Wadad Dabbagh to Eleanor Roosevelt

11 August 1948 [Beirut]

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,

I was astonished to receive your short reply of july 10; 1948 to my letter of june 30, which I sent to you in the name of human rights which you were defending.

I regret to see that there is a great difference, in the meaning of those human rights, between theory and practice, and I am sorry to feel that I have bothered you in vain with my previous correspondance. I have to thank you any way.

                                      Very sincerely yours,

                                        Wadad Dabbagh

TLS AERP, FDRL

1. Wadad M. Dabbagh to ER, n.d., AERP.

2. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) formed in the spring of 1947, was comprised of delegates from eleven neutral states. After holding hearings and meetings in Palestine, Beirut, and Geneva, it issued a summary report August 31, 1947, recommending unanimously that Britain end its mandate and grant independence. A majority of the UNSCOP members recommended partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states ("The Recognition of the State of Israel" under www.trumanlibrary.org, accessed March 01, 2006; "Committee Is Split: Minority Urges Federal Status—All Agree on End of Mandate," NYT, 1 September 1947, 1; "British Exit," NYT, 28 September 1947, E1; Report to the General Assembly by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, September 1947 [Doc A/364 3], SDB, 21 September 1947, 547-61).

3. In a letter from the British foreign secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour, to the head of the British Zionist Organization, Lord Rothschild, on November 2, 1917, the British government stated that it "viewed with favor" the establishment in Palestine of a homeland for the Jewish people. It also declared that in facilitating this objective nothing should be done that would prejudice the "civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities" in Palestine, or the "rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." The Balfour Declaration, which was later incorporated into the language of the British Mandate over Palestine, quickly encouraged Jewish immigration to the Holy Land, and became a rallying cry for Arabs, who viewed it as a violation of their sovereignty. For more on the Balfour Declaration see n3 Document 82 and n3 Document 227 (Bickerton and Klausner, 40-41).

4. See Document 328 for an assessment of violence between Arabs and Jews in the aftermath of the General Assembly's endorsement of UNSCOP's partition plan.

5. In a statement to the press on June 21, 1948, ER called the draft of the International Declaration of Human Rights "a document of very great intrinsic worth" produced "despite variations in attitudes and customs and historic precedent of the nations represented on the commission." She also thought the draft declaration an indispensable step in working to define freedom and determine "what every man and woman have a right to have" ("Rights Plan Hailed by Mrs. Roosevelt," NYT, 21 June 1948, 9; "The United States in the United Nations," SDB, 7 June 1948, 830-31).

6. The Allies consisted of Great Britain, France, and Russia.

7. In 1922, tensions flared after Britain announced that it would uphold the Balfour Declaration and the proposed constitution for the state of Palestine limiting municipal councils to consultative duty only. The Arab daily, Palestine, called on Arabs to follow Egypt's example of resistance and in July, many in the Arab community participated in a general strike, an action that received support from Syria and Transjordan. When the League of Nations announced ratification of the declaration, violence erupted in Hanna, Jaffa, and Ludd. Seven years later, in August 1929, two events occurred that inflamed Arab-Jewish tension: first, Britain allowed the Jewish Agency (originally founded as the Zionist Organization) to expand its membership and recruit Zionist supporters from outside Palestine and, second, as part of preparations for Yom Kippur, a Jewish sexton respon-sible for the Jewish section of the Wailing Wall placed a screen adjacent to the site (holy to both Arabs and Jews) that would allow Jewish men and women to worship separately. The British agreed with Arab objections that this violated protocol; Jews objected to the ruling; and widespread violence soon erupted, killing 133 Jews and wounding another 399 and killing eighty-seven Arabs and wounding another seventy-eight. Four years later, Arabs attempted an unsuccessful boycott of Zionist- and British-made goods. In April 1936, in retaliation for the robbery and murder of three Jews, two Arabs were killed, an act that sparked a general strike in Jaffa and Nablus. Five Arab groups coalesced to form the Arab High Commission, which, under Haj Amin's direction, organized widespread civil disobedience, tax protests, and the closing of city governments. By the time the rebellion subsided in 1939, 3,764 Arabs, 610 British, and 2,394 Jews had died and millions of dollars of property had been destroyed ("Arabs Are Incited to Rise in Palestine," NYT, 15 April 1922, 2; "Palestine Arabs Bitter," NYT, 18 May 1922, 3; "Palestine Crisis Believed Near," NYT, 3 September 1922, 3; Sachar, Israel, 174, 219-22; Mansfield, 203-7).

8. Although the Jews owned only 6 to 8 percent of the total land area in Palestine, and constituted less than half of its population in 1947 (600,000 Jews; 1.3 million Arabs), the UN resolution of November 29, 1947, which partitioned Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, allotted the Jews approximately 55 percent of the land, including the agriculturally rich areas of the coastal plain, as well as the Negev Desert. The Arabs, who opposed the partition plan from its inception, were left with the less fertile hill country of central Palestine and northern Galilee (Bickerton and Klausner, 89).

9. On the morning of April 9, 1948, 132 members of the Jewish underground groups Irgun and Stern Gang attacked the small village of Deir Yassin, which lay on the outskirts of Jerusalem, eighteen miles outside the boundaries of the Jewish state outlined in the partition plan. The village was captured and more than 250 men, women, and children were killed, their bodies mutilated and later thrown into a well. Similar attacks also occurred in the towns of Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, and Safed in late April and early May, forcing Arabs to flee their homes and their families. It was "a frightening and fantastic sight," the future Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion wrote after his tour of the abandoned neighborhoods in Haifa. "A dead city … without a living soul, except for stray cats." The Arabs believed the attacks were part of the Jews' larger "campaign of terrorism" to force the Arab population to leave their villages and homes (Bickerton and Klausner, 99-100; Sachar, Israel, 333-34; Segev, 508-9).

10. Gustave Le Bon, La civilisation des Arabes, 465-533, 614-32. For an abridged translation, see The World of Islamic Civilization, 33-66, 89-94, 137-42. Le Bon (1841–1931), a French social thinker, became renowned in the non-Arab world for his work on crowd psychology ("Dr. Gustave Le Bon, Scientist, Is Dead," NYT, 15 December 1931, 27).

The US, the UN, and the Recognition of Israel

When the British Mandate expired at midnight May 14, 1948,¹ David Ben-Gurion, acting as chairman of the Zionist Council of State (the provisional Jewish government in Palestine), declared Israel a state. Truman immediately issued a statement extending de facto recognition to the new nation. The announcement from the White House disturbed members of the US delegation, who were still trying to secure a truce in Palestine between Arabs and Jews, and who had not been given any prior notification of the president's decision. When Dean Rusk, the head of the State Department's UN desk, telephoned chief delegate Warren Austin, and informed him of the president's decision to extend recognition, Austin apparently was so disgusted with the decision that he got in his limousine and went home without informing any of his colleagues about it.

Minutes later, a UN delegate read the news from an Associated Press ticker tape release in front of the General Assembly and demanded an explanation from the US delegation, which was caught completely off guard. Philip Jessup, who, along with Francis B. Sayre, were the only members sitting in the delegation at the moment, quickly left the assembly to find out what was happening. Sayre, also stunned by the news, went to the podium and reportedly said he unfortunately had no additional information to report.

Fearing that pandemonium was breaking loose at the UN, Secretary Marshall immediately sent Rusk up to New York to prevent the entire US delegation from resigning. By the time Rusk arrived, however, cooler heads had prevailed and no resignations ensued. But the episode left the entire delegation, and Eleanor Roosevelt, in particular, bitter at the White House and State Department for keeping them in the dark and undercutting their position.²

ER then wrote Marshall to express her "consternation" and "deep concern."