Thursday, November 10, 2022
From Ian:
The One Week of World War II That Gave Rise to the Modern Middle East
Imagining a Jewish Atom Bomb
The One Week of World War II That Gave Rise to the Modern Middle East
This week marks the 80th anniversary of three seismic events in North Africa that would change the shape of the entire Middle East. On November 8, 1942, Britain and the U.S. launched Operation Torch—the invasion of French North Africa (today Morocco and Algeria). Germany responded the next day by sending its forces to Tunisia, which until then had remained under Vichy control. Then, on November 11, Britain defeated the Nazis at El Alamein in Egypt—winning their first major victory of the war. Robert Satloff reflects on the long-term consequences of these events:The Schlesinger Diaries - new and troubling revelations
[T]he most lasting impact of the Nazi presence in Tunisia was to give Arabs an up-close look at a model of all-powerful government infused with supremacist ideology. Along with the 1941 arrival in Berlin of the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini and Iraqi putschist Rashid Ali, both forced to flee from Baghdad, the Tunisia experience would play a role in building two movements that competed for power in the Middle East for decades to follow—the radical Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdul Nasser and Saddam Hussein and the Islamist extremism of Osama bin Ladin and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Whether both of these movements have been flushed from the Arab political system—or are just passing through a period of reassessment, retrenchment and rebirth—is one of the region’s most profound uncertainties.
As recent scholarship shows, the Germans had designs on Egypt and the Levant that went beyond the purely strategic objectives of controlling the Suez Canal, the eastern Mediterranean, and the oil fields of Arabia. In fact, there is convincing evidence that the Nazis planned to follow on Rommel’s expected sweep into Cairo and then onto Jerusalem with the extermination of the Jewish communities of Egypt, Palestine, and beyond. If the Panzers were not defeated in the Western Desert, this would likely have added more than 600,000 additional Jews to the Holocaust death toll.
This would have aborted any hope of the Zionist dream for a “Jewish national home” in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. The near annihilation of the Jews of Europe fed the desire for Jewish sovereignty; the annihilation of the Jews of the Levant would have killed it. Israel would never have been.
Fourteen years after the passing of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., his diaries continue to provide historians with important new information. The latest beneficiary is John A. Farrell, whose biography of Ted Kennedy contains disturbing new details concerning the Chappaquiddick cover-up, which Farell obtained by gaining access to unpublished sections of Schlesinger’s diaries.
My own experiences with Schlesinger and his diaries concerned a different American political leader, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The information that emerged was deeply troubling, to say the least.
“We Have No Jewish Blood”
My first encounter with Schlesinger was related to a meeting that President Roosevelt held on August 4, 1939, with a political ally, Sen. Burton Wheeler (D-Montana). They discussed possible Democratic candidates for president and vice president in the event FDR did not seek re-election in 1940; Wheeler composed a memo for his private files recounting their conversation.
According to the memo, FDR dismissed the idea of vice president Jack Garner as the party’s presidential nominee on the grounds that he was too conservative: “[Roosevelt] said ‘I do not want to see a reactionary democrat nominated.’ The President said, ‘I love Jack Garner personally. He is a lovable man,’ but he said, ‘he could not get the n—- vote, and he could not get the labor vote’.” (Wheeler did not use the dashes.)
The president also expressed doubt about the viability of a ticket composed of Secretary of State Cordell Hull for president and Democratic National Committee chairman Jim Farley for vice president. Sen. Wheeler wrote:
I said to the President someone told me that Mrs. Hull was a Jewess, and I said that the Jewish-Catholic issue would be raised [if Hull was nominated for president, and Farley, a Catholic, was his running mate]. He [FDR] said, “Mrs. Hull is about one quarter Jewish.” He said, “You and I, Burt, are old English and Dutch stock. We know who our ancestors are. We know there is no Jewish blood in our veins, but a lot of these people do not know whether there is Jewish blood in their veins or not.”
The memo is located in Wheeler’s papers at Montana State University. The file also contains two letters sent to Wheeler from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in 1959. At the time, Schlesinger was working on The Politics of Upheaval, the final installment of his three-volume history of the New Deal. According to the letters, Sen. Wheeler sent Schlesinger a copy of his 1939 memorandum on the “Jewish blood” conversation with FDR. Schlesinger, after reviewing the memo, wrote to Wheeler that the document “offer[s] valuable sidelights on history.”
Nevertheless, Schlesinger never quoted FDR’s remarks about “Jewish blood” in any of the many books and articles he subsequently wrote about Roosevelt and his era. Ironically, in one of those articles (published in Newsweek in 1994), Schlesinger specifically defended FDR against any suspicion that he was unsympathetic to Jews; and he approvingly quoted Trude Lash, a friend of the Roosevelts, as saying, “FDR did not have an anti-Semitic bone in his body.”
Imagining a Jewish Atom Bomb
The early interest in a nuclear reactor, which originated with Weizmann’s appeals to Oppenheimer, passed from Weizmann to Ben-Gurion via Bergmann. It seems that at some point during 1948, Weizmann’s views on nuclear technology began to change: he moved away from ideas of practical science to “pure science.” The existing sources do not directly outline how Weizmann’s thinking evolved, leaving room for some speculation. It is possible that Weizmann felt compelled to join the community of scientists, like Einstein, who by now publicly rejected the development of an atomic arsenal and its handling by the US government, which in their view was not making the required progress toward nuclear disarmament. Another explanation relates to Weizmann’s political decline and his sense of betrayal by his former close confidante, Bergmann.Unpacked: Operation Opera: How Israel Destroyed Iraq's Nuclear Power | History of Israel Explained
During 1947, Bergmann drew closer to Ben-Gurion, both personally and professionally. According to his biographers, as of the fall of 1947 Bergmann became “completely absorbed in the task of meeting the immediate wartime needs of Israel, and any plans which he might have been formulating with regard to nuclear energy had to be put on the back burner.” As the academic director of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Bergmann championed the institute’s participation in the Yishuv’s war effort. During the War of Independence, in 1948, Bergman and other scientists persuaded Ben-Gurion that “a national nuclear project was within Israel’s scientific abilities.” Weizmann’s declining interest in atomic energy took place in parallel with Ben-Gurion’s increasing interest in the matter and the close cooperation between Ben-Gurion and Bergmann. It is possible that growing resentment toward Bergmann, who crossed the line into Ben-Gurion’s camp, in some part motivated Weizmann’s rejection of Bergmann’s nuclear activism. In 1951, Bergmann would become Ben-Gurion’s personal scientific adviser and later the chair of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (1952-1966).
Ben-Gurion first publicly mentioned his fascination with the atom on Sept. 11, 1948, citing the “miraculous make-up” of the atom and the “enormous capacity hidden in its dismantlement.” In March 1949, Ben-Gurion held a meeting with Moshe Moris Sordin, a French nuclear scientist raised in the Yishuv. Sordin, who in 1945 took part in the establishment of the French Atomic Energy Commission, was secretly brought to Israel to meet with Ben-Gurion and discuss “the future of nuclear reactors.” In a 1986 interview, Sordin recalled that at their meeting Ben-Gurion demonstrated deep understanding of and interest in nuclear technology. Around that time, Bergmann also convinced Ben-Gurion to send six promising Israeli graduate students to study nuclear physics abroad.
It was Ben-Gurion, together with Bergmann and the young Shimon Peres, who pushed forward the Israeli nuclear program during the 1950s, bringing about the establishment of two research reactors in Soreq and Dimona. Of the three, it was Peres, the political operator, who cemented the nuclear relationship between France and Israel, paving the way for the French agreement to build the Dimona reactor in the days leading up to the 1956 Suez crisis.
On Feb. 14, 1949, a fragile and almost blind Weizmann inaugurated the opening session of the Constituent Assembly of the new State of Israel. No longer enthusiastic about the role of the Jewish scientists in the Manhattan Project, a more cautious, weary Weizmann took the stand. Though his speech was short and concise, he included in it, remarkably, a warning against the dangers of the atomic bomb. He framed this as the result of scientific development lacking any moral vision:
Yet, for all the decisive importance of science, it is not by science alone that we shall win through. Let us build a new bridge between science and the spirit of man. Where there is no vision the people perish. We have seen what scientific progress leads to when it is not inspired by moral vision—the atomic bomb threatening to destroy the entire planet.
Unpublished memoir passages shed light on Weizmann’s views regarding nuclear technology and its benefits, and how these relate to its so-called Jewish heritage:
“If human folly reaches such a stage that atomic energy will be used extensively in the next war about which one hears so much talk, it will be said that the Jews have conspired to destroy the world. If, however, as I hope and believe is the case, atomic energy will be guided into constructive channels, and humanity will enjoy the benefits of unlimited sources of energy ... I doubt whether people will remember the great number of Jews who will have helped to bring these results about.”
On the night before the holiday of Shavuot 1981, Prime Minister Menachem Begin shocked his cabinet by announcing they would be launching a surprise attack called “Operation Opera” on a nuclear reactor in Iraq, known as Osirak.
Should the operation fail, the lives of four million Israelis would be at risk, however Begin chose to go ahead with the plan. Despite the large criticism Israel faced in the aftermath, Operation Opera was successful in protecting Israel and preventing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from building nuclear weapons.
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