Introducing "Dying to Forget"

DYING TO FORGET Oil, Power, Palestine, & the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East IRENE L. GENDZIER

Introduction Open Secrets

GAZA 2014 AND 1948

I completed this study in 2014 in the midst of the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Those familiar with the distant origins of the present conflict will recall the events of 1948.1 As in past Israeli invasions of Gaza, in 2008 and 2012, the 2014 war in Gaza was enabled by U.S. support. In the summer of 2014, the National Security Agency (NSA) disclosed that “Israeli aggression would be impossible without the constant, lavish support and protection of the U.S. government, which is anything but a neutral, peacebrokering party in these attacks.”2 Subsequent disclosures in the Wall Street Journal exposed the direct link between Israel and the Pentagon, thus bringing to light a relationship that embarrassed the White House, which did not contest it.3 The link between the events of 1948, when Israel was established, and the latest war in Gaza was highlighted by William R. Polk, former U.S. diplomat and author. As Polk wrote in August 2014, “the events of today were preordained,” adding that “only if we understand the history can we hope to help solve this very complex, often shameful and sometimes dangerous problem.”4 Gaza was directly affected by that history in 1948–1949, when its population was vastly increased as a result of the influx of Palestinian refugees.5

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The problem transcends Gaza, however, as journalist Rami Khoury pointed out in the fall of 2012 when he asserted that as long as the crime of dispossession and refugeehood that was committed against the Palestinian people in 1947–48 is not redressed through a peaceful and just negotiation that satisfies the legitimate rights of both sides, we will continue to see enhancements in both the determination and the capabilities of Palestinian fighters—as has been the case since the 1930s.6

The connection between Gaza and 1948 was made by other critics as well, including Donna Nevel, who pointed out that “the heart of the problem is not Hamas or who the Palestinian leadership is, it is the Israeli occupation, beginning with the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land in 1948 (what the Palestinians term the Nakba or ‘catastrophe’).”7 The same view was echoed by journalist Steven Erlanger in the New York Times on August 16, 2014, when he reported that “Israelis can feel as stuck, in different ways, as the Palestinians themselves.

Because of course this is really just another round in the unresolved Arab-Israeli war of 1948–49.”8 What these varied commentaries left unsaid was that this was but another chapter in U.S. policy in this region. By 1948–49, it was the United States that felt “stuck,” as it confronted its failed efforts to resolve the very same conflict. U.S. officials engaged in the Palestine question understood then, as now, that they needed to address the core issues of the conflict, including the origin and repatriation of Palestinian refugees, the absence of internationally accepted boundaries, and the fate of Jerusalem.

Despite its avowed support for consensus between Arab and Jew as the essential prerequisite for a resolution of the conflict in Palestine, U.S. policy subverted such a goal. Washington’s support for Israel’s policy of “transfer,” which meant the coercive expulsion of Palestinians from their towns and villages to ensure a largely homogeneous Jewish population, was incompatible with this objective. It intensified the refugee problem that the United States repeatedly criticized, as it repeatedly announced its support for United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 194 and its recommendation for the repatriation of Palestinian refugees. xiv

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This was not the product of caution or confusion. There was no conspiracy involved. There was no wavering at the top. The United States was not ambivalent about what policies to pursue. On the contrary, the decisions to stop pressuring Israel to take action on the refugee question and to lay low in opposing Israel’s territorial expansion were unmistakable signs that there was a shift in priorities.

U.S. officials recognized the Israeli reliance on force to expand and control territory. They appreciated the political efficiency of the Israeli leadership and its military superiority as compared to that of surrounding Arab states. On the basis of such developments, and, notably, in response to Israel’s ability to alter the regional balance of power, Washington calculated that Israel could be useful in the protection of U.S. regional interests. While successive U.S. administrations continued to identify the core issues in the conflict in terms of refugee repatriation, territorial expansion, and Jerusalem’s status, they did not move to implement changes. On the contrary, the United States deferred to Israeli policy while insisting on the need for Arab-Jewish consensus.

More than sixty years later, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry attempted yet another effort to broker peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, the Israeli daily Ha’aretz observed that everyone knows that “the condition for reaching a deal is through agreements on the real core issues of the conflict: the refugees, the status of Jerusalem, borders and security arrangements.”9 The same editorial added that “any attempt to avoid dealing with these issues, or investment of energy in other issues, is as if no negotiations are taking place.”

Seldom were the reasons for the failure of such efforts as starkly stated in the U.S. media, or in many parts of academia. The habit of deferral and denial was deeply ingrained in both circles, where the “lingering effects of past struggles on present confrontations” were ignored.10 Yet as Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim reminded readers in considering the war over Palestine, no event has marked Arab politics in the second half of the twentieth century more profoundly. The Arab-Israeli wars, the Cold War in the Middle East, the rise of the Palestinian armed struggle and the politics of peace making in all of their complexity are a direct consequence of the Palestine War.11

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WHY THIS BOOK?

The role of the United States in the Arab-Israeli conflict is an inextricable part of history in this region. Confronting that role is indispensable to understanding both U.S. policy in the conflict and its course.12 A knowledge of the foundation of U.S. policy in the Middle East in the postwar years is indispensable to an understanding of current U.S. policies in the Middle East in which oil, Palestine, and Israel play such significant roles.

The record of U.S. policy from 1945 to 1949 challenges fundamental assumptions about U.S. understanding and involvement in the struggle over Palestine that continue to dominate mainstream interpretations of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Coming to grips with the U.S. record and its frequently mythified depiction of the struggle over Palestine is critical. Those engaged in the creation of the Common Archive, a project of Zochrot, the Israeli NGO, in which Israelis and Palestinians have joined to reconstruct the history of Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel in 1948,13 clearly understand the importance of this record. Palestinian historians have long written about this history, and Israel’s “New Historians” have confirmed it in their challenge to the dominant Israeli narrative of the war of 1948.

The Middle East in 2014 is not a mirror image of what it was in 1948, when the struggle over Palestine was at its height. In the immediate postwar years, the United States defined its policy in the Near and Middle East in terms of assuring unimpeded access and control by U.S. oil companies of its great material prize, petroleum. Congressional hearings on the role of petroleum and the national defense envisioned petroleum as a weapon of war. It followed that ensuring the presence and stability of compatible regimes was an essential dimension of policy, as was containing and crushing those whose nationalist and reformist orientation rendered them suspect.

At once undermining and inheriting Britain’s imperial mantle, the American state was widely viewed by political leaders in the area as an anti-imperialist power, albeit driven by petroleum and political ambition. Its footprints were found in widely divergent endeavors, including missionary and educational enterprises. But in the immediate postwar years, Washington was increasingly drawn into the Palestine problem, xvi

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whose origins linked Europe’s dark history with Zionist ambitions protected by the British mandate. The ensuing struggle over Palestine was accelerated in the years that followed as Washington became increasingly involved in its outcome, aware of the inevitable link between the fate of Palestine and U.S. oil and defense interests in the Middle East.

The controversies over British policy, over partition, the war of 1948, the armistice agreements, and the Lausanne Conference in 1949 consumed Washington’s Near and Middle East specialists and their representatives at the United Nations.

This history is not new. The subject has long evoked interest and criticism. What was taboo yesterday, however, is openly discussed today, as the weight of current wars compels a confrontation with events that can no longer be ignored.

Disclosures of previously classified information, as well as previously ignored sources, whether of Palestinian or Israeli origin, have further altered the record. Although U.S. sources have long been open, they have been inadequately examined, significantly contributing to the flawed history of U.S. postwar policy in the Middle East, including oil and the transformation of Palestine.

Main Themes

A number of key questions have long dominated scholarly accounts of postwar U.S. policy in the Middle East, and these questions compel consideration. Among them is the ongoing controversy over the bureaucratic origins of U.S. policymaking in the Middle East in the postwar years. Did the State Department or the White House make Middle East policy? Was policy determined by domestic or foreign policy considerations? Did domestic lobbying by Zionists or by oil company partisans shape policy?

How did the president fit into this context? Some lauded President Truman as unquestionably committed to the creation of a Jewish state.14 Was he moved primarily by religious, humanitarian, and moral considerations that trumped other factors?15 Some argue that cultural, psychological, and religious factors cannot be ignored in shaping U.S. policy.16 On the other hand, works by Kenneth Bain, and more recently

by Peter Hahn, Melvin Leffler, and John Judis, have, in different ways, I N T RO DUC T I O N

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demonstrated the extent of the president’s ambivalence, if not overt hostility, to the idea of a religious state.17 Without ignoring any of these factors, some historians also include the role of the Cold War as an influence on U.S. policy in Palestine.18 Analysts such as J. C. Hurewitz, who was a consummate insider, recalled another important dimension of early policy formation in his study on Palestine. He reminds us that the bureaucracy dealing with the Palestine question in 1943 was very small, and few officials were involved.19 U.S. policymakers confirmed this when they faced the need to define U.S. policy. Within a very few years, however, the Palestine question assumed greater importance, as its connection with developments in the Second World War and the Holocaust, as well as its relation to the foundation of postwar U.S. oil interests in the Middle East, promoted more attention to the needs of policymaking in this area.

As the question of partition on Palestine assumed greater importance in Washington, another theme dominated, as it still does. This was the claim that U.S. policymakers were faced with the choice of protecting U.S. oil interests or deferring to partisans of partition and, later, Jewish statehood. The question became: Oil or Israel? This formula erred, as I will explain in the following chapters. The choice facing policymakers was not oil versus Israel but rather oil and Israel. In the years that followed, it was oil and Israel versus reform and revolution in the Arab world.

The Changing Landscape of Middle East Studies

The changing landscape of Middle East scholarship is apparent in the spate of publications, books, and articles appearing on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Collectively, they attest to the changing nature of research and the increasing availability of U.S. and international sources that contribute to a “transnational” and “multiarchival perspective.”20 Particularly at this time of increased U.S. intervention in the Middle East, this expanded view and increased understanding by western, notably American, writers on the Middle East is something that Ussama Makdisi has eloquently pleaded for, particularly at a time of increased U.S. intervention in the Middle East.21 xviii

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The new scholarship promises no agreement but provides the seeds for a more informed debate, although thus far it has not altered conventional accounts of the Middle East or U.S. policy in the region. Nor has it fundamentally challenged the media, who often portray the Middle East as a danger zone whose complexity and controversy defies understanding, as does its alleged predilection to violence, instability, and sectarian hatreds.

Those seeking to break with such caricatured depictions of states and societies in the Middle East discover that this is no easy matter.

The familiar images of mad mullahs and jihad-prone fanatics allow for scant reflection on who or what is involved, let alone the conditions giving rise to the emergence of religious movements across the region.

In such an intellectual environment, approaches that challenge longstanding narratives are often viewed as frankly subversive. As a result, they are marginalized in the media and often in academia, particularly in fields such as international relations that have long served to justify western supremacy.22 In this context, recent scholarship may indeed make a difference. But examining previously neglected sources of newly declassified government documents, of whatever origin, is not enough. What is required is not only new data but new ways of thinking about what we know, or have chosen to ignore. Considering why certain questions related to policy remain unanswered, or unasked, involves asking who benefits from the existing production of knowledge, and whose interests are served by censoring those who challenge it?

Consider the impact of the invaluable studies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict produced by some of Israel’s new historians, such as Ilan Pappé, Benny Morris, and Avi Shlaim, and the journalist and historian Simha Flapan. Their work is based on the release of classified Israeli documents that challenge fundamental Israeli myths concerning the events of 1948 and Israel’s emergence as an independent state.23 Such works have confirmed the accounts of Palestinian historians such as Walid Khalidi, Nur-eldeen Masalha, and Rashid Khalidi and have been critically appraised by others, such as Joseph Massad, who have written about the events of 1948.24 Masalha has argued that the work of Israel’s “New Historians” is indicative of “a marked desire among the younger generation of Israeli authors and academics to unearth the I N T RO DUC T I O N

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truth concerning the events surrounding the Palestinian refugee exodus of 1948. This new tendency breaks the wall of silence, myth, secrecy and censorship instituted by the older generation of Zionist leadership.”25 In a penetrating essay on the new Israeli historiography, however, historian Joel Beinin points out that “much, even if not all the details of the information [Benny] Morris presents in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem and other works was always available in one form or another. It was actively rendered illegible in the Israeli historical narrative.”26 This applies to the historical evidence concerning U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East as well. U.S. sources provide evidence that has long been available but in some instances has been all but invisible. Sources such as those included in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), U.S. Presidential Papers, and the records of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, in conjunction with Israeli and Palestinian sources, strongly suggest the need to reconsider the dominant narratives of U.S. policy in the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

How the Present Work Differs

Building on the record of past scholarship and criticism of U.S. policy, this book differs from previous accounts in several significant respects.

It situates the origin of the U.S. relationship with Israel in 1948 in the framework of postwar U.S. policy when petroleum dominated U.S. planning for the Middle East. Moreover, on the basis of U.S. sources, the present study maintains that the prevailing assumption with respect to U.S. policy toward Palestine, according to which U.S. officials feared that support for Zionism and partition of Palestine would undermine U.S. oil interests in the Arab world, proved to be a false assumption.

The papers of Max Ball, director of the Oil and Gas Division of the Interior Department, and his exchanges with the representative of the Jewish Agency in the United States, Eliahu Epstein, confirm this fear, as do Israeli records of the same period. Ball operated outside the formal channels of policymakers, which does not negate the importance of his experience. It may explain, however, why that experience has been neglected in accounts of U.S. policy. xx

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Evidence of the encounter between Max Ball and Eliahu Epstein in 1948 forms the basis of the “oil connection” discussed in this book. The encounter opened doors and broke barriers that had long been considered taboo. It revealed that major U.S. oil executives were pragmatic in their approach to the Palestine conflict and were prepared to engage with the Jewish Agency and later with Israeli officials, albeit operating within existing constraints. The relationship between Max Ball, his son and associate, and his son-in-law Ray Kosloff, who became the first Israeli adviser on oil matters, yields additional information on how this former U.S. official assisted Israel in its fuel policy after his retirement.

Second, I emphasize the extent to which U.S. officials who were part of the formal policymaking framework understood the secular roots of the conflict in Palestine, its significance for Zionist support, and its traumatic impact on Palestinians. They understood that Zionist objectives were incompatible with Palestinian Arab self-determination and independence, even as they persisted in calling for compromise among the parties. Well informed about the consequences of the struggle over Palestine by U.S. consuls, officials in Washington, including the secretary of state, undersecretary, and their colleagues operating in the United Nations and in the specialized agencies dealing with Palestine and the Near and Middle East, were prepared to reconsider partition in favor of trusteeship. The record of their views on the Palestinian refugee problem and, specifically, the Israeli response and rejection of responsibility for its creation, led to major clashes between Washington and Tel Aviv after Israel’s emergence.

That record is known, but a more detailed examination of the evidence is required and is presented here. This examination complements some of the work of Israel’s “New Historians,” as well as Palestinian historians. More attention needs to be paid to the contributions of the U.S. consuls in Jerusalem, Thomas Wasson and Robert Macattee, as well as to the views of Gordon Merriam, who had broad experience including oil policy as well as working within the Policy Planning Staff, among other assignments; Mark Ethridge, the U.S. delegate to the Palestine Conciliation Commission; and Philip Jessup in his role at the United Nations.

Reconsidering their analyses as well as those of the far better known and more authoritative figures in the policy establishment—such as Robert McClintock, Loy Henderson, Robert Lovett, George Marshall, I N T RO DUC T I O N

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and Dean Acheson—provides a clearer view of the nature and evolution of U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine.

Third, the input of the chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, the chief of naval operations, the secretary of defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) also provides insight into U.S. policy in the Middle East. Within months of Israel’s emergence, U.S. officials reassessed their views of the new state, in accord with presidential recognition of Israel. What followed was not only recognition of Israeli sovereignty but recognition of its strategic potential in Washington’s postwar policy in the Middle East, which was designed to exclude the USSR and to protect U.S. oil interests and allied defense arrangements. This assessment undermined Washington’s critical position on Israeli policy toward Palestinian refugee repatriation and territorial expansion. These vital factors in the conflict between Israel-Palestine and the Arab world thereby assumed a subordinate position in light of the priorities defined by the JCS and officials in the Department of State.

Here, then, is the logic of U.S. oil policy, which was responsible for the increasing deference to Israeli policies whose purpose was to ensure that Israel turned toward the United States and away from the USSR. This objective, in turn, was allied to Washington’s principal goal in the Middle East—protection of its untrammeled access and control of oil.

These connections are crucial to understanding what many historians have taken to be signs of the cautious and contrary character, or weakness, of U.S. policy, which appeared to waver between criticism of Israel and silence in the face of the very policies it criticized. In this book, I focus on the consequences of these policies, the network of relations they promoted, their objectives, and their effect on Israel, Palestine, and the Arab world in 1949 and the years that followed.

Confronting this history is an exercise in uncovering the open secrets of past U.S. policy and in confronting the past, which remains embedded in the troubled present.

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