Why is Israel such a close ally to the U.S.?
I thought it was because the US helped established Israel as the zionist state for the Jews after the war. Not true. Israel was established by the Jews themselves, and there was intense debate in the U.S. government about whether to recognize the new state. Truman went against the strong opposition of much of his cabinet and did so. Clark Clifford remembers:The President regarded his Secretary of State, General of the Army George C. Marshall, as “the greatest living American.” Yet the two men were on a collision course over Mideast policy, which, if not resolved, threatened to split and wreck the Administration. British control of Palestine would run out in two days, and when it did, the Jewish Agency intended to announce the creation of a new state, still unnamed, in part of Palestine. Marshall firmly opposed American recognition of the new Jewish state; I did not. Marshall’s o
Israel was part of the British Mandate for Palestine, established by the League of Nations after World War I from part of the former Ottoman Empire. The November 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine called for establishing a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine. A civil war started almost immediately, sparked by Palestinian Arabs’ perception of the partition plan as unfair. (Ironically, the proposed partition would have resulted in more land for the Palestinians than any likely settlement would do now.) Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948. The United St
