In this unintentionally amusing December 6, 1957 correspondence on United Nations letterhead, Ralph Bunche advises an obviously uninformed person that the autographed photo he is sending him does not belong in his “collection of the signers of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, since [he] had nothing to do with that historical event.”
Bunch (1904-71) played no role in the drafting or execution of Israel’s Declaration of Independence; he, did, however, mediate between Israel and the Arabs after Israel’s War of Independence and negotiated armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1950 for his efforts in this regard – the first black man to receive this award – and was also presented with the Medal of Freedom by President Kennedy in 1963. AIPAC (the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) later created the Ralph Bunche Award to recognize African-American activists who advance the U.S.-Israel relationship as well as other causes important to Jewish communities in the U.S.
Among his duties as special assistant to the UN Special Committee on Palestine in 1947, Bunche was charged with resettling European refugees post-WWII. While traveling across Europe and interviewing Jewish survivors in displaced person camps, he became aware of the need for a homeland for the Jewish people. When the United Nations created the post of Mediator of Palestine and appointed Count Folke Bernadotte to that post on May 20, 1948, Bunche was asked to travel to Paris to escort Bernadotte to Israel and brief him on the difficult negotiations as well as the conflicting interests and personalities.
Bernadotte proposed a revolting plan in which he endorsed a number of anti-Jewish changes to the UN partition plan, including a recommendation that the Negev “should be defined as Arab territory.” The following day, a member of the Lehi underground group assassinated him in Jerusalem. Bunche had been en route to meet Bernadotte, but he was held up at a checkpoint at the Mandelbaum Gate because of a problem with his secretary’s passport; the French officer who took his place in Bernadotte’s vehicle was slain.
Bunche, who was then generally unknown, was appointed acting mediator to replace Bernadotte on September 17, 1948, a selection that created an immediate furor because of Bunche’s race. He quickly proposed that the UN order the parties to the Mideast dispute to enter into immediate negotiations aimed at a formal peace or, at the very least, an armistice.
At a meeting with Chaim Weizmann, Bunche told the Israeli president – whom he later called “the great old man of Israel” – that he had stirred his support for the Jewish cause, which he favored in part because of the hardships and discrimination he had suffered as a black man. He wrote that Jewish and black organizations should cooperate because “in large measure, their problems, their grievances, and their fears are cut to a common pattern” and, as he noted in his diary, “a wise Negro can never be an anti-Semite.” Bunche was broadly viewed as being a fair mediator, but also as one who supported Israel’s interests.
However, according to an article by Asle Sveen, who has written several books on the Nobel Peace Prize, entries in Bunche’s personal diary show that he was often aggravated by the conduct of the Jewish delegation and expressed sympathy for the Egyptian position. In particular, Bunche’s diary reflects his general rejection of an independent Jewish state and his support for a single binational state in Eretz Yisrael. He was dragged only incrementally and reluctantly to a partition of the land and the establishment of a Jewish state.
As the Security Council’s duly appointed chairman, he accomplished what most of the parties and observers had considered impossible. He successfully negotiated an Israel-Egypt armistice agreement (February 24, 1949 at Rhodes) and, within months, he negotiated subsequent armistice agreements between Israel and Lebanon (March 23, 1949, at Rosh Ha-Nikra), Israel and Jordan (April 3, 1949, at Rhodes), and Israel and Syria (July 20, 1949, at Machanayim).
In one interesting and generally unknown incident, Bunche may have saved the life of Levi Eshkol, then-Israel’s director-general of the ministry of defense and later Israel’s third prime minister. On March 8, 1949, an Air France plane departing Lod airport with Eshkol aboard developed mechanical problems and was forced to make an emergency landing in Beirut. It was Bunche who succeeded in securing the release of the plane and its passengers.
Upon his return to the United States after negotiating the armistices, Bunche was hailed as a hero; Eisenhower called him “one of the greatest statesmen this country has ever produced,” and he became nationally venerated after his receipt of the Nobel Prize. Interestingly, he originally planned to decline the award because of his belief that UN representatives should not be rewarded for simply doing their jobs which, he modestly believed, was all that he had done. He ultimately changed his mind at the urging of UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie, who convinced him that accepting the award would generate important positive publicity for the work of the United Nations.
Recent studies indicate that Lie and the American government played a more important role in the armistice negotiations than previously understood. Bunche sought assistance from President Truman through Lie, who was strongly pro-Israel, and Bunche shared confidential UN information with the president, who pressured the recalcitrant Egyptian delegation.
Bunche also played an important role in Israeli history during the 1956-57 Suez crisis, when UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold appointed him as undersecretary general of the United Nations (the highest UN position held by an American), in which capacity he was designated civilian supervisor of 6,000 UN troops sent to the Suez after the 1956 Israeli-Egyptian War – effectively the first UN “peacekeeping” mission.
Notwithstanding his Nobel Prize for the 1949 Armistice Agreements, he characterized this assignment as his “single most satisfying work,” because military forces were being used to maintain peace rather than wage war. He became renowned as “the father of peacekeeping” for designing and implementing procedures and tactics for international peacekeeping, many of which are still used at the UN.
The first African-American to be awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard (1934), Bunche wrote A World of Race (1936), an important treatise on race and colonialism, and served as chief researcher and writer for Gunnar Myrdal’s renowned An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), a historic study of U.S. race relations in which he introduced the theory that “poverty breeds poverty” and developed the idea that notwithstanding the so-called “American dream,” Americans-born poor faced monumental obstacles in achieving financial prosperity.
After serving in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and in the State Department – becoming the first African American to hold a top position there – Bunche played a key role in the establishment of the UN. He served as a member of the United States delegation to the 1945 San Francisco conference; helped draft the UN charter, particularly Chapters XI and XII, which laid the foundation for the ultimate de-colonialization of the world; was instrumental in the drafting and adoption of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and joined the UN Secretariat as director of the new Trusteeship Department (1946), in which capacity he helped most of the territories under his administration attain independence.
President Truman sought to appoint Bunche as assistant secretary of state, but he declined the appointment, telling Dean Rusk, who had been sent by the president to convince him to accept the position, that “living in the nation’s capital is like serving out a [prison] sentence for any Negro who detests segregation and discrimination.”
Bunche served for over 20 years on the board of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). After being targeted as a communist sympathizer during the McCarthy hearings and attracting some criticism, particularly by black nationalists, for his seeming neglect of the black freedom movement at home, he began to speak out more directly on U.S. racial discrimination and participated in the 1965 civil rights marches in Selma and Montgomery.
Bunche’s important role in the history of Israel may perhaps best be seen through Golda Meir’s condolence letter to Mrs. Joan Bunche after her husband’s death:
I was shocked at the tragic death of your husband who has devoted his life to the cause of peace. There is hardly anybody outside of Israel who was so intimately connected with the State of Israel from its emergence and who has contributed so much in bringing to a close the first outbursts of Arab hostility against Israel. His wisdom, objectivity and ability are sadly needed in the troubled world of today. His passing is a great loss to all who are interested in peace. Please accept my participation in your great sorrow.
