U.S.-Israel Ties: 50 Years of Benefits, Costs

Just minutes after the Jewish community in Palestine proclaimed its independence on May 14, 1948, President Harry S. Truman--motivated by domestic politics and a sense of moral obligation in the wake of the Holocaust--extended U.S. diplomatic recognition to the new nation of Israel.

In the eyes of his State Department and Pentagon, it was a dumb idea. Recognition was diplomatically foolish because it would alienate the Arab world, they argued, and it was strategically dangerous because the new state would never be able to defend itself, eventually drawing the United States into war.

While the darkest of those Truman-era assessments have been proved wrong in the ensuing half-century, there is little doubt that the United States has paid a stiff price for its alliance with Israel. Even as 50 rams’ horns and a biblical harp provided the lyrical launch to Israelis’ official celebration today of their nation’s five decades of existence, the question now for the U.S. is whether the benefits of its links with the Jewish state have been enough to outweigh the costs.

Proponents of the alliance point to Israel’s role as a steadfast ally in a part of the world where the U.S. has few reliable friends. They cite its military might, its intelligence expertise and its role as a model of democracy in a region where representative governments are few and far between.

Moreover, supporters say Israel’s status as a Jewish homeland after the Holocaust is so important that it overshadows the difficulties that have sometimes beset the relationship.

“Israel is a cultural and ideological kindred spirit in a part of the world that is very difficult,” said Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “That is difficult to quantify because we are not out to re-create the world in our own image. But it is nice when there is a country with such an affinity.”

Critics paint a different picture, arguing that the alliance undercuts Washington’s relations with Arab states, complicates energy policy, makes Americans targets of terrorism and costs billions of dollars in military and nonmilitary aid.

They also say the alliance clouds the U.S. public’s view of the Middle East and leaves the United States vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy in matters such as human rights and nuclear proliferation--issues it claims are universal.

“In foreign policy terms, Israel is nothing but a liability,” said I. William Zartman, a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University in Washington. “Without Israel, we would be tactically more agile in regard to an area that is strategically important to us.”

Regardless of the diplomatic balance sheet, however, the U.S.-Israeli relationship has become part of the bedrock of American foreign policy. Even most of the critics concede that it would be impossible to disentangle the two countries at this point in history.

Despite some friction, the Clinton administration is staunchly friendly to Israel. And on Capitol Hill, Israel is so popular that the administration is criticized for, in effect, being too evenhanded in the Arab-Israeli dispute, not for being too overtly pro-Israel.

Israel Has Strongest Army in the Region

Confounding the Pentagon’s assessment in 1948 that Israel would be too weak to survive, the Jewish state today has the strongest army in the region and has become Washington’s most reliable military ally in a critical part of the world.

For both the U.S. and Israel, the clearest advantages of the relationship have been in the military and technological arenas.

U.S. assistance, including advanced aircraft and other sophisticated weaponry, has been indispensable to Israel’s military posture. In return, Jerusalem has made contributions to the U.S. fighting capability by producing such battle-tested modifications to U.S.-designed weaponry as fuel tanks for F-15s that extended the range of the Air Force’s top-of-the-line fighter.

Beyond weapons and equipment, Israel’s supporters cite the 1981 bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad by Israeli forces--which clearly set back Iraq’s nuclear weapons program--as another huge benefit to the United States. The Israeli attack was condemned at the time by much of the rest of the world, producing a diplomatic embarrassment for Washington. But no one really knows how the Persian Gulf War would have gone a decade later without the Israeli military action.

In the diplomatic sphere, however, the pluses and minuses of the relationship are not as clear. The U.S.-Israeli connection has complicated Washington’s relations with other countries in the Middle East and throughout the world. Indeed, history has fulfilled Secretary of State George Marshall’s warning in 1948 that support for Israel would prove to be an irritant to U.S. relations with Arab states.

For example, anti-Americanism is an increasingly strong current among Arab populations, possibly undermining friendly leaders such as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Hussein.

United States Has Been Target of Terrorists

Moreover, as Israel’s chief international patron, the United States has been a target of terrorist attacks by groups motivated primarily by hatred of Israel.

“The Arab-Israel conflict has impeded our ability to relate to the region as a whole,” said James Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute. “There is today a better-developed Arab public opinion than there ever was before. And the sense of betrayal runs deep.”

During the Cold War, Israel evolved into Washington’s most reliable military ally in the region. The United States could count on support from the Israeli military--by far the strongest in the Middle East--as it maneuvered for position in the global superpower competition.

“Israel became the bedrock from which we operated” during the Cold War, said William H. Lewis, professor of strategy at the National Defense University in Washington. “Israel became a major player in the bipolar world of power politics and served as a very important touchstone in terms of our own security interests.”

But the flip side of the relationship is that it “certainly gave the Soviets an entre” into the Arab world, said Michael Hudson, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington.

Moscow was able to make effective use of Arab resentment over U.S. support of Israel, Hudson said. The Soviet Union established military ties with Arab countries such as Syria, Iraq and, for much of the Cold War, Egypt.

Although military cooperation was close, the United States and Israel were often at odds about the exact purpose of their partnership. In 1984, the Reagan administration created a new description for the relationship, saying the U.S. and Israel were joined in a “strategic alliance.” Neither country spelled out exactly what that phrase meant.

“From the beginning there was a contradiction of interpretation,” said Richard Murphy, who was the State Department’s chief Middle East expert when the alliance was proclaimed. “It was, in Washington’s view, an agreement to work together to keep the Soviets out of the Middle East. From the Israeli view, it was to work together against the Arabs, something we never accepted.”

Jewish State Provides U.S. With Intelligence

Even before the phrase “strategic alliance” was coined, Israel supplied the Pentagon with valuable intelligence gleaned from Soviet-made aircraft, tanks and other weaponry captured during the recurring Arab-Israeli wars.

The Israelis also shared with the CIA and other U.S. agencies the intelligence gathered by their spy agency, the Mossad, concerning the Soviet Bloc and the Arab world. Israeli agents are credited with obtaining the first copy to reach the West of Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing the excesses of Josef Stalin’s regime.

But there is a downside as well. Intelligence experts say there is a danger that Washington has relied too much on the product of a single foreign agency, even an effective one.

“The Israeli intelligence agency always had a mystique,” Murphy said. “They really became supermen in Washington’s thinking. They retain much of that, especially in Congress. Their analyses and their secret reports were always given an extra measure of credibility, not always deserved. They were using intelligence to manipulate us and European governments.”

Despite Truman’s decision to offer Israel almost immediate diplomatic recognition, the relationship between the two governments was not particularly close until after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. The United States, in fact, participated in a global arms embargo against the new state that left its militia units with a ragtag arsenal of outmoded and makeshift weapons during the 1948 war.

Israel won the 1967 war using mostly French-designed equipment. But after that conflict, Paris distanced itself from Israel and worked to polish its position in the Arab world. The United States stepped in as supplier of Israel’s high-tech weaponry beginning in 1969.

U.S.-supplied F-4 jet fighters were the mainstay of the Israeli air force during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and later-model U.S. F-15s were added to the mix during the 1982 war in Lebanon.

Washington Brokers Peace Treaties

Washington’s effort to mediate the Arab-Israeli crisis has been a cornerstone of U.S. diplomacy since the aftermath of the 1973 war. The results have been impressive, including U.S.-brokered peace treaties between Israel and Egypt in 1979 and--15 years later--between Israel and Jordan.

But the U.S. effort to combine its role as honest broker with its role as Israel’s best friend has proved to be a difficult one.

For the Arab world and for many of Washington’s European allies, the U.S.-Israeli relationship makes the United States look hypocritical. Washington supports human rights and nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction--but it seems to give Israel a free pass on both issues.

While Arabs who are Israeli citizens enjoy full voting rights, they do not have all privileges extended to Israeli Jews. Prisoners are tortured in Israeli prisons, although not as often and as viciously as in some other countries. And in a region especially fearful of weapons of mass destruction, Israel has a well-known, although officially unacknowledged, nuclear arsenal.

A briefing paper prepared by the Washington-based American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby, cites Israel’s strong support for U.S. efforts to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of Iraq, Iran, Libya and other “rogue” states as one benefit to the United States.

But other experts argue that Washington’s campaign to rid Iraq of chemical and biological weapons is hampered because the U.S. government chooses to ignore Israel’s nuclear weapons capability.

“It is impossible for the United States to deal effectively with the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East until such time as there is a regional peace settlement, because there is no way we are going to lean on Israel because of its nuclear arsenal and long-range missile capability as long as there are states in the region that do not recognize its right to exist,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East expert in the Reagan administration.

U.S. Gives Billions a Year to Egypt, Israel

Since Israel and Egypt signed their peace agreement nearly 20 years ago, the United States has provided $3 billion in military and economic aid to Israel and $2 billion to Egypt each year--a total for the period of at least $100 billion. In recent years, this assistance has sopped up more than half the funds Congress has appropriated for all foreign aid.

Earlier in its history, Israel clearly needed financial help. But the country has become so prosperous that, under the guidelines that govern U.S. aid to all other countries, the program would have been terminated several years ago.

Critics say that aid to Israel and Egypt “eats up” the foreign aid budget, leaving almost no money to help poorer countries. But Israel’s supporters reply that the country is the only aid recipient with a recognizable constituency on Capitol Hill that defends the program as a whole, not just Israel’s substantial share of it.

Unflinching Support Gets Grudging Respect

Some experts say Washington gains grudging points diplomatically for consistency from Arab countries because of its unflinching support for Israel. For instance, Murphy said, during the Cold War, representatives of Arab governments aligned with the Soviet Union told him, “We wish the Soviets were as steady in their dealings with us as you are with Israel.”

And Leonard Hausman, a Middle East specialist at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said that the chances of democracy taking root in Arab countries are far better today because of the example of Israeli democracy.

“The emerging state of Palestine stands a good chance of becoming a democratic country . . . because of its proximity to Israel,” Hausman said.

But as with so many other elements of the U.S.-Israeli equation, the issue of democracy is a muddy one.

“Israel is democratic for Jews, but it is not democratic for Arabs,” Zartman said.

Impatience With Netanyahu’s Approach

In recent years, much of the friction between the United States and Israel has come from Washington’s impatience with the approach of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians. The Clinton administration was far closer to one of Netanyahu’s predecessors, assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was much more receptive to a compromise settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Netanyahu has refused to carry out key parts of Rabin’s peace agreement, arguing that the Palestinians are in default because they haven’t kept their side of the bargain. The impasse has been frustrating for U.S. mediators, who say both sides must share the blame.

Nevertheless, Washington’s approach draws criticism in Arab countries and even from some U.S. allies in Europe, who accuse Netanyahu of foot-dragging, assign most of the blame for the deadlock to Israel and complain that the United States is refusing to use its leverage to force Israel into concessions.

Despite his proclaimed impatience with Netanyahu’s policy toward the Palestinians, President Clinton has made it clear that he will not pull away from the U.S.-Israeli alliance.

American Jews make up a large segment of Clinton’s political constituency, both as voters and campaign contributors, a factor that certainly sharpens his support for Israel. But, domestic politics aside, administration officials say that the relationship has proved its worth over the years, despite its costs.

“On balance, it’s a real win,” said Steven L. Spiegel, a UCLA political science professor and Middle East expert. “If in 1948 somebody would have said to us, this is what in 50 years you will accomplish with Israel, it’s a deal everyone would have grabbed. There are far fewer skeptics today than there were 50 years ago.”

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VOICES

“President Truman used to speak about us in the conditional. He would use words like “if you make it” and “if you succeed.” Our staunchest friend was not sure of our success.”

ABBA EBAN, One of Israel’s elder statesman

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“If we are not going to be a Jewish state, what are we doing here? If we have no unique marks and become like every other country, why? The Israeli stage will never be as western as London and Broadway. We’ll never have a basketball team like the United States. . . . All we can build is a unique culture and a Jewish identity.”

YISRAEL HAREL, A leader of Jewish settlers in the West Bank

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“Palestinians are living a reality that came about because Israel was aggressive and violent and violated the rights of a people. That anyone dares to celebrate this is an insult to human decency.”

HAIDER ABDEL SHAFI, A key Palestinian peace negotiator

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“Israel is much stronger than the Palestinians. The big issue is not what Israel can do but what Israel wants to do.”

MAJ. GEN. UZI DAYAN, Commander of Israeli troops in occupied parts of West Bank

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“The anniversary of the Palestinian catastrophe encourages us to go forward with our struggle to put an end to the occupation.”

ABDELAZIZ RANTISI, A leader of the militant Islamic group Hamas

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“The Zionist movement was a movement toward the future, a conscious dislocation from past anchors. . . . We did not come to Israel because this is the land of our forefathers; we came to the land of our children. I would prefer to relinquish homage to our ancient holy sites and the graves of our forefathers than to see new grave sites of our children and grandchildren.”

GEORGE SOBELMAN, an American immigrant from New York who arrived in Israel in 1973