A New Look at Truman and "Exodus 1947

In 2003, a desk diary of Harry Truman's for the year 1947 was found at the Truman Library, in Independence, Missouri. It had been sent to him as a present in late 1946 by Matthew G. Ely, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, Inc. A slip of paper inside the diary, with the heading "President's Study," indicates that Truman used it in his study at the oval office in the White House. The diary, in Truman's own handwriting, contains one single entry on Palestine, dated July 21—almost two months to the day before the opening of the UN General Assembly at Lake Success, New York, that was destined to decide at the end of November to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. In this entry, the president of the United States gave vent to his spleen in an antisemitic diatribe against the Jewish people. The cause of his anger was a ten-minute telephone call he had received from Henry Morgenthau, President Roosevelt's secretary of the treasury, concerning a "Jewish ship in Palistine" (sic). But first, a brief review of the events of the few days prior to that. There can be no doubt that the ship in question was none other than the Exodus 1947. The ship, carrying some 4,500 Jewish Holocaust survivors from Europe, all would-be "illegal" immigrants into Palestine, had been shadowed by four ships of the British Navy all the way from Port de Bouc, France, its point of departure. Just after 03:00 on the morning of July 18, when the Exodus was still some thirty miles outside of Palestine's territorial waters, British Navy marines boarded the ship. A violent, vicious struggle ensued, relayed live to the world by Hagana radio transmitters. At around 05:00, Ike Aranne, the ship's American- born captain, surrendered to the British in order to secure medical aid for the great number of Jewish wounded—three Jews dead or dying, twenty-eight in need of hospitalization and some two hundred in need of first aid. The Exodus was