Zionism

Support of Zionism, the international movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine, increased in the 1930s because of the plight of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. During World War II, mounting evidence of the Holocaust further augmented Zionist sentiment. By the middle of the war, most American Jews, including such prominent figures as Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., had apparently become supporters of a Jewish state in Palestine; so too had many people outside the Jewish community, including Vice President Henry A. Wallace.

At a conference in New York in May 1942, American Zionist leaders called for an independent Jewish state in Palestine and subsequently stepped up pressure for support from the American government. Congressional resolutions for a Jewish state in Palestine were reviewed and supported by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, but they encountered opposition from the State Department, which feared that an official acceptance of these resolutions would create problems with the Arab nations where the United States was building oil pipelines. AntiSemitism among some State Department officials also militated against Zionist aims.

Zionists also sought support from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who seemed open to providing assistance. The Roosevelt administration helped organize the Conference on Refugees in Bermuda in 1943, but the conference failed when Britain continued to oppose the immigration of Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine. Even though Roosevelt, concerned about American-Arab relations and about stability in the Middle East and deferring to British policy, continued to avoid formal backing of a Jewish state in Palestine, Zionists supported him in the election of 1944. But following the election, Roosevelt, despite some sympathy for Zionist goals, still refrained from endorsing a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

At the end of World War II, Zionists had thus failed to win official support of their goal of a Jewish state in Palestine. Concerns about oil and relations with the Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, had proved more powerful than the lobbying and political influence of Zionist supporters. But a highly effective publicity campaign by the American Zionist Emergency Council helped persuade some three-fourths of all Americans to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine by late 1947 and produced growing pressure on new president Harry S. Truman to support Zionist aspirations. When the British mandate over Palestine ended in May 1948, Palestinian Jews declared the independence of the new state of Israel. Reflecting among other things sympathy for Jewish suffering during the Holocaust and the importance of the Jewish vote to the Democratic Party, President Truman gave de facto recognition to Israel. His action helped secure the success of the Zionist aim of an independent Jewish state in Palestine.

Further reading: Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970); Melvin I. Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1975).

—Ann Adams