Year XXXVII, Number 3, November 2024

Matthew Rozsa
Writer 

One of the political thinkers who most influenced me in high school – a man whose ideas are especially relevant today, as amply illustrated by the ongoing Middle East crisis – was once nominated by a major political party for the presidency, but ultimately did not succeed in reaching that ostensibly distinguished office.

His book convinced me that humanity needs a world government.

I refer to Wendell Lewis Willkie, an Indiana leftist radical-turned-Wall Street lawyer who won the Republican presidential nomination in 1940. He later wrote a book called “One World” that, like this organization, advocates for international federalism. I have been a global federalist ever since.

One would have hardly envisioned this future for Willkie during the 1940 election. That was the year when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was seeking his unprecedented third term; by campaigning as a centrist, Willkie hoped to inspire heavy turnout among the conservatives that always loathed Roosevelt while appealing to moderates turned off in equal measure by Republican reactionism and Roosevelt’s bid for a third term. Although Willkie outperformed the previous two Republicans to run against and lose to Roosevelt (President Herbert Hoover and Kansas Gov. Alf Landon), he still lost in a landslide. The president won 38 states with 449 electoral votes compared to Willkie’s 10 states worth 82 electoral votes. In the popular vote, Roosevelt amassed 27.3 million to Willkie’s 22.3 million, or 54.7 percent to 44.8 percent.

It was a thumping defeat for Willkie, but he had still finished a historic campaign. Until Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Willkie was the last person to win a presidential nomination from a major party without previous political or military experience; while Trump was most famous as the host of a reality TV show called “The Apprentice,” Willkie had been best known as a crusading lawyer who took on Roosevelt’s liberal New Deal programs. Yet just as Trump ended the 2016 campaign as a changed man – a president, for better or worse, forevermore – Willkie also concluded his 1940 campaign as a changed man.

Yet whereas Trump decided to become a far-right president who illegitimately seized power in a coup when he lost in the 2020 election, Willkie chose the exact opposite course. Instead of nursing grievances against his erstwhile opponent, Willkie put aside partisan differences and worked directly with Roosevelt. America was sucked into World War II by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Willkie believed Americans had a moral responsibility to focus on both winning the war and creating a lasting peace.

To this end, Roosevelt dispatched Willkie in August 1942 on a worldwide trip, one that would eventually form the basis of "One World." Brimming with optimism, Willkie departed on an airplane called The Gulliver flown by Major Richard T. Kight, D. F. C. The itinerary included the Middle East, Soviet Union and China, with Willkie appearing as the president's personal representative while gathering information and creating postwar alliances. After a successful trip through the North African front at El Alamein with the legendary General Bernard Law "Monty" Montgomery, and an equally fruitful session with the iconic General Charles de Gaulle in Beirut, Willkie's wanderings finally brought him to Jerusalem.

This was almost six years before Israel would become an independent nation – a reality that Willkie would not live to see.

It is here that one must pause and read some of Willkie’s observations about Palestine in their entirety. It is not an understatement to observe that Willkie was prophetic about the intractable nature of the conflict between the diverse groups in Palestine, then controlled by the British Empire. He described the “polite but skeptical people” who greeted him everywhere he went in the region. They were painfully aware of America’s own problems with racism and imperialism, and therefore were among the colder visitors in terms of their reception of Willkie.

Yet the once and future presidential aspirant did not hold this against his hosts. Quite to the contrary, he empathized with the abject poverty all around him.

"I understood in Jerusalem for the first time how so many other Americans have gone there with a real feeling of returning to Biblical times," Wilkie said. "The reason was that they were in truth returning to Biblical times, where little has changed in two thousand years."

Willkie picked up on one major exception to this rule – the areas in British-controlled Palestine where Zionist colonies had been established. In this respect, Willkie compared the world Zionist movement to the Arabs in Baghdad who had achieved self-government. He argued that when people are provided with autonomy and the tools for success, they will succeed.

"Four things, it seemed to me, these people need, in varying degree and in different ways," Willkie said. "They need more education. They need more public-health work. They need more modern industry. And they need more of the social dignity and self-confidence which comes from freedom and self-rule."

With a tone one would find shocking in a modern Republican, Willkie argued that income inequality and colonialism were the two major problems in the Middle East. Blame for both could be placed in large part at the feet of the world’s major powers, at that time the sprawling global European empires promulgated by Britain, France and Germany. As these nations carved up lands and civilizations among themselves as if they were portioning food during a meal, Willkie reported that the peoples in those societies despised their overlords.

"I was talking with one of the high officials of the Lebanon about the struggle that was then going on between the French and the British for the control of Syria and the Middle East," Willkie said. "I asked him where his sympathies lay, and he replied, 'A plague on both their houses.' The intellectual leaven of the Middle East has little faith in a system of mandates and colonies, whatever power controls."

Speaking with leaders of the Arab and Jewish communities, Willkie mused that “I felt a great temptation to conclude that the only solution of this tangled problem must be as drastic as Solomon’s.” He turned with hope to the words of Henrietta Szold, the founder of the Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization of America, who informed Willkie that foreign powers were intentionally stirring up prejudices between Arabs and Jews to consolidate their own control. After explaining that Jews no longer believed antisemitism would go away in their lifetimes, and that the only practical solution was a homeland of their own, Szold concluded thusly:

“I am an ardent Zionist, but I do not believe that there is a necessary antagonism between the hopes of the Jews and the rights of the Arabs. I am urging my fellow Jews here in Jerusalem to do those simple things that break down the prejudices, the differences between people. I urge each of them to make friends with a few Arabs to demonstrate by their way of life that we are not coming as conquerors or destroyers, but as a part of the traditional life of the country, for us a sentimental and religious homeland.”

Willkie wished that matters could be as simple as the vision expressed by Szold, but he emphatically saw that material conditions would have to improve first. He was appalled by the rampant diseases and lack of adequate infrastructure, dismissing the then-pervasive racist belief that “the natives don’t want anything better than what they have.” Instead, he felt that a higher standard of living produced a superior quality of public health and education whenever it was introduced in a society.

Unfortunately for the Middle East, Willkie’s period of prominence on the American political scene was destined to be brief. After completing his travels through the Soviet Union and China, Willkie returned to the United States in October 1942 and described his trip in a radio broadcast "Report to the People." Thirty-six million individuals listened to Willkie's speech, and millions more bought "One World" when it was published the following April. Edited by his lover, New York Herald Tribune book review editor Irita Bradford Van Doren, "One World" was an immediate bestseller, selling one million copies in its first month.

Yet this was the peak of Willkie's career. The iconoclasm that charmed Republican delegates in 1940 had become a liability by 1944; the tousle haired Hoosier's full-throated support for Roosevelt's interventionist foreign policies was deeply unpopular among the GOP rank and file. Willkie did so poorly in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1944 that he soon dropped out, and shortly thereafter he literally dropped dead: the portly 52-year-old paid a fatal toll for his lifetime of eating excessively, heavy drinking and smoking and little exercise. He suffered a dozen heart attacks in less than a month at New York City's Lenox Hill Hospital, eventually dying. He was mourned by Democrats and Republicans alike, who praised his support for world peace and an end to racism.

Like most failed presidential candidates, Willkie quickly faded into obscurity. The ideas in “One World,” however, did not. They were promoted by luminaries like former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Indian civil rights activist Mahatma Gandhi, and physicists like Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer. All of this leads to the thesis of “One World” and how it changed my life. The book was not compelling enough to cause me to immediately abandon my Zionism – that was a slow process which took decades, as I had been raised to dismiss criticisms of Israel as at best suspect and at worst bigoted – but it certainly was the genesis of my belief in world federalism.

While I believe one can be both a Zionist and a world federalist, I do not believe that a person can support the human rights violations perpetrated by many Israelis in the name of Zionism. The same is true of the anti-Israel movements which, in seeking justice and liberation for the oppressed Palestinians, engage in antisemitism and violence: They too cannot adhere both to those beliefs and world federalism.

To understand why, look at Willkie’s explanation of the basic precepts of world federalism.

While paying due respect to the nationalist aspirations of all peoples, Willkie told his readers that humans would need to start viewing their interests globally rather than parochially. He criticized documents like the Atlantic Charter, an August 1941 statement of post-World War II goals signed by Roosevelt and his British counterpart (Prime Minister Winston Churchill), as being too weak to effectively create global peace and justice. After the experience that crushed Wilson in the post-World War I years, Willkie doubted that politicians – whether elected or authoritarian – could set aside their narrow self-interest to create a truly better world.

Instead, he argued that any successful world federalist structure would need to draw its power directly from the people it serves. Peoples who had previously been exploited with relative impunity by Western powers were self-educating and self-empowering. They understood that societies across the globe are interdependent, and as such effective political structures would need to meet the transnational needs of the struggling, working masses.

"Our Western world and our presumed supremacy are now on trial," Willkie said. "Our boasting and our big talk leave Asia cold. Men and women in Russia and China and in the Middle East are conscious now of their own potential strength. They are coming to know that many of the decisions about the future of the world lie in their hands. And they intend that these decisions shall leave the peoples of each nation free from foreign domination, free for economic, social and spiritual growth."

A world federalist government that competently implemented these principles in good faith would be able to impose a just outcome on the situation in Israel. It definitely would not be easy or quick. But a solution can only come from outside authority that recognizes the legitimate grievances on both sides.

The Palestinian Arabs have suffered ever since the Nakba, or the violent displacement of Palestinian Arabs from their land in 1948. Immediately prior to the Nakba, the Jewish colonists in Palestine – a territory soon to be abandoned by the British Empire – prepared to declare their independent statehood. Upon doing so and being recognized by President Harry S. Truman, the surrounding Arab nations declared war on Israel and vowed to push the Jews into the sea. Meanwhile the Zionists forcibly removed 750,000 Arabs from their homes and killed another 15,000 in dozens of village massacres, setting in motion a cycle of bloody wars and tense interludes marked by unremitting hostility on both sides.

Today there are more than one million Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip and an additional 750,000 in the West Bank. According to Amnesty International, they face regular discrimination as they are segregated in strictly monitored territorial and legal domains. Families are often separated involuntarily. Thousands of people are regularly removed from their homes by force, with their property seized. Israel has imposed an economic blockade on the Palestinians since 2007, severely restricting the population’s access to vital resources as well as their right to freedom of movement. This is why Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians meets the six standards that Amnesty International lays out as necessary to be considered an official apartheid state.

Israel also has valid criticisms of the Palestinian Arabs. More than 24,000 Israelis have died defending their homeland since 1860, and thousands more have died in terrorist attacks. On Oct. 7^th, 6000 Gazans poured across the border while 1,000 more fired rockets from across the border in the Gaza Strip. They managed to kill 1,139 people, the largest single loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, including 695 Israeli civilians (including 38 children), 71 foreign nationals and 373 members of Israel security forces.

Adding salt in the fresh and raw wounds of these horrifying crimes, Israelis and the world Jewish community have witnessed a resurgence of vicious antisemitism. While the majority of pro-Palestine protesters are peaceful and non-bigoted, a vocal minority has been hateful and incendiary against Jews more broadly. In perhaps the most repulsive manifestation of this trend, many critics of Israel defend, downplay and/or deny Palestinian atrocities, such as the widespread and credible reports of rape against victims. As The Atlantic columnist Michael A. Cohen wrote:

"Since allegations of sexual violence first appeared in the fall, a contingent of anti-Israel activists have sought to disprove them," Cohen said. "'Believe women' and 'Silence is violence' have been rallying cries of progressive feminist organizations for decades. But the same empathy and support have not been shown for Israeli victims."

The spirit of Willkieism – the ideas laid out by Willkie in “One World” and his other writings, particularly those after his 1940 presidential campaign – is inimical to both the colonialist oppression of Israel and the vile bigotry of the antisemites. Meanwhile the practice of Willkieism would provide all of the sides in this conflict with neutral outside sources that could mediate a just and peaceful resolution to the complex and massively entangled conflict.

No one knows for sure how to successfully win these battles. But in his book “One World,” Willkie gave us a good idea about how we can start.