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state.”
    “Well, if he does that, then he’s absolutely dead wrong,” the secretary of defense shot back. [127]
    Now the moment of truth had come. The British Mandate for oversight of the land then referred to as Palestine (a term that dated back to the Greeks’ and Romans’ descriptions of the Holy Land) was set to expire in forty-eight hours. David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, was poised to announce the declaration of the Jewish state’s independence on May 14. That action, the administration knew, would almost certainly trigger a war between Israel and the surrounding Arab nations. Interestingly, Clifford noted that Ben-Gurion and his advisors had not yet decided on a name for the Jewish state. “The name ‘Israel’ was as yet unknown,” Clifford wrote, “and most of us assumed the new nation would be called ‘Judaea.’” [128]
    At four o’clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, May 12, Marshall, Clifford, and several other advisors entered the Oval Office to meet with the president. Secretary Marshall explained that the creation of a Jewish state would be “dangerous.” He said he had told a representative of the Jewish Agency that if the Jews got into trouble and “came running to us for help . . . they were clearly on notice that there was no warrant to expect help from the United States, which had warned them of the grave risk they were running.” [129]
    When Marshall and his colleagues were finished making their case opposing a Jewish state, the president turned to Clifford and asked for the case in support. Clifford noted a war between Israel and its neighbors was going to begin any moment and that delaying support would be tantamount to denying support. He said that the more quickly the president supported the Jewish state, the more likely it was for the new state to become friendly with—and hopefully eventually an ally of—the United States. If the Soviet Union, however, were the first to recognize the state, perhaps the Jews would form closer ties to Moscow. He continued by stating that in the Balfour Declaration, the British government had long before promised a state to the Jews and that “the United States has a great moral obligation to oppose discrimination” against the Jews and to create a “safe haven” for Jews escaping the Holocaust and Eastern European Communism. Finally, he argued that the U.S. should support the creation of democracies, that the Middle East had long been unstable, and that helping establish a democracy in the Middle East would be consistent with American values.
    At that point, Secretary Marshall exploded. “Mr. President . . . I don’t even know why Clifford is here. He is a domestic advisor, and this is a foreign policy matter.”
    “Well, General,” the president replied calmly, “he’s here because I asked him to be here.”
    Marshall and his colleagues protested that Clifford was pressing for support in order to win Jewish votes in the next presidential election. Marshall then threatened that if Truman supported the Jewish state, he would lose Marshall’s vote. The room grew silent. The president ended the meeting by saying he would consider both sides seriously and make his decision soon. [130]
    American Jewish Opposition to Israel
    Actually, Truman’s support of the creation of the Jewish state was opposed by many American Jews, a fact unknown or forgotten by many friends of Israel.
    “A significant number of Jewish Americans opposed Zionism,” Clifford wrote in his memoir. “Some feared that the effort to create a Jewish state was so controversial that the plan would fail. In 1942 a number of prominent Reform rabbis had founded the American Council for Judaism to oppose the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. It grew into an organization of over fourteen thousand members, which collaborated closely with State Department officials.” Clifford also noted that Arthur H. Sulzberger, the Jewish publisher of the New