6. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford An Unrecognizable Episode President Richard Nixon came to office in 1969 intending to pursue an impartial policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, but he had no interest in, and knew little about, the Palestinian situation or its political ramifications. When Nixon was forced to resign the presidency following the Watergate […]
CHRISTIAN ZIONISM/EVANGELICALS
5. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson 5 *INFO
5. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson Possession Is Nine-Tenths of the Law In line with the principle that what is out of sight is out of mind, the Palestinians rarely entered U.S. policy considerations throughout the 1950s and 1960s. After their dispersal in 1948, the name Palestine disappeared from the world’s political register, primarily because for Israel and even […]
4. Harry Truman 5*INFO
4. Harry Truman History Belongs to the Victors History, writes Israeli historian and Oxford University professor Avi Shlaim, is in a sense “the propaganda of the victors,” and because Israel so resoundingly won the 1948 war, which gave it independence and determined for decades thereafter the fate of the Arabs of Palestine, Israel was able […]
3. Franklin Roosevelt 5*INFO
3. Franklin Roosevelt Locked In Franklin Roosevelt made no major policy decisions with regard to Palestine, but because he perpetuated what had already become a firmly set frame of reference at a critical time in the history of Palestine, his tenure was pivotal. Elected in 1932, he was in office from the era of increased […]
1. Palestinians in the Nineteenth-Century Mind 5*INFO
1. Palestinians in the Nineteenth-Century Mind Humorist Mark Twain’s bitter cynicism and cleverness as a wordsmith combined to make him a popular commentator in mid-nineteenth century United States. His jaundiced observations of Palestine and Palestinians, publicized in his 1869 account of travels through Europe and the Holy Land, The Innocents Abroad, have made him a […]
2. Woodrow Wilson 5*INFO
2. Woodrow Wilson “Rising Above” Self-Determination A frame of mind in which Arabs essentially played no part, in which they were politically invisible, patronized, disdained, or ignored altogether—this is the mind-set with which the policymakers who made the first official decisions on Palestine for the United States after World War I grew up. President Woodrow […]