U.S. Relations with Israel over the Decades

Like most members of my generation, Joe Biden grew up with a rosy view of Israel.  It was based on Bible stories plus hearing about the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe plus the novel Exodus by Leon Uris. The best seller became a film watched by millions about the establishment of the state of Israel.  President Truman exercised his executive authority to recognize the Zionist leaders as a sovereign state in 1948, while they were still pushing to get borders more desirable for Jewish immigrants to the British mandate for Palestine than those agreed to by the United Nations General Assembly partition plan.  Aside from objections behind the scenes by officials in the U. S. Departments of State and Defense, there was almost no push back.

The American public heard virtually nothing about the Palestinians.  They assumed the worst motives of Arab states that opposed Israel’s relentless expansion of its borders and the persecution of the centuries-old Palestinian population.  This did not change until 1956 when the U.S. opposed the tripartite aggression of Israel, the United Kingdom and France to seize control of the Sinai Peninsula and the Suez Canal.  President Eisenhower was an extremely popular war hero who had led U.S. and allied forces in the liberation of North Africa and Europe from the Axis occupation and made it possible for surviving Jews to escape the Nazi death camps.  Americans did not call Ike anti-Jewish.  They recognized that he was advancing a strategy based on U.S. interests in the Middle East.
Like most Americans I continued to have a positive view of Israel until my fourth year of college in 1961.  I had decided to learn Arabic and study the Middle East and Islam.  One day the lecturer in the Middle Eastern studies course was an Assistant Professor named Nadav Safran.  He came to us from Israel, but he was originally from the Jewish community in Egypt.  He had joined with the Israeli forces in the 1948 war with the job of going to Arab villages in Palestine and broadcasting warnings to the population to flee before they were massacred, something that had already happened at the village of Deir Yassin.  This helped explain for me the huge number of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere, including my Arabic teachers in the U.S.  From them, I learned the meaning of Nakba, the catastrophe.

I continued on to Cairo for another year of Arabic studies and then to assignments at the U.S. embassies in Baghdad and Amman, Jordan.  I was in Amman on June 1967, when Israel launched a surprise attack that wiped out the Egyptian Air Force and set the stage for the Israeli occupation of Sinai, the West Bank and Syrian Golan Heights.  There were accusations of U.S. involvement in the war by carrier-based aircraft of the Sixth Fleet. I believe those accusations were unfounded, the result of underestimation by the Egyptians of the capabilities of an Israeli Air Force armed mostly with French made jet aircraft.

In fact, the Israelis attacked a U.S. naval vessel assigned to monitor what we predicted would be some kind of military conflict between Israel and Egypt.  The attack on the U.S. Liberty killed 34 Americans and wounded 171.  That episode is still a matter of disagreement among historians of the two countries, but it certainly contributed to U.S. support for UN Security Council resolutions like 242, which called for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories and negotiations to establish secure borders among Israel, its Arab neighbors and the Palestinians.  Unfortunately, the strong wording of the U.N. resolutions was not matched by quick progress in the talks that the U.S. has sporadically tried to mediate under U.S. presidents of both parties.

After the June war, the State Department sent me to Jerusalem with the assignment to resume visa issuance at the American Consulate General.  This function at one of our oldest diplomatic posts in the Middle East had been suspended in 1949, requiring visa applicants to either visit the new U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv or for those in East Jerusalem and the West Bank to go to Amman.  I hired and trained three new employees who had Israeli citizenship and were fluent in both Arabic and Hebrew.  They were a Palestinian woman from Haifa, a Palestinian woman from West Jerusalem and a Jewish woman who had emigrated from Iraq.  They cooperated beautifully with our existing staff of Palestinian employees. Our reception area seated side by side visa applicants who were Israelis and Palestinians.  This example was the envy of Teddy Kollek, the new Israeli mayor of so-called united Jerusalem.  He was trying, usually unsuccessfully, to engage Palestinians in cooperative ventures.

I left Jerusalem in 1968 and went on to assignments in various Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa, but on State Department assignments I was often drawn into the Arab-Israel conflict.  In October 1973, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat launched a successful attack on Israeli forces still controlling the east bank of the Suez Canal.  I quickly came aboard the Task Force staff of Secretary Henry Kissinger.  I saw the way he used his relationship with the White House to press the U.S. Department of Defense to airlift arms to Israel to counter Soviet arms supplies to Egypt and Syria.  I also saw the way he engaged in shuttle diplomacy to get a ceasefire that left Israel in control of the Sinai Peninsula.

President Sadat made a brilliant switch to diplomacy.  He curtailed his dependence on the Soviet Union, built up a relationship with the U.S. and reached out secretly to the Israeli government.  His visit to Israel in 1977 and his speech at the Knesset calling for détente were master strokes. I was in Baghdad when this happened, and I remember hearing from my Arab diplomatic colleagues that he had stunned their governments.

U.S. President Jimmy Carter followed up by inviting Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Begin from the right- wing Likud Party to Camp David for talks that led quickly to a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979.  The U.S. blessed this achievement with financial support and arms shipments to both governments.   U.S. mediated negotiations have never again been so successful.  One can point to failures by both Israeli governments and Arab governments.  It is also true that the U.S. has often been reluctant to use the great leverage that it has, particularly with Israel.

After numerous attacks on the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Israel launched a major invasion in 1982 and advanced all the way to Beirut.  Their military success eventually turned into a series of political failures as Israeli forces became bogged down and Lebanese politics were radicalized in ways that led to the establishment of Hezbollah and the spread of Iranian influence to Lebanon and Syria.  From 1982 to 1985, I was back in the State Department as the Director of the Office of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq.  I saw first hand how this was undermining U.S. interests.  Finally, the Israelis turned to us for help.  I visited Beirut several times, including when I was part of the U.S. team led by Ambassador Philip Habib, a famed Lebanese-American diplomat whom President Reagan brought out of retirement to serve as his envoy to negotiate a peace.  We got Israel and Lebanon to agree to a ceasefire and withdrawal of Israeli forces to southern Lebanon, but efforts for their full withdrawal and peace on the Israel-Lebanon border bogged down.  Later on, I joined with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy for intensive shuttle diplomacy among the governments of Israel, Lebanon and Syria in an effort to get both Israeli and Syrian forces to leave Lebanon.  As it turned out, the Israeli government was too disunited to take the hard decisions to make it happen.  The situation in southern Lebanon is still potentially explosive.  Today, I see dangers for a new regional war among Israel, Lebanon and Syria.  I believe that both Iran and the U.S. would prefer using diplomacy to avoid a conflict that would be detrimental to both of our interests.

Despite numerous failures in US-Israeli relations, there have also been some notable successes.  For the most part, the U.S. worked to prevent Israel from interfering in the eight year-long Iraq-Iran war.  I was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates for the final years of that tragic conflict.  I will never forget how his Highness Shaikh Zayed Al Nahyan angrily reacted to me in private regarding news of the covert supply of arms from Israel to Iran.  That stupid event was partly caused by some rogue U.S. officials on President Reagan’s national security staff.  For a few months it undermined State Department efforts to bring that conflict to an end and stopattacks on the peaceful commerce of the Gulf.

Later on, I was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, despite our efforts to head that off.  Among other failures of policy, Saddam Hussein had made reckless threats a few months earlier to strike Israel with missiles armed with chemical warheads.  We took various measures to keep Israel out of the conflict that followed.  After the success of Desert Storm in liberating Kuwait and crippling Iraqi armed forces, President George Herbert Walker Bush capitalized on U.S. military success to launch a major diplomatic effort between Israel and the Arab states.  Rather than ordering our forces to march on to Baghdad, the elder Bush used our heightened prestige to convene a major peace conference at Madrid.  Even Syria attended.  Israel was reluctant to sit down at the table with several Arab states and with Palestinian representatives, but Secretary of State James Baker had the backing of President Bush to stage the conference and follow up steps.

The Madrid Peace Conference led to the Oslo process.  A Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty soon followed. Another success was to allow the PLO to set up a Palestinian Authority in Ramallahfor the West Bank and Gaza.  For a while, U.S. mediation between Palestinians and Israelis made progress toward a Palestinian state in a peaceful relationship with Israel.  More recently, U.S. mediation has led to demarcation of the Israel-Lebanese maritime boundary, something that has great potential economic benefits for both countries.  Hopefully, the U.S. can move on to negotiate the demarcation of the land border and force levels in buffer zones on both sides.

The four years of the Trump Administration were filled with dramatic events in the U.S.-Israel relationship that appeared to promise great achievements.  I regret to say that the U.S. gave Israel what it wanted by moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem and closing our consulate office in East Jerusalem, as well as accepting Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, without getting anything meaningful in return.  Normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab countries had started with the Camp David agreements and were advanced by the Madrid Conference.  As normalization spread to the U.A.E, Bahrein and Morocco, the Trump Administration came up with a great advertising label, calling them “The Abraham Accords.”  But the reality does not match the shrewd public relations benefits.

The tragic events of October 7 and the subsequent six months of terrible warfare for the civilians of Gaza are posing new questions for relations between Israel and the United States.  There is wide support in both countries to maintain a strong bilateral relationship.  But what does that mean in practice?  The personal relations between the two top leaders in Washington and Jerusalem have seldom been worse.  Moreover, public opinion in both countries has turned hostile.  Calls for Netanyahu to step down and for Israel to have new elections are growing.  In the U.S., opposition to Biden’s warm embrace of Israel since October 7 and six months of war in Gaza threatens his re-election.  Behind the scenes, senior officials in both governments are maneuvering to restore a U.S.-Israeli relationship that would advance the cause of regional peace in the Middle East along with the reputations of top leaders in both capitals.

Increasingly, President Biden is saying the right things.  Unfortunately, Prime Minister Netanyahu does not take those words seriously enough.  Biden will have to start doing the right things.    That means concrete actions, like more rigorous enforcement of U.S. laws and regulations regarding the transfers of bombs and other military equipment.  Another idea is to take real steps toward a two-state solution.  For example, President Biden could recognize a revitalized and reformed Palestinian Authority as a sovereign state in the making, allowing the return to Washington of a Palestinian diplomatic office and reopening a U.S. diplomatic office in East Jerusalem.  Taking a few lessons from how President Truman eased the path to statehood for Israel in 1948 would send a good message to our friends abroad.  At home, it would show that Biden is a man of action, not just soothing words.

About the Author

David Lyle Mack is an American diplomat. He is the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs (1990–1993) and U.S. Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates (1986–1989). Mack also served as the Principal Officer in Iraq from May 1977 until February 1978.

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