Was Truman Courageous in Recognizing Israel in ’48?

I was driving yesterday and heard Terry Gross interviewing presidential historian Michael Beschloss a year back about Harry Truman's decision to recognize the state of Israel in 1948. Beschloss puts Truman's decision in his book on nine presidential decisions that he regards as courageous. I found myself questioning Beschloss's judgment again and again. He says Truman had to override his wife's antisemitism to do so. I don't think his wife's antisemitism was a factor. Sec'y of State George Marshall's opposition to the state of Israel was a real factor, but was Truman's defiance brave or craven? How much did it reflect "pressure and influence" bearing on the '48 election, as even Abba Eban has said.

Marshall's position had wisdom. It reflected the fact that U.N. partition the previous year had resulted in great violence in Palestine, not a resolution of the ongoing problem there. And indeed in the winter of 48, Zionists denied that there was violence, fearing that bloody Palestine would mean the revocation of partition. Marshall sought a U.N. trusteeship of the territory on a continuing basis, to preserve Arab political rights, which a month later went out the window in the Nakba (and again I'd point out that the other U.N. partition decision of '47, India/Pakistan, resulted in self-determination for both peoples, something the Arabs of Palestine have never had).

Beschloss played a tape of Truman talking about his decision two decades later, where he said it was one of the hardest of his presidency. The thing that comes thru strongest on the tape was how much sympathy Truman seemed genuinely to have for the Jews in the D.P. camps in Europe in '46-'47. He said that he was reminded of his own ancestors who were displaced from Missouri and put in camps in Illinois  during the Civil War under Order #11. That felt real, but hardly a basis for establishing borders that were anathema to Arabs.

I don't think Beschloss understands Truman's true motivation. His recognition of the decision as a brave and great one strikes me as further reflection of the degree to which Zionism has become an unconsidered Establishment value in the U.S. Terry Gross failed to ask: Knowing what we do now, was it the right thing to do?  Even Richard Cohen of the Washington Post has said in the last year or two that Israel was a "mistake."

I'm not trying to undo Israel. I'm for a two-state solution, in the limited window that is now open for it. Mostly I seek reform of Israel, so that it accepts that it is in the Arab world, gives up its dependence on daddy America, and shows respect toward Arabs. And I wish the media would show greater respect for the American State Department guys, the Arabists, and the cultural Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews who saw all this coming.