The US and Palestine, 1948 – AUB

Program in Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA)
Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES)
American University of Beirut

Cordially invite you to a talk: “The US and Palestine, 1948”
Irene Gendzier, a Professor Emerita, Department of Political Science, Boston University

Irene L. Gendzier presents incontrovertible evidence that oil politics played a significant role in the founding of Israel, the policy then adopted by the United States toward Palestinians, and subsequent U.S. involvement in the region. Consulting declassified U.S. government sources, as well as papers in the H.S. Truman Library, she uncovers little-known features of US involvement in the region, including significant exchanges in the winter and spring of 1948 between the director of the Oil and Gas Division of the Interior Department and the representative of the Jewish Agency in the United States, months before Israel’s independence and recognition by President Truman. Gendzier reveals how the politics of oil helped move the US from an initial position – one that considered the consequences of partition to be deleterious and supported repatriation of Palestinians – to one that saw Israel as a strategic ally and put the US squarely on its course to the position it holds today.

Irene L. Gendzier is Professor Emerita in the Department of Political Science at Boston University. She is also the author of Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945–1958 and Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, and she is a coeditor, with Richard Falk and Robert Lifton, of Crimes of War: Iraq.

Location: IFI Building (facing Green Oval) – 4th Floor Conference Room