The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict

Making America's Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan

Steven L. Spiegel

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226226149
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict illuminates the controversial course of America's Middle East relations from the birth of Israel to the Reagan administration. Skillfully separating actual policymaking from the myths that have come to surround it, Spiegel challenges the belief that American policy in the Middle East is primarily a relation to events in that region or is motivated by bureaucratic constraints or the pressures of domestic politics. On the contrary, he finds that the ideas and skills of the president and his advisors are critical to the determination of American policy. This volume received the 1986 National Jewish Book Award.

1

THE PROCESS OF AMERICAN MIDDLE EAST POLICY MAKING

The Middle East—its inhabitants and disputes—has long fascinated and divided Americans. From the beginning of the American experiment, many in the New Jerusalem looked romantically on the aspirations of those who had once ruled the holiest of Biblical cities. In a country imbued with Old Testament protestantism, with a frontier ideology and a belief that miracles were possible, a Jewish return to Palestine was anticipated by many. “I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation,” wrote John Adams in 1818.¹

Later, in 1891 (three years before Theodor Herzl, founder of the modern Zionist movement, began his campaign to establish a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine), William Blackstone of Chicago presented President Benjamin Harrison and Secretary of State James Blaine a memorial signed by 413 prominent Americans proposing that the Jews be restored to Palestine. In response, the American consul in Jerusalem reported to the State Department, “1. Palestine is not ready for the Jews. 2. The Jews are not ready for Palestine.”²

This clash of views is a conflict older than the Arab-Israeli struggle itself, and just as intransigent. The battle is for Washington’s favor. On one side are those concerned with the Arabs or the Israelis. Supporters of Israel, remembering the Holocaust, may place the survival of the Jewish state before all other considerations. Some Christians see the working out of a divine plan in the Jews’ return to Palestine. Other observers focus on Arab rights or demands; they view the Palestinian refugees as a displaced people with the right to self-determination. Some Christians operate missions among the Arabs or have theological difficulties with the Jewish return to Palestine.

On the other side are nonpartisans who see the Middle East as part of larger, more global conflicts. These people favor the side that seems more compatible with the foreign policies they advocate. Disagreements occur over global views, or over tactics, but do not center on commitments to either Arabs or Israelis. For example, both President Eisenhower, whose overriding global concern was fighting communism, and President Carter, who favored detente with the Soviet Union, viewed the Arab states as crucial to the achievement of their aims in the Middle East. President Eisenhower considered the Israelis an impediment to his fight against communism, but President Nixon, with similar priorities, saw them as an asset.

To complicate the issue further, the Middle East is changing while American policy changes and there is no necessary connection between the two. A series of overlapping regional conflicts have pitted Arab against Arab and the Arabs against Israel. There have also been conflicts elsewhere in the region, in places such as Iraq and Iran; Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus; Ethiopia and Somalia. Within the Arab world rivalries have changed. In the 1960s, radical Egypt was in conflict with moderate Libya; in the 1970s, radical Libya was hostile toward moderate Egypt. A similar about-face occurred between Iraq and Egypt from the 1950s to the 1970s. Further, in the 1970s Iraq and Syria—whose regimes both originated from the Baathist party—were bitterly disputing which government was more ideologically pure. Today, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, ruled by the once fiercely competitive Hashemite and Saudi families, cooperate as moderate monarchies. Undermining the claim of Arab unity have been wars within their world, as over Yemen in the 1960s and Lebanon in the mid-1970s and among the Palestinians in the early 1980s. Even Israel has played a part in these intra-Arab conflicts, as in 1970 when it was prepared to aid Hussein’s Jordan against radical Palestinian insurgents and invading Syrians, its support of the Christians in Lebanon after 1975, and its further entanglement in Lebanese politics after the June 1982 invasion.

American reactions to these regional developments are often confused and always involve multiple perspectives. Over the years, myths have developed among those with special concerns. These myths usually assume that American policy is being sabotaged by those of opposing views. For example, former Senator James Abourezk, an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause, has written:

U.S. policy on the Mideast is virtually directed by Tel Aviv. So long as the public ignores U.S. Government actions in the Middle East, Israel will continue to dictate our policies there. When a politician gets no message from his constituents on a particular issue, he is completely free to vote and act as he chooses. Thus, the only real pressure on politicians concerning the Middle Eastern question comes from the Israeli lobby. Always capable of raising money for political campaigns, the lobby enlists the active aid of American Jews in every state of the Union. It takes its orders from Israel and then lays down the party line to the American Jewish community in a variety of ways—newsletters, community newspapers, and synagogue speeches. American Jews want desperately to help Israel; so they rely on the Israeli lobby to tell them how. Highly organized, smart, and constantly alert, the Israeli lobby uses political intimidation if everything else fails.³

In contrast, in The Plot to Destroy Israel, author and veteran foreign correspondent Alvin Rosenfeld argues,

There are a great many groups the Arabs can use to “pressure and influence the decision-makers” in a country like the United States, where lobbying is an accepted method of political action. The use, however, by Big Oil of propaganda processed by the Arab belligerents has gone largely unnoticed. Few stockholders and few, if any, holders of oil company credit-cards know that their investments and the tanks of gas they buy may help finance the circulation of foreign propaganda aimed against Israel through tax-exempt foundations.⁴

These opposing assumptions about who influences American Middle East policy are widely held, but both radically oversimplify the process of policy formulation. Every administration confronts an array of conflicting perceptions and interests that must be balanced. Influences operate from at home and abroad, from within the government and without, during periods of crisis and quiet. Critical differences occur even within the chief executive’s circle. Some pressures are consistent; others shift in particular presidencies according to the background, predispositions, and philosophies of the key players. The task of this book is to examine the experiences of each president who has dealt with the highly controversial Arab-Israeli question in order to understand what decision-making systems developed and what substantive policies resulted from the process. In conducting this examination, I seek to separate actual policy making from the mythologies surrounding the issue among partisans of different philosophies and preferences.

The Components of Policy

American policy toward the Arab-Israeli dispute involves three levels of decision making: the global, the regional, and the actual area in conflict. However, while these levels may be related for purposes of analysis, their relationship in the real world is constantly shifting. Any administration will always have global aims (for example, containment of the Soviet Union, human rights, free trade). Sometimes these aims seem to relate directly to the Middle East, as in Eisenhower’s and Dulles’s pursuit of the Baghdad Pact and Carter’s pursuit of stability for energy supplies. At other times the Middle East is peripheral to the administration’s main concerns, as it was to Truman’s containment policy or Kennedy’s multiple options doctrine. There will also be regional aims, such as the promotion of a pro-American Arab unity around the favorite of the moment or the attempt to build Iran as a protector of the Persian Gulf. Last, there may be specific plans for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, such as Eisenhower’s Johnston Plan, Kennedy’s Johnson Plan, and Nixon’s Rogers Plan.

In any administration, the global perspective will be paramount. Regional objectives may sometimes conflict with goals related to Arab-Israeli differences but neither regional nor Arab-Israeli policy will contradict global objectives knowingly. To understand an administration, it is important to identify its global objectives, observe the degree and intensity of consensus, and analyze how the Middle East fits in. Every president begins with foreign policy priorities and objectives, however obscure and inarticulate. Most, if not all, of the president’s major advisers share these primary notions; they pay attention to the Arab-Israeli dispute to the extent that it seems critical to their global aims. Of course, occupying an important place in the administration’s global picture can aid either the Arabs or the Israelis. In the Ford administration, for example, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and U.N. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan both saw the Middle East as a key element in their top priority effort to limit Russian influence. But Kissinger in his shuttle diplomacy pursued an evenhanded strategy and Moynihan believed in close American identification with democratic Israel. Similarly in the Truman era, Clark Clifford, the president’s special counsel, advocated a new Jewish state to thwart Russian aims in the area where Secretary of Defense James Forrestal opposed a Jewish state that might draw Russian intervention and jeopardize essential energy supplies for the West.

Not only executive key officials (such as the president, the national security assistant, the secretaries of state and defense, the ambasador to the U.N., White House aides) see the Middle East in light of their global concerns. Others on the American political scene also approach the Arabs and Israelis from a global orientation. Many congressmen approach the area with ideologies (or rationalizations for perceived political necessities) that have global applications—the need to support Israel because of its anticommunism, its friendship with the United States, its status as a liberal democracy; the need to support the moderate Arabs because of their anticommunist and pro-American position or because of the need for stable energy supplies.

These arguments, frequently heard in congressional debates, reflect foreign policy priorities; both the Arabs and the Israelis are subordinated to other American objectives. For example, after the Vietnam War, ideologists on the left—especially within America’s minority communities—identified with the third world in rallying against global inequality. Many viewed the Palestinian cause as part of a worldwide struggle between the oppressors of the “North” (here symbolized by the Israelis) and the oppressed of the “South” (played here by the Palestinians). The Arab-Israeli dispute temporarily became part of a global ideological conflict.

Until the fall of the shah and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Pentagon showed no primary interest in the Middle East. Throughout much of the post-1945 period, its missions concentrated on the European and Asian theaters, where most conventional forces abroad were stationed in opposition to the Soviet Union and China. In the late 1940s, Defense Department officials fretted that oil supplies would be threatened or opportunities for Russian influence opened if a Jewish state emerged. The Pentagon worried about having to expend scarce troops to rescue the Jews if the Arabs attacked. By the 1960s, however, some officials saw arms sales to Israel as a means of extending production runs and cutting unit costs. Later, the military planners came to favor arms sales to the Arabs for the same reason. During the Vietnam years, Israel shared with American intelligence and military officials its combat experience with Egyptian-manned Russian equipment over the Suez Canal. This cooperation, and not developments in the Middle East, increased the sympathy of many officers and analysts toward Israel. The 1970s brought new threats to energy supplies, causing Pentagon planners again to focus on the Middle East and Arab importance as they had in the 1940s.

Only one organized interest group has viewed the Middle East as a symbol of global ideological interests. American labor has consistently focused on the prominent role of labor in Israeli society and, particularly after the mid-1950s, applauded Israeli anticommunism and urged support for the Jerusalem government. Although labor’s attitude has not been important to the American executive branch, unless it influenced the president’s ideas or affected his political calculus, it has helped strengthen the prevailing support for Israel in Congress.

Those who focus on primarily the second level of policy making in the Middle East, regional concerns, concentrate on the structure of international politics there. These people, both analysts and participants, seek an American policy relevant to the cultural, religious, political, and economic trends in the area. Because the Arab states outnumber the other regional actors, such thinking focuses on the Arab role in the area. Analysts who argue from this view often stress the benefits of Arab unity (or, at least, low levels of inter-Arab strife), believing that an Arab consensus encourages a coherent U.S. Mideast policy. When tensions erupt within the Arab world, so do conflicts among adherents of a regional strategy, thereby dissipating their influence on American policymaking.

This regional approach to the Middle East dominates the State Department, especially within the Bureau of Near East and South Asian Affairs. Even during the Ottoman Empire and the period of French and British rule, the department sought to protect American commercial, educational, and cultural interests by maintaining at least correct relations with the party or parties thought to be dominant in the region.⁵ The Zionists could never attain that position, and so it is not surprising the State Department’s strategies have often been at odds with those of the Israelis. For similar reasons many intelligence officials, Near East analysts in the National Security Council, and involved officials in the International Security Agency (the Pentagon’s “State Department”) have usually favored the regionalist approach. By the early 1980s this view also prevailed among analysts at the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Outside of government, oilmen and many scholars have taken a similar position. Over the years oilmen have sought to support stable, moderate, pro-American regimes in the Arab world. Any movement or leader espousing a doctrine of nationalization or producer-independence has been feared and opposed. Oilmen and diplomats have not always addressed precisely identical concerns, but their policy preferences have tended to coincide on the Arab-Israel issue. While the influence of petroleum industry representatives on specific policies has been minimal, their overall harmony of view with many bureaucrats has given the appearance of influence. This coincidence of perspective has been shared by construction companies, banks, and other businesses increasingly active in the area since the petro-financial revolution of October 1973.

Most students of the region also have focused on the Arabs as the area’s dominant cultural and linguistic unit, which has led to increasing sympathy for the Arab world in American academia. This broad diplomatic, corporate, and scholarly regional consensus is best exemplified by the Middle East Institute in Washington where retired officials, leading corporate figures, and scholars engage in discussions, educational programs, and research.

The third way of thinking about American policy toward the Arabs and Israelis is taken by those who have a specific interest in the conflict itself and are largely unconcerned about either global or regional trends. The best known and most-noted example of this perspective is American Jewish support for Israel. Few American Jewish leaders offer global or regional reasons for backing the government in Jerusalem. Their support has deep religious and cultural roots reinforced by concern for Jewish survival in the wake of the Nazi extermination of one out of every three Jews in the world during the Second World War.

This support for Israel is expressed in myriad ways—backing of sympathetic political candidates, rallies and demonstrations on Israel’s behalf, financial contributions, lectures and publications, communications to political leaders. The abundance of Jewish organizations brings diverse pressures to bear. For example, the American Jewish Committee deals especially with minorities and Christian clergy. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith defends Jews (and Israel) against discriminatory practices. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee—the pro-Israeli lobby—supports legislation that favors Israel in Washington, especially on Capitol Hill. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations speaks on foreign policy issues concerning Jews (especially Israel) and deals directly with the executive branch.

Jewish strength arises from the thousands of individual Jews who are prepared to express their sentiments to politicians and officials. Intense concern in part compensates for small numbers. Moreover, Jews have neither a bureaucratic mission nor a profit motive. Their religious, humanitarian, and ethnic concerns often appear more altruistic and less self-serving to politicians than those of their adversaries.

Despite their small number, Jews also have a definite, though limited influence on the electoral process. They contribute more generously to political campaigns than any other ethnic group; they go to the polls in higher percentages; their largest concentrations of population are located in the states electorally crucial to any presidential race; they are active in politics, especially in presidential campaigns. Thus, few people who run for the presidency do not first meet with Jewish leaders to discuss political issues, particularly their attitudes toward Israel. Many candidates and some presidents have counted prominent supporters of Israel among their friends and devoted backers. Most presidents have attempted to maintain communications with the Jewish community. Most have named a White House aide, who has usually had other domestic policy assignments as well, to champion the administration’s positions to Jewish leaders and organizations and to represent their views at the White House.

The respect and attention commanded by the American Jewish community in the executive and legislative branches is not always dup...