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george marshall: the beginner's guide for cruising 1964

Our new book tracks the growth over nearly eight decades, of the most powerful foreign policy lobby in US history

Ian Lustick and Eli Clifton for The Guardian:

In 1948, with war raging in Palestine, Harry Truman found himself trapped. On one side were Zionist lobbyists and the president’s domestic political advisers, who were urging him to support the establishment of a Jewish state in as much of Palestine as possible. On the other were his top foreign policy and national security officials, led by the secretary of state, George C Marshall. Their unanimous recommendation was to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, which they believed would trigger war in the Middle East and endanger the future of US relations with the Arab and Muslim world. With the exception perhaps of George Washington, no diplomatic or military leader in American history had a reputation for patriotic virtue and skilled devotion to duty comparable to that of Marshall. Truman was in awe of the secretary of state, who, as chief of staff of the US armed forces, had been hailed by Winston Churchill as “the true organizer of victory” in the second world war. After the war, it had been Marshall who launched the plan named after him to rebuild Europe.

In the mid-1940s, Marshall pushed quietly but steadily against the Zionist movement’s proposals to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. He was concerned that American support would open opportunities for the Soviet Union to exploit Arab anger, put Middle Eastern oil supplies at risk in the event of a war between the Soviet Union and the United States, and require the deployment of unavailable American troops to prevent bloodshed and instability in Palestine. These were, indeed, the strongly held views of virtually all of Truman’s most important military and foreign policy advisers. Truman was personally and deeply moved by the suffering of Jewish survivors of the Nazi “Final Solution”, but also irritated by and at times furious with the constant hectoring to which he was subjected by campaigners for recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine, including the World Zionist Organization and a host of other Jewish delegations, friends and politicians. Despite his personal exasperation, he could not ignore them. Coming in an election year that would pit him against Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, pressures from the Zionist lobby forced him into an excruciating and embarrassing position.

With Palestine engulfed by civil war, Arab states threatening to invade and the last British soldiers about to leave the country, Truman called a meeting of his top advisers on 12 May 1948. According to Marshall’s own account of the meeting, he warned Truman against adopting the policy strongly advanced by Clark Clifford, his main political adviser, to recognize the state of Israel before it was established. Such a move, according to Marshall, would be a “transparent dodge to win a few votes”, he said, leaving the “great dignity of the office of the President … seriously diminished”. Marshall declared he would not personally be able to vote for Truman should he bow to political pressure on the issue. A shaken Truman closed the meeting by saying he agreed with Marshall. However, within two days, exquisitely sensitive to the tenuousness of his hold on the presidency and the power of Zionist sympathizers to throw New York’s electoral votes to the Republicans, he ordered that the US recognize Israel.

Today, the influence of the groups loosely known as the Israel lobby has only become more powerful. Truman’s bind – caught between his sense of the national interest and the domestic political price of defying a powerful lobby – was something that, in the decades to come, president after president would experience. To fast forward: Donald Trump’s decision to go to war on Iran earlier this year came after a sustained campaign by Israel to convince the US to join the disastrous operation. It also came in defiance of several of his top advisers, as well as the 45% of Republicans who hold an unfavorable view of Israel. That decision may be most quickly explained as yet another example of the erratic policymaking that define Trump’s two terms as president. But a closer examination of the experience of several of his predecessors reveals that this presidential decision is more the rule than the exception.

The fact is that from Truman to Trump, most American presidents have caved to the demands of Israel and its advocates. Driven by the fear of domestic political defeats, presidents have regularly rejected or abandoned foreign policies that both they and their most senior advisers believed were in the best interests of the US and at the expense of making meaningful progress in bringing a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our new book, Israel’s Lobby, tracks the growth over decades of the most powerful foreign policy lobby in American history. Composed of a panoply of organizations, groups and individuals who advocate American policies that explicitly favor the interests of Israel, the lobby was nurtured – and has been encouraged and guided – by Israeli governments. Exploiting the fact that most voters were ignorant or uncaring on the issue, the lobby used enormous resources and concentrated attention to punish or reward politicians at every level depending on their willingness to follow lobby instructions.

[...] Indeed, Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter. The lobby hoped Carter, who won 71% of the Jewish vote, would abandon aspirations for a comprehensive Middle East peace, but he was quick to disappoint. The president set his sights on a peace treaty resolving the core issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict. With high poll numbers and an American public that seemed ready for a commonsense, problem-solving president, Carter voiced his belief in March 1977 in the need for a “Palestinian homeland” as a key feature of the Middle East peace he wished to achieve. The pro-Israel lobby immediately mobilized against Carter’s peace initiative. In a closely held 50-page memorandum for the president in early June, Carter’s senior adviser on domestic political affairs warned him that he would suffer serious consequences, including risks of failing to receive the renomination of his party, as a result of lobby opposition to his public consideration of a Palestinian homeland. Undeterred, Carter offered direct criticism of what he described in an Oval Office meeting as the prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s increasingly inflexible positions. His differences with Menachem Begin, who became Israel’s prime minister in May 1977, were even sharper. Meanwhile Carter began intensive communications with Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian leaders.

[...] It is likely, 13 years later, that President George HW Bush felt just as Carter must have felt when, faced with the Israel lobby’s ferocious opposition to his Arab-Israeli peace initiatives, he made public his frustration with its influence. In a failed effort to boost the prospects for the upcoming Madrid peace conference, Bush suspended US loan guarantees amounting to what Israel was spending on housing in occupied territories and faced ferocious opposition from the Israel lobby for doing so. In a press conference he described his exasperation. “We’re up against very strong and effective, sometimes, groups that go up to [Capitol Hill]” Bush said. “I heard today there was something like a thousand lobbyists on the hill working the other side of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy down here doing it.”

The lobby’s ability to thwart presidential peace initiatives was on particularly powerful display again during the Obama administration. No president before him had entered the White House with such detailed knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, such a record of personal engagement with both Jews and Palestinians, and such a sustained commitment to closer American relations with Arabs and Muslims. Fully embracing a “two-state solution” to the problem, he launched a high-profile peace initiative to be jumpstarted by a full-scale Israeli freeze on West Bank settlements.

But a storm of outrage in Israel and among leaders of Israel’s lobby in the United States, and the public feud that erupted between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, proved more costly to the former than the latter. Obama quickly reversed course, in effect replacing his peace process envoy George Mitchell, who was closely identified as friendly to the Palestinians, with Dennis Ross, a lobby insider, whose advice to ditch the effort altogether the president quickly implemented. Instead of pressing Israel to stop settlements, Obama made a personal call to Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, threatening to pull $450m in American aid to the Palestinians if Abbas did not withdraw an anti-settlement resolution put forward at the UN security council. In Obama’s address to the United Nations, general assembly, in the first year of his second term, he shifted dramatically from language used in his previous UN speeches. Instead of criticizing Israeli settlements and pressing for a two-state solution, he identified himself with Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism, opposed any UN action contrary to Israel’s insistence on direct negotiations between the parties, and condemned challenges to the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.

[...] More recently, in Joe Biden, the Israel lobby found a president who genuinely believed the Jewish state deserved the “special relationship” with the US. The firmness of that commitment was put to the test by Israel’s response to the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Socialized into accepting the lobby’s mantra that any “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem would encourage Arab intransigence, and remembering the political punishment Obama received for showing “tough love” to the Israelis, Biden, quashed all recommendations from his top advisers to do something meaningful to stop the Israeli onslaught on Gazan Palestinians. When he did make limited complaints about excessive civilian casualties and implemented minor delays in American resupply of Israeli armaments, the Republican Jewish Coalition responded by slamming the administration for inserting daylight into the US-Israel relationship, while Aipac sent a detailed memorandum to members of Congress defending Israeli actions as limited, necessary and designed to reduce civilian casualties.

Ian Lustick and Eli Clifton, co-writers of the soon-to-be released Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, wrote in The Guardian about the role the pro-Israel lobby’s influencing of Presidents of both parties starting from Harry Truman.

#Israel Lobby #US/Israel Relations #Foreign Policy #Ian Lustick #Eli Clifton #The Guardian #Opinion #Israel’s Lobby: America In The Grip Of A Foreign Power #George Marshall #Palestine #Clark Clifford #Jimmy Carter #Harry Truman #American History #Middle East #West Asia #George H.W. Bush #Barack Obama #Joe Biden

Hi Mr. deadpresidents! I'm in high school and have to write a paper about a person from WW2 but want to choose someone different because I know everyone will pick FDR or Churchill or Hitler, any suggestions? thank you!

In my opinion, the person who never gets enough credit is General George C. Marshall, who was the U.S. Army Chief of Staff during World War II and remembered as the "organizer of victory." Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, de Gaulle, Truman, Eisenhower, and many others considered General Marshall to be the greatest man they ever knew. Stalin once said "I would trust General Marshall with my life." STALIN said that! About an American General! Stalin didn't even trust his children! Marshall was so indispensable to FDR that, instead of appointing him to command the Supreme Allied forces in Europe, the President kept Marshall in the United States to be the overall organizer of the immense logistical challenges required to fight a true world war. And, after being one of the most important reasons for the Allied military victory during the war, Marshall ended up earning a Nobel Peace Prize following the war for his Marshall Plan relief work to help rebuild Europe. He is one of the great Americans in our history -- there should be a national monument honoring him in Washington.

If you want to really pick someone out of left field, I've always been fascinating by King Haakon VII of Norway. His contribution wasn't nearly as active or vital as General Marshall's (or pretty much any of the major figures of World War II). But his refusal to accept the puppet regime installed in Norway when the Nazis occupied his country turned him into a very important symbol that the Norwegian resistance used as a foundation against the Nazis. When King Haakon refused to recognize Quisling (who was such a tool of the Nazis that his name has become synonymous with puppet rulers), he offered to abdicate if that was what the true government of Norway wished, but they supported him. The Nazis were determined to capture the King and the royal family, so they had to form a government-in-exile in England, but the Norwegian people rallied around him and began their resistance. Even the King's "H7" monogram became a symbol of the resistance. There's a good Norwegian-language movie called The King's Choice about his story, which is actually available on YouTube right now for free with ads.