T. Belman. That meeting was instrumental in influencing Truman to recognize the State of Israel against the wishes of the State Department. Truman did so with misgivings as he believed that the Arabs would invade and crush the new state. Even though he believed this, he didn’t lift a finger to help the new Jewish state and maintained the US embargo on weapon sales to Israel.
Due to the efforts of Golda Meir and Ben Gurion a clandestine organization was created to smuggle weapons to Israel. In my early years I read The Pledge which dealt with their activities. But the bulk of the weapons and planes that Israel procured, came through Czechoslovakia, courtesy the USSR.
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great video….
so USA and Truman were the bad guys and USSR and Stalin were the good guys.
A friend advises:
It was a hostile Secretary of State George C. Marshal who imposed an arms embargo on the Middle East in 1947. This could have resulted in the inability of Israel to defend itself except for some arms from Czechoslovakia. I fault Harry Truman for failing to lift the embargo.
I think the Weizmann quote was “its now or never”. Ben Gurion agreed.
The rest is history.
Just to point out that it was Chaim Weizmann who persuaded a reluctant Eddie Jacobson to go to visit Truman, and Jacobson famously told Truman that it was this old sick man who came to him and I couldn’t turn him down. On another close point, whilst i Israel Ben gurion was wavering and almost decided not to declare a state, it was Weizmann who cabled him urgently that he MUST declare a State right away, no matter what happens. All this paraphrased and from my recollections of the time and much reading later.