Lyndon B. Johnson and the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel: In the Shadow of the Hawk (Israeli History, Politics, and Society)

156 Pages·2004·0.93 MB·English

by  Abraham Ben-Zvi

LYNDON B.JOHNSON AND THE
POLITICS OF ARMS SALES TO ISRAEL
IN THE SHADOW OF THE HAWK
LYNDON B.JOHNSON
AND THE POLITICS OF
ARMS SALES TO ISRAEL
IN THE SHADOW OF THE
HAWK
ABRAHAM BEN-ZVI
Tel Aviv University
FRANK CASS
LONDON • PORTLAND, OR
First published in 2004 in Great Britain by
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Copyright © 2004 Abraham Ben-Zvi
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Ben Zvi, Abraham
Lyndon B.Johnson and the politics of arms sales to Israel
1. Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908–1973 2. Defense industries—United
States—History–20th century 3. Arms transfers—United States—History–20th
century 4. M48 (Tank)—History 5. Skyhawk (Jet attack plane)—History
6.Phantom II (Jet fighter plane)—History 7. United States—Foreign relations—Israel
8. Israel—Fòreign relations United States 9. United States—Politics and government—
1963–1969 10. United States—Foreign relations–1963–1969 I. Title
382.4’562374’0973’09046
ISBN 0-203-64607-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-67794-3 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-7146-5580-5 (cloth)
ISBN 0-7146-8463-5 (paperback)
ISSN 1368-4795
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
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.
iv
Contents
Foreword vii
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations xii
1 Introduction Lyndon B.Johnson and the Politics of Arms Sales 1
to Israel: In the Shadow of the Hawk
2 The Road to the M-48A Patton Tank 27
3 The Road to the A-4E Skyhawk Fighter-Bomber 87
4 Beyond the F-4 Phantom Fighter-Bomber: The Changing 1 11
Dynamics of the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel
Selected Bibliography 1 25
Index 1 33
In memory of Rosa and David Rosenbaum, beloved
grandparents who perished in Auschwitz
Foreword
This book is a continuation of Abraham Ben-Zvi’s earlier path-breaking
studies of the politics of arms sales to Israel in the Eisenhower and Kennedy
Administrations. Taken together, this body of work constitutes a
fundamental and definitive re-examination of this decisive period in the
building of the close US-Israel relationship that became, and remains, a
fixed point of reference in Middle Eastern diplomacy. Despite the
controversies and contestations that attach to this topic, Ben-Zvi’s trilogy
will stand the test of time because he has dug deeply into the primary sources
and allows them to speak for themselves, while combining this meticulous
research with a sophisticated conceptual framework and a penetrating
analysis that plays no favorites.
Each stage of this project has corrected prevailing stereotypes about the
birth and early childhood of the US-Israeli alliance. The first volume showed
how the initial turn to a more supportive US stance toward Israel, often
credited to the Kennedy administration, actually began in the later
Eisenhower years and reflected changing realities in the Middle East. The
Kennedy-era study focused on the first major arms sale to Israel, the 1962
Hawk anti-aircraft missile deal, connecting it persuasively to a historic shift
in strategic thinking within the defense community rather than to transient
political factors, and showed that the critical transition took place well before
the 1967 war, rather than after it.
The book in hand covers the culmination of this process during the
Johnson years: with the beginning of an on-going arms supply relationship.
Ben-Zvi concentrates on the two major arms sales—M-48A Patton tanks
in 1965 and A-4E Skyhawk fighter-bombers in 1966—with some attention
to the 1968 sale of Phantom fighters. Even here, however, previous
perceptions need to be qualified. Ben-Zvi points out that there was not a
simple linear process of growing cooperation, but rather a series of
tendentious bargaining situations with different strategic and political
components in each.
viii
This close analysis of policy-making inevitably underlines the role of
bureaucratic, cognitive, and other subjective elements in the policy process,
despite the overwhelming strategic and security concerns of US policy in
the Cold War era. The Johnson years appear to exhibit these influences even
more strongly. perhaps because the basic strategic choice—working with
Israel in order to keep a balance and have a moderating influence—had been
made, and what remained were questions of finetuning, in which internal
forces could be more influential. Be that as it may, Lyndon Johnson’s
pronounced sympathy for Israel, and growing distrust of Gamal Abdel
Nasser of Egypt, did not translate simply and directly into greater support
of Israel. Not only did there remain the ‘traditionalists’ who had resisted
the policy shift from the outset, but the ‘pragmatists’ who wanted to try a
new approach also expected a ‘quid pro quo’ from Israel for key arms
transactions, and were quite ready to play hardball in order to secure this
reciprocity.
We now know, thanks in large part to the work of Avner Cohen, that
the major US concern in these tough behind-the-scenes encounters was
Israel’s likely development of nuclear weapons, following the earlier
revelation of the existence of the Dimona reactor and US pressure for Israel
to join the Nuclear Non-ProliferationTreaty. Ben-Zvi puts all these
elements in place, providing an arresting case study of how and why
bargaining between a superpower and a local power does not always favor
the former. In this case, the many competing concerns of US policy, in the
Middle East and elsewhere, militated against the kind of brutal
singlemindedness that would have been needed to bludgeon Israel into
submission on an issue as critical as building a nuclear deterrent.
The cumulative impact of the three arms sales, despite the inevitable
contretemps, was ‘the establishment of a de facto patron-client strategic
relationship in the American-Israeli sphere before the outbreak of the June
1967 Six Day War.’ The story of this relationship, in all its nuances, has
never been better told.
Professor Alan Dowty
University of Notre Dame 2003
Preface and Acknowledgements
This manuscript was written as a sequel to an earlier endeavor,1 which
attempted to reconstruct and elucidate President John F.Kennedy’s
decision, of August 1962, to set aside the traditional American posture of
refusing to sell advanced weapons systems to Israel and to approve the sale
of Hawk short-range, anti-aircraft missiles to the Israeli Government of
David Ben-Gurion. As was the case in John F.Kennedy and the Politics of
Arms Sales to Israel, which was largely based on documentary material
(primarily from the John F.Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston), so will
the following chapters rely extensively on primary sources, particularly those
available at the Lyndon B.Johnson Library in Austin and the Israeli State
Archives (ISA) in Jerusalem.
Furthermore, the earlier analysis of the Hawk decision viewed the
Kennedy Administration not as a unitary entity, whose main actors were
fully and invariably committed to the same vision of the world and derivative
policy preferences and recommendations, but rather as an extremely
heterogeneous machine, whose components fiercely competed with one
another for influence and dominance.
Similarly, the present effort to shed light on the actual dynamics of the
decision-making process concerning the issue of arms sales to Israel, as it
unfolded during the Johnson era (and which culminated in three major
Presidential decisions to sell Israel tanks and planes), will rely upon the
‘bureaucratic politics’ paradigm as its central analytical tool or conceptual
prism. It is through this paradigm that the evolution of American arms sales
policy between November 1963 and January 1969 (with particular emphasis
on the M-48A Patton tank and the A-4E Skyhawk fighter-bomber deals)
can be most persuasively illuminated and explained. In view of the fact that
the decision-making process concerning the sale to Israel of 50 Phantom
fighter-bombers, concluded on 7 November 1968, was closely patterned on
the M-48A Patton tank sale and the A-4E Skyhawk fighter-bomber