The Day Eleanor Roosevelt Passed Through the Mandelbaum Gate

By Andrew I. Killgore

Israeli newspapers and the Herald Tribune from Paris had alerted us that Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the late American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would be coming to the Middle East. Given the realities of domestic American politics, that meant she would be coming to Israel for sure.

It was the spring of 1959 and Easter was approaching. I was U.S. consul in Jerusalem and I dreaded what I feared would follow: that Mrs. Roosevelt would decide on very short notice after she arrived in Jerusalem that she wanted to cross from Jewish West Jerusalem through the Mandelbaum Gate into Arab East Jerusalem to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I also feared that the Palestinian officials who ran the External Liaison Office, the Jerusalem branch of the Jordanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs which controlled Mandelbaum crossings, would say no, and I would understand why.

Eleanor Roosevelt was a heroine in the United States. She had long stood up for Black Americans, for workers and for women. And she was indelibly identified with Jewish issues—political Zionism and the birth of the State of Israel.

But if her support for the establishment of Israel had heightened her popularity in Israel and the U.S., it had exactly the opposite effect elsewhere in the Middle East. She was detested by the Palestinians, who had never heard her breathe a word about their considerable suffering, or even mention the word Palestinian. If she was even aware that the arrival of some 750,000 Jewish immigrants in Palestine had turned 750,000 Palestinians into refugees, it could not be deduced from anything she had ever been quoted as saying.

A Bubbling Quote

Each day as newspapers from Israel and Jordan were exchanged at the Mandelbaum Gate, which was really an intersection between the two hostile sides of the city, I read in Israel's English-language Jerusalem Post about Mrs. Roosevelt's travels and conversations in Israel where, it was clear, her visit was being handled as a major public relations event. And from deep in Israel's Negev desert, where Israel had harnessed a small oasis spring to plant a few hundred acres of richly dark green alfalfa, came a bubbling quote from Eleanor Roosevelt that Israel had, indeed, "made the desert bloom." In East Jerusalem the comment was read, of course, by External Liaison head Najati Nashashibi, a member of one of Jerusalem's great Christian families.

My own feelings about Mrs. Roosevelt were mixed. I had long been appalled by the forced displacement of the Palestinians, and her apparent lack of interest or information on that subject made her seem either soft-headed or senile—too old to change her mind even though the evidence was all around her. (In fact she died only three years later at 80 years of age.) Still I admired her earlier stands on U.S. domestic issues.

The very same day that Mrs. Roosevelt's quote about "making the desert bloom" appeared in the Jerusalem Post, her request arrived to cross the Mandelbaum Gate to attend Easter services the next day at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I dreaded the reaction of my friend Najati Nashashibi, but I had to get his approval for that crossing, come hell or high water.

As I anticipated, he at first said no with eloquence and passion. I understood his anger, but I pointed out that there would be an awful stink if Mrs. Roosevelt, a world-renowned figure, couldn't go to church because a Palestinian, even a Christian Palestinian, said no. I explained, correctly I still believe, that it would hurt the Palestinian cause.

Finally, when it was clear that I could not take no for an answer, the External Liaison Office director reluctantly said yes. (Although I did not say so, I also knew that via our embassy in Amman I probably could have him overruled by King Hussein.)

So I met Mrs. Roosevelt at the Mandelbaum Gate and took her and a young niece accompanying her for tea in our living room barely 75 yards away. The tea was a pleasant kind of anticlimax. Mrs. Roosevelt was graciousness itself, and my wife Marjorie and I enjoyed her company.

Mrs. Roosevelt did, however, allude to the marvelous example of desert-blooming to which the PR-skilled Israelis had drawn her attention. Out of respect for her person, neither we nor two charming Palestinian Christians whom we also had invited to tea took issue with her comments, though we all knew that Palestine had been one of the most fertile lands in the Middle East, and the orange groves had been thriving long before the Israelis arrived.

Then, to my astonishment, Mrs. Roosevelt, who had only recently visited Iran, described her surprise upon discovering that the Iranian Jews she had talked with in Tehran seemed to prefer to stay in their Iranian homeland rather than emigrate to Israel. I was sorely tempted to ask her if she was surprised that American Jews, likewise, seemed also to prefer to stay where they were. But, again, I regret to say, I kept my thoughts to myself.

My Palestinian friends returned with Mrs. Roosevelt to the Mandelbaum Gate after the Easter service at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I asked later if they had questioned any of her assumptions. As I had feared, out of respect for her, they had not.

So Mrs. Roosevelt visited and departed from the very heart of the Arab-Israel dispute without absorbing even a glimmer of what it was all about. On that day, I fear, by being excessively polite, and perhaps unnecessarily cautious, we all did a grave disservice to Mrs. Roosevelt, ourselves, and the truth.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.