Just before Israel emerged as a state in May 1948, key United States officials hesitated and backtracked. Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett told Moshe Sharett of the Jewish Agency for Palestine that the US had expected a peaceful transition to dual states in Palestine. Now, war between Jews and Arabs and a broader regional conflict loomed. Apart from the Cold War repercussions, another mass slaughter of Jews would roil the US in a presidential election year. James G. McDonald arrived in Israel soon after its birth, serving as US special representative and later as its first ambassador. McDonald continued his longstanding practice of dictating a diary, which remained for many decades in private hands. Here his letters, private papers, and exchanges with the US State Department and the White House are interspersed chronologically with his diary entries. Envoy to the Promised Land is a major new source for the history of US-Israeli relations. Brilliantly describing the tense climate in Israel almost day by day, McDonald offers an in-depth portrait of key Israeli and other politicians and analyzes the early stages of issues that still haunt the country today: the disputed boundaries of the new state, the status of Jerusalem, questions of peace with Arab states and Israel’s security, Israel’s relationship with the United Nations, and the problem of Palestinian refugees.
These papers and diaries from 1948 to 1951, with their bridging narrative, follow the widely praised Advocate for the Doomed, Refugees and Rescue, and To the Gates of Jerusalem. Together these four volumes significantly revise the ways we view the Holocaust, its aftermath, and the early history of Israel.
McDonald probably did more than any American in history to establish the enduring close ties between Israel and the United States, and he did so against unremitting opposition from powerful forces in the U.S. government. His diary is a treasure trove of vignettes and observations which bring vividly to life an exciting and perilous time in the history of both countries. Historians will be poring through it for years to come, but so should policymakers, since many of the issues McDonald dealt with are still alive today. Those who are simply interested in Israel, and in America’s role in that nation’s founding, will find these pages an endless source of fascination and delight.”
From the first US ambassador, a long-awaited revelatory and virtually day-to-day account of modern Israel’s birth in the midst of storm, blood, and fire. James G. McDonald was an American patriot who took part in the great drama prompted by the intensification of the plight of European Jewish refugees. A witness and participant who was wise and perceptive, a lover of mankind, a lover of the Jewish people, and a lover of Israel, he had walked alongside those who survived the Holocaust and had limped beaten and weary, downtrodden and ravaged, into displaced persons camps after World War II. Here he chronicles their initial return to their historical homeland, their assembly within it, and their fight for it. McDonald sought to convince Washington to ensure Israel’s fortification and to support its development as the strategic stronghold of the democratic world in the Middle East. It is difficult not to feel awed by what this generous diary reveals on major policy issues, with unique perspectives on Truman, Bevin, Stalin, Pope Pius XII, Ben-Gurion, and many others in opening phase of the Cold War in the Middle East. It also provides hundreds of observations of everyday life amidst mass Aliyah, economic development, religious controversy, and much much more. This volume is a celebration for the historian, the sociologist, the researcher of political science, and everyone else who wishes to know the intimate context of today’s Middle East and is as compelling and relevant as tomorrow’s newspapers.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. June – July 1948
2. August 1948
3. September 1948
4. October 1948
5. November 1948
6. December 1948
7. January 1949
8. February 1949
9. March 1949
10. April 1949
11. May 1949
12. June 1949
13. July 1949
14. August 1949
15. September 1949
16. October 1949
17. November 1949
18. December 1949
19. January 1950
20. February 1950
21. March 1950
22. April 1950
23. May 1950
24. June 1950
25. July 1950
26. August 1950
27. September – December 1950
Epilogue
Index
Norman J.W. Goda is the Norman and Irma Braman Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida and author of Tomorrow the World: Hitler, Northwest Africa, and the Path toward America; Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War; and The Holocaust: Europe, the World, and the Jews, 1918–1945. He is author (with Richard Breitman) of Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War and (with Richard Breitman, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe) of U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis.
Richard Breitman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at American University and author, most recently, of FDR and the Jews (with Allan J. Lichtman). His other books include The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution and Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew. He is editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Barbara McDonald Stewart, the late daughter of James G. McDonald, taught at George Mason University and is author of United States Government Policy on Refugees from Nazism, 1933–1940.
Severin Hochberg, a historian formerly at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
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