In most world capitals, the creation of Israel — which used to be seen through a heroic lens, as in the film Exodus — is now viewed as a matter of regret. The current U.S. administration, too, is rather cool toward Israel. So this is a good time to be reminded of how and why Israel was founded in the first place, and how one American’s role in that founding rose to the heroic. Allis and Ronald Radosh have given us an invaluable and compelling account of Pres. Harry Truman’s fight against enormous and unscrupulous opposition from within his own administration, in order to make sure America played a public role in the creation of Israel.

“The situation at many of the camps [is] practically as bad as it was under the Germans.” That was Truman’s reaction on August 24, 1945, to the report of his emissary Earl Harrison about Europe’s displaced-persons camps, where the majority of the 1.5 million European Jews who had survived the Holocaust were waiting for the victorious Allied powers, dubbed the United Nations, to decide whether they would have a national home.

The Allies were divided. The British Labour government adamantly opposed allowing the Jews to emigrate to Palestine, for fear it would inflame Arab opinion, even though previous British governments had promised Zionist leaders a future Jewish homeland there. Russia’s Stalin instinctively hated Jews as much as any Arab did — at Yalta he told FDR they were all “profiteers and parasites” — but he was willing to back a Jewish state in Palestine in order to irritate the British. Franklin Roosevelt had supported the idea of a Jewish state until he met Saudi King Ibn Saud shortly after Yalta. To the dismay of American Zionists, Roosevelt reported that on that occasion he learned more about “the Jewish problem . . . by talking to Ibn Saud for five minutes than I could have learned in the exchange of two or three dozen letters.”

When Roosevelt died in April 1945, it was left to his successor to make up America’s mind on this issue, along with others — including dropping the atomic bomb and foiling Stalin’s plans for Eastern Europe. Truman later said he faced no more complex or controversial issue than the Israel question.

Should he support a United Nations resolution partitioning Palestine and allowing the creation of a Jewish state alongside an Arab one? On one side, Truman’s State Department ferociously said no. Then and later, State’s Middle East desk was run by the so-called Arabists, who shared many of the aspirations and prejudices of their Arab clients. They saw Jews as having no place in a future Middle East, whether in Palestine or elsewhere. A U.S. vote to create such a place, they believed, would be a severe blow to our strategic hopes in the region and shut off any future flow of oil from the Middle East (on both counts, they proved to be wrong).

On the other side was a mixed bag of liberals like New York senator Robert Wagner, conservatives like Ohio senator Robert Taft, and various American Zionist and Jewish groups — including the American Jewish Conference — who were understandably galvanized by the possibility of a Jewish state. However, as the Radoshes show, Israel’s supporters in 1948 were lousy lobbyists, divided among themselves. If it hadn’t been for two men, Truman might well have yielded to the enormous pressure from State, against his own view that the Jews, like everyone else, deserved a homeland in a post-war world.

One of them was Chaim Weizmann, friend to Winston Churchill and longtime champion of the Zionist cause. He came to New York City and the U.N. for one last push to get America on board. The other was Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s Jewish partner from the haberdashery business and his closest friend, who took up the cause of Israel and became Jewish groups’ point man in getting messages to the White House. No other person played a greater role in outmaneuvering Israel’s powerful opponents, who included Secretary of State George Marshall. Jacobson would go on to become Truman’s unofficial ambassador to Israel after the nation was born on May 14, 1948.

The State Department did everything it could to prevent that birth. It importuned the British to remain in Palestine. When that failed, at the last minute Truman’s U.N. ambassador sabotaged the president’s clearly stated policy by switching the U.S. vote from supporting partition of Palestine to supporting a more or less permanent U.N. trusteeship. A furious Truman had to read the riot act to Marshall and Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett. It was as close as Truman and his semi-deified secretary of state came to breaking publicly on an issue. Marshall relented, but told Truman he intended to vote against him in the upcoming presidential election.

There is some irony in this. If there was any political calculation in Truman’s decision to support the creation of Israel, it was based on his advisers’ fear of losing the Jewish vote in New York, a state that was crucial for his reelection. Truman lost New York anyway, although he still managed to stay in the White House. (The other northeastern state where the Jewish vote was crucial was Pennsylvania; Truman lost there, as well.)

The night of May 13, some 75,000 people turned out for a celebration at Madison Square Garden. However, by and large the creation of Israel was not an issue that unified American Jewish groups, then or later. Indeed, some, including the American Council for Judaism, were positively hostile. If it had been left to American Jews alone, it is doubtful whether the U.S.’s alliance with Israel would have been as strong as it has turned out to be.

What was true then is true today. Barack Obama is arguably the most anti-Israel president ever, yet — with the exception of blacks — no American ethnic group voted more solidly for Obama than America’s Jews.

Instead, American support for Israel has come to rest on other, more solid grounds. It is partly strategic. A great deal of it comes from American Protestants, such as today’s evangelical Right (and, in his day, President Truman himself). Some of it comes from a commitment to support a fellow democratic-pluralist society, especially when it’s under siege.

And it may also come from a lingering sense, as Winston Churchill put it, that the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine is an event “to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years.” Supporting Israel was and is an act of gratitude toward the religion and people who stood at the founding of Western civilization, and without whom we would not exist. Men like Churchill and Truman understood it was important to return the favor.