The strength of the Jewish lobby and its privileged journalistic
and financial position in the U.S., the role of Protestant
millenarian Zionism, Israel as a strategic asset in a troubled and
vital region, similar histories and institutions, post-Holocaust
guilt, mutual benefits and converging interests, have all been
taken, singly or in combination, as reasons for America's close
support to Israel over the years. These various elements surely did
playa role in ensuring that the U.S. generally chose Israel over
its opponents, in confrontation with the Arab countries and the
Palestinians. The two states have a great deal in common: they are
both settler democracies, whose existence and political operation
has been based on the elimination, displacement or expulsion of an
indigenous people.¹ This underlying "original sin" has created
a similar ethos on the part of both peoples, with resultant mutual
sympathies. The U.S. shared in the general feeling of guilt in
Western nations over the Holocaust. The Zionist lobby in the United
States is a powerful one, and has in the 20th century done much to
set the U.S. foreign policy agenda, at least with regard to Middle
Eastern questions. Israel and the U.S. have had a shared interest
in thwarting the success of Arab nationalist and revolutionary
movements.
But the fact of the matter is that U.S. support for the Zionist
movement and Israel has not been historically monolithic, having
shifted in quality and in intensity over the years. There have, in
fact, been three major phases in U.S. support for the Zionist
movement and Israel, the third of which, somewhat' curiously,
continues to the present day.
Roosevelt and Truman
From the Balfour Declaration to the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt
in April 1945/ the U.S. did not take the lead in supporting the
Zionist movement. Its progress tended to be viewed with great
sympathy, between the two world wars. But the United States, an
isolationist power, took a back seat to Britain and Europe in
relations with the Zionist movement, and allowed the United Kingdom
to carry the brunt of implementing the Balfour Declaration, through
its mandate over Palestine. Furthermore, the U.S. was competing
with Britain for influence in the region, because of the growing
importance of oil, and it was conscious of the need to preserve its
good relations with Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia, and the
contradictions involved in actively supporting the Zionists'
settlement and state-building project. These contradictions
continued to be played out through the wart as reflected in the
discussions over the future of Palestine between Churchill and
Roosevelt leading up to the issuance of the Atlantic Charter, the
former insisting that Palestine be excluded from the list of states
to be granted self-determination. The Zionists, on the other hand,
led by Ben-Gurion, were actively courting the U.S. and, therefore,
slighting the British government (a veritable "diplomatic
revolution" on the part of the movement).2 The new reality was
reflected in the famous Zionist Baltimore program of 1942. On the
eve of his death, Roosevelt was still trying to bridge the mounting
contradictions of U.S. Middle Eastern policy.3
Truman soon inaugurated a new phase, as he led the way to the
establishment of the Jewish state in 1947-1948. But even at that
stage, Israel had other friends among the powers, the Soviet Union
at first/ and then France. And the U.S. still had an interest in
appearing to be evenhanded in its dealings with the Jewish state,
on the one hand, and the Arabs, on the other; of course, the
Palestinian question did not exist for the international community,
except as one of a number of post-war issues. And in 1956,
President Eisenhower (acting in concert with the Soviet Union)
forced Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula following the
Suez Campaign.
A variety of reasons for this have been suggested: Eisenhower was
concerned with consolidating the Baghdad Pact, involving regimes
which, because of their instability and unpopularity, could not
afford to be seen to acquiesce in Israeli expansionism; Israel had
overstepped the bounds of the permissible by entering a coalition
with the two major if declining colonial powers, whose spheres of
interest needed to slip gracefully into the American sphere of
interest; Israel had participated in an unacceptable escalation of
the Cold War confrontation (indeed, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev
offered the apocalyptic vision of rockets "raining down" on London
if the French, British and Israelis did not withdraw from Egypt);
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles saw Israeli intervention as
counterproductive in terms of achieving his main short-term goal in
the Middle East, the toppling of Gamal Abdel Nasser;4 Israel's
friends in the United States felt that it had moved too soon, its
strategic superiority (air force, nuclear weapons and their
delivery systems) not yet having been sufficiently developed.
The third phase, which has carried over to the present day, began
with the Kennedy administration, when support became more firmly
anchored, and then automatic, in tandem with the move to establish
Israel as the regional leader. Kennedy helped to consolidate
Israel's nuclear capability (a previously French-supported
program),5 and thus to define, for the long term, the strategic
configuration in the Middle East, given that the U.S. president
then moved vigorously to bring about nuclear nonproliferation
agreements. These would make it much harder for new members to join
the club.
Keeping Order in the Cold War
The new approach was part and parcel of the ambitious plans for
reducing the reliance on the doctrine of massive (nuclear)
retaliation (hence the interest in Israel's autonomous nuclear
capability), and carrying out global programs of counterinsurgency
warfare, particularly in Latin America and,
of course, in Vietnam. This policy required a series of regional
policemen to keep order in the context of the Cold War. Various key
actors were singled out. For the Middle East, it would be Israel
(in conjunction, if possible, with an Arab or at least an Islamic
partner). And Israel would serve the additional purpose of
distributing the weaponry and the technical training required to
repress peoples' wars. President Johnson, having the necessary
intelligence-based information regarding Israeli military
preponderance, gave his green light for the June 1967 war, and
supported the cease-fire which consolidated enormous military
gains; Reagan's secretary of state, Alexander Haig, urged Begin on
in the initial invasion and subsequent move toward Beirut in June
1982; Nixon re-supplied Israel with a massive airlift in October
1973, which created the basis for its counteroffensive on the Sinai
front, even as he provided the satellite pictures of the Egyptian
forces which revealed the famous gap in its lines in the Deversoir
area of the Suez Canal;6 and all along, U.S. administrations, since
the 1960s, have provided firm diplomatic, political and logistical
support for Israel's positions in its negotiations with the Arab
states and the Palestinians. It was in fact during and after the
October 1973 war that u.s. military assistance to Israel increased
dramatically to a level of between $1 and $2 billion per year, at
which it has remained ever since.
Civilian assistance has a longer history and likewise climbed, but
not as steeply, towards its present level of $1.2 billion. Far from
declining in the wake of the peace or non-belligerency accords,
such as those signed with Egypt, the PLO and Jordan, aid levels
remained firm or even increased (quite dramatically following Camp
David). On the other hand, U.S. assistance to those three Arab
parties increased considerably when they signed their treaties with
Israel, but not to any comparable degree, and mainly in the
economic field. President Bush managed to apply some pressure on
the Shamir government to get it to the negotiating table (he owed
it to the Arab members of his anti-Saddam coalition), and also, by
withholding $12 billion in housing loan guarantees, contributed to
the victory of Rabin in 1992. But that technique would only work
once, and Clinton's clumsy efforts on behalf of Shimon Peres, which
were not backed up with financial threats or measures, backfired,
and may even, because they were so half-hearted yet overt, have
contributed the winning edge to Netanyahu. There is obviously no
love lost between these two men and their administrations (they
are, in their personal morae, perhaps a bit too similar, or should
one say, as similar as Little Rock and Philadelphia can ever hope
to be), but Clinton has made it clear again and again that he will
do nothing to force Israel to implement the various signed accords
in their letter (further redeployment) or in their spirit (a halt
to settlement activity).
Why Unconditional Support for Israel?
The question then arises as to why a relationship which has a
history (that is to say, that it has a beginning and that it went
through various stages) appears in the meantime to have become an
intrinsic and unconditional one. As of the early 1960s and until
the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the two countries became involved
in increasingly active and complex common activities, particularly
in the clandestine (and largely illegal) field of
counter¬insurgency? Israel was an active participant in the
financing and training of the anti-communist military dictatorships
and their repressive apparatus in Latin America from Honduras and
Guatemala through Argentina and Chile; it heavily supported
Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua and, thereafter, the Nicaraguan
counterrevolutionary war against the Sandinistas. It was in this
context a key player in the Iran-Contra affair. And prior to that,
it had heavily supported Iran under the Shah, as well as the
Kurdish insurgency in Iraq during the 1970s. Israel was likewise
the vital link between the United States, inhibited (although not
always very much so) by the U.N.-mandated boycott of South Africa,
and the apartheid regime. It had excellent relations with the
Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, and with Mobutu in Zaire.
All of these relations were in the context of specific missions on
behalf of the leader of the Western world, in its struggle for
influence with the Soviet Union. The question is: why has
unconditional support for Israel in the international arena
continued beyond the end of the Cold War, when it made strategic
sense and proved its worth, particularly in stymieing revolutionary
movements in Latin America and Africa?
There are several reasons for this. On the one hand there are
fears, nurtured in American academic circles, that the collapse of
the Soviet Union will inevitably lead to the rise of one or more
new rivals to U.S. hegemony, heretofore an iron-clad law of
international relations. These rivals have been rather skillfully
defined, in particular regarding the Middle East, as the
"collective forces of Islam"8 or as one or more Islamic states. The
previous "pivotal states" and "special allies"9 cannot now be
discarded as vestiges of bipolar superpower confrontation. On the
contrary, they need to be strengthened for the struggle ahead. And,
of course, the psychological factors that have conditioned the
closeness of the U.S. and Israel over time are even more strongly
felt when, as at present, emphasis on cultural contradictions
within and among societies dominate political discourse.
No Overt Alliance
But what seems most of all to paralyze thinking in the U.S. on the
matter of support to Israel, even when the latter's policies
contribute to local and regional instability, tension and even
violence, is paradoxically the fact that there is no
institutionalized security arrangement between them. There is no
overt alliance, with written clauses, which does not mean that
there are not a good many secret agreements, particularly regarding
the disposition and use of force and weaponry (notably nuclear
bombs) in the event of war. The reasons for the absence of such
ties, similar to those which link the U.S. to so many of its allies
all over the globe, are numerous, complicated and, because they
have not been widely analyzed, somewhat obscure.10 But its effects
are clear, in the context of the strong bonds of sympathy which
exist. It permits Israel to get away with excesses which would be
impossible in the framework of a well-delineated
relationship.
The widespread use by the Israeli military of forbidden weapons
(such as booby-traps and fragmentation bombs) supplied by the
United States, in the 1982 Lebanon war could be, and duly was,
deplored by the U.S. But there are not the same means available to
deter and to respond to objectionable behavior. Just as one
shudders to contemplate what might have been the level of conflict
between Greece and Turkey in the Aegean had there not been the
strictures of common NATO membership, one may legitimately wonder
what excesses might have been prevented or limited had the
U.S.-Israeli relationship been codified.
Because of a connection to which no formal limits have been set,
Israel, as the weaker party, can and does act as though there were
no limits at all. Nor do the U.S. and Israel join temporary
coalitions together, such as that of the Korean, the Vietnam, or
Gulf wars. This likewise leaves it in a sense free to act
unilaterally, confident of u.s. support. The failure of Israel to
continue on the road to peace with the PLO, Syria and Lebanon since
1996, thus setting the clock back to where it was before 1991, and
placing the stability of the region at risk, leaves the world, and
singularly the United States, at a loss what to do.
Not Purely Defensive
There are no institutionalized commitments; but the organic ties
which bind the two nations are such that, in spearheading the
latest escalation with Iraq, the rallying-cry was the alleged
capacity of Saddam to blow Tel Aviv to smithereens. This was dearly
a considerable overstatement of the situation, as the French and
Russian governments did not fail to point out. But the purpose was
achieved. Opinion in the U.S. (and pc ssibly elsewhere) was
instantly mobilized. No matter that the Gulf states ,are much
closer (and thus more vulnerable) to such an attack, and that,
unlike Israel, they do not themselves have the means to deter it,
but must rely on the presence of u.s. forces in and near their
countries, and on commitments in the framework of the anti-Baghdad
coalition headed by the United States. It appears in this instance
that the U.S.-Iraqi confrontation is to a great extent fueled by
the one partner with which the U.S. has no conventional
relationship: Israel.
Certainly, the two parties are unanimous in not wishing to
institutionalize their relationship. This leaves both of them with
the illusion of greater freedom, to act unilaterally and to push
their common goals forward without limits. Alliances tend nowadays
to be defensive ones. This is true of NATO, just as it was of the
Warsaw Pact. Perhaps the reason why the relationship between the
U.S. and Israel will not be institutionalized is that its nature is
not purely defensive. At any rate, this is one of the reasons why
its manifestations and potential are so destabilizing, so
unlimited, and so disconcerting. This is true even though the
intensity of the relationship, as we have shown, has a beginning
and should therefore have an end. One can predict an eventual
toning-down of the unconditionally of the relationship for the day
when Israel has reached a definitive peace with Syria, Lebanon and
Palestine. At that time, the U.S. will have to offer some
guarantees, and the codification of the relationship might be
conducive to greater evenhandedness. This is probably precisely the
reason why Israel is not anxious for that day to dawn.
Footnotes
1. The US Declaration of Independence, in one of the accusations
leveled against King George III which justified the secession of
the thirteen colonies, the fact that he "was endeavored to bring on
the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages,
whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of
all ages, sexes and conditions:' a style reminiscent of the
creators of Israel in their self-justification (for example
Menachem Begin in The Revolt, who refers to Palestinian forces in
1948 as "Nazis").
2. Cf. Elias Sanbar, Palestine 1948: l'expulsion, Paris, 1984, pp.
89-97.
3. As reflected in his letter to King Ibn Saud of April 5, in which
he promises not to act on the question of Palestine without
consulting the Arabs.
4. Cf. Samir Kassir and Farouk Mardam-Bey, Itineraires de Paris a
Jerusalem: la France et le conflict israelo-arabe, Paris, 1992, p.
189.
5. Cf. PR. Kumaraswamy, "Israel, China and the U.S.: The Patriot
Controversy," Israel Affairs 3(2), 1996, pp. 12-33. The progressive
transition from French to American support coincided with the
winding down of French colonialism and the assumption by the U.S.
of the colonial-imperial burdens of the French and British around
the world, culminating in De Gaulle's condemnation of Israel's role
in the June 1967 war, and the ending of arms shipments.
6. Mohamed Abdel Ghani El-Gamasi, The October War: Memoirs of Field
Marshal EI-Gamasi of Egypt, Cairo, 1993, p. 281.
7. Cf. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection: Who Israel
Arms and Why, New York,1987.
8. "The twentieth-century conflict between liberal democracy and
Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical
phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual
relation between Islam and Christianity": Samuel P. Huntington, The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York,
1996, p. 208. While this assertion contradicts the realities of
most recent conflicts and slaughters from Rwanda to Croatia to
Somalia to Ecuador/Peru to Algeria, it is grist to the mill of the
arms industry, just as the same author's advocacy of the heavy
bombing of Vietnam (in the context of the "strategic hamlet"
theory) was in the 1960s. And it is testimony to his, and to the
U.S. military-intellectual-industrial complex's quick conversion
from the ideological to the civilizational crusader.
9. Robert S. Chase, Emily B. Hill, and Paul Kennedy, "Pivotal
States and U.S. Strategy," Foreign Affairs 75(2), 1996, pp. 33-51.
The authors count Israel as a "special ally" rather than a "pivotal
state," apparently because it is small and stable rather than large
and unstable.
10. Curiously, a variety of works allude to the fact that what
binds the two countries together is more than an alliance, a kind
of "Bruderschaft" of existential proportions, but none of them to
my knowledge has identified the correlate phenomenon, the lack of
an alliance, as part of the phenomenon; e.g. Camille Mansour,
Beyond Alliance: Israel and U.S. Foreign Policy, New York,
1994.