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John F. Kennedy & the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel PDF

151 Pages·2002·3.339 MB·English
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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 Israel's 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 Israel's national security agenda. The Jaffee Center seeks to address the strategic community in Israel and abroad, Israeli policymakers and opinion-makers and the general public. The Center relates to the concept of strategy in its broadest meaning, namely the complex of processes involved in the identification, mobilization and application of resources in peace and war, in order to solidify and strengthen national and international security. JOHN F. KENNEDY AND THE POLITICS OF ARMS SALES TO ISRAEL ABRAHAM BEN-ZVI Tel Aviv University FRANK CASS LONDON·PORTLAN~OR First published in 2002 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and in the United States ofA merica by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 TIansferred to Digital Printing 2005 Website: www.frankcass.com Copyright © 2002 Jaffee Center 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) I. Arms transfers - Political aspects - United States 2. United States - Foreign relations - Israel 3. Israel Foreign relations - United States 4. United States - Foreign relations - 1961-1963 5. United States - Politics and government-1961-1963 I. Title 327.7'3'05694'09046 ISBN 0-7146-5269-5 (cloth) ISSN 1368-4795 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 1368-4795) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-7146-5269-5 (cloth) - ISBN 0-7146-8251-9 (pbk.) I. United States-Foreign relations-Israel. 2. Israel-Foreign relations-United States. 3. Kennedy, John F. Uohn Fitzgerald), 1917-1963. 4. United States-Politics and government-1961-1963. 5. United States-Foreign relations-1961-1963. 6. Defense industries-United States-History-20th century. 7. Arms transfers-United States-History-20th century. 8. Hawk (Missile)-History. I. Title. II Series. E183.8.17 B455 2002 382'.4562345194-dc21 2002019201 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book. Typeset in 11.5/ 13pt Ehrhardt by Vitaset, Paddock Wood, Kent Contents Foreword Vll Preface and Acknowledgements IX Abbreviations Xl 1 Introduction: The Debate 1 2 The Sale of Arms to Israel, 1953-60: Perceptions and Policies 7 3 The Sale of Arms to Israel, January 1961-August 1962: 33 Perceptions and Policies 4 Essence of Decision: Missiles and Refugees 65 5 Epilogue 121 Selected Bibliography 127 Index 137 To Irith and Doreen Foreword 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 begin nings of a more supportive stance in US policy during the Eisenhower administration, he has combined a historian's meticulous attention to primary sources with a political scientist's 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 docu ments with exceptional clarity the slow but steady process in which US policymakers under two Presidents, responding to shifting strategic realities and perceptions ofA merican interests, came gradually to a policy of maintaining an arms balance in the Arab-Israeli conflict and a close VI11 John F. Kennedy and the Politics ofA rms Sales to Israel 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 com munity 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 oppo sition of diplomats and Arabists (a division that has remained in Washington's 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. Professor Alan Dowty University ofN otre Dame 2002 Preface and Acknowledgments 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. Although various facets of the decision of the Kennedy Administration to sell Hawk anti-aircraft missiles to Israel have already been alluded to in chapter 4 of my book, Decade of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Origins of the American-Israeli Alliance, my renewed encounter with the documentary material (and particularly with the recently declassified papers and oral history interviews of Robert W. Komer of the National Security Council (NSC)) led me to significantly update, modify and expand the original analysis. Whereas Decade of Transition only briefly and intermittently touched upon the intragovernmental debate which preceded the Hawk decision, the present work specifically seeks to identify all the groups competing for influence and dominance within the Kennedy Administration in an effort to comprehensively reconstruct and elucidate the bureaucratic game (both in terms of the respective cognitive maps of the various individuals and groups involved, and their relative influence) as well as the actual dynamics of the decision-making process as it unfolded during the spring and summer of 1962. In addition, while Decade of Transition explained the formation of the American-Israeli alliance almost exclusively in terms of the changing strategic landscape in the Middle East, the following analysis of the Hawk decision will approach the strategic setting as merely one element in a vastly complex,

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