Tag Archives: Harry Truman

The Rebirth of a Nation

29 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Israel, Middle East, Opinion and Response

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Panama…yes; Paraguay…yes; Peru…yes. As Philippines voted next in favour of the partition plan for Palestine, cheering broke out across the yishuv in the British mandate of Palestine. It was late in the evening as the news from Flushing Meadows crackled over radio sets in the Middle East. In essence, the British had announced their intention to abandon the Mandate and it was up to the locals to pick up the scraps of civilisation from the mess left behind. On November 29, 1947, United Nations Resolution 181 created legal ground for the formation of a Jewish state partitioned from the Arab domains of the region. The State of Israel had not been declared yet – that would have to wait until May 14, 1948 – or the 5th of Iyar if you want to get all Jewish about it – the day before the British mandate formally ended.

Seventy years hence, there is an air of inevitability around the story of the partition. Israel’s march from strength to strength makes the tense moments of its past seem like mere signposts to the present generation. However, the United Nations resolution came in the midst of tumult among even Zionist ranks, not all of whom were supportive of the partition plan. The Levant was a powder keg, something that would become customary over the decades. International opinion had been against the Jews and flipped at the last minute with some impressive Zionist diplomacy and an inexplicable Soviet change of heart. Although the United States has long been presented as Israel’s saviour at this crucial moment, the Soviet Union (and its four satellite nations) had a larger role to play than many realise.

In the immediate aftermath of the Jewish diplomatic victory in New York, riots broke out across Palestine. Angry Arab mobs attacked Jewish shops and residences to punish them for the partition plan and to dissuade them from further political audacity. The formal war would come later, the day after the declaration of the State of Israel, when the fledgling Jewish state’s six Arab neighbours would invade it. In the meantime, however, Jewish blood flowed in a frenzy of disorganised violence. In a single week in March 1948, over a 100 Jews were killed.

Zionist leaders had predicted such a reaction and had prepared themselves well. In their experience, the British government could not be trusted – in the past, they had stood by as Arabs massacred Jews and even intervened to disarm Jewish defence groups to place them at the mercy of the Arabs. In April 1947, the Haganah had little more than 10,000 rifles and less than 3,000 machine guns of poor quality and varying calibers; by independence, David Ben Gurion had almost tripled the Jewish arsenal and even added a couple of dozen Messerschmitts left over from World War II. In addition, a fund-raising drive by Golda Meir in the United States had garnered $50 million for the new Jewish state.

The plan to “save Israel” had been put into play since at least July 1945, when Ben Gurion met with 18 millionaires at the residence of his friend, Rudolph Sonnenborn, in New York. Under the guise of shipping medical equipment to hospitals, the Sonnenborn Institute would collect funds to purchase arms for the future Israeli military. Ben Gurion was fully aware that Washington’s feelings on Zionism were lukewarm at best and he was willing to evict the British, weakened by war, from Palestine by force if necessary. London, however, announced in February 1947 that it would leave Palestine by May 15 of the following year.

When war did break out six months after the passing of UN Resolution 181, the Western powers imposed a strict embargo against arms to the region. This seemingly fair step only helped the Arabs, who not only had established armies but also had British officers to consult with and train under. Israel had to use some clever tricks to procure arms: in one case, a sympathiser posed as a Hollywood producer interested in making a war film and smuggled all the props of his set to Israel. The bulk of the assistance came, as several of the founding generation attested, from the Soviet bloc. A vital purchase from Czechoslovakia, obviously approved by Moscow, saw Israel through the darkest days of its short existence.

The British Mandate of Palestine The separation of Jordan in April 1921 Israel, before and after the War of Independence

Diplomatically too, as Martin Kramer has recently written in Mosaic, the creation of Israel was forged largely through unexpected Soviet support. Zionist leaders such as Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann had long argued the Jewish case at the court of the Red tsar, particularly through the Soviet envoy to Britain, Ivan Maisky, but lack of sufficient access to Soviet archives has kept still kept a mystery the reason Stalin eventually allowed the vote to play out as it did. Despite their egalitarian dystopia, the Bolsheviks were only marginally less anti-Semitic than the prevailing currents in Europe. The vote, therefore, was a total surprise even to experienced Eastern Europe hands among the Zionists.

The United States’ role in the creation of Israel has been hyped beyond compare, Harry Truman even anointing himself a modern-day Cyrus, after the Persian emperor who liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity, in a November 1953 speech to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Yet like the British Balfour Declaration, a seemingly pivotal moment in Jewish history tarnished by its context of the White Paper of 1922, the US vote in favour of the creation of Israel was followed by a declaration that partition was impossible to implement and the British mandate be temporarily passed on to the United Nations. Even on the eve of Israeli independence, US diplomats were still busy warning Zionist leaders to defer from statehood.

Besides the superpowers, the international community – perhaps with some transient shame for the Shoah – voted overwhelmingly in favour of the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state. Only Cuba, Greece, and India, along with Muslim countries, voted against partition. The final tally was 33 countries for the resolution, and 13 against, with 10 abstentions and one absence.

The military and political dimensions aside, Resolution 181 was not a completely kosher proposal even in its terms. The Arabs resented it for obvious reasons – they saw European Jews as usurpers of the land, if not a theologically inferior people – and there was no way the holy sites of the Scriptures could be surrendered to them. There was also some power play involved in the Arab position: Haj Amin al-Husseini aspired to build an independent Palestinian state out of the partition, while King Abdullah of Transjordan (Jordan attained its modern name in 1949) sought to annex the remains of Mandatory Palestine into the rest, which was his own kingdom. To this end, the king even negotiated in secret with Jewish representatives to foil Husseini’s bid for a separate state.

A not insignificant minority of Zionists were also unhappy with the partition plan. They argued that the mandate had already been partitioned once in April 1921 when Arab Jordan was created from 77 percent of the Mandatory domains; why should there be a further partition to deprive the Jews of even the little that was left? If the Arabs wanted a state out of the Mandate, they already had one in Jordan.

The Revisionist Zionists, led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky until his demise in 1942, had argued that Israel should extend across the river Jordan such that all the Biblical holy sites fell in the Holy Land. The Smol Ha’Yarden, a poem by Jabotinsky that later became one of Betar’s famous songs, encapsulated this ideal extent of Israel’s borders as that of the British Mandate. Several Zionists were unwilling to give up Judea and Samaria, what is today more commonly known as the West Bank, because it holds so many of their religious places.

This was not an uncommon view even among those who were more receptive to Resolution 181. Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, pleaded with his colleagues that they accept the UN resolution as it would constitute a formal international endorsement – for the first time – of the Jewish state. If the boundaries of the plan were not to their liking, he told them, they could later be redrawn. It was with careful thought, thus, that the boundaries of Israel were not announced in the declaration of independence. In fact, one of Ben Gurion’s biographers, Michael Bar Zohar, reveals that the prime minister clung to this notion even during the Suez Crisis of 1956, withdrawing Israeli forces from Sinai with great reluctance and only after repeated pressure from US president Dwight Eisenhower. The southern boundary was finally set, despite fierce domestic disapproval, only in 1979 during the Camp David accords between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.

Between the in-house Zionist squabbles, the Arab machinations, and the international warm-up to the Cold War, a narrow window of opportunity opened for a brief moment for the creation of Israel and was quickly shut. The political tumult of the past is obscured in the light of Israel’s military, economic, and political successes. Almost two thousand years after the last Jewish king – Herod Agrippa II –  had ruled, Israel would rise up again. And just as when it had fallen last, it had no allies but those it might be lent it for a fleeting moment by time and fate. Like Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; like Maisky, Andrei Gromyko, and, perhaps, Stalin.

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Bungling in the Himalayas

25 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by in Book Review

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tibetHalper, Lezlee Brown, and Stefan Halper. Tibet: An Unfinished Story. London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 2014. 367 pp.

In the broader story of freedom and liberty, the case of Tibet is seldom heard. Headlines and activists scream about the Syrians, Rohingyas, Kurds, and even the Yezidis but one of the greatest acts of geographical and political usurpation and cultural and demographic genocide of the Cold War era – Tibet – gets only an occasional mention in the international press. Tibet: An Unfinished Story by Lezlee Brown Halper and Stefan Halper impressively details the sad history of the Roof of the World from its earliest mentions in the West to its conquest, annexation, and subjugation by China, to eventual relegation to oblivion by the world community.

Ostensibly starting with Herodotus’ mention of Tibetan gold prospecting ants, the Halpers quickly move through the mythologising of Tibet in the 18th and 19th centuries by the British – no doubt, due to difficulty of access and a curious Oriental warp Westerners have always displayed – and German interest in the early 20th century in locating the Aryan homeland in Tibet to the critical years after the end of World War II when Tibet became one of the first pawns in the Cold War.

The book is impressive in its use of archives from the United States, Britain, and available Chinese and Indian sources. The basic premise of Tibet is that the country was abandoned – betrayed? – by India, the United States, and Britain in its hour of need against China. Not only did Tibet not receive much military support, it found little bilateral political assistance or even in the United Nations. Meanwhile, Mao systematically crushed the Tibetans. While this argument carries some weight, it does not  consider the Tibetan role in their own fortunes nor does it account for the material realities of the late 1940s.

The end of World War II saw the rise of Soviet power and the United States at once committed to fighting the spread of communism around the world. Tibet was a point of contact between the Communist bloc and the non-Communist world. However, Washington found itself restrained in its support for Tibet by several factors. One, the British, who had ruled over India and indirectly extended influence into Tibet after a military expedition in 1903 – in an effort to protect the jewel in the Crown, of course, against imagined Russian designs – accepted Chinese suzerainty over the Himalayan state though not sovereignty. This was a different position from that of George Curzon, who had stated in the British parliament that Chinese claims on Tibet were a constitutional fiction. Two, the Himalayan terrain was difficult to access even with aircraft. During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services had tried to supply the Chinese Nationalists against Japan (and the Communists) via Tibet but the mountains proved a difficult obstacle for early aircraft and Lhasa was unwilling o cooperate. Three, Jawaharlal Nehru did not want the Cold War to come to Asia. The Indian prime minister was not open to the idea of a new imperial power – that is how Nehru saw the United States’ actions in Europe and elsewhere – establishing a presence in India; furthermore, he was afraid that a substantial US presence would antagonise the Chinese into hostile relations with India who had to live with China even after the Americans left. And finally, four, despite an ongoing war between the Communists and the Nationalists in China, both sides agreed that Tibet was indisputably Chinese. Chinese Nationalists thus became an obstacle in US policy towards Tibet as well.

The United States did conduct covert operations in Tibet. This was done with Pakistani help rather than Indian, resulting in greater complications in the India-US-Pakistan triangle. These operations, as US intelligence had already foreseen, did not amount to much in the ultimate reckoning.

The Halpers put a fair share of the blame for the loss of Tibet on Nehru. They fail to consider, however, that there was little that Delhi could do in terms of providing military or economic support to the Tibetans. India was a new republic that was itself going through the pangs of Partition and faced a war in Kashmir after its twin, Pakistan, had instigated Pashtun tribesmen into invading the province. A poor economic and industrial base meant that India’s only realistic contribution to a Tibetan struggle would be to provide the geography for Western powers to fight. Additionally, Nehru was sceptical of Washington’s resolve: he did not believe that Harry Truman was as committed to the cause of an independent Tibet as he was to Western Europe. He was right in his suspicions: in a May 1950 meeting with his British counterparts, Dean Acheson had explained that the US State Department did not see the possibility of resisting the Chinese Communists in Tibet. However, “little covert assistance in the form of specialised military instruction and supplies to the Tibetans might make a Chinese military expedition prohibitively costly.” In other words, Washington’s aim was not to protect Tibet to use the country to harass the Chinese Communists. Nehru did not believe that this low bar sufficed Indian intervention.

The cynicism of the United States and the idealism of Nehru’s pan-Asian dream were pertly responsible for Tibet’s demise. The lion’s share of the blame, however, must rest with the Tibetan leadership. After the death of Thubten Gyatso, the 13th Dalai Lama, the country was wracked by a struggle for succession. A regent – Thubten Jamphel Yeshe Gyaltsen, of the Reting monastery – was put in place until the next Dalai Lama could be anointed but he was known for his fondness of beautiful women and other habits unbecoming of a spiritual leader of the Tibetans. He was replaced by Taktra Rimpoche in 1941 but led a failed uprising against his successor in 1944. The infighting among the Tibetan elites, monasteries, and the Kashag – Tibet’s governing council – diluted Tibet’s voice to the outside world. Some sections were content with autonomy under Beijing while others wanted complete independence.

To compound problems, the Tibetans were not yet educated in the ways of modern statecraft. They did not take the Chinese threat seriously, seeing them as merely the descendants of Szechuan warlords and reasoned that they could be easily defeated. When China finally did invade, the Tibetan National Assembly telegraphed Mao Zedong, “This is a sacred place of Buddhism, which does not allow armed force from foreign countries. This type of bullying activity shall not happen…. We hope you order all border troops not to exercise force against Tibetan soldiers and immediately withdraw to their original locations.” Needless to say, the message went unanswered by Mao. Perhaps the worst example of Tibetan incompetence is the incident at the fall of Chamdo, an important city in eastern Tibet on the route to Lhasa. As Chinese soldiers neared the city, the governor, Ngabo Jigme, frantically sent messages to Lhasa asking for instructions. After several messages went by without any response, his aide-de-camp finally got through to the Kashag aide-de-camp only to be told, “Right now is the period of the Kashags’ picnic and they are all participating in this. Your telegrams are being deoded and then we will send you a reply.” The aide’s angry and frustrated response, ‘skyag pa’i gling kha!, is quite understandable.

Tibet meticulously explains the key players in the sad saga. The authors analyse the political trends in Indian non-alignment politics and superpower rivalry in detail. Tibetan idiosyncrasies are not entirely left out. The Halpers relate one instance when Nehru yelled at Tenzin Gyatso, the new Dalai Lama, upon being told that Tibet must have independence. “That is not possible!” the Indian prime minister exploded, “You say you want independence and in the same breath you say you do not want bloodshed. Impossible!” At first glance a hypocritical outburst from a man who had, with Mohandas Gandhi, led India to independence through non-violent means, careful and objective consideration reveals that Nehru did not believe that non-violence was possible with all enemies.

The Halpers point to Nehru’s poor council on China – VK Menon and KM Pannikar have been lambasted by Indian scholars for their excessively anti-imperialist and pro-China perspectives, attitudes that landed India in trouble in 1962. Between Nehru’s approach to Indian national interests and the jaundiced views of his advisors, Tibet stood little chance. However, recent scholarship has also revealed that India’s first prime minister was concerned about the threat China posed to India. He expressed such thoughts privately to a select group of confidantes while publicly proclaiming brotherhood with the Chinese. To be fair, Tibet is not about Indian foreign policy or Nehru but about how actions, rather than thoughts, played out in Tibet’s story.

Tibet is an excellent read for any reader wishing to acquaint himself with the general contours of Tibetan history in the mid-twentieth century. Its placing of blame, however, seems to come from a sense of anguish – that all lovers of Tibet share – than the scholarship done even by its own authors. Particularly commendable is the the way the Halpers have shown how the different strands of the Tibetan issue – actors, political compulsions, material restrictions – all interlinked to a final tragic outcome.