Abraham Ben-Zvi - John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel

The purpose of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University is, first, to conduct basic research that meets the highest academic standards on matters related to Israels national security as well as Middle East regional and international security affairs. The Center also aims to contribute to the public debate and governmental deliberation of issues that are or should be at the top of Israels national security agenda.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Ben-Zvi, Abraham

John F. Kennedy and the politics of arms sales to Israel.
(Cass series. Israeli history, politics and society)
1.Arms transfers Political aspects United States
2. United States Foreign relations Israel 3. Israel
Foreign relations United States 4. United States Foreign
relations 19611963 5. United States Politics and
government 19611963

I. Title

327.730569409046

ISBN 0714652695 (cloth)
ISSN 13684795

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ben-Zvi, Abraham

John F. Kennedy and the politics of arms sales to Israel / Abraham Ben-Zvi.

p. cm. (Israeli history, politics, and society, ISSN 13684795)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0714652695 (cloth) ISBN 0714682519 (pbk.)

1. United StatesForeign relationsIsrael. 2. IsraelForeign relationsUnited States.
3. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 19171963. 4. United StatesPolitics and
government19611963. 5. United StatesForeign relations19611963. 6. Defense
industriesUnited StatesHistory20th century. 7. Arms transfersUnited
StatesHistory20th century. 8. Hawk (Missile)History. I. Title. II Series.

E183.8.I7B455 2002

382.4562345194dc21

2002019201

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The subject of US relations with Israel evokes an extraordinary range of pleadings and prejudices. Some see US support for the Jewish State as an unnatural attachment, not explainable by objective American interests and concerns in the Middle East, and they therefore underline the role of extraneous influences (especially domestic lobbies). But many of those who see the relationship more favorably also stress the importance of subjective factors (in their case shared values or religious sentiments) that likewise transcend a narrow definition of national interest. Thus there is a widely-shared assumption, among observers who agree on little else, that Israel constitutes a special case in US foreign policy that defies the usual tools of analysis; lost to sight in the heat and smoke of partisan battle are the everyday questions one would usually ask in the study of state-to-state relations.

In this murky landscape the recent work of Abraham Ben-Zvi is like a flash of lightning on a stormy night. Instead of rehashing the old tired arguments, Ben-Zvi does something that is refreshingly old-fashioned in a period when fashionable epistomology has enthroned prejudice as principle: he has gone to the sources to see what the evidence says. As in his previous book, Decade of Transition, which documented the beginnings of a more supportive stance in US policy during the Eisenhower administration, he has combined a historians meticulous attention to primary sources with a political scientists sensitivity to conceptual implications of the evidence.

Drawing upon presidential archives in the United States and state archives in Israel, many of them recently declassified, Ben-Zvi documents with exceptional clarity the slow but steady process in which US policymakers under two Presidents, responding to shifting strategic realities and perceptions of American interests, came gradually to a policy of maintaining an arms balance in the ArabIsraeli conflict and a close working relationship with Israel. Contrary to commonly held opinion, the major thrust of this shift came before rather than after the 1967 war, and it was not tied to particular personalities or lobbying campaigns (though the domestic dimension was, of course, an important aspect of a complex relationship). In fact, the period in which Israel was viewed primarily as an unwanted obstacle to pursuit of closer ties with Arab nations was fairly short-lived, being limited to the first part of the Eisenhower years. The crossing of the Rubicon to an informal strategic partnership with Israel came, as Ben-Zvi demonstrates, in the 1962 sale of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles to Israel by the Kennedy administration.

The key to this decision, which was the beginning of the US arms relationship with Israel, was a reversal of thinking in the defense community based on the lack of success with earlier approaches to the Middle East. This made possible a winning coalition of security experts and domestic political advisors that carried the day over continuing opposition of diplomats and Arabists (a division that has remained in Washingtons bureaucratic politics). But lest this be cast in simple pro- and anti- language as popular accounts often have it, Ben-Zvi reminds us that closer relations with Israel were also seen as a means of exerting greater influence and constraint over Israel actions.

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, and this study of a complex tectonic shift in US policy is an illuminating essay in how superpower policies respond over time to changing realities. To be sure, major powers do have a margin of choice (and accordingly they do make dumb mistakes), but generally the basic lines of their policy are not determined by arbitrary influences or chance factors. This path-breaking study of a historic passage that has often been misread should serve as a model for studies of controversial questions.

This manuscript was originally intended to be the first chapter in a comprehensive book surveying various ways in which successive American administrations have attempted, since 1962, to use the sale of arms to Israel as a leverage for extracting from the Israeli recipient a wide range of political compensations. However, my research at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston and the Israeli State Archives (ISA) in Jerusalem provided me with such a wealth of documentary material that the planned chapter analyzing the Hawk decision of August 1962, was ultimately expanded into a separate book-size manuscript.