U.S. Special Representative to Israel, James McDonald, in a private meeting with Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion after presenting his credentials.
Overview
- Caption
- U.S. Special Representative to Israel, James McDonald, in a private meeting with Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion after presenting his credentials.
- Date
-
1948 August 20
- Locale
- Tel Aviv, Palestine/Israel
- Variant Locale
- Israel
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of James McDonald
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumProvenance: James McDonaldSource Record ID: Collections: 2004.220
Keywords & Subjects
Administrative Notes
- Biography
- James Grover McDonald (1886-1964), American professor and diplomat. Born in Coldwater, Ohio, McDonald became a professor of history and political science at the University of Indiana. In 1919 he was appointed chairman of the Foreign Policy Association in New York and served in that capacity until 1933. After several visits to Nazi Germany, McDonald became convinced that the new German regime was going to take radical steps to solve the "Jewish question," and became increasingly disturbed by the indifference of the U.S. State Department to this state of affairs. In 1933, with the help of important German Jewish leaders, including James Rosenberg, Felix Warburg, Mildred Wertheimer, and Arthur and Herbert Henry Lehman, McDonald was appointed head of the newly created Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany within the League of Nations. However, from the very beginning of his tenure he faced serious obstacles, stemming from his lack of legitimacy as an American commissioner to an organization (the League of Nations) to which his country did not belong. He enjoyed the support neither of the U.S. State Department nor of key League members such as France and Britain. In addition, Germany, which had recently withdrawn from the League, argued that McDonald had no right to interfere in Germany's internal affairs. In 1935, when enactment of the Nuremberg Laws exacerbated the Jewish refugee problem, McDonald decided to resign in a dramatic fashion in an attempt to focus attention on the plight of the refugees. In his resignation speech, which was delivered on December 3, 1935 and published in the New York Times, McDonald accused the German government of pursuing a policy of racial extermination and condemned the members of the League for their inaction. In 1936 McDonald took a position on the editorial staff of The New York Times, and in 1938 he assumed the presidency of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. In July 1938 McDonald was a participant at the international refugee conference in Evian-les-Bains, France, convened by Roosevelt in the wake of the German annexation of Austria. At the same time Roosevelt established the Presidents Advisory Committee on Political Refugees (PAC) and appointed McDonald to be its chairman. The PAC was a quasi-governmental agency tasked to serve as a liaison between the government and numerous private agencies involved with refugees. However, McDonald was given no budget with which to operate. He was also plagued by the opposition of the U.S. State Department, which rejected nearly every suggestion posed by the new agency to alleviate the plight of the refugees. In the fall of 1940 McDonald clashed most directly with the State Department when it refused PAC 's request for permission to grant special visas to prominent European political and cultural leaders. Discouraged, McDonald turned down a vague offer to head the American delegation to the Bermuda refugee conference in April 1943. McDonald's sympathy with the cause of Zionism and his longstanding opposition to British efforts to prevent large-scale immigration to Palestine won him a place on the postwar Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, appointed by President Truman. After the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, McDonald was appointed U.S. Special Representative to the Jewish State, and in March 1949, the first American ambassador to Israel. He remained in that position until 1951.
[Source: Gutman, Israel. "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust," MacMillan, 1990. 3:954-55.]
David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Zionist leader who became the first prime minister of the State of Israel. Born in Plonsk, Poland, Ben-Gurion was a Zionist from his early youth. He was educated at a Hebrew school established by his father, an ardent Zionist, and by his mid-teens, Ben-Gurion was in charge of the local Zionist youth group known as Ezra, whose members spoke only Hebrew among themselves. At the age of 18 he became a teacher in a Warsaw Jewish school and joined the Socialist-Zionist Poalei Tzion movement. He immigrated to Palestine in 1906, where he took part in the creation of the first agricultural workers' commune (which evolved into the kvutzah and finally the kibbutz), and helped establish the Jewish self-defense group, Hashomer (The Watchman). Following the outbreak of World War I he was deported by the Ottoman authorities. Ben-Gurion traveled on behalf of the Socialist-Zionist cause to New York, where he met and married Paula Monbesz, a fellow Poalei Tzion activist. He returned to Palestine in the uniform of the Jewish Legion, a new Jewish unit in the British Army. Ben-Gurion was one of the founders of the Histadrut (the General Federation of Labor) in Palestine and was its secretary-general from 1921 to 1935. In 1935 he also became chairman of the Zionist Executive and of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, holding both posts up to 1948. Ben-Gurion spent much of the first two years of World War II in the U.S., where he worked to mobilize American Jewry's support for a resolution calling for Palestine to be opened for large-scale Jewish immigration and, after the war, to become a Jewish commonwealth under Jewish authority. This resolution (the Biltmore Program) was adopted in May 1942 at a conference of American Zionists in New York. From the end of 1942, Ben-Gurion took part in organizing the Yishuv for rescue operations, but he left political action in the hands of the Jewish Agency departments. He was, on the whole, skeptical about the chances of success for rescue efforts, especially after the failure of the Bermuda Conference of April 1943 and the Joel Brand "blood for trucks" negotiations in the summer of 1944, and therefore focused on what he considered to be the long-term political solutions to the root causes of the Holocaust. In the immediate postwar period, Ben-Gurion was very influential in molding the Jewish displaced persons in Europe into a dynamic force for the Zionist cause. During his three tours of the DP camps, in October 1945, and in January and October 1946, Ben-Gurion invigorated and inspired the DPs by addressing them not as powerless victims, but as partners in a national struggle. On May 14, 1948 Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel. He served as both prime minister and defense minister in the subsequent War of Independence. In late 1953, Ben-Gurion left the government and retired to Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev. He returned to political life after the Knesset elections in 1955, assuming the post of defense minister and later the premiership. In June 1963 Ben-Gurion resigned as prime minister, but remained active politically. In June 1970, Ben-Gurion retired from political life and returned to Sde Boker where he died in 1973.
[Source: Gutman, Israel (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Macmillan, 1990, pp.180-182; "David Ben-Gurion." The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise. Jewish Virtual Library http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/biography/ben_gurion.html (14 March 2004)]
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