Mahal – The Third International Brigade When Israel Was the Darling of the Left

The world has since been inundated with a tsunami of Arab propaganda and crocodile tears shed for the “Palestinians” who have reveled in what they refer to as their Catastrophe or Holocaust (“Nakba” in Arabic). Their plight has been accompanied by unremitting criticism that the United States was the principal architect that stood behind Israel from the very beginning with money, manpower and arms.

This is totally false – the opposite was true. The Arab states who invaded Palestine to prevent the establishment of a Jewish State had been equipped, trained and financed for over three decades by the two leading European Imperialist Powers – Britain and France.

The fact is that President Truman eventually decided against the overwhelmingly pro-Arab “professional opinion” of his Secretary of State, General George Marshall and the career Arabists of the State Department in order to vote for partition. He managed to accord diplomatic recognition to the new Jewish state but never considered active military aid. Truman’s memoirs reveal a bitter contempt for the professional “striped-pants” boys of the eastern Ivy League Colleges and State Department.

Although at times angered by Jewish pressure on the question of the Zionist movement’s goal of a Jewish state, Truman’s strong Baptist sentiments and basic human decency won out in reaching his decision against the “experts” to recognize the State of Israel. His diary comments speak for themselves….”Hitler had been murdering Jews right and left. I saw it, and I dream about it even to this day. The Jews needed some place where they could go. It is my attitude that the American government couldn’t stand idly by while the victims [of] Hitler’s madness are not allowed to build new lives.”

His own memoirs recall how he felt betrayed by State Department officials and the American U.N. Ambassador, Warren Austin, who pulled the rug out from under him one day after Truman had promised Zionist leader Chaim Weitzman support for partition.

American Jewish military veterans, pilots and merchant seamen were under supervision by orders of the State Department and the FBI to make sure that they were not carrying illegal immigrants or arms and more than once they were stopped, and their cargoes seized, remote from the President’s knowledge.

Suspicions of American Intelligence

American intelligence continued to buy the myth from 1947 to 1951 that the new Israeli state might be pro-Soviet because of the large presence of the Socialist-Zionist political parties and the proven success in combat of the Hagana and Palmach, units with a large participation of leftwing kibbutz members. Taking (as always) their lead from Moscow, the (hitherto anti-Zionist) Palestinian communist organizations merged their separate Arab and Jewish divisions in October, 1948, giving unconditional support to the Israeli war effort and urging the Israel Defense Forces to “Drive on toward the Suez Canal and hand British Imperialism a stinging defeat!” This alarmed the State Department that had been warned by British intelligence of possible Soviet infiltration or influence among the Israeli forces.

Overwhelming Support for Zionism and Partition from the American Left

The most well established, highly respected and veteran organ of the Left in the United States (celebrating its 150th anniversary this year), The Nation, enthusiastically editorialized in favor of partition and supported the creation of a Jewish State more so than any other American journal of opinion or media outlet. Freda Kirchwey, The Nation’s publisher and editor-in-chief wrote and spoke that the struggle for a Jewish Palestine was nothing less than the sequel and parallel of the Spanish Civil War, the other struggle to which she had dedicated much of her career. Spanish Republican exiles remembered with much emotion and gratitude the outstanding contribution Jewish volunteers had made to the International Brigades in Spain. Estimates of their participation range as high as 20%.

In this, she was undoubtedly correct, for her words were echoed by Dolores Ibarruri, “La Passionaria” the Basque Communist leader in the Spanish Cortes before and during the Civil War in Spain, followed by a long period of exile in Moscow. She issued a proclamation in 1948 from Moscow saluting the new State of Israel and compared the invading Arab armies to the Fascist uprising that had destroyed the Spanish Republic. Just a few months later, the hero of the American Left, the great Afro-American folk singer, Paul Robeson sang in a gala concert in Moscow, electrifying the crowd with his rendition of the Yiddish Partisan Fighters Song.

Kirchwey’s father had been dean of Columbia University Law School, President of the American Peace Society (a sponsor of the journal) and a leading pacifist spokesman. In 1918, Freda joined the staff of The Nation, eventually becoming its editor in 1933 and its publisher from 1937 to 1943. After her death, the New York Times editorialized that Kirchwey enjoyed a “unique combination of personal charm and militant principle” and lauded her for being “a cheerful crusader.”

Her most important crusade was waged on behalf of the Jewish State. She attacked the State Department and the Aramco Oil Company for their unholy alliance with the Saudi regime and appealed to President Truman to escape their clutches.

Kirchwey and her board decided that the magazine should concentrate its efforts on the issue of Palestine. They believed that the plight of Holocaust survivors languishing in Europe’s displaced-persons camps “presented a problem which challenged the conscience of mankind and the ability of civilization to make some restitution.” The overwhelming majority of Jewish refugees wished to go to Palestine to rebuild their shattered lives.

Kirchwey’s pro-Zionist sentiments were cemented during a trip to Palestine as The Nation’s correspondent in the spring and summer of 1946. Her impressions of the Jews, the Arabs, and the British were typical of almost all on the Left and held by many of the members of the various international commissions dispatched to Palestine. She was impressed with the achievements of the Jews in Palestine and their rehabilitation of the Holocaust’s survivors and contrasted their accomplishments with the poverty and what she called the backwardness of the Arabs. She also harshly criticized the role played by the 100,000 British troops stationed in Palestine.

In a series of articles she wrote about her trip, Kirchwey stated how “overpowering” the British military presence had become and how biased against the Jews, concluding that the British were inviting an Arab revolt and encouraging the Arabs to conclude that through blackmail, the “Western powers can be frightened into sacrificing the Jews just as they have already abandoned the Christians in Lebanon.”

No amount of rationalizations conjured up by spokesmen for the Left’s current vehemently pro-Arab position regarding the 1948 war for Israeli independence can obscure the fact that the Jews enjoyed the collective support of all those forces in the West who identified with the Left as well as the entire Eastern Bloc.