...Prof. Netanyahu told our class how his movement took out ads in the papers and encouraged Jewish voters to register a protest vote against Truman in the midterm congressional elections in 1946.
And he told us that there were those who ascribed the Republican victory in the 1946 congressional elections to that Jewish pressure.
Until a few months ago, I had never seen any documentation of this episode.
However, on January 26, 2012, while I was on a visit to the US, historian Dr. Rafael Medoff published an article in the JTA, where he documented how the American Zionist Emergency Council sent the State Department a 13-page memo urging the United States to indict the mufti and how Prof. Netanyahu had taken out ads in major US newspapers, headline, “The Mufti Must Be Brought to Trial!” while featuring a photograph of Husseini meeting with Hitler.
Dr. Medoff confirmed that the Truman administration had indeed ignored the protests and that this “contributed to the Republican landslide in the 1946 midterm congressional elections (including the election of the first Republican senator from New York in 30 years) and the shocking defeat of Truman’s candidate in a congressional election in New York City in early 1948”.
Dr. Medoff concluded that “these developments doubtless had a profound impact on Truman. Fear of losing Jewish votes to the Republicans moved Truman to endorse the idea of a Jewish state in 1946, when he heard Dewey was about to do so; to support the 1947 U.N. partition plan, when his advisers told him failure to do so would cost him “two or three pivotal states” in the 1948 presidential election; and surely influenced his decision in May 1948 to recognize the newborn State of Israel”.
David Bedein
^
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment