April 4, 1948
A memorandum from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff answers three specific questions President Harry Truman has about the partition plan the United Nations approved in November 1947 with U.S. support:
- If the Jewish Agency and Arab Higher Committee agree to abstain from further violence, an estimated 100,000 U.S. troops, six destroyers and considerable air support will be necessary to monitor a truce.
- If Britain agrees to participate in monitoring the truce, each country should provide 50,000 troops.
- The U.S. military implications of partition could include a partial mobilization of the Selective Service (the military draft) to achieve the numbers required.
The Joint Chiefs advise that the United States could not fully deploy forces before Britain’s scheduled withdrawal May 15 because the U.S. military would be overextended overseas and would require a supplementary budget.
The findings support a shift in U.S. policy from partition to trusteeship.
In March 1948, concerned that the conditions were not viable for partition as a result of ongoing violence between Arabs and Jews in Mandatory Palestine, the U.S. State Department urged ending support for partition in favor of trusteeship. The State Department worried that backing the establishment of a Jewish state would jeopardize Arab oil supplies, force the deployment of U.S. troops to the Middle East to save the Jewish state and trigger a confrontation in the region with the Soviet Union.
After a standoff between the White House and State Department over partition and trusteeship, President Harry Truman announced support March 25, 1948, for a trusteeship as a temporary alternative to partition: “Unfortunately, it has become clear that the partition plan cannot be carried out at this time by peaceful means. We could not undertake to impose this solution on the people of Palestine by the use of American troops, both on charter grounds and as a matter of national policy.”
