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The Passionate Attachment: America's Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present
... The first urgency is for America Dot to allow the balance of power to shift in favor of the militant Arab states in a Dew war ••• the United States must see to it that Israel's military is Dever at a level vis-a-vis the Arab militant that will invite a war of revenge (president NixoD, 1968, cited in Guit, 1987 Ball and Ball, 1992, Gold, 1993, Alters, 1993, and others). Herrmann (1991: 45) US policy makers allowed for the sale of arms to Israel in order to strengthen its security. ...
... A final reason is a basic US humanitarian policy toward Israel from its foundation in 1948. These ties between the US and Israel go back many years even before the 24 See Ball and Ball (1992), especially chapter 10, and Findley (1989 be located in defensive sites to lessen their threat to Israel (Lugar, 1986). ...
... Moreover, Britain gained another $5 billion for building new air bases for the Saudis and $5 billion more for maintenance work (Ball and Ball, 1992). Two years after the US refusal of arms sales to Saudi Arabia under the pressure of Israel and its lobby in the US, the Saudis purchased the Tornado aircraft from Britain, a deal worth more than $30 billion. ...
... The first proposed diverting approximately 50 Mm 3 annually from the Hasbani River via a tunnel into the Litani; the second involved construction of a canal to divert both the Hasbani and the Banias rivers into the Yarmouk River for irrigation in both Syria and Jordan ( Figure 11) (Doherty 1965). What makes the suggestion of a hydraulic imperative on the part of Israel even more confusing is Prime Minister Begin s admission in 1982 that the 1967 conflict was not a war of necessity, but a war of choice (quoted in Ball and Ball 1992). Perhaps the most sensible statement appears in Heller and Nusseibah (1991, p. 107): The development of Israel s National Water Carrier and Syrian attempts to divert headwaters of the Jordan River played a part in the chain of events leading to the Arab Israeli war of 1967. ...
... 5 In studies about American policy-making toward the Middle East, some scholars attribute American support for Israel to the mobilization of American Jewry on behalf of its coreligionists abroad. 6 Many of these accounts conclude that Jewish influence on the Middle East debate has produced a suboptimal foreign policy for the United States. 7 With equal determination, other observers argue that American Jewry is but one of a host of forces (and certainly not the primary influence) accounting for the pro-Israel tone of American Middle East policy. ...
What accounts for individual differences in the level of politicized ethnic identity among members of an ethnonational diaspora? By politicized ethnic identity, we refer to the disposition to assign priority to the interests of the homeland in the politics of the host society. The question presumes that even the most thoroughly mobilized of diasporas contain members who differ among themselves in the degree to which homeland matters predominate in determining political preferences and behavior. Using a 1999 survey of American Jewry, we establish the level of variation in the political salience of Israel to members of the community, then identify and test the factors that promote or retard such commitment.
... These papers have posited possible political objectives of foreign aid and then tested these hypotheses. For example, studies have analyzed whether foreign aid is tied to the human rights record of the regime in power, among other factors (see for example, Abrams and Lewis, 1993;Ball and Ball, 1992;Maizels and Nissanke, 1984;McKinlay and Little, 1979;Palda, 1993). In addition, this paper fills a vacuum in the literature on humanitarian military intervention by presenting a formal model, in contrast to the existing literature where analysis of the topic tends to be normative in scope and empirical work is relegated to case methods (see, e.g., Gordenker and Weiss, 1990;Weiss and Minear, 1993 and for a recent exception see McGinnis, 1998). ...
The stated objectives for countries in providing foreign aid have been strategic, economic and humanitarian. The end of the Cold War and the recent disintegration of territorial states has increased the prominence of the humanitarian objective. Therefore, the paper concentrates on the transfer of resources from wealthier and politically stable countries to poorer and politically unstable ones. The amount of foreign aid provided by governments and international relief agencies is determined by the altruistic desires of individuals. Within a median voter framework, it is found that foreign aid is increasing in the degree of altruism of the median voter, their income, the similarity the median voter has with the ethnicity or religion of the recipient group, and the number of civilian casualties resulting from armed conflicts in the recipient nation. Foreign aid is inversely related to the size of the recipient country and the extent that international relief is being pilfered. This latter result explains "foreign aid fatigue."
An implication of this analysis is that donor nations may have an incentive to intervene militarily in civil conflicts which reduce the welfare of their altruistic citizens in order to establish order in the relief effort or to stabilize or establish a government capable of controlling the domestic unrest. This option will be chosen if the welfare of the median voter is greater under military intervention than under the status quo of continuing to send only aid. Intervention will occur, the more effective the military option is in reducing the unrest, the greater the degree of altruism of the median voter, the larger the size of the donor country, the lower the cost of intervention, the larger the extent and size of the group being victimized, the lower the relative valuation placed on alternative domestic uses of foreign aid, and the greater the size of the transfer being provided.
... It is difficult to reconcile these data about American Jewish concern for Israel with the scholarly literature on what Anderson (1992) aptly called "long-distance nationalism." In the extensive literature on U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, many studies give the impression that the Zionist movement has completely captured the American Jewish population which has, in turn, captured U.S. Middle Eastern policy (Ball 1992, Ganin 1979, Schoenbaum 1993, Tivnan 1987, El Azhary 1969Woocher 1986. 3 These studies convey the impression of a cohesive American Jewish community that grants precedence to Israel on the communal agenda. ...
... It only serves to encourage further bloodshed that results in the injury and death of innocent victims on both sides, and consumes economic resources for purposes that do not in any way help the Palestinian people. 30 An al-Jazeera reporter in the West Bank, Walid al-Omary said, "If the American administration wants Arab support they should change their policy on the Palestinian issue." 31 In 2002, a survey conducted in France and Venezuela found that a majority of people in both countries would have a more favorable opinion of the United States if it was successful in settling the conflict. ...
The image today of the United States of America in the Middle East is extremely negative. It is based upon Arab perceptions of an inconsistent and biased United States Middle East foreign policy. This image is further exacerbated by the Arabic language media. Unfortunately America's image has dramatically worsened in the last four years. In April 2003 Business Week stated Hatred of American policies in the Arab world has never been higher. A negative image of the United States in the Middle East was also shared by United States allies in Europe. Lee Walczak of Business Week continued In every Western European country polls show that George W. Bush is seen as a greater threat to world peace than Saddam. Ironically the President of the United States of America was perceived to be a greater threat than a ruthless dictator who oppressed his own people. The Gallup polls showed by a 2-to-i margin in February 2003 that people in nine Islamic countries have an unfavorable image of the United States. These feelings amongst Arab countries are stronger today as the war in Iraq continues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unresolved. The United States must engage in a more skillful public relations campaign now. This paper will examine the Israeli and Palestinian conflict and the impact of Arab satellite television on American foreign policy as two reasons for the country's negative image and offer a strategy to improve our image in the Middle East.
This dissertation demonstrates how the relationship between the United States and the State of Israel underwent a significant transformation during 1970s and 1980s. After more than two decades of limited American aid since Israel declared its independence in 1948, the United States under Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan dramatically increased its support for Israel in the wake of the October War of 1973. This increased level of support is most apparent in the level of U.S. military aid provided to Israel, which Israel received under extremely favorable terms. The deepening of U.S.-Israeli ties from 1973 onwards occurred despite the fact that there were very real differences between U.S. and Israeli national and strategic interests, differences that sometimes erupted into fierce disagreements between American and Israeli officials. U.S. support for Israel was based on several factors, including Israel’s perceived value as a strategic ally during the Cold War, Americans’ vision of Israel as a fellow democracy with similar political, cultural, and religious values, and the large number of Jewish and Christian supporters in the United States. The 1970s and 1980s are also important for the U.S.-Israeli relationship because these years saw an important shift among Israel’s supporters in the United States. While American Jews had traditionally been Israel’s strongest backers, from the 1970s onwards American evangelical Christians emerged as some of Israel’s most vocal champions in the United States. Adviser: Thomas Borstelmann
Standard explanations for the demise of U.S.-Soviet détente during the 1970s emphasize the Soviet Union's inability to put aside its communist ideology for the sake of a more cooperative relationship with the United States. Soviet resistance to reaching a stable accommodation during this period, many analysts maintain, was especially evident in the Middle East, where Moscow is said to have embraced the “radical Arab program” vis-à-vis Israel. Such accounts do not fare well, however, in light of the historical evidence. Instead, that evidence indicates that the Soviet Union was eager to cooperate with the United States to achieve an Arab-Israeli agreement. The Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations, however, were not interested in working with the Soviets in the Middle East, and instead sought to expel them from the region. These findings have important implications for scholarly debates about whether great power rivals can cooperate on issues where their strategic interests are overlapping, as well as for contemporary debates over U.S. policy toward countries such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
This dissertation is a political history of the origins and early evolution of the U.S. acquiescence in Israel’s nuclear ambiguity. Its thesis is that, contrary to the interpretation of much of the academic historiography, senior decision-makers within the Eisenhower administration, including the President himself, were confronted with detailed evidence of Israel’s covert nuclear development project as early as spring 1958 but, for a variety of reasons which have not previously been examined in detail, chose not to reveal evidence of its existence, even within the wider U.S. intelligence community, for at least two years. Only when the Eisenhower administration became aware, in December 1960, that President de Gaulle of France was pressuring the Israeli Government to make its own announcement, did U.S. intelligence agencies leak details of Israel’s nuclear project to the press, and only then to distance the U.S. government from international perceptions of complicity in the project.
Israel’s nuclear ambiguity is not, nor could it be, a unilateral policy; it has required a bargain with the United States. This study analyses how and why America’s part in that bargain came about and what this means for the treatment in modern scholarship both of American support for Israel’s opaque nuclear posture and of foreign policymaking in the Eisenhower White House.
During his eight years in the White House, Eisenhower tried to build anti-Soviet security systems in the Middle East, engaged in or contemplated operations to overturn national governments across the region, tried without success to promote Arab–Israeli peace, dealt with an international crisis involving an Anglo-French-Israeli armed assault on Egypt, sent US Marines into Lebanon to prevent a revolution, and monitored anti-western political leaders and movements who threatened to undermine the stability of the region. This chapter presents an overview of the voluminous scholarly literature on the president's policies toward the Arab states, Israel, and the Arab–Israeli conflict. Several scholars have essentially used the Suez crisis as a case study to test the revisionist argument that Eisenhower was actively in charge of the formulation of American diplomacy. Among the scholars exploring US diplomatic relations with the Arab states in the 1950s, Egypt has drawn the highest degree of attention.
The previous chapter focused primarily on the impact of “domestic institutions,” examining the institutional context in which dual containment policy was made. This chapter plays a complementary role, examining interest groups within society at large that interacted with these structures to shape and influence dual containment. It examines the role of “policy coalitions”—those constellations of forces within a society that use political influence to affect policy in different ways, in a manner determined both by their own influence and the opportunities offered to them by the political system in which they operate. Specifically, organized interest groups espousing a variety of causes and interests fre- quently seek to insert their preferences and policies into the policymak- ing process by lobbying legislators and executive branch officials. While the institutional context of the state in which they operate determines how effective they can be (depending on the relative autonomy of poli- cymakers and the accessibility of the policymaking process to outside interest groups), it is the degree of influence these forces wield and the nature of their preferred policies that determine specific outcomes. In the American case, interest groups are able to influence policy despite holding no formal power by lobbying legislators and officials, though their influence varies from issue to issue and from group to group.
John F. Kennedy's foreign policies;U.S. foreign relations;cold war;international communism;democracy
U.S.-middle east relations;cold war dynamics;anti-american nationalism;revolutions;preservation of Israel
About Jeff rey Blankfo rt Jeffrey Blankfort was raised in a Jewish non-Zionist family. He pro-duces radio programs on three stations and has written extensively on the Middle East. He was formerly the editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin and co-founder of the Labor Committee of the Middle East. His photographs of the Anti-Vietnam War and Black Panthers Movements have appeared in numerous books and magazines. In February 2002, he won a lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which was found to have had a vast spying operation directed against American citizens opposed to Israel's policies in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza and to the apartheid policies of the government of South Africa and passing on information to both gov-ernments.
Beginning in the ancient world, Jewish populations have repeatedly attained a position of power and influence within Western societies. I will discuss Jewish background traits conducive to influence: ethnocentrism, intelligence and wealth, psychological intensity, aggressiveness, with most of the focus on ethnocentrism. I discuss Jewish ethnocentrism in its historical, anthropological, and evolutionary context and in its relation to three critical psychological processes: moral particularism, self-deception, and the powerful Jewish tendency to coalesce into exclusionary, authoritarian groups under conditions of perceived threat. Jewish populations have always had enormous effects on the societies in which they reside because of several qualities that are central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy: First and foremost, Jews are ethnocentric and able to cooperate in highly organized, cohesive, and effective groups. Also important is high intelligence, including the usefulness of intelligence in attaining wealth, prominence in the media, and eminence in the academic world and the legal profession. I will also discuss two other qualities that have received less attention: psychological intensity and aggressiveness. The four background traits of ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggressiveness result in Jews being able to produce formidable, effective groups—groups able to have powerful, transformative effects on the peoples they live among. In the modern world, these traits influence the academic world and the world of mainstream and elite media, thus amplifying Jewish effectiveness compared with traditional societies. However, Jews have repeatedly become an elite and powerful group in societies in which they reside in sufficient numbers. It is remarkable that Jews, usually as a tiny minority, have been central to a long list of historical events. Jews were much on the mind of the Church Fathers in the fourth century during the formative years of Christian dominance in the West. Indeed, I have proposed that the powerful anti-Jewish attitudes and legislation of the fourth-century Church must be understood as a defensive reaction against Jewish economic power and enslavement of non-Jews.1 Jews who had nominally converted to Christianity but maintained their ethnic ties in marriage and commerce were the focus of the 250-year Inquisition in Spain, Portugal, and the Spanish colonies in the New World. Fundamentally, the Inquisition should be seen as a defensive reaction to the economic and political domination of these "New Christians."2 Jews have also been central to all the important events of the twentieth century. Jews were a necessary component of the Bolshevik revolution that created the Soviet Union, and they remained an elite group in the Soviet Union until at least the post-World War II era. They were an important focus of National Socialism in Germany, and they have been prime movers of the post-1965 cultural and ethnic revolution in the United States, including the encouragement of massive non-white immigration to countries of European origins.3 In the contemporary world, organized American Jewish lobbying groups and deeply committed Jews in the Bush administration and the media are behind the pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy that is leading to war against virtually the entire Arab world.
Robert Lieberman's critique of our work on the Israel lobby is at odds with an abundance of evidence and prior scholarship describing the powerful influence that pro-Israel groups exert on U.S. Middle East policy. In addition to mischaracterizing our arguments, Lieberman claims that our methodology and research design are flawed and that our work contradicts the scholarly literature on American politics. Neither claim is true. Contrary to what he says, we did consider alternative hypotheses, and our analysis contains significant variation on both the independent and dependent variables. Given the methodological challenges involved in assessing the causal influence of any interest group, we also relied heavily on “process-tracing.” Lieberman recognizes this is an appropriate method for assessing causal impact and he concedes that this evidence supports our central argument. Moreover, we went to some lengths to avoid selection bias. Similarly, our arguments are consistent with the existing literature on interest groups, and with much of the scholarly literature on congressional decision-making, campaign financing, electoral politics, and the role of think tanks and the media. Surprisingly, after leveling a variety of false charges, Lieberman offers an “alternative” explanation for the Israel lobby's influence that is virtually identical to our own.
In their recent book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argue that American support for Israel does
not serve American interests. Nevertheless, they observe that American foreign
policy regarding the Middle East, especially in recent years, has tilted
strongly toward support for Israel, and they attribute this support to the
influence of the “Israel lobby” in American domestic
politics. Their book is principally an attempt to make a causal argument about
American politics and policymaking. I examine three aspects of this
argument—its causal logic, the use of evidence to support hypotheses,
and the argument's connection with the state of knowledge about American
politics—and conclude that the case for the Israel lobby as the
primary cause of American support for Israel is at best a weak one, although it
points to a number of interesting questions about the mechanisms of power in
American politics. Mearsheimer and Walt's propositions about the direct
influence of the Israel lobby on Congress and the executive branch are generally
not supported by theory or evidence. Less conclusive and more suggestive,
however, are their arguments about the lobby's apparent influence on the terms
and boundaries of legitimate debate and discussion of Israel and the Middle East
in American policymaking. These directions point to an alternative approach to
investigating the apparent influence of the Israel lobby in American politics,
focusing less on direct, overt power over policy outcomes and more on more
subtle pathways of influence over policy agendas and the terms of policy
discourse.
The world's major religions espouse a moral code that includes injunctions against murder, theft, and lying — or so conventional 19th-and 20th-century Western wisdom would have it. Evidence put forth here argues that this convention is a conceit which does not apply to the West's own religious foundations. In particular, rules against murder, theft, and lying codified by the Ten Commandments were intended to apply only within a cooperating group for the purpose of enabling that group to compete successfully against other groups. In addition, this in-group morality has functioned, both historically and by express intent, to create adverse circumstances between groups by actively promoting murder, theft, and lying as tools of competition. Contemporary efforts to present Judeo-Christian in-group morality as universal morality defy the plain meaning of the texts upon which Judaism and Christianity are based. Accordingly, that effort is ultimately hopeless. Ridley for steadfast encouragement and sage advice. Any errors of fact or interpretation are mine, and all criticisms, accusations, and assignations of bad karma that might be inspired by this work should be directed exclusively at me.
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