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War, Peace and Politics - The Royal Family and Palestine (Part I)

personal or political?

Saudi advocacy on behalf of the Palestinians goes back to the earliest days of the Kingdom, when the new monarch, Abd al-Aziz (known in the West as Ibn Saud), first met US President Roosevelt near the end of the Second World War. Roosevelt was returning from the Yalta Conference in 1945, and had arranged to meet Ibn Saud on board the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal. Ibn Saud was looking to both Britain and the US for economic help, since the country was effectively bankrupt, but he distrusted the British, regarding them as avaricious and deceitful.

Ibn Saud met Roosevelt on February 14, and the two men found an instant rapport, talking for several days in all. It was at this meeting that the famous compact was made - access to Saudi oil in return for American protection, for a period of 60 years. Roosevelt also brought up the plan to find European Jews a new home in Palestine after the war; he hoped to convince Ibn Saud to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine (or alternatively, Libya), but the king was vehemently opposed. Why should Germany not be the one making amends, he asked. "The Jews should return to live in the lands from which they were driven. The Jews whose homes were completely destroyed and who have no chance of livelihood in their homelands should be given living space in the Axis countries which oppressed them." Ibn Saud was unmovable - that "amends should be made by the criminal, not by the innocent bystander" was his firm belief.

Roosevelt did not press the issue, and left promising that America "would make no change in its basic policy in Palestine without full and prior consultation with both Jews and Arabs." He reiterated this commitment in a letter dated April 5, 1945, just one week before his death, promising that he, as president, would take no hostile action against the Arabs, and that the US would not change its basic policy toward the Palestine issue without prior consultations with both Arabs and Jews.

Still firmly opposed to the Zionist movement and Jewish immigration into Palestine, Ibn Saud was enraged by the subsequent call at a American Zionist conference for the creation of a Jewish state, and threatened to sever relations with both Britain and the US should they support that initiative. Things changed even more dramatically, however, when Truman took over as president. The US voted at the United Nations in November 1947 in favor of the partition of Palestine, and Ibn Saud was furious at the key role Truman played in the later settlement of 100,000 Jews there. The king believed, erroneously as it turned out, that Roosevelt's promise had been binding on the American government. Now that the Zionist movement had triumphed in Palestine and created the state of Israel, it seemed a betrayal of the promise the king thought he had secured aboard the USS Quincy. This was, to the king, a direct and forceful repudiation of Roosevelt's commitment to take no action harmful to the Arabs.

The king's son, Faysal, urged his father to cut all diplomatic relations with the US. But Ibn Saud badly needed the income from the American oil company in the Eastern Province, which the Truman administration had correctly surmised would be the case. The president's advisors calculated that military necessity, along with the need for political and economic self preservation, would compel the Saudis to sell their oil regardless of any principled stand on the issue of Palestine. Their assessment convinced Truman to forge ahead with the Jewish settlement plan in spite of furious Arab opposition. Ibn Saud did, however, instruct all his provincial governors to raise volunteers to fight in Palestine alongside the other Arab armies - a thousand joined the war effort in 1947-48, the first instance of Saudi volunteers going outside the country to fight for a Muslim cause. In spite of the new reality, however, the American role in the creation of the Israeli state would leave a bitter taste.

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