Any discussion of America’s role in the Middle East during the Nixon presidency must begin with the complicated characters of the two individuals responsible for its conduct: Nixon, of course, and his chief foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger.
Richard Nixon was the kind of antisemite who hates “the Jews,” but quite likes some of those he knows. Leonard Garment, the president’s (Jewish) lawyer and longtime loyal friend, recalled that whenever something angered Nixon, he could be heard yelling, “God damn his Jewish soul!” Asked what kinds of people he wanted appointed to his administration during his second term, he replied, “No Jews. We are adamant when I say no Jews.” Nixon bragged to the evangelist Billy Graham that Jewish leaders “don’t know how I really feel about [them].” And while many Nixon defenders have excused these outbursts as the president merely blowing off steam, they are quite clearly wrong about this. For instance, one day in July 1972, Nixon was musing with his aides about the potential value of reviving the House Committee on Un-American Activities. “You know what’s going to charge up an audience?” Nixon mused. “Going after all these Jews. Just find one that is a Jew, will you?”1
Kissinger was a Jew who found other Jews exceptionally annoying—none more so than Israelis, with whom he frequently negotiated but failed to get his way. He found them, he said at various times, “as obnoxious as the Vietnamese,” “boastful,” “psychopathic,” “fools” and “common thugs,” “a sick bunch,” and “the world’s worst shits.” But he was not any more enamored of American Jewish leaders. Their problem was, he said, “that they seek to prove their manhood by total acquiescence in whatever Jerusalem wants.”2
Kissinger admitted, one assumes only semi-seriously, that were it not for the accident of his birth, he would likely have been an antisemite. By way of explanation, he added, “Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.” It is entirely possible that Kissinger did not dislike Jews any more or less than he disliked anyone else who did not defer to what he believed to be his genius; he just had to deal with them more often. We must also allow for the possibility that he spoke this way at least in part to placate his boss. Practicing what he himself called “obsequious excess,” Kissinger frequently wrote notes to Nixon thanking him “for the privilege” of serving him, for “the inspiration” he experienced in observing Nixon’s “fortitude in adversity and [his] willingness to walk alone.” Behind Nixon’s back, however, Kissinger would refer to his boss as “that madman,” and “our drunken friend” with the “meatball mind.”3
Given the fact of Kissinger’s Jewishness, Nixon’s feelings naturally created the potential for some sticky situations. Behind Kissinger’s back, Nixon was hardly shy about his feelings. His top adviser was “Jewish, Jewish… Jewish as hell,” and “a rag merchant” when Nixon was angry, but “my Jewboy” when the president was in a good mood. In person, Nixon enjoyed torturing Kissinger with mock-humorous references to his apparent genetic affliction. During one White House meeting following a Kissinger précis of the situation facing the United States in the Middle East, Nixon turned to the others present to ask for “an American point of view.” He enjoyed complaining during meetings about “Jewish traitors” and the like before turning to Kissinger to ask, “Isn’t that right, Henry? Don’t you agree?”4
Like many German Jews of his generation, Kissinger displayed a special sensitivity to this issue. He worried that Nixon “suspected that my Jewish origin might cause me to lean too much toward Israel.” When, in September 1973, Nixon appointed him to be secretary of state, Kissinger thanked him for saying nothing about his “Jewish background.” And as he doled out jobs to his aides, Kissinger ensured that he didn’t accidentally hire too many Jews. He explained that while he knew that it required ten Jews for a minyan (prayer service), he could not “have them all on the seventh floor” (the State Department’s executive suite). Kissinger also once removed a counselor, good friend, and fellow German Jew, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, from a list of passengers for the president’s plane on a trip to Germany, explaining, “I don’t think too many Jews should be around.”5
Given Nixon’s prejudices, Kissinger likely felt he had something to prove. For instance, during the lengthy 1974 negotiations over Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai, Kissinger uncharacteristically reminded Nixon of his Jewishness before admitting that he found Israel’s refusal to embrace America’s priorities in the talks to be “terribly painful.” Playing to Nixon’s natural prejudices, he added, “I am Jewish. How can I want this?” together with the age-old antisemitic insinuation, “I have never seen such cold-blooded playing with the American national interest.”6
Despite his prejudices, Nixon admired the Israelis for what he perceived to be their toughness and lack of sentimentality. So, too, did Kissinger, at least when they agreed with him. Both men, however, hated having to deal with Israel’s Jewish supporters in the United States. Nixon’s lifelong resentment toward East Coast elites and the media—which he, not unreasonably, identified with Jews—together with his instinctive antisemitism and anti-liberalism, sometimes drove him to distraction. In his memoirs, he warned that “the danger for Israel of relying on the prominent liberal and dove senators of both parties to come through in the event a crisis arose” was that they would “cut and run… when the chips are down.” This was what he saw Jews doing vis-à-vis Vietnam, and it was therefore what Israel should expect in the future “when any conflict in the Mideast stares them straight in the face.” According to Nixon, Israel’s “real friends (to their great surprise) are people like Goldwater, Buckley, RN et al., who are considered to be hawks on Vietnam but who, in the broader aspects, are basically not cut-and-run people whether it is in Vietnam, the Mideast, Korea, or any place else in the world.”7
The Israelis shared Nixon’s analysis and acted accordingly, along with what we may now identify as their typical audacity. During the 1972 election, Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s ambassador to the United States, instructed American Jews that Nixon had “done more than any other chief executive to sustain the existence of the state of Israel.” He advised them to “reward men who support it, in deeds rather than in words.” Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President mailed out literature containing this quote to over one hundred Jewish newspapers and to Jewish community leaders throughout the country. Rabin’s comments constituted an obviously inappropriate intervention in American internal politics, and its violation of diplomatic protocol would likely have caused considerable public outrage had its origin been anywhere but the Israeli embassy. A few Jews did complain. Eugene Borowitz, an influential Reform rabbi, described the “heavy, unrelenting pressure the Israelis have put on American Jewry to vote for Richard Nixon” as “thoroughly demeaning to American Jews.” The Reform rabbinical association passed a resolution noting its “distress” over “the reported intervention of Israel’s ambassador to the United States into the coming presidential election.” The Israelis naturally paid them no mind. When the issue was raised with then prime minister Golda Meir, her response echoed Stalin’s famous quip about the number of troops belonging to the pope: “Have you any liberals who can supply us with Phantom [jet fighter planes]?”8
Nixon’s prophecies and the Israelis’ willingness to embrace their logic mark an important moment in the enduring conflict between American Jews’ liberalism and their Zionism. There was an unavoidable logic to the position that American liberals were taking during the Nixon era, and it was the logic of global retrenchment. America had intervened in Vietnam as a liberal hegemon, and it turned out that this had been a terrible idea. Americans were baffled that other nations did not wish to be converted to their way of life at the point of a gun. Internally, moreover, the nation was tearing itself apart. The problems raised by its global empire and ensuing demands of blood and treasure were no longer sustainable. It was time, most Jewish liberals would have agreed in the early 1970s, for America to “come home,” as Senator George McGovern put it in the 1972 speech in which he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination. This was the position of much of the rabbinate, none more so than America’s most famous rabbi of the time, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who spoke out against the Vietnam War with the passion of a latter-day Jeremiah. But rabbis were no longer the voices that mattered in American Jewish politics. The baton had long ago passed to the executives of the representative organizations and the funders who made their jobs possible. And these people did not, as a rule, listen to latter-day prophets. They listened to wealthy and powerful men like their patrons and themselves.
Conservatives consistently made the case that, because of Israel’s reliance on American power and global involvement, it was long past time for Jews to give up on liberalism altogether. Barely a month went by when this argument did not appear in some article in Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary and in the columns of neoconservative columnists and critics. But the argument did not really find much resonance among American Jews, who would remain liberals and Democrats well into the next century. Instead, they were willing to carve out an exception for Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” and one that “shared America’s values,” even if that meant turning a blind eye to the fundamental contradiction between their dovish liberal politics and their heartfelt support for Israel as it carried out an increasingly brutal occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. George McGovern, himself the son of a Methodist pastor, nicely illustrated this phenomenon when, speaking to New Yorkers at a political rally, he attacked the Vietnam War as the “most painful and regrettable military, political, and moral blunder” in the nation’s history, while stating that Israel, in contrast, “has legitimate goals, and the whole nation is united.” He added his hope that the Israelis “not give up a foot of ground” until given assurances of secure borders. Leftists derided this position, then as now, as “Progressive Except for Palestine,” but it also remained the unofficial ideology of most American Jews and their professional organizations.9
American Jews initially viewed Nixon’s 1968 election victory with great trepidation. Per usual, they had voted heavily for the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had long championed the Zionist cause. With the nation experiencing race riots, political assassinations, and endless antiwar protests, Nixon’s reputation for vindictiveness made them more nervous still. His campaign’s “law and order” focus echoed those of politicians who had used such slogans to scapegoat Jews in the past. Writing in Commentary, Nathan Glazer viewed the landscape of Jewish involvement in the various antiestablishment movements and suggested the “possibility—almost a probability—of the rise of a stab-in-the-back myth, in which it will not only be students and professors and intellectuals who are attacked, and not only Jews in their role as members of this general community, but conceivably Jews as Jews.” Ominously, he added, “The parallel between Weimar and America is often raised. There are many, many differences. And yet this parallel cannot be dismissed.”10
Jews had every reason to suspect that the Nixon administration would return to the Eisenhower administration’s Middle East policies, as Nixon had served as Ike’s vice president. Arabists still reigned inside the State Department. And when Nixon’s first secretary of state, William Rogers, announced a US peace plan that demanded significant concessions from Israel, in 1969, it inspired Jewish organizations into a massive campaign of opposition. In Philadelphia alone, the local Jewish federation planned through its community relations arm for one hundred thousand written communications to Nixon, Rogers, and key senators and congressmen. They need not have bothered, however. Behind the scenes, both Nixon and Kissinger made certain that what Kissinger termed “Bill Rogers’ Middle East Insanity” went nowhere. Before the secretary of state could even discuss his ideas with Israel’s leaders, Nixon sent Leonard Garment, now his de facto ambassador to American Jews, to head off Golda Meir when she came to the United States in early 1970 for a fund-raising trip. His instructions were to “slam the hell out of Rogers and his plan.” There would be no successful “Rogers plan” for the Middle East so long as Henry Kissinger was around.11
Kissinger’s machinations planted the seeds for catastrophic results. Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, speaking through his adviser Hafiz Ismail, began to reach out to the Americans to perhaps find a way to end the state of low-level war that remained between Egypt and Israel, and even to discuss a final peace agreement in exchange for the return of Egyptian territory captured during the 1967 war. Clearly intrigued, the Israelis began discussions over what concessions they might be willing to offer for a full peace with Egypt. But Kissinger instructed the Israelis not merely to ignore Egypt’s feelers, but also not to mention their interest to Rogers, who was still secretary of state at that point. “We are pushing nothing, we are wasting time,” he confided to the Israelis, who eventually decided they had no choice but to go along with Kissinger’s admonition, especially as he saw fit to sweeten it by arranging a secret promise to supply Israel with over a hundred US Phantom fighter jets. Sadat eventually decided that another war to avenge the humiliation of 1967 was his only choice were he ever to secure the land lost in 1967.12
Israel had become so popular in Congress by this time that the Nixon administration found itself in a virtual arms race to see who could claim the role of the Jewish state’s most generous benefactor. Kissinger’s concessions to the Israelis were no doubt extraordinary, but they were not enough. According to the 1970 Defense Procurement Act, Israel was invited by Congress to obtain “ground weapons, such as missiles, tanks, howitzers, armored personnel carriers, ordnance, etc. as well as aircraft,” purely on credit. In the eyes of some of Israel’s most dedicated supporters, even this was not enough. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) insisted that offering Israel better and more sophisticated weaponry all but unconditionally would encourage its leaders “to take risks at the negotiating table” for peace. Jackson’s argument became yet another constant theme that the Jewish state’s supporters would stick to through thick and thin for the coming half century, albeit with little in the way of evidence to support it.13
Resistance to this beneficence soon appeared in the form of the dovish J. William Fulbright (D-AR), who chaired the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Fulbright had long been deeply concerned with the activities of pro-Israel lobbyists and their connections to its government. He had even hired an investigator to see what laws were being violated and forced changes to the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act, embarrassing Israel and forcing a restructuring of its lobbying operations in the United States. His insistence that the law be followed likely cost him the fulfillment of his longtime ambition to be secretary of state in any future Democratic administration. But whereas Congress was dominated by doves when it came to Indochina, when attention turned to Israel the members of this species proved few and far between. Fulbright could secure only seven votes for his bill tying arms sales to a willingness on the part of Israel to negotiate a peace agreement (together with US willingness to guarantee Israel’s pre-1967 borders militarily if need be). In a letter to a friend, he complained that he could not “find any substantial support in the Senate for a balanced attitude toward the two contending forces in the Middle East.” He blamed this lack of support, in part, on an alliance between Zionists and “our own military establishment.” Here again the hawks were lining up behind Israel and the doves were divided and defensive—another pattern that would define Congress in the coming decades.14
Nixon and Kissinger’s appreciation of Israel’s potential strategic value to their foreign policy plans rose enormously during Jordan’s “Black September” of 1970. At the time, the Middle East was undergoing a degree of violent chaos that made America’s exploding cities appear bucolic in comparison. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had been formed at an Arab summit in 1964 as an umbrella group made up of various factions representing different constituencies of the Palestinian people and their supporters (and funders) in the Arab world. It had little influence before 1967, however, when the failure of the Arab states to take any meaningful steps to try to address the sorry condition of Palestinian refugees led to a widespread feeling that any “liberation” from Israel’s oppression would need to be undertaken by the Palestinians themselves. Most of the refugees remained either under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza or in refugee camps across the Arab world. Beginning in 1968, a group of militant, explicitly violent revolutionary factions joined the more mainstream “Fatah” in its ruling body, the Palestinian National Council (PNC). The following year, the PNC chose Fatah’s Yasser Arafat as the PLO’s “chairman.”
It was not until October 1974 that the Arab League proved willing to recognize the PLO as the “sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” In the meantime, feeling themselves forgotten by a world that failed to prioritize, or even take much notice of, the refugees’ increasingly desperate plight, while simultaneously seeing themselves as a colonialized nation rather than merely displaced “refugees,” many Palestinians came to support terrorism as a tactic to reclaim the world’s attention. But owing to their lack of organizational discipline, or even communication, various PLO factions acted with virtually no coordination. As every tiny groupuscule sought to create ever more fantastic spectacles of violence and mass murder, the early 1970s saw what often felt like an endlessly gruesome carnival of Palestinian plane hijackings, bombings, and both individual and mass murders. Sometimes the victims were Israeli diplomats in Europe, sometimes non-Israeli Jews traveling to Israel, and sometimes schoolchildren inside Israel. Inevitably, each Palestinian attack on Jews led to a purposely “asymmetric” Israeli response, usually involving bombing missions that resulted in large numbers of civilian deaths—or “collateral damage,” in the parlance of the time. As PLO terrorist cells were often armed and trained by the Soviet, Chinese, or Cuban military and intelligence agencies, funded by Arab nations in the region, and cheered on by revolutionary organizations in the West, the Middle East became another Cold War battlefield and Israel/Palestine yet another proxy war.
By 1970, the PLO had created its own somewhat anarchical mini-state inside Jordan. Its leaders overplayed their hand, however, when one of its radical factions—the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)—blew up three hijacked planes in an abandoned desert airfield, thereby humiliating King Hussein one too many times. Following a failed attempt on his life, Hussein decided to take his country back regardless of the level of brutality this might involve. The so-called Black September of 1970 involved massive attacks by Jordan’s military, killing not only PLO fighters but also many thousands of Palestinian refugees living in PLO-controlled refugee camps located within Jordan’s borders. The attacks appeared to backfire when Syria, backed by the Soviets, threatened to invade Jordan to rescue the PLO. Nixon and Kissinger understood the Syrians to be Soviet surrogates and were panicked by this potential expansion of the USSR’s influence in the Middle East, but given the situation in both Vietnam and at home, yet another deployment abroad of US troops would have been politically impossible. So they hit upon the idea of asking the Israelis to save Hussein and fight the Syrians. After receiving assurances that if the Soviets intervened, Israel would not be asked to fight them alone, Prime Minister Golda Meir, speaking through Ambassador Rabin, agreed. The threat worked. The Syrians decided they preferred abandoning the PLO to the prospect of yet another war with Israel.15
Even without a war, Israel’s willingness to make its military available to the United States cemented its unique role in the hearts and minds of not only the Nixon administration, but the entire US national security establishment. Kissinger informed Rabin that the president wanted Prime Minister Meir to know that he would “never forget the role played by Israel.” He promised what he now called America’s “Middle Eastern ally” that the United States would take Israel’s willingness to use its military to serve US interests “into account in any future development.” Israel benefited further in the opinions of both policymakers and the public thanks to the actions of its adversaries. PLO terrorist attacks and hijackings succeeded in reminding people of the Palestinian grievances against Israel, but not in a good way. Few Americans could summon much sympathy for masked men wearing kaffiyehs and brandishing AK-47s as they threatened, humiliated, and sometimes murdered people who looked and sounded very much like Americans, and sometimes were.16
By far the costliest of these terrorist operations, when judged purely from a public relations perspective, was the 1972 attack on the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, and the eventual murder of eleven Israeli athletes during a botched rescue raid by the German police. Given the fact that so many members of the global media had gathered there to cover the Olympics, millions of Americans watched the action live on television. It thereby affixed the image of Arab-as-terrorist in their minds. This was an image that was constantly reinforced, both in the news media and in American popular culture, as Arab terrorists became the “go to” villain in many movie and television plots. (Thanks to Nixon’s détente policies, Russians did not work in this role nearly as well as they once had.) Because so many Palestinian factions deployed often impenetrable Marxist jargon in support of the anti-Western “revolution” they claimed to be building, these characters were able to do double duty as both terrorists and commies in the imagination of Hollywood scriptwriters and producers, much to the delight of those among Israel’s supporters who felt themselves committed to making similar arguments about the Palestinians in real life.17
Having failed to interest Kissinger, Nixon, or the Israelis in a peace agreement that might reclaim the territories lost in 1967, Egypt, together with Syria, launched a joint surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur—the holiest day on the Jewish calendar—October 6, 1973. Israel was almost entirely unprepared for the attacks and struggled to defend itself as Soviet-supplied SAM missiles shot down its bombers and fighter jets and the Arab armies marched across the Sinai and the Golan Heights. The Israelis’ miscalculation can certainly be attributed to their own arrogance. Sadat had been preparing and issuing public warnings for months following his frustration with Israel and the United States and their lack of response to his peace feelers. But both US and Israeli intelligence misread his signals as mere bluster. King Hussein had even made a secret trip to Jerusalem to warn Golda Meir about a likely Syrian (and possibly Egyptian) attack.18 But the Israelis could not imagine that Arab nations would dare to risk the consequences of another all-out war after having been so soundly defeated just six years earlier. Israel’s hubris was reinforced by Kissinger’s remarkable duplicity—even by Kissinger’s standards—in not merely helping to engender Egypt’s attack but also discouraging the Israelis from adequately defending themselves. According to Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s testimony before Israel’s 1974 Commission of Inquiry, just before the war began Kissinger offered the Israeli government strong but off-the-record warnings not to make a preemptive strike against Egypt or Syria, and not to mobilize the reserve army before the war actually started, if it wanted any help from the United States in the event of hostilities. These warnings were given after Kissinger insisted that all other Americans leave the room and no notes be taken. Dayan then canceled the air force’s preemptive operation and objected to Meir’s plan to mobilize the reserve. But in his frequent candid discussions with the Egyptian diplomat Hafiz Ismail, Kissinger is not known to have given any similar warning to the Egyptians. Indeed, according to Sadat’s memoirs, Kissinger actually encouraged the attack, via secret messages purveyed to him through Ismail, in order to improve Egypt’s negotiating position in the war’s aftermath.19
In the days immediately following the attacks, the war looked as if it might be lost. “The Third Temple is crumbling,” Dayan cried to his generals, and he even initiated discussions with Prime Minister Meir for a “demonstration” nuclear blast if the advance could not be thwarted. Three days into the war, Kissinger told Ismail that he hoped he understood that the United States was doing merely the minimum to aid Israel that was possible under the circumstances. After eight days of fighting, however, Nixon insisted, over both Kissinger’s and the Pentagon’s objections, on implementing a massive emergency airlift of extremely sophisticated weaponry. He did this despite his prediction to Kissinger that after Israel won the war, it would be “even more impossible to deal with than before.”20
Israel was soon able to turn around the war so completely that its forces encircled the entire Egyptian Third Army. Together, the United States and the Soviet Union negotiated a cease-fire agreement via the UN Security Council, which the Israelis proceeded to ignore. As the Israelis continued to conquer Syrian territory and threaten the destruction of Egypt’s army, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev sent an urgent message to Nixon, via the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, and Kissinger “invit[ing]” the United States to join Moscow “to compel observance of the ceasefire without delay.” The alternative, Brezhnev clearly implied, was unilateral Soviet military intervention, as Israel could not “be permitted to get away with the violation.” Kissinger responded by assuring him that the United States had placed its nuclear missile force on “high alert” and raised its readiness from DEFCON 4 to DEFCON 3 (nuclear war is DEFCON 1). Kissinger, now secretary of state, gave the order himself, without even bothering to wake Nixon. He then let the Israelis know that it was time for them to finally agree to a ceasefire, though he also made it clear that he would certainly find it understandable if it took them a day or two to implement it. Viewing the conflict through the lens of a proxy Cold War battle, he later told American Jewish leaders that what he now “wanted was the most massive Arab defeat possible so that it would be clear to the Arabs that they would get nowhere with dependence on the Soviets.”21
Nixon had unarguably come through for Israel in its time of great need, and he expected to be rewarded for it. He instructed Kissinger to get in touch with the people he usually labeled as “those dirty rotten Jews from New York,” who he imagined to control the news, to make sure he received the praise he felt he deserved. “The major concern is Israel. Who saved Israel?… You have to tell them that,” Nixon told him. A few minutes later he added, “Get the whole bunch in a room and say you are American first, and members of the American Jewish Community, and interested in Israel. Who is going to save Israel and who will save it in the future?”22
In fact, both Nixon and Kissinger were eager to lean on Israel; this was another of the rewards they felt they had earned during the war. Nixon had been planning just this for a while but had gotten sidetracked by Watergate. In February 1973, in response to another of Kissinger’s arguments in favor of postponing any attempt at a comprehensive peace agreement, Nixon responded, “The time has come to quit pandering to Israel’s intransigent position.” After the war, Kissinger was feeling much the same way. He feared that the results of the war would push Arab regimes deeper into the Soviet orbit. During the endless, back-and-forth disengagement negotiations—at one point between January and May 1974 Kissinger and his team shuttled between Damascus and Jerusalem on twenty-five straight days—Kissinger repeatedly demanded Israeli concessions, but, as with previous secretaries of state, he almost always ended up empty handed and retreated in fury. To take just one of countless blowups, when in March 1975 Kissinger felt that the Israeli foreign minister, Yigal Allon, was stalling him on the final wording of the deals over which he had long labored, Kissinger told the president he was “outraged at the Israelis,” but that his hands were tied because of the “power” American Jews enjoyed, owing to their ability to finance political campaigns. “It is not easy to explain to the American people why we must oppose 115 million Arabs who possess all the world’s oil, permanently, on behalf of a nation of 3 million,” but there it was.23
The reaction among American Jews to the “Yom Kippur War” was in many respects a repeat of 1967: panic, existential dread, and intimations of a “second Holocaust.” But this time, they were prepared. Since 1967, American Jewish leaders had committed themselves to the creation of an informal but still tightly knit network of literally countless communal organizations in support of Israel’s advocacy. The result was what Rabbi Daniel Silver, Abba Hillel Silver’s son, and head of the Jewish Community Relations Council, proudly termed “a continuing and systematic year-in and year-out public information campaign concerned with maintaining for Israel the sympathy and understanding of the American people.” This network focused not only on elected officials, but also local community leaders. It disseminated information about the Arab-Israeli conflict via its own literature, newsreel footage, and reports of pro-Israel rallies, speeches, and holiday celebrations that its member organizations sponsored. As Silver observed, “up to 1967 there was a breathing space between crises—1948, 1956, 1967. Now we live in a period of unrelenting crisis.” And so the pro-Israel world prepared for permanent war.24
Kissinger came in for extremely harsh criticism from members of this network, more than a few of which termed him to be a traitor to the Jewish people. Rabbi Silver imagined in a sermon that “Israel’s destruction might give [Kissinger] pause for a night or become a paragraph in a book.” Hans Morgenthau, a respected international relations scholar whom Kissinger personally revered, went so far as to compare the pressure he was applying to Israel to the way the West had treated Czechoslovakia in 1938 when it was threatened by Hitler.25
To disarm such critics, Kissinger undertook a series of off-the-record meetings with Jewish writers and intellectuals, and another with leaders of Jewish organizations. His goal was to convince them to tone down their criticism of the disengagement negotiations and, if possible, to get some help leaning on the Israelis to lighten up a bit on their demands. The intellectuals spanned the political spectrum, from the democratic socialists Irving Howe and Michael Walzer to neoconservatives such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Norman Podhoretz. There was no room for disagreement between the two poles, however, because the only issue discussed was Israel’s security and how to best ensure it in the future. Kissinger posed as Israel’s true savior and warned of a noticeable turn against all-out support for Israel in Congress—a phenomenon that would turn out to be 100 percent imaginary. He pointed out that, given the “critical opposition” to Israel within the international community, the perfidy of the “European vultures,” and the likely power of the “extremely effective” oil embargo, Israel was “in great danger,” adding, “We shouldn’t kid ourselves.” (The oil embargo had been instituted by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to punish the United States, along with the Netherlands, Portugal, Rhodesia, and South Africa, for their support for Israel in the war.) He clearly had their attention. Henry Rosovsky—Dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Science—asked the question that had appeared to be at the forefront of American Jewish minds since 1967: “In ten years will [Israel] still exist?” Kissinger assured him that it would, but what he needed from the assembled was “some wisdom in the Jewish community, and among friends of Israel.” Sure, they could “stand up publicly for the security of Israel, and its right to legitimacy, yes. But privately you should make clear to the Israelis that you understand the situation.” By “the situation,” Kissinger meant that only Henry Kissinger could save Israel, and would the Israelis please get with his program already. The meeting broke up, according to the notes taken by an aide to Kissinger, “with warm expressions of gratitude.”26
To the leaders of Jewish organizations, Kissinger went further. He complained that he could not serve Israel’s interests—and prevent another Arab attack—“if the Jewish community starts climbing walls every time I am seen smiling with Sadat.” He was rewarded with a pledge from Max Fisher, a Republican funder, that Jews got the message: “The Jewish community is becoming conscious of the need for a strong defense posture,” Fisher said. A leading figure in national Jewish philanthropy, Fisher thereby joined a long line of false prophets of a future Jewish community conservatism that would never arrive. In neither meeting were any issues raised beyond those expressing concern for Israel’s best interests, and these were always discussed exclusively in military and Cold War diplomatic terms. When one participant did try to raise the question, asking, “Is peace possible with the Palestinians?” Kissinger replied, “The Palestinians have to get a little hungrier.”27
Kissinger also saw value in the postwar Arab oil embargo and the domestic chaos it was causing as a means of intimidating American Jews into quieting down about Israel. When he met with a group of Jewish businessmen, they were concerned that “the Arab oil embargo, coupled with anti-Israel propaganda[,] might ‘pose a threat to the Jewish community in the United States.’” No matter how secure Jews became as full citizens in the United States—indeed, their success story was the story of the country’s own success—their concern about an organized antisemitic campaign never fully disappeared. As a first-generation German Jew, Kissinger knew this concern as well as anyone. So he used it as a weapon to try to deflect any potential criticism of his policies.28
Following the upheavals of Watergate, Nixon’s August 1974 resignation, and America’s ignominious retreat from Vietnam, Kissinger’s tenure in government, now under President Gerald Ford, ended with yet another exercise in frustration at the hands of Israel and its American Jewish supporters. With Israel continuing to resist his plans for disengagement in the Sinai and the Golan Heights, in March 1975 Kissinger convinced the new president to order a “reassessment” of US foreign policy in the region, which included a deliberate slowdown and deferral of arms deliveries pending its outcome. He announced that “every department is to be instructed to end the special relationships [with Israel].” Acting as much on the basis of paranoia and pique as on principle or policy, he imagined that American Jews were “conducting a systematic campaign” to undermine his authority and complained to Ford, “I think the Israelis are after me.” Alas, Ford and Kissinger’s reassessment would be a short one. With lightning speed, Israel’s Washington lobbyists circulated a letter signed by seventy-six senators demanding that the president be responsive to Israel’s “urgent military and economic needs,” and that he “make clear, as we do, that the United States, acting in its own national interests, stands firmly with Israel in the search for peace in future negotiations.” Next came Congress’s cancellation of a planned sale of defensive antiaircraft weapons to Jordan. Should the pro-Israel message somehow be unclear, Bertram Gold, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, warned that “if 1975 turns out to be the year of intense pressure on Israel, there will be a very serious reaction among American Jews. We will go directly to Congress, and 1976 is not that far away.”29
Kissinger was predictably furious. He told one aide that what was needed was “psychological warfare against Israel… which has treated us as no other country could,” and threatened, privately, that “if the Jewish Community comes after us, we will have to go public with the whole record.” Resistance, he promised, would be futile, as he instructed his State Department colleagues that “we are to see it through and even if they win it will do so much damage to the Jewish community here that it may never recover.”30
None of this happened, of course. At the end of his extensive period of “shuttle diplomacy,” Kissinger did successfully secure a “Disengagement Treaty” between Israel and Egypt and another between Israel and Syria in the spring of 1974, as well as the “the Sinai Interim Agreement” in September 1975, separating the forces of all sides and committing Egypt and Israel to forgoing use of the threat of military force against one another. Thanks in part to the careful attention he paid to cultivating his image in his memoirs and interviews, and his constant stroking of journalists, biographers, and interested pundits and historians, he later succeeded in creating a myth of himself as the supreme diplomat. The Middle East policy maven Martin Indyk, a friend of Kissinger’s, titled his widely reviewed 2022 book on him Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy. It was a nearly seven-hundred-page paean to the man’s “formidable intellect.” (Indyk thanked Kissinger in the acknowledgments for his “generosity and friendship,” which allowed Indyk to provide an account that reflected his “deep respect for him” and his “appreciation of his statesmanship.”) His book, like so many accounts, reflects the many instances in which Kissinger attempted to rewrite his record in this—as in so many conflicts in which he was involved. Documents released in the decades since the incidents in question took place have demonstrated the costs to the credibility of anyone, whether pundit or historian, who has embraced Kissinger’s unsupportable self-serving version of these events and the conclusions they implied.31
While Kissinger’s role in the Middle East may not be as stained with the blood of innocents as in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, or East Pakistan, to name just four nations where his policies led directly to mass murder, they are hardly worthy of the myth he worked so hard to create. After discouraging the Israelis from pursuing the possibility of a peace agreement with Egypt without a war, he then purposely disadvantaged Israel in the war that he helped ensure would happen. When it was over—and contrary to his own stated goals—Kissinger apparently felt it necessary to cave in to the Israelis in almost every respect. To secure Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai, Kissinger agreed to virtually every Israeli demand with promises of weaponry, oil, radar, shared intelligence, and help with resupply in the event of war. Most significantly, Kissinger promised that the United States would not recognize or negotiate with the PLO so long as the organization did not first recognize Israel’s right to exist. He also promised that the United States would “make every effort to coordinate with Israel… with a view toward refraining from putting forward proposals that Israel would find unsatisfactory.” This came pretty close to saying that the United States had farmed out its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel and its supporters. The Israelis had defeated him only slightly less convincingly than the allegedly equally “obnoxious” Vietnamese had. And as for the prospect of actual peace between Israel and Egypt, it would take the tireless (and often thankless) efforts of a former one-term Georgia governor with no diplomatic experience whatsoever to bring that about, long after Kissinger had retired to make his fortune in private life. In the meantime, however, with Nixon gone, Kissinger was not done with the Israelis and their champions in the American political debate, and they were certainly not done with him.32