Israel: The Embattled Ally
Safran, Nadav
BOOK REVIEW Israel: The EmbattledAlly Nadav Safran / Harvard University Press / $18.50 Francis Fukuyama M1N4any foreign policy "professionals"' in and out of government maintain that...
...pressure on Israel could have produced, if not a comprehensive settlement, at least a Sinai II-type agreement which would have prevented the October War...
...Yet the present favorable outcome was very nearly aborted by U.S...
...Safran points out that John Foster Dulles pursued contradictory and fundamentally irreconcilable objectives in the mid-1950s by trying at once to preserve the status quo in the Arab-Israeli conflict and to draw the Arab states into an anti-Communist alliance...
...Safran believes that American efforts to settle the conflict since that war have been consistent with Israeli interests (unlike former times), and that the subsequent disagreements between the U.S...
...Behind this impulse it is possible to detect a certain guilt feeling that America had been too pro-Israel in the past, and somehow had to compensate for this mistake...
...appeasement of Egypt would not have brought forth acceptable peace terms from Nasser, while any weakening of American support for Israel would merely have encouraged further threats and violence from the Arabs and their Soviet backers...
...Yet moral concerns become "real" concerns if amoral behavior abroad leads to a cheapening of one's own political values...
...The U.S...
...It has been suggested that Truman's decision to support the UN majority partition plan, coming as it did as the result of intense lobbying by various Zionist groups, was both unjust and contrary to the national interest...
...to side with the Arabs did not, of course, begin in 1973...
...policymakers who, in their eagerness to appease radical Arab sentiment, pushed hard for a comprehensive conference including the PLO and Soviet Union...
...More to the point: What will prevent the United States from doing the same thing to them when the bear is at the door...
...By contrast, Safran provides a rather eloquent defense of America's Israeli connection which deserves to be quoted at length: On an abstract plane, that interest [in Israel] may be viewed as a logical progression from the proposition that the supreme interest of the United States is the preservation of its free way of life...
...Moreover, Safran shows that the October War itself, while hardly a boon to the Israelis, in certain ways made the Egyptians more ready for peace and thereby paved the way for the subsequent step-by-step negotiations...
...Where Safran does score U.S...
...After Camp David, it is hard to fault this view...
...A number of observers have pointed to the 1970-1973 period as one of lost opportunities, when stronger U.S...
...The U.S...
...will be forced to choose between a long-standing commitment to Israel and -the increasingly powerful temptation to cater to Arab wishes...
...mistake was not due to Jewish-lobby election-year pressures...
...was the only one that was both practical and moral...
...failure to achieve a settlement of the conflict between 1967 and 1970 was due to insufficient pressure on Israel to make concessions...
...For example, it describes how the highly charged, ideological strands of Zionism were transformed into the present-day party structure in Israel...
...Nadav Safran's Israel: The Embattled Ally gives us precisely this sort of analysis...
...policy is in its later failure to stick by its original choice: When the subsequent war of independence seemed to be going badly for the Jews, the U.S...
...attempted to be more "evenhanded" towards the Arab-Israeli conflict, simultaneously endangering Israel while nonetheless failing to appease the Arabs, at least twice subsequently...
...was not dependent on Arab oil for its own needs in the late 1940s, the Cold War made it a strategic priority for Western Europe...
...Hence the choice actually made by the U.S...
...The other two alternatives--the UN majority and minority plans-were both vehemently rejected by the Arabs...
...Safran's caution is evident in his treatment of the events subsequent to Nasser's death in 1970...
...BOOK REVIEW Israel: The EmbattledAlly Nadav Safran / Harvard University Press / $18.50 Francis Fukuyama M1N4any foreign policy "professionals"' in and out of government maintain that the American stake in the Middle East lies largely, if not entirely, with the Arabs, and that our tendency to side with Israel has been the result of pressure from the Jewish lobby, which has imposed its special claims on the country to the detriment of our "real" interests...
...and Israel have been tactical in nature...
...Safran's book points to the conclusion that, on the contrary, it was precisely U.S...
...For despite the successful Camp David negotiations, it remains likely that there will be times in the future when the U.S...
...recommended abandoning the partition plan, an act which only encouraged the involvement of outside Arab states in the Palestine civil war...
...The temptation for the U.S...
...For the American free way of life to persist and prosper in the face of temptations of alternative forms and the challenge of antithetical systems, other free societies must exist and prosper...
...policy which would have satisfied the Arabs and fully protected U.S...
...indeed, to make the plan work might have required the active participation of outside powers like the United States...
...While the U.S...
...This 600-page magnum opus is in fact two books: a general study of the history and politics of Israel (starting with Abraham's journey to Palestine), and an account of American-Israeli relations (this story beginning slightly later, in 1949...
...This is necessary so that the United States and these other societies may mutually sustain their faith in the possibility of free government, which, as Lincoln indicated in the Gettysburg Address, is essential for the survival of free government...
...He points out that since it was felt the Arabs still had a longer way to go than the Israelis in making concessions, it was perfectly reasonable to sit tight and hope for a moderation in their terms, given the almost universal belief in the deterrent power of the Israeli military...
...foreign policy goal...
...Similarly, Safran rejects the notion that the U.S...
...religious issue cutting across more familiar ideological ones, coupled with absolute proportional representation in the electoral system, have had a significant impact on Israeli foreign policy...
...Sheehan totaled up the $30-60 billion in foregone U.S...
...GNP that resulted from the Yom Kippur War and asked whether it was worth paying this price so that Israel could remain in the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank...
...This applies to the shortsighted abandonment of Israel by the nations of Western Europe in 1973: If they were so willing to forsake one of their own, with what self-confidence can they regard their own democratic systems...
...The first part is not without relevance to the second...
...or that American Jews have a right to impose their wishes on the rest of the polity...
...for its failure to avert war...
...But the greatest interest of Safran's book lies in the second part on AmericanIsraeli relations...
...Of the two remaining alternatives, only the majority plan satisfied Jewish aspirations...
...This development was no doubt very frustrating to Sadat...
...Behind the ritual incantations of American politicians, one senses a number of insufficient justifications: either that Americans have a sentimental fondness for something in the Israeli life-style, whether of a political, cultural, or even racial nature (much as one might want to save France from destruction because of one's taste for Burgundies...
...Given the inadequacy of this kind of calculation, a scholarly and dispassionate review of American policy tnwards the Arab-Israeli conflict is surely needed to help us clearly understand what our "real" interests are...
...rather, it was the result of a faulty military evaluation...
...Safran points out that the only U.S...
...The additional political fissures that resulted from the Francis Fukuyama is a graduate student in government at Harvard...
...would therefore have had to acquiesce in the sealing off of Palestine while Arab armies crushed the Jewish settlement there...
...oil interests would have been to support the Arab plan to create an independent, unitary Arab state in all of Palestine in which the Jews received guarantees as a protected minority...
...To begin at the beginning: For what reasons ought Americans, as Americans and notJews, desire that the survival of Israel have priority as a U.S...
...It is conceivable that the bargaining process begun in 1974 could have started earlier had the Israeli government not failed to agree on the final terms of an acceptable settlement, a failure which was the direct result of the divisions within each of the successive government coalitions...
...To appease Arab sentiment, the U.S...
...The 1973-1974 oil crisis provoked a round of sophisticated cynicism as to the value of our Israeli ally, exemplified by Edward Sheehan's well-publicized book on Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy...
...It is not surprising that political "realists" such as George Kennan or Charles de Gaulle, who focus narrowly on a nation's material concerns and are not distracted by merely moral considerations, have seen fit to recommend their nations' distancing themselves from Israel when it seemed expedient to do so...
...But Safran does not condemn the U.S...
...support for Israel's military power that made Camp David possible...
...Israel's existence and success as a genuine democracy therefore helps sustain faith in the democratic way of life in the United States as in other free societies...
...Safran admits that a very important concession made by Sadat in 1971-an agreement in principle to settle the conflict on the basis of a contractual peace-was met by a hardening of American support for Israel in the wake of the 1970 Jordanian crisis...
Vol. 12 • January 1979 • No. 1
