501.BB Palestine/2–449
The Secretary of State to the Egyptian Ambassador (Rahim)
The Secretary of State presents his compliments to His Excellency the Ambassador of Egypt, and has the honor to acknowledge the receipt of the Ambassador’s note of February 4, 1949,1 concerning the recognition of Israel.
The Government of the United States has granted full recognition to the Government of Israel since that Government, after the legislative elections of January 25, is now considered to be the legally constituted authority in the State of Israel. The Government of the United States recognized the existence of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, when it recognized the Provisional Government of Israel as the de facto authority in Israel. It will therefore be seen that the existence of Israel as a state has been recognized by the United States for some time and is not a new development.
The Secretary of State desires at this time to reiterate the Department’s hope that the conversations now going on may lead to the establishment of permanent peace in Palestine. It is the Department’s conviction that all parties must bend every effort to remove any obstacles standing in the way of a final settlement and work to establish a normal atmosphere on questions relating to Palestine.
- Not printed; it expressed the “very deep regret” of the Egyptian Government that “certain powers” had recognized “the so-called State of Israel,” despite failure to find a solution for the problems of Palestine. It also stated that the Zionists had exploited the fact of recognition as a definite stand in their favor and had thereby been encouraged to persist “in their purely aggressive complicity against the Arabs.” It denounced the recent recognitions as “submission to force and acceptance of the accomplished fact even at the expense of the encouragement of aggression and the violation of the Law of Nations.” (501.BB Palestine/2–449) The Egyptian Ambassador handed the note to the Secretary of State on February 5.↩