An historic Oval Office confrontation on May 12, 1948, between President Harry Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall over the creation of the state of Israel has echoed through American foreign policy and politics ever since.
Marshall, whom Truman deeply respected, frequently referring to him as "the greatest living American,” strongly supported the creation of a United Nations trusteeship for all of Palestine that would treat Arabs and Jews evenhandedly, a proposal that had been agreed earlier and was already being advanced at the UN by America's representative, Warren Austin.
Marshall believed that a last-minute rejection of the UN trusteeship in favor of an independent Jewish state would alienate the entire Muslim world, embroil the U.S. with the Soviet Union, and dangerously imperil United States national security far into the future.
Truman—already trailing New York Governor Thomas Dewey in polling for the November presidential election—ultimately chose to heed the advice of his chief domestic political counsellor Clark Clifford, whom he had brought to the meeting to argue against Marshall's position, because as the President told an earlier gathering, “I have hundreds of thousands of constituents deeply committed to the Zionist cause but no comparable constituency for the Arab cause”.
Highly indignant and angry at what he correctly viewed as the intrusion of politics into a matter of vital national security, the usually imperturbable Marshall bluntly told the president “If I vote in the coming election, I shall vote against you ." Nonetheless, knowing that his resignation or even public opposition could sink the Truman Presidency, Marshall opted for soldierly loyalty and later in the day conveyed to the White House that while his views had not changed, he would not publicly oppose his President.
Two days later (May 14th) in Jerusalem at 6:01 p.m. David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of Israel. Eleven minutes later the United States became the first government to recognize the fledgling Jewish state. The following day the first Arab-Israeli war began.
Today, in an ironic historical parallel, another Democratic president trailing in a bid for re-election is being forced to make critical choices between the starkly different interests of Arabs and Jews in the context of a widening cycle of violence in the tumultuous Middle East. What is different now from 1948 is that Israel has long been America's only reliable ally in a dangerous part of the world while at the same time Muslim-American voters and their sympathizers—currently inflamed by the carnage in Gaza—could in a close election end President Biden's time in the White House.
The fundamental dilemma for Democrats is that the left wing has become the dominant force in the party as evidenced by the steady stream of progressive initiatives—legislative and regulatory—psince the 2020 election. However, these initiatives such as open borders and the Green New Deal while pleasing to the ideologically oriented elites of the party have been greatly damaging to the largest element in the traditional Democratic coalition—the white working class.
Until recently, these deep fissures within the party could be glossed over. But the aftermath of the barbaric Hamas assault on Israel last October 7th would dramatically expose and exacerbate them. Initially Democrats’ sympathies were entirely with Israel, particularly among Jews who had always been a bulwark of the party coalition.
But as the invasion of Gaza dragged on, a small but loud group of leftist congressional Democrats (e.g. “The Squad”), and Arab-American voters (particularly in Michigan), and a growing number of young people at leading universities, began to redefine the war in terms of Israel's alleged “long oppression” of the Palestinian people.
Amazingly, what began as a small group of dissident anti-war voices within the party has become in the space of just a few months the official policy of the Biden Administration—as shown by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s startling demand for new elections to replace Israel's wartime government.
The stark contradictions within this policy were best illustrated by the awkwardness of President Biden declaring his “unwavering support” for Israel while in the same statement effectively threatening to cut off US military aid if the attacks on Hamas in southern Gaza didn’t stop.
His remarks vividly illustrate the twin prongs of the dilemma on which the Democratic Party is now impaled. The party’s success or failure in the daunting task of reconciling the antithetical viewpoints of two historically Democratic leaning constituencies—Jews and Muslims—without being punished by either will only be revealed after November 5th.
William Moloney is a Senior Fellow at Colorado’s Centennial Institute who studied history and politics at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate from Harvard University. His columns have appeared in the Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Hill, Washington Post, Washington Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Human Events and The Denver Post.