, however, for the massive displacement they witnessed as hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled from their 

homes. The UN partition vote in November 1947 ignited war between Jews and Arabs in Palestine five months before Israel declared its 

statehood in May 1948. 

Stone and Kirchwey visited the country at an early stage of nation-building and national myth-making, before dominant narratives 

about the war congealed. In Israeli—and American—collective memory, this period would become known as the War of Indepen- 

dence— war fought by the young country of Israel against hostile Arab nations backed by the British Empire. Palestinians would collec- 

tively remember the same period as the Nakba, the Arabic word for “catastrophe,” when at least three-quarters of a million Palestinians 

fled or were expelled from their homes. Stone and Kirchwey celebrated the new Jewish state in their journalism, but their accounts of the 

war were somewhat conflicted. Writing about the struggle that transformed Palestine into Israel, they built their reports to fit the precon- 

ceived liberal frameworks they brought with them. Their writing naturalized the absence of Arabs from the new nation, but the ghostly 

presence of Arabs in flight from Palestine haunted their prose. 

References to binationalism or even to “the presence of two peoples, two nations, Arab and Jewish” disappeared from I. F. Stone’s 

writing in 1948. He traveled to Israel in May to report for PM on Israel’s declaration of sovereignty and its ensuing war against the invad- 

ing Arab armies. He was surprised to discover that the war was over in a sense before it even began, because the goal of establishing a 

state had been achieved. “From a military point of view” he wrote, “the Jewish State was fully in existence the day it was declared. Parti- 

tion was an accomplished fact.” By the time the Jews declared the establishment of their state on May 14, he added, “of some 350,000 

Arabs in the Jewish area, 300,000 had fled.” Stone’s story is less about a battle between two armies than about a moral confrontation in 

which Jews held their ground, despite their meager arms, and Arabs ran away, without provocation.⁷⁸ 

Stone’s account would not quite square with the later, dominant narrative that Israel’s War of Independence did not start until it de- 

clared independence, after which it defended its fragile borders from the onslaught of overwhelming numbers of Arab armies. Nor 

would it fit the Israeli story that Palestinian Arabs ran away at the dictate of their leaders. By the end of January, Stone wrote, Palestinian 

Arab leaders had grown so alarmed by the departure of twenty thousand people from the country that they asked the neighboring na- 

tions “to refuse visas to these refugees and seal the borders against them.” But what caused them to leave? Although Stone reported on 

Jewish militias committing violence, and he also recorded the massive numbers of Arabs abandoning every major city, he did not 

present the two as being connected with each other. In Jaffa, he vividly described Irgun and Haganah fighters attacking neighborhoods 

throughout the city with armored cars and mortars, but as for the fifty thousand inhabitants, he wrote: “The city was encircled and its 

people began to flee. Jaffa became a ghost town.” In Jerusalem, he described Haganah men risking their lives block by block, but con- 

cluded: “In the meantime, virtually the entire Arab population of the city had fled.” In the north, “the Arabs began to flee.… So Safad fell 

to the Jews.” The closest he came to venturing an explanation was to speculate about the “unwillingness of the Palestinian population 

to put up a last-ditch fight.” Stone acknowledged that in the fighting after May 14, an additional “350,000 Palestinian Arabs fled east- 

ward and northward from the Israeli armies, in many cases abandoning homes and fields out of sheer fright without attack.” Yet he 

made no effort to understand what might have frightened them, if not an attack or the threat of one.⁷⁹ 

Stone collected his war reports into an attractive coffee-table book, This Is Israel, with photographs by the famed Robert Capa (and a 

preface by Bartley Crum), published in 1948. The overarching narrative of the book is about the birth of a nation, which overshadows its 

references to the Arab flight. Chapter titles form a sequence from “The Pains of Birth,” to “The Lusty Baby,” to “Wicked Midwives,” to 

“Israel Is Born.” Stone presents Israel as the rightful first-born child of the United Nations. The drama opens neither with the partition 

vote of 1947, nor with Israel’s Declaration of Independence in May 1948, but with diplomatic efforts to rescind partition on a “Black Fri- 

day” in March. The “wicked midwives” who threatened “to bring about a stillbirth” are the British Foreign Office, feudal Arab regimes, 

and the U.S. State Department, which was catering to oil companies, bankers, and anti-Soviet rivalry. The “lusty baby” thus had to give 

birth to itself, making its way against a world of reactionary forces composed of millions of Arabs and Muslims, the British Empire, and 

American capitalism. Stone does not show the Jews in Palestine primarily doing battle with the Arabs living there. It is the absence of 

these Arabs that makes possible the narrative of self-birth, “in which the Jews implement partition for themselves.” According to Stone, 

the Arabs who did fight played only a halfhearted supporting role for the British, who seemed “as unsuccessful in using the Arabs 

against the Jews as they were 150 years before in stirring up the Indians against the American colonies.” Stone furthermore evokes his 

prewar belief in anticolonial solidarity to posit that “many Arabs, like almost all the Jews, felt that this was a British War.” He attributes 

the vastly different outcomes for Jews and Arabs not to direct confrontation or to military advantage, but to the virile dedication of one 

and apathy of the other: “the Jews held and the Arabs failed because one people cared enough to die and the other didn’t.”⁸⁰ 

 

 

Palestinian residents evacuating from Jaffa in the face of advances by Israeli forces, May 7, 1948. 

 

Stone concludes the book with a progressive vision of the new nation as both a sanctuary for the survival of the Jewish people and a 

global “laboratory in the building of a new society.” He depicts Israel as the “little man” of nations, aligned with other “small powers 

strengthening the UN as their own protection against the division of the world into contending groups moving toward common catas- 

trophe.” Israel demonstrated the possibility of transcending the antinomies of the Cold War. Its “mixed economy, voluntary farm collec- 

tives, [and] network of cooperatives” all proved that “socialist devices and democratic method could be combined, social justice 

achieved without sacrifice of individual freedom.” Yet Stone’s harmonious vision of coexistence excluded the Arabs of Palestine. This Is 

Israel symbolically emptied the land of Palestinians and repopulated it with photographs of new Israelis creating a brave new world.⁸¹ 

Stone did not write about the Arab refugees until he returned to Israel in 1956. Throughout the war of 1948, however, a number of 

American journalists did link the plight of the Arab refugees to that of the Jewish refugees on common humanitarian grounds. In May, a 

New York Times headline read “Palestine Strife Creates DP Issue,” and in August, Time magazine called Arab refugees the “new D.P.s.” 

Journalists reported that the Arab refugees in makeshift camps in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and Jordan were living in even more dire condi- 

tions than were the refugees in Europe, that they were much more numerous than the Jewish DPs after World War II, and that fewer 

facilities and organizations were in place to aid them. In addition to comparing Arab refugees with the Jewish DPs, journalists also 

noted the irony that the solution to one crisis was creating the problem of the other, and they reported that Jewish refugees were moving 

into homes abandoned by those Arabs now living in refugee camps. The U.S. Congress debated whether to include Arab refugees in its 

deliberations on the immigration bill for displaced persons and rejected the idea. The United Nations called for their repatriation, which 

the U.S. government supported. But Israel made an early decision not to allow refugees to return, a decision the government would 

enact through a series of laws as well as by destroying more than four hundred Arab villages. This decision had to be explained to a 

world that had just supported the political establishment of the Jewish state on the humanitarian basis of creating a homeland for 

homeless refugees. One pro-Zionist American journalist bluntly expressed this dilemma in a letter to an Israeli diplomat: “In preventing 

Arab refugees from returning to their native land, the Jews may be subject to the same kind of criticism for which I and others have criti- 

cized intolerant Gentiles.… Now we have a situation in which the Jews have done to others what Hitler, in a sense, did to them!” On 

these grounds, some Americans urged Israel to accept the return of at least a portion of the Arab refugees.⁸² 

At the same time, others were working to discredit any parallels between the two groups. For these journalists, including Freda Kirch- 

wey, this meant treating the stories of Jewish DPs and Arab refugees as essentially different in kind and denying them any shared moral 

or political significance. At the end of 1948, Kirchwey wrote a five-part series for The Nation titled “Israel at First Glance.” She described 

her trip from the airport this way: “We drove to Tel Aviv through sharp moonlight that revealed plainly the little Arab villages by the 

roadside. Many had been shattered by gunfight. All were deserted.” She did not comment on this emptiness, but she reassured her lib- 

eral readers that although she was traveling with a government representative, that arrangement would not compromise her reports; 

rather, it would give her access to a “freely functioning intelligent information service run by people who respect the virtue of facts.”⁸³ 

Kirchwey visited the “silent and deserted” city of Jaffa to address the question “Why did the Arabs run?” She registered the momen- 

tousness of more than fifty thousand people fleeing from Palestine’s largest Arab city. And she briefly noted the attack and siege by the 

combined forces of the Irgun and Haganah at the end of April. Yet she did not mention the impact of this attack on the population. In- 

stead, she claimed that the mass flight from Jaffa, and other Palestinian cities and villages, seemed “to have little to do with the fighting 

itself.”⁸⁴ She drew a picture of the neighboring towns of Jaffa and Tel Aviv as “hostile Siamese twins,” sharing the poisoned blood of 

mutual hatred that had naturally exploded into war. During her visit, she witnessed the damage to one district in particular, where the 

houses were riddled with bullet and mortar holes and their interiors had been trashed by Israeli soldiers. But the destruction in Jaffa ap- 

peared to her to be an aberration; her press guide told her that although individual soldiers occasionally looted in defiance of orders, 

the authorities disciplined them. At stake for Kirchwey in the image of the humane soldier was her investment in the Jewish refugee as a 

universal symbol of noble suffering and the creation of the Jewish state as a moral triumph for civilization over fascism. 

By the time Kirchwey started considering answers to the question of why the Arabs fled, she had already ruled out Jewish soldiers as 

a cause. She ran through a list of possible motivations that drew on Orientalist images of Arab backwardness. And she portrayed Arab 

civilians as behaving differently from most civilians throughout world history, who supposedly stuck to their land while waiting for trou- 

bles to end. All her speculations led to the same implication, that Arab roots in the land were shallow; they must not have felt very at- 

tached to their homes if they willingly abandoned them. Kirchwey concluded that “a dozen reasons probably combined to create the 

vast epidemic of fear that drove some 500,000 Arabs out of Jewish Palestine into the already overcrowded ranks of homeless, penniless 

‘displaced persons.’ ” Characterizing fear as an epidemic turns attention away from the violent external sources of that fear, instead 

imagining it as an internal phenomenon by which an invisible agent infects individuals of the community.⁸⁵ 

By severing humanitarian needs from political rights in the case of Arab refugees, many liberals who had fused these together in their 

argument for a Jewish state came to view the refugees neither as collective victims of political processes—of violent expulsion or ethnic 

cleansing—nor as war refugees with an internationally mandated right to return home. Labeling displacement as individual hardship, 

rather than as an assault on a community, had the effect of denying Palestinian Arabs a claim to a collective solution. Kirchwey pre- 

sented the Israeli case against repatriation during the same month that the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, resolving that 

“refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable 

date.” Kirchwey reported that most Israelis felt no obligation to help the refugees return, because repatriation would saddle the new 

country with a “big and unassimilable minority.” She recorded a change of heart expressed by “one of the wisest men in Israel” (whom 

she doesn’t name). Although this man once had an “intimate association with Arabs,” he now believed that they had “forfeited all claim 

on us” by fleeing at the behest of their leaders. He advocated the resettlement of refugees in Arab nations, possibly through an “ex- 

change of populations,” in which Israel would “take all the Jews now in the Arab states.” Kirchwey acknowledged that some Israeli 

officials believed that “when peace comes, the refugee Arabs should be readmitted after careful screening,” but she came to agree with 

the other group, “who look upon the Arab exodus as an unexpected and enormous favor conferred upon Israel by its enemies,” a favor 

it had no obligation to return by readmitting the refugees.⁸⁶ 

Although Kirchwey rejected Israeli responsibility for the flight of the Arabs, she could not quite lay the question to rest during her 

travels. Like a Freudian return of the repressed, it came up indirectly in her visit to the village of Ein Karem in the hills outside 

Jerusalem, a trip she made with two Israeli press officers and Bartley Crum. Like many visitors, she was struck by the beauty of the vil- 

lage, where most of the buildings remained intact, including an old Franciscan church, even though its population had fled. She happily 

reported that a Spanish priest confirmed to Crum that the Jewish soldiers had behaved properly, protecting the holy sites as well as the 

abandoned and locked houses and the handful of remaining villagers living in the courtyard of an old church. This idyllic scene was 

suddenly interrupted by an agitated older Arab woman who ran up to the Arabic-speaking press officer and, “shaking her fist and ges- 

turing toward the door,” dragged him upstairs. There they saw a young woman shouting a complaint against an Israeli soldier. From the 

look of “fierce indignation” on her face, Kirchwey “could imagine nothing less serious than rape.” Hence, she expressed astonishment 

to hear that the women were only accusing the Israeli soldiers of stealing the lid of their Primus stove. The press officer explained that 

because of their poverty, “it means something to them. Besides, they probably feel uneasy here.”⁸⁷ 

Kirchwey did not probe the uneasiness of the Arab women any further, or her own. The story ostensibly showed how the worst that 

Israeli soldiers were capable of was petty theft. But the fact that Kirchwey herself brought up rape, even if only to dismiss it, means that 

it must have been on her mind. Traveling in Israel at the time, even with a press officer translating, she might well have heard stories 

from other journalists about rape and looting and the demolition of villages by Israeli soldiers.⁸⁸ An event she could not have missed 

hearing about was the massacre at Deir Yassin, a village in sight of the hilltop of Ein Karem. On April 9, 1948, troops from the Irgun and 

the Stern Gang murdered over one hundred villagers, including many women and children. There were also cases of rape and muti- 

lation. Every major American newspaper reported the massacre.⁸⁹ In Palestine, it instilled terror and panic in surrounding villages and 

beyond, and the news provoked many villagers to flee. When Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas visited Ein Karem in 1949, he 

inquired of two old women living there why three thousand inhabitants had abandoned their beautiful ancestral home during the war, 

even though the Israeli army had never attacked it. One of the women responded that right after Deir Yassin, “some thought all of us in 

Ein Karem might also be killed some night.”⁹⁰ 

Around the same time that Kirchwey visited Ein Karem, in December 1948, the massacre at Deir Yassin featured prominently in a let- 

ter to the New York Times by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and twenty-five other intellectuals, protesting a visit by Menachem Begin, 

former commander of the Irgun. The letter denounced the new political party he had founded as “closely akin in its organization, meth- 

ods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Deir Yassin provided their chief evidence. The letter ac- 

cused “terrorist bands” of attacking a peaceful village with no military objective, murdering civilians, and then forcing survivors “to pa- 

rade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.” In contrast to the outrage expressed by Jewish and Arab leaders, Begin’s “terrorists” 

proudly publicized the massacre and invited foreign correspondents to view the corpses. The letter states: “It is inconceivable that 

those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed of Mr. Begin’s political record, could add their names and sup- 

port to the movement he represents.”⁹¹ 

Kirchwey’s “Israel at First Glance” series for The Nation did not take note of Deir Yassin as possibly contributing to the “epidemic of 

fear” that made the Arabs flee. And Stone did not mention the massacre as one of the causes of the Arab flight underlying the fait 

accompli of statehood. This omission was not likely due to lack of knowledge, but to a discordance. The story of Deir Yassin clashed 

with their deeply held belief in the moral significance of the new Jewish state as a universal symbol of social justice. 

These preconceived narratives barred them from seeing the haunted landscape of the new nation, as another American journalist de- 

scribed it: “In holiday drives through the country, people saw whole Arab villages razed to the ground—insurance against the owners’ 

return.… True, they saw new immigrant cities.… But always in the background, ghostlike, was the crumbled Arab village, … a visual re- 

minder that the Arabs, too, had a Diaspora.”⁹² 

1

LANDS OF REFUGE

IN THE 1947 Oscar-winning film Gentleman’s Agreement, a journalist played by Gregory Peck decides to pose as a Jew to gather material for a story about anti-Semitism in America. At a cocktail party he awkwardly approaches a famous Jewish physicist, played by Sam Jaffe as a thinly veiled Albert Einstein, suggesting that the two hash over some ideas:

What sort of ideas?

Palestine, for instance. Zionism.

Which? Palestine as a refuge … or Zionism as a movement for a Jewish State?

The confusion between the two, more than anything.

If we agree there’s confusion, we can talk. We scientists love confusion.

Smiling at his earnest listener, the scientist rambles through a thicket of ideas about Jewish identity, questioning whether Jews constitute a religion, a race, or a nation. He pokes fun at the logic of each; to a secular Jew, religion seems irrelevant; to a scientist, race is unscientific; to a worldly refugee, nationalism is suspect. The confusion he sows about Jewish identity underscores the questions he first raised about the nature of Zionism.¹

This Hollywood banter reflected serious questions that were being asked about the meaning of Zionism after World War II. Some Americans viewed the movement to settle Jews in Palestine as a humanitarian cause, one that would provide refuge for the homeless survivors of Nazi extermination camps in Europe. Others viewed Zionism as a political movement to establish a sovereign state in Palestine for Jews from around the world. Many blurred the distinction between these two ideas, while others found them irreconcilable.

It is often presumed that the revelation of the Holocaust led Americans to embrace the Zionist cause. A Jewish state, however, was by no means a universally applauded or uncontested idea in the aftermath of the war. Sympathy for the suffering of European Jews did indeed motivate many Americans to support their emigration to Palestine. But humanitarian sympathy often foundered on the political notion of a state based on an exclusive ethnoreligious identity. This notion struck some Americans as counter to their democratic values, especially in a postwar world recovering from the devastating outcome of virulent nationalism. The idea of a Jewish state in a land inhabited by an Arab majority alienated others who understood democracy as majority rule. A religious basis for national identity appeared foreign to those who believed that citizenship—irrespective of creed—should provide the basis of national belonging. Such reservations and ambivalences were widely expressed in the mainstream press, within Jewish organizations, and in government commissions.

These debates about Zionism have virtually disappeared from the American memory of the founding of Israel. Historians have focused on the political struggle between representatives of Zionist organizations and State Department diplomats for the heart of President Harry Truman, viewing it as a conflict between domestic electoral pressure and national geopolitical interests. They have also highlighted the interplay of other geopolitical and domestic factors: big power rivalries, the founding of the United Nations, Arab nationalism, oil politics, the rebuilding of Europe, and the status of Jews in the United States.²

But for the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine to achieve widespread acceptance, more was needed—the idea had to be Americanized. Its proponents attributed New World meanings, symbols, and mythologies to a European movement to establish a Jewish polity in the Arab Middle East. They drew parallels between Mayflower Pilgrims and Jewish pioneers in the familiar landscape of the biblical Promised Land, and they presented Zionist settlement as enacting American ideas of modern development. This project of Americanization took on particular urgency in the post–World War II effort to establish a Jewish state, and it had to grapple with all the ways in which Zionism appeared misaligned with American values.

In the 1940s, American liberals enthusiastically championed this project. The most powerful arguments on behalf of Zionism appeared in left-leaning publications, such as The Nation, the New Republic, and PM—not in the New York Times, Commentary Magazine, or Life, all of which took skeptical or noncommittal stances toward the Zionist movement. Liberal journalists, activists, and politicians fused humanitarian and political understandings to create an influential and enduring narrative of Zionism as a modern progressive force for universal good. Their way of narrating the founding of Israel was not a historical inevitability, but rather the outcome of a struggle in which the stories we are so familiar with today prevailed over others.

Contested Narratives

The United States first confronted the question of Palestine in the displaced persons camps of occupied Germany. At the end of the war, the army was holding tens of thousands of Jewish concentration camp survivors in the American sector. Haunting images of gaunt refugees behind barbed wire—some still wearing prison garb—filled newspapers and newsreels for months after the liberation of the death camps. President Truman appointed attorney Earl Harrison to lead an investigation, and his report on the crowded, unsanitary, and dismal conditions in the camps concluded chillingly: We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. Harrison recommended that one hundred thousand displaced persons (DPs) be permitted to settle in Palestine immediately. Truman agreed and called on Great Britain to end its restrictions on Jewish immigration, which had been in effect since 1939.³

British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin responded by inviting Truman to convene a joint commission to investigate the impact of mass immigration on the inhabitants of Palestine and its governance. Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Britain had ruled Palestine under a mandate endorsed by the League of Nations in 1922. The mandate incorporated the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which expressed British favor for the establishment in Palestine of a national home of the Jewish people with the caveat that "nothing shall

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