Once Israel was firmly established, having won its war for independence and signed four armistice agreements with its Arab adversaries in July 1949, the new state’s relationship with the United States settled into a pattern of continual repetition. US diplomats would ask Israel to compromise on something, often having to do with the repatriation of the Arab refugees who were expelled or had fled during the war. The Israelis would listen patiently and then proceed to do whatever they had intended in the first place. The secretary of state would complain to the president, and there the matter would end.
Inside the Truman White House, according to the US diplomat Richard Ford, writing in 1951, one found “an informality not normally associated with the high-level ties found between two sovereign states.” This casualness was the product of the long-standing relationships between Zionist leaders, Truman’s advisers, the leaders of both US political parties, and countless members of Congress. And these connections, combined with the political and financial support of American Jews, left the Israelis free to pursue whatever goals they felt appropriate without concern for too much pushback. Assorted Jewish leaders, and often the president’s close friends and political advisers as well, countered every State Department complaint. Inevitably, President Truman would decide he did not need another domestic headache and leave the Israelis to do whatever they likely would have done anyway.1
Israel’s refusal even to entertain the notion of the return of any significant number of the roughly 750,000 Arab refugees created by the war proved a massive thorn in the young nation’s side. In the US national security establishment, Israel was viewed as an inconvenient complication for US relations with the Arab world. Inside the State Department, the refugees’ plight was understood to be problematic less for humanitarian reasons than for the fact that Arab leaders felt the need to make a show of caring about them. Whatever motives were at work, the Palestinians never—and still have never—lost their longing to return to their homes, villages, lemon groves, etc. The sight of them forced to live in horrifically unsanitary conditions in refugee camps spread across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the Egyptian-held Gaza remained a permanent wound in much of the Arab world. This was in addition to the fact that Israel proved a perfect focus of anger for what became known as the Arab “street,” and therefore an extremely convenient way to divert whatever political energies that might otherwise have been channeled into resistance to these regimes’ repressive rule. “From the time of Israel’s birth as a state, talking about Israel has been, in part, a way that Arabs talk about their own world,” the late Arab historian Fouad Ajami wrote, but it has also been a way of avoiding that discussion.2
US-Israeli disputes arose even before the war’s end. A March 1949 State Department analysis had advised Secretary of State George Marshall that the failure to “liquidate or materially reduce the magnitude of the Arab refugee problem” would increase regional instability and possibly invite the Soviets in to take advantage of the instability. But Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, acknowledged to James McDonald, America’s first ambassador to Israel, that the Arab exodus had created “a miraculous simplification of our tasks.” When McDonald passed this comment along to Marshall, the secretary replied, “The leaders of Israel would make a grave miscalculation if they thought callous treatment of this intractable issue could pass unnoticed by world opinion.” He added that “hatred of Arabs for Israel engendered by [the] refugee problem would be a great obstacle” to any hopes the Jewish state had for peace with its neighbors.3
But the Israelis believed themselves entitled to what foreign minister (later prime minister) Moshe Sharett described as “spoils of war,” as compensation for the conflict they insisted they had tried to avoid. And these included “the lands and the houses” given up by Palestinian Arabs, regardless of whether they had left voluntarily or been expelled. Indeed, within Ben-Gurion’s cabinet, discussion focused on methods of inspiring more such departures, both in order to make room for the Jewish immigration necessary to ensure the survival of the state and to significantly reduce the threat of a potential fifth column inside the country.4
The 150,000 or so Arabs who remained in Israel after the war lived under martial law and needed travel permits—often denied—to move from one village to another. Their towns and villages were placed under permanent curfew, and large regions of the country where they had lived before 1948 were now closed off to them. Ben-Gurion was heard to worry aloud that if they were permitted to move more freely around the country, “those 600,000 or more refugees living on our borders will cross the border and enter the villages that have emptied.” When speaking publicly, he slyly argued that it was all being done for the Palestinians’ own good, “just like the first reservations” the United States had set up for Native Americans. In 1950, Israel enacted the Absentee Property Law, which transferred ownership, without compensation, to the state of any property previously belonging to “anyone who spent any time in an enemy country or ‘in any part of the Land of Israel that is outside of the area of Israel.’” Records show that most of the property of 372 separate Arab villages was expropriated and turned over to the Jewish National Fund, which defines itself as a “trustee on behalf of the Jewish People.” In its place, 116 parks were established. The Israel Land Authority was thus accorded 93 percent of the land inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Virtually all of it was distributed to Jews.5
As would become the norm for virtually all matters relating to the Jewish state, the actual situation in Israel and on its borders bore precious little resemblance to the Israel imagined in US debate and discussion. Writing in 1995, the “post-Zionist” Israeli historian Avi Shlaim described what he termed the “conventional account” of the war and its aftermath:
With the expiry of the Mandate and the proclamation of the State of Israel, seven Arab states sent their armies into Palestine with the firm intention of strangling the Jewish state at birth. The subsequent struggle was an unequal one between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath. The infant Jewish state fought a desperate, heroic, and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming odds. During the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled to the neighboring Arab states, mainly in response to orders from their leaders and despite Jewish pleas to stay and demonstrate that peaceful coexistence was possible. After the war, the story continues, Israeli leaders sought peace with all their heart and all their might but there was no one to talk to on the other side. Arab intransigence was alone responsible for the political deadlock.6
This narrative has little in common with the complex reality of events that led to what Palestinians and their supporters now call the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” of 1948. The roughly 750,000 Arabs who fled did so for many different reasons, but orders from other local and foreign leaders were hardly their primary inspiration. In a 1948 study undertaken by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Israel’s unified military service, the IDF itself took credit for forcing out 70 percent of the Arabs who left. David Ben-Gurion would later be so haunted by these expulsions that, as prime minister, he would speak to their imaginary presences, à la Macbeth. Jewish pleas for Arabs to remain were few and far between, and decidedly overwhelmed by numerous threats, expulsions, and acts of deliberate terrorism, including rape and mass murder. (Jews, it needs to be mentioned, were also the victims of Arab attacks and massacres during the war, both inside Palestine and in the bordering Arab nations, where they, too, had lived for centuries.)7
Eager to minimize the Arab presence inside their nation and quickly arrange for the immigration of the vulnerable Jews stuck in now hostile Arab nations, Israelis evinced zero interest in proposals that demanded a return of Arab refugees to Israel or the return of lands conquered by Israel in the 1948 war. Israel did make an offer to Egypt at the 1949 UN Conciliation Commission on Palestine meeting to accept Gazan refugees as Israeli citizens. The catch was that Israel insisted as well on annexing Gaza, in addition to all the territory it had captured in the war, beyond that included in the partition agreement. This was hardly to be taken seriously, as no Arab leader could possibly justify turning over additional lands to Israel if he wanted to remain breathing, much less leading. (Jordan’s King Abdullah, who in 1948 had come to “a tacit understanding” with the Jewish Agency “to divide up Palestine between themselves at the expense of the Palestinians,” as Shlaim put it, was assassinated in 1951 for just this reason.) And the offer’s lack of seriousness was consistent with a fundamental aspect of Israeli policy that has remained unchanged from the moment of the war’s end to the present day: Arab refugees would not be returning to their former homes; their resettlement was an Arab, not Israeli, responsibility. As for conquered lands, as Ben-Gurion made clear in December 1955 in instructions to Foreign Minister Sharett, “Israel will not consider a peace offer involving any territorial concession whatever. The neighboring countries have no right to one inch of Israel’s land.”8
US State Department officials never tired of attempting to convince the Israelis to soften their stance. When Marshall retired as secretary of state in January 1949, he was replaced by Dean Acheson, who shared his predecessor’s impatience with what both men perceived to be Israeli intransigence. Acheson was an unusually influential secretary of state, and the issues upon which Truman refused his counsel were few and far between. But when it came to Israel, the president rejected his secretary’s advice with unusual forcefulness. Acheson advised Truman that the refugees “constitute[d] a serious political problem” and consistently urged that “a considerable number be repatriated.” He made the case on “moral” grounds, no doubt because the president liked to think of himself as making decisions on that basis, but US influence in the Arab world, together with potential Soviet inroads that might result, was obviously Acheson’s primary concern. The State Department repeatedly advised the president to condition US aid on Israel taking back Arab refugees and simultaneously reducing Jewish immigration to the new state. The US ambassador to Israel, Monnett Davis, McDonald’s successor in that post, urged that the president take the case to America’s Jews, informing them that Israel’s unwillingness to compromise on the issue was interfering with America’s own objectives in the area. This, too, would become a consistent theme of the history of the Israel/Palestine debate: a secretary of state, or some other top official, would suggest to the president that he enlist American Jews to help the Israelis see the wisdom of compromise—a fool’s errand every time.9
Israel and its US supporters fought—and won—a multipronged propaganda war both to defend its conquests and refuse the return of any refugees regardless of whatever State Department officials may have wished. To build public support, the Israelis disseminated a myth of a purely voluntary Arab exodus during the war, unabetted by forced expulsions or the threat of potential massacres such as those carried out in the villages of Deir Yassin and Lydda. (In January 2022, in the documentary Tantura, directed by Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwarz and premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, several Israeli combat veterans detailed their participation in another 1948 massacre, this one of an estimated two hundred to three hundred residents of the Arab village of Tantura. All reports of the event were subsequently covered up and quashed by Israeli authorities.) The Israelis also invented an imaginary series of “radio broadcasts” by influential local and regional voices allegedly instructing local Arabs to temporarily leave their homes and villages just long enough for the Arab armies to expel the Zionist invaders.10
The truth of what really happened never did entirely supplant the Israeli fairy tale, but much of it emerged over time. The 1979 publication of the memoir of former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, followed up in meticulous detail by the archival research of historian Benny Morris published nine years later, would demonstrate that while the Israeli military never officially implemented its “Plan Dalet,” which would have used the army to drive Arabs out of the country en masse, individual commanders were empowered to make the decision to do so on the basis of military necessity, and many did just this. For instance, in a document censored by the Israelis, but released accidentally, Ben-Gurion is quoted saying, “I am against the wholesale demolition of villages.… But there are places that constituted a great danger and constitute a great danger, and we must wipe them out. But this must be done responsibly, with consideration before the act.” When the war ended in March 1949, more than three-quarters of the Arab population was gone. It is important to note that even today, documentation of these events remains woefully incomplete. The Arab nations have never opened their archives, and the Israelis have not only done so extremely selectively, but also have also started reclassifying previously released documentation.11
Well before any documentation was available, the insistence that the Arabs who left their homes did so without any encouragement whatsoever from Israeli soldiers—indeed, against the wishes of the Israelis, who were dedicated to the dream of Arabs and Jews living alongside one another in peace and harmony—became a foundational argument for American Jews. Testifying before a congressional hearing in 1951, Isaiah L. “Si” Kenen, who headed the American Zionist Council—the first of many “Israel lobbies” to be formed in the United States—insisted on what he called “the central and incontrovertible fact… that the Arab Higher Committee stimulated, organized and directed the mass exodus.” He told the congressmen present that Zionists regarded this “as a disaster,” as it prevented the Israelis from demonstrating “that the Jews and Arabs could live together,” a line that pro-Israel lobbyists would stick to for decades, and that many continue to repeat today.12
Meanwhile, just as they did during the partition debate, the Israelis sought to solve the problem of America’s diplomatic discomfort with their policies and priorities by sending Chaim Weizmann to charm Truman into submission. Now occupying the largely ceremonial office of Israel’s presidency, Weizmann informed Truman that the refugee problem was “not created by us,” but by Arab aggression against Israel, and that it was the Arabs’ problem to solve. He then informed the president who so admired him that “these people are not refugees in the sense in which the term has been sanctified by the martyrdom of millions in Europe.” Truman proceeded to tell Acheson to give in to the Israelis on pretty much everything. The president came to feel so strongly about these matters that he eventually issued an edict that “no one” in the State Department “should express views of any sort outside the department [on Israel] without further direction from me.”13
As the Cold War heated up, the Israelis discovered new arguments to support their plans. During the spring of 1950, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, was preparing to pass a “Law of Return” as part of the nation’s quasi-constitutional “Basic Laws.” The new law offered any Jew in the world automatic citizenship and posed Israel as a prospective place of refuge should Jews once again become a target for religious persecution, thereby binding all Jews to Israel’s fate. Seeking to win new friends and influence more people, a group of high-profile American Jews, including the president’s old friend Eddie Jacobson and former treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, sent a letter to Truman that portrayed the imminent immigration of six hundred thousand Jews from Europe and the Arab Middle East to Israel as a help to the United States in its long, twilight struggle with the USSR—“a step towards consolidation of the defenses of the democratic world.” Israel considerably strengthened its case as a Cold War ally when its intelligence agency was able to obtain and share the contents of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s February 1956 “secret speech” denouncing Stalin and Stalinism. The theme of Israel as a Cold War asset soon became yet another staple of the arguments of Jewish American leaders.14
When Dwight Eisenhower won the 1952 presidential election, Israel’s American supporters were understandably concerned, as barely 25 percent had pulled the Republican lever. The president once admitted that he had never even met a Jew before he turned twenty-five years old, and was surprised, after reading about them in the Bible as a child, to learn that they still existed. During the first year of his presidency, he mused, “My Jewish friends tell me that except for the Bronx and Brooklyn the great majority of the nation’s Jewish population is anti-Zion,” a likely indication that the president had no Jewish “friends” at all. Though likely better informed, his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was perhaps even less sympathetic. Dulles had lost a New York Senate race in 1949 to a Jewish Democrat, Herbert Lehman, and blamed Jews for his failure. Upon meeting Ben-Gurion for the first time, Dulles thought to complain about past “decisions [that] were often taken under pressure by the United States Jewish groups which felt they had the right to exercise influence because of contributions to election victory.” Those days were over, he assured the prime minister. He could hardly have been more wrong.15
Dulles considered “the Israel factor” to be a “millstone” around America’s neck in the Arab world and judged the Jewish state’s policies of “aggressive expansion” to be a massive impediment to America’s success in the area. Henry Byroade, assistant secretary of state for Near East, South Asian, and African affairs, told the Israelis of his having been “beaten over the head” in Arab capitals owing to America’s perceived favoritism toward Israel. Both the president and his secretary of state sought to implement a policy of genuine neutrality. To try to garner domestic support for this reversal, they looked to the American Council for Judaism, as a counterpoint to more mainstream Jewish organizations. Byroade spoke to its 1954 annual meeting, fresh off an address at the World Affairs Council in which he importuned Israel to “drop the attitude of the conqueror and the conviction that force and a policy of retaliatory killings is the only policy that your neighbors will understand.” He added that Israel might consider “making your deeds correspond to your frequent utterance of the desire for peace,” and advised Israel to jettison its self-image as the “headquarters” of a state offering “special rights and obligations” to Jewish citizens the world over. While also asking Arabs “to accept the state of Israel as an accomplished fact,” Byroade further counseled the Israelis to curb their devotion to ingathering Jews from other nations, as this justifiably inspired “Arab fears that if the population of Israel were to expand materially through further immigration,… it would be humanly impossible to maintain those people within the confines of the present state.”16
Byroade’s speech to the ACJ had little, if any, discernible effect. For if there was one issue upon which most Jews—Zionists and non-Zionists—could agree in the aftermath of the Holocaust, it was on the necessity of open Jewish immigration to Israel. The creation of the state of Israel had only increased the precarious position of Jews living in Arab nations in particular. And American Jews had seen—and indeed, been seared by—the consequences of persecuted Jews having nowhere to turn and no voice to plead their case. Byroade, who was named ambassador to Egypt in 1955, continued to argue within the administration for Eisenhower to deliver a presidential address designed to “break the back of Zionism as a political force.”
Needless to say, there was no such speech and never would be. The soaring rhetoric in Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence about extending “its hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness” had been scarcely more than rhetoric. In reality, Ben-Gurion expected endless war. He explained this to the Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann in decidedly unsentimental terms not long after independence had been achieved. “Why should the Arabs make peace?” he asked. “If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”17
During its first eight years, the young state’s frequent military operations against its neighboring Arab nations cost the country 1,237 lives, and far more than that among their victims. Among the worst of these was a disastrous foray into the West Bank village of Qibya (then under Jordanian rule) on October 14–15, 1953, following a grenade attack that killed a Jewish mother and her two children. The Israeli response, carried out by an army commando unit led by a twenty-five-year-old major, Ariel Sharon, resulted in the death of 69 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and the destruction of 45 houses, a school, and a mosque. While most tit-for-tat attacks and retaliation occurred under the radar of the world’s attention, this example of Israel’s commitment to asymmetrical retaliation received almost universal condemnation in the world’s media and among its diplomats.18
As a result of these events, when Israel conspired with Britain and France to invade Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in October 1956, it was already finding itself in far less congenial grounds in Washington than it had enjoyed under Truman and the Democrats. The attack came in response to the July 26, 1956, announcement by Egypt’s president, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, that he had nationalized the nearby Suez Canal and shut off Israeli shipping in the Straits of Tiran, effectively blockading Israel’s southern port of Eilat and cutting off its access to the Indian Ocean. Britain and France obviously had their own reasons for wanting to seize control of this crucial shipping passage, as Nasser’s nationalization of the canal could potentially threaten their trade routes and endanger their economies. It could also inspire other such moves by third world leaders were it to be allowed to succeed. The three co-conspirators kept the Americans completely in the dark, which understandably left the president furious.
This development was particularly damaging as it came at a time when President Eisenhower was preoccupied with the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which was seeking to detach itself from the Eastern bloc and praying for American intervention. Israel, France, and England had put the United States in an “acutely embarrassing position,” according to the president, whose first order of business was always to ensure that “the Soviets must be prevented from seizing the mantle of world leadership.” Dulles was all but apoplectic. Notwithstanding both his and the president’s fondness for violent military coups in places such as Iran, Guatemala, and the Congo when engineered by the CIA, Dulles nevertheless fumed: “We do not approve of murder. We have simply got to refrain from resort to force in settling international disputes.”19
What particularly infuriated Eisenhower and Dulles was the fact that they thought themselves to be in the process of wooing Egypt into a US-led Middle Eastern alliance to counter Soviet influence in the area. The invasion created exactly the situation the United States sought to avoid, not only offending the entire Arab world but also offering an opening to the Soviets to appear as the anti-imperialist power par excellence to the rescue. And it did so, to top it all off, at a time when the United States wanted the world’s attention focused on the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary.
To the degree that Dulles and Eisenhower felt that the invasion undermined their plans, they should have known better than to entertain them in the first place. Such a simplistic anti-Communist alliance could only have been dreamed up by someone with no understanding of or much interest in the recent rise of pan-Arab nationalism. But Dulles and Eisenhower were far from ready to admit this and blamed Israel and company for pushing Egypt and much of the Arab populace into the Soviet camp. A perceived avatar of anti-imperialism during its fight for independence, Israel was now acting as the junior partner in an old-fashioned imperial adventure. The Soviets soon took full advantage of the situation by threatening war with the Western powers and Israel in the event they refused to withdraw.
That the invasion occurred on the eve of a US presidential election only added to the president’s fury. Eisenhower would confide in a special “memorandum for the record” that if Israel’s leaders believed “winning a domestic election [was] as important to us as preserving the interests of the United Nations and other nations of the free world in that region,” they were sadly mistaken. He instructed the State Department to “inform Israel” that the United States would proceed “as if we did not have a single Jew in America.”20
The invasion was nothing but bad news for American Jewish leaders. The president’s anger forced them to confront the dilemma they so wished to avoid: Which side were they on, Israel’s or America’s? American Jewish officialdom found itself pulled in multiple directions simultaneously. Speaking during a nationwide television broadcast, Zionist Organization of America president Emanuel Neumann insisted that the Israelis were simply “continuing” the same war that the Arabs had begun eight years earlier, only this time they had been forced to take on Nasser (the “Hitler of the Nile”). The group demanded nothing less than “full and forthright support for Israel’s defense” from the Eisenhower administration. Another group of Jewish leaders rounded up sixty-four prominent Christian clergy and lay leaders to sign a letter decrying Nasser as “clearly imitative of the Hitler pattern, and of the present communist pattern in Hungary.” Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Abba Eban, huddled with the leaders of the American Jewish Committee to try to find a way to mitigate the damage. Secretly, the group asked Secretary Dulles to help facilitate direct negotiations between Egypt and Israel, so that “the status quo ante” might be restored, and the “conditions which have caused bloodshed, misery and turmoil” addressed (without naming what those conditions might have been). Behind the scenes, its members feared the public relations impact of what appeared to be Israel’s “expansionist aims,” while at the same time hoping to prevent the United States from supporting UN sanctions of the Israelis to ensure its withdrawal.21
Britain and France had no choice but to accede to Eisenhower’s demands to turn around and go home, especially given the possibility of the Hungarian situation devolving into a world war. But the Israelis, per usual, stuck to their guns. They demanded access to the Suez Canal and refused to consider unilateral withdrawal without it. Once again, American Jewish organizations lined up to cause massive headaches for US diplomats. And once again, the White House was barraged with mail, with over 90 percent of it supporting Israel’s position. Both Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and Senate Minority Leader William Knowland strongly supported Israel’s claims as well.22
Like his predecessors, Dulles found Zionist pressure to be a major annoyance, which only amplified his already considerable antisemitism. He believed that the Israeli embassy was “practically dictating to the Congress through influential Jewish people in the country,” and complained to colleagues that he found it “almost impossible in this country to carry out a foreign policy not approved by the Jews,” particularly given what he judged to be their “terrific control” over Congress and the news media. He said he wished that, instead of circulating its “various inaccuracies and distortions” about his policies, the “Jewish fraternity” would focus its attention on “the Israeli government to try to change their policy of presenting the world with faits accomplis,” and in so doing end what he defined as their policy of treating US cooperation “as a one-way street.” Almost certainly with his brother John Foster Dulles’s knowledge, and possibly under his orders, Allen Dulles, who happened to be director of the CIA, even funneled secret funds to a pro-Arab interest group, the American Friends of the Middle East, made up of oilmen and former Arabist diplomats, albeit to little effect. Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, weighed in as well. He warned that if Israel failed to accede to US demands for withdrawal, and the United States did not sanction it at the United Nations, the president risked, in consequence, “endanger[ing] western influence by convincing Middle Easterners that U.S. policy toward the area was in the last analysis controlled by Jewish influence in the United States.”23
The administration had initially refused to engage the Israeli demands for concessions from the Egyptians, adhering to President Eisenhower’s stated principle “that a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of U.N. disapproval could not be allowed to impose conditions on its withdrawal.” In his memoir Eisenhower said he wanted to propose a UN resolution to cut off “not just governmental but private assistance to Israel” until it withdrew. Dulles was particularly interested in cutting off loans to Israel from what he considered to be “Jewish banks,” a category in which he included such decidedly non-Jewish institutions as Chase Manhattan and Bank of America. He even sought to stop all transfers of funds to Israeli accounts. Undersecretary of State Herbert Hoover Jr., acting in Dulles’s stead while the secretary was in the hospital for cancer treatment, suggested that perhaps Israel might be expelled from the United Nations. In his memoir, the president wrote that he even considered using US forces against Israel if its leaders did not agree to withdraw.24
By January 1957, however, the administration was singing a decidedly different tune. Israel’s demands came to loom larger in its decision-making, and the sanctity of the administration’s commitment to UN principles rather less so. Instead of a return to the status quo ante, Secretary Dulles offered Israel a guarantee of the security of the border between Israel and the Egypt-held Gaza Strip, together with a similar guarantee of safe passage for Israeli shipping in the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba. The United States also endorsed the Israeli position regarding “interference, by armed forces, with ships of the Israeli flag,” which entitled Israel to strike Egypt again if passage through the Gulf of Aqaba and the Straits of Tiran were denied it. That was the carrot. For the stick, should Israel continue to stonewall, the president threatened to suspend all US government assistance and do away with the generous system of tax credits designed to facilitate private-sector investment in the country. He even went public with his threats, telling the country in a televised speech that “if the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, we will have destroyed the very foundation of the organization.” These threats led, finally, to a complete Israeli withdrawal in early 1957. Moreover, the president had made his position stick both with the Israeli and the US public. A November 1956 Roper poll taken shortly after Eisenhower’s landslide reelection found that fewer than 20 percent of those surveyed agreed that Israel had been “justified in sending troops to Egypt,” compared to over 30 percent who felt it was not (about half of those asked had no opinion). Other polls confirmed these views, and most of the editorials on the topic published in major newspapers were largely critical of Israel.25
Though the Sinai debacle inspired what now stands as perhaps the strongest admonition ever given to Israel by a US president, Eisenhower and Dulles succeeded in condemning its actions without paying any discernible political price for it. Indeed, both the polls and the editorial pages supported their tough response, and Eisenhower’s performance among Jews in the 1956 presidential election would constitute a high point for Republicans in this era.
American Jewish organizations had reasons to be grateful. They had helped Israel improve its position, demonstrating their worth as something more than just a money spigot. And they had done so without having their loyalty to the United States publicly called into question. In fact, the question was barely even raised in public. True, the invasion had upset America’s strategy of seeking strategic partnership with the Arab world, in the hopes of preventing the Soviets from gathering up Arab allies in the oil-rich region. But this policy, too, was conducted largely outside the prying eyes of public opinion. What’s more, Israel’s survival was never threatened. This war really was, as the Prussian military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz had posited, the conduct of politics by other means. And in that regard, Israel achieved most of its aims at little political cost; ditto the American Jewish community. Nothing related to Israel/Palestine would ever appear so simple again.