Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 16
The notion that Israel owes her existence to the United States is a myth rooted in antisemitism
How many times have you heard or read a journalist explaining that Israel’s actions – or even survival – are, to a large extent, a product of unwavering American backing? That perception has long been a feature of much media and academic commentary throughout the world.
It is, and always was, nonsense. And it arises from a racist assumption. To help us identify its origin, let’s rewind to the Six Day War.
On 9th June 1967, Egyptian President Nasser broadcast these words to his people:
“In the morning of last Monday, 5th June, the enemy struck. If we say now it was a stronger blow than we had expected, we must say at the same time and with complete certainty that it was bigger than the potential at his disposal. It became very clear from the first moment that there were other powers behind the enemy.” [1]
Nasser was referring to the UK and, especially, the USA. In the jargon of his political backers in Moscow, who had exploited dysfunctional authoritarian regimes throughout the Middle East for their own geostrategic purposes, the Arab defeat was result of the intervention of the “imperialists” in the early hours of the war. That scenario was, of course, pure fiction. It had been invented to save the faces of both the Soviet and Arab leadership.
The Soviet Union viewed Israel as a US outpost, a colonial creation of the capitalist West, and one that had severely embarrassed their Arab allies to whom they had supplied state-of-the-art weaponry for many years. Israel’s victory in 1967 compromised the reputation of the USSR itself and so any alibi, however implausible, was useful.
But the speech was revealing in another way: it exposed the contempt with which Nasser, schooled in all matters Jewish by the antisemitic Muslim Brotherhood, viewed Israelis. That contempt had deep roots. For most Arabs, it was axiomatic that Jews – an inferior dhimmi minority throughout the Muslim world for centuries – were cowards who couldn’t fight and were therefore incapable of winning a war without the help of a powerful ally. To this day, the “Arab street” believes two specific fabrications: that America, forced into action by the Jewish lobby, won the Six Day War for Israel and that, as a result of American hesitancy, Egypt and Syria won the 1973 (Yom Kippur) War for the Arabs.
In the twenty-first century, the idea of Israel and the US scheming in lockstep to dominate the Middle East is a core belief of the “progressive” left that seeks to apply the intersectionality principle to Zionism, imperialism, slavery and other forms of oppression. On this issue, ideologists of the far left and far right, cheered on from the sidelines by Islamists, are of one mind – that Jews control the US government through the dark arts of a near-invincible pro-Israel lobby. In their racist paranoia, they are aided and abetted by a coterie of western academics such as Mearsheimer and Walt [2] who invoke the classic antisemitic trope of a Zionist conspiracy manipulating American foreign policy to serve Israel’s interests.
But surely, I hear my reader protest, the US is indeed a staunch ally of Israel? Well, yes and no. US friendship for Israel is far from the unshakeable constant that is widely assumed. As so often, the historical evidence points to the need for a more nuanced view.
Although the US supported both the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the subsequent League of Nations Mandate – that instructed Britain to re-establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine – it declined, at the Evian conference of 1938, to offer the trapped Jews of Europe sanctuary from the murderous Third Reich.
As for Jewish efforts to reverse the British betrayal of the Mandate and establish a safe haven for the remnants of their people after the Holocaust, the US was unenthusiastic about the UN partition plan of 1947 and offered no assistance whatsoever to Israel during her War of Independence.
As historian George Simpson [3] explains: “Washington’s actual support for the Zionists was ambiguous, halting, and limited. Its support for partition followed that of Moscow and was virtually confined to the White House, which acted against the staunch opposition of the Department of State and the Pentagon. Indeed, not only did the State Department collaborate with the British to exclude the Negev from the territory of the prospective state of Israel (only to be foiled by Truman), but in late 1947, State [Dept] orchestrated a regional arms embargo that left the Palestine Jews highly disadvantaged.”
After an unpropitious start, the American posture towards Israel lurched back and forth in the succeeding decades. Yet the much-touted economic, military and diplomatic US-Israel alliance is often regarded as the ultimate secret weapon in Israel’s armoury. The facts suggest otherwise.
Middle East analyst Sean Durns [4] sets the record straight. “It is a common, albeit false, assumption that the United States and Israel closely cooperated since the Jewish state’s recreation in 1948. The State Department and the Pentagon had argued that US support for Israel would be a strategic liability. America, in turn, often kept Israel at arm’s length, both forcing the Jewish state to give up territory won in the 1956 Suez War against Nasser and prohibiting weapon sales until 1962.”
The US remained pointedly cool to Israel throughout the fifties, when first Czechoslovakia and then France provided most arms at a period of greatest danger to the renascent Jewish state. In a stunning revelation by Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien [5], the US abandoned Israel at least three times in the face of threats by the Soviet Union to annihilate the tiny country – in 1956, 1970 and 1973 – by declining to offer Israel protection under its nuclear umbrella. This alarming fickleness on the part of her “ally” must have been a major factor in Israel’s decision to develop and retain an independent nuclear deterrent.
In the 1980s, the pro-Israel Ronald Reagan publicly criticised Israel’s actions in Lebanon and annexation of the Golan Heights. He punished Israel by temporarily holding up arms deliveries and suspending strategic cooperation. Reagan also clashed with prime minister Menachem Begin over the sale of AWACS (an airborne early warning system) to the Saudis.
As for formal alliances, Israel’s claim on US support in times of crisis is weaker than that of Montenegro or Albania, both NATO members, unlike Israel. Bizarrely, if Turkey, an increasingly Islamist and anti-Western NATO country, is threatened with attack, the US is obliged to help her. Israel has no such protection.
US diplomatic support for Israel in the UN is often characterised as permanently protective of Israel and obstructive to the reaching of a fair settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. This is demonstrably false.
When President Barack Obama, one of the most pro-Palestinian US leaders, refused to veto the harshly anti-Israel UNSC resolution 2334 in 2016, it was followed by no discernible progress towards peace – if anything, Palestinian positions hardened. Obama may have been influenced by the growing culture of anti-Zionism in his academic circles. In this respect he resembled his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, whose stridently expressed policy of creating “daylight” between the US and Israel led to his rejection by a majority of Jewish voters, whom Carter falsely blamed for his 1980 re-election defeat. According to former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren [6], Obama (like Carter) saw Israel as persecutor rather than victim. And (also like Carter), he blamed US peace-making failures on Israel – despite the previously hawkish Begin’s agreement to withdraw from all of Sinai, to secure a peace treaty with Egypt, at Carter’s behest.
What about economic support for Israel’s armed forces? We keep hearing that the US Treasury virtually underwrites Israel’s purchases of advanced weaponry to maintain her qualitative military edge. That’s another half-truth, at best. The US only provided substantial financial support to Israel after 1978 – and then it was conditional on recycling most aid back to the US. Currently 75% of US military aid to Israel must be spent in the US – a figure that will rise to 100% in a few years – and thus supports the American rather than the Israeli economy. Much of the rest is spent in joint projects (e.g. the Iron Dome missile defence system) that benefits US as well as Israeli security.
Few are aware that US military support to the Arab and Muslim world dwarfs (by a factor of around six) that given to Israel. [7] Even Donald Trump, said to be the most pro-Israel president in US history, insisted on selling a massive package of F-35 fighter jets and MQ-9 unmanned systems to the United Arab Emirates as part of the 2020 Abraham Accords – with more lucrative arms sales to Arab states in the pipeline – riding roughshod over the Israeli defence establishment’s explicit opposition.
In summary, while many US presidents have been sympathetic to Israel, US foreign and defence policy is generally moulded by the State and Defence departments that have been consistently indifferent and at times openly hostile to Israel’s predicament.
Those who mistakenly believe that the US is and always has been the final guarantor of Israel’s security will, if they have been genuinely misinformed, revise their opinions in the light of the evidence presented here. But those who continue to peddle the Nasserian myth of an unbreakable US-Israel axis, forged by the hidden tentacles of a global Zionist conspiracy and sustained by an irresistible American pro-Israel lobby, should be called out for what they are: purveyors of an antisemitically motivated falsehood.
1. Laqueur W, Rubin B (eds). The Israel-Arab Reader. London, Penguin Books, 2008
2. Mearsheimer JJ, Walt SM. The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007
3. Simpson GL. Revisiting the US role in three Middle East crises. Middle East Quarterly, Summer, 2018
https://www.meforum.org/7242/revisiting-the-us-role-in-three-middle-east-crises
4. Durns S Black September remembered: how the PLO forged the modern Middle East. The National Interest, 21st August 2020.
5. O’Brien, CC. The Siege. London, Paladin Books, 1988
6. Oren M. Ally. New York, Random House, 2015
7. Shindman P. Understanding US foreign aid to Israel. Honest Reporting, 2019 https://honestreporting.com/us-foreign-aid-israel/
