A Crucial Turning Point?
GROSSMAN, LAWRENCE
A Crucial Turning Point? Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance By Warren Bass Oxford. 336 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Lawrence...
...Prime Minister Eshkol certainly hoped so in early June 1967 when, under threat of attack by Egypt and possibly Syria, he fended off demands from his military leaders for a pre-emptive strike by invoking the prospect of an American-led strategy to force the Arabs to back off...
...Israel fought alone, and won, its Six-Day War for survival...
...As Nasser's stock gradually fell in Washington, Israel's rose...
...The second was the Kennedy Administration's initiation of high-level security consultations between the two countries, "paving the way," Bass shows, "for fullblown military joint planning...
...The two early written accounts by men who worked in his Administration, Theodore Sorensen and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., barely mention the region...
...Bass also has a gift for bringing the dry details of diplomacy to life...
...But in June 1963 Ben-Gurion, under pressure domestically, resigned and retired to his home on a Negev kibbutz...
...Ronald Reagan and the invasion of Lebanon in 1982...
...Warren Bass, however, in this fascinating new book, argues that the Kennedy years marked a crucial turning point in U.S...
...Ambassador to the United Nations, told Gideon Raphael, his Israeli opposite number, "You must understand that you stand alone and you have to know the consequences...
...It did not coincide with any remarkable event in the life of Israel, so one rarely hears about Kennedy's record in the Middle East...
...His successor, Lyndon Johnson, cared little about the matter and did not seriously follow up...
...The linkage that began with Harry S. Truman and the creation of Israel in 1948 continued with Dwight D. Eisenhower and the ill-fated Sinai campaign of 1956...
...Repeated offers of U.S...
...Bass devotes considerable attention to "the delicate matter...
...Middle East policy, moving it away from the studied neutrality of the 1950s toward a virtual U.S.-Israel alliance...
...military...
...already embroiled in Vietnam, Johnson was not eager for another foreign entanglement and stayed out...
...Israel was also lucky...
...Support A ny Friend has the added virtue of underlining just how much has changed since the 1960s...
...Richard M. Nixon and the 1973 Yom Kippur War...
...Bill Clinton and Oslo, the Yitzchak Rabin-Yasir Arafat handshake on the White House lawn, and the failed Camp David conference of 2000...
...Kennedy recognized the significance of his Jewish constituency by deputizing one of his domestic aides, Myer ("Mike") Feldman, as liaison to the Jewish community...
...Far from taking sides in the Arab-Israeli dispute, he attempted to make "friends" out of both Israel and the leading Arab radical regime, Egypt, to prevent Soviet penetration of the region...
...But some things never change: Much of the Arab media interpreted the Kennedy assassination as a Zionist plot...
...and refuse meaningful inspection of the site...
...and George W, Bush and the new "road map" to peace...
...Arthur Goldberg, the U.S...
...Bass makes short shrift of the "myth" of an omnipotent pro-Israel lobby...
...involvement in Vietnam...
...But with the U.S...
...George Bush the elder and the Madrid Conference of 1991...
...Jimmy Carter and the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of 1978...
...Both devote most of their pages on foreign affairs to the overarching theme of Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union as played out in the Cuban missile crisis, negotiations toward an atomic test-ban treaty, the struggle for influence in emerging Third World nations, and the early stages of U.S...
...The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (ATPAC), founded in 1954, was still a weak and struggling organization...
...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Co-editor, "American Jewish Year Book...
...His replacement, the soft-spoken Levi Eshkol, toned down the rhetoric and appeared more amenable to inspections—though Bass believes that in the end he, too, would have stonewalled...
...So much for alliances...
...Some of the dramatis personae appear in an unfamiliar light: Shimon Peres, not yet the perpetually unsuccessful Israeli politician, is, in this book, the Wunderkind of Israel's Defense Ministry, credited with negotiating the purchase of the Hawks...
...In the light of today's Christian conservative enthusiasm for Israel, one is surprised to read that in the Kennedy years it was the political liberals...
...Quite aside from the story it tells...
...Absent from this schematic outline is the tragically short-lived Presidency of John F. Kennedy that began with his inauguration in January 1961 and ended with his assassination in November 1963...
...A key factor in the improvement of U.S.-Israeli ties during the Kennedy Administration was something that did not happen—an open clash over Israel's secret nuclear reactor in Dimona...
...Lyndon B. Johnson and the 1967 Six-Day War...
...Five months later, before any showdown could take place, Kennedy was killed...
...Kennedy made nuclear nonproliferation a cornerstone of American policy, yet Ben-Gurion, Israel's cantankerous founding father and longtime Prime Minister, seemed ready to defy the U.S...
...Johnson was now the President and, Bass reports, he was even more enthusiastically pro-Israel than Kennedy...
...The first was the sale of Hawk antiaircraft missiles to the Jewish state, the initial major American arms transaction with Israel...
...Rabin, fated to lead Israel to victory in the Six-Day War and later launch peace talks with the Palestinians only to be assassinated, is a young general in charge of the first Israeli delegation to hold security talks with the U.S...
...The strength of Support Any Friend rests on exhaustive research in government documents, numerous interviews with the important players, and one dramatic tape of a key meeting surreptitiously recorded by the President, filed at the Kennedy Library...
...The stability of the Saudi Arabian regime was then, as it is today, a pillar of American policy, and Kennedy was forced to conclude that Nasser was a lost cause...
...He was convinced that only the possibility of an Israeli nuclear response would keep Nasser from attacking Israel...
...This meant serving as well as de facto advocate for Israel within the Administration...
...But as Bass shows, Feldman was more often than not excluded from key decisions, for the State Department and to a great extent the President were eager to insulate foreign policy from domestic considerations...
...Despite being confined to defensive weaponry, the Hawk deal furnished the precedent for making the U.S...
...Did Kennedy's policies in the Middle East produce a U.S.-Israel alliance, as Bass claims...
...He believed, in fact, that enticing Egypt closer to the West would make it less of a threat to the Jewish state...
...American Jews, congenital Democrats that they were, had overwhelmingly supported JFK in his close race for President against Nixon in 1960, but this meant little in terms of influence over policy...
...The new President, by choosing the competent but unimaginative Dean Rusk as Secretary of State, made clear from the beginning that he would handle foreign affairs himself...
...Associate Director of Research, American Jewish Committee The United States has played such a central role in Israel's evolution that each diplomatic and military turning point in Israeli history is commonly associated with an American President...
...Soon arms sales to and security consultations with the Jewish state, impossible dreams under past Presidents—not just the Republican Eisenhower but the Democrat Truman—became a reality...
...He believed relations with the two countries had been badly botched by Eisenhower, his predecessor, who cut off aid to Egypt and severely chastised Israel for its invasion of the Sinai...
...foreign policy and Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, Bass situates the origins of the current American government's strongly pro-Israel posture in two related decisions of the Kennedy Administration, both propelled by the force of events...
...Although Congressmen representing Jewish constituencies often felt politically obligated to support Israel, this was not the case nationally...
...It was the drawn-out civil war in Yemen, where his proxies fought Saudi-backed troops, that finally doomed EgyptianAmerican relations...
...What stymied Kennedy's impartial outreach strategy in the Middle East was Nasser's imperialistic designs in the Arab world...
...A senior fellow in U.S...
...Viewing all foreign policy questions from a Cold War perspective, Kennedy announced in his Inaugural Address "that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty...
...Specifically, Kennedy wanted to woo Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser, a leader of the neutralist or Third World bloc, away from the Soviet orbit through economic aid, while at the same time not endangering ties with the oil-rich conservative Arab monarchies that felt threatened by Nasser's revolutionary pan-Arab nationalism...
...None of this was on Kennedy's agenda when he assumed office...
...Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had long ago concluded that Israel's security was bound to the United States...
...Kennedy—who, we learn, spent nearly a month of 1939 visiting Palestine, and returned to what was Israel as part of a Congressional trip to the area in 1951—hoped to carry this off without undermining Israel's security...
...Yet the book leaves doubts about whether JFK's new direction in the Mideast had the long-run impact Bass ascribes to it, indeed whether the relationship it built could be called an "alliance...
...over the years into what Bass calls "the arsenal of Jewish democracy...
...The Israelis, in contrast, eagerly responded to American overtures...
...economic assistance if he would focus on improving the living conditions of the Egyptian people notwithstanding, Nasser became ever more committed to spreading his revolutionary form of Arab nationalism...
...Democrat and Republican, who complained the Administration was not proIsrael enough...
Vol. 86 • May 2003 • No. 3
