Benjamin Netanyahu is not the first Israeli prime minister to find himself at odds with Washington. In fact, several prime ministers from the Labor Party, Netanyahu’s traditional rival, have suffered the wrath of an angry American president.
Harry Truman, for example, is remembered fondly by Israelis and American Jews for his quick de facto recognition of the newborn State of Israel on May 15, 1948. But in the preceding weeks, the State Department, acting with the approval of the White House, repeatedly pressured David Ben-Gurion and his colleagues to accept a “truce” that would include postponing statehood indefinitely.
“If the Jews refuse to accept a truce on reasonable grounds they need not expect anything from us,” Truman told State Department official Dean Rusk. Undersecretary Robert Lovett threatened Nahum Goldmann –a Washington representative of Ben-Gurion’s Jewish Agency– that if the Zionists did not indefinitely postpone the proclamation of statehood, “we will become very tough. We will wash our hands of the whole situation and will prevent any help being given to you.”
Lovett then went further, warning that if Ben-Gurion did not back down, the administration would release a “White Paper” so critical of the Zionists that it would “do great harm to the Jews in this country.” He told Goldmann that the report would have “grave repercussions,” since “anti-Semitism is mounting in an unprecedented way in groups and circles which are very influential and were never touched by anti-Semitism.”
In the 1950s, it was the Eisenhower administration that took aim at Israel’s Labor-led government. Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, visiting Washington in April 1953, was shocked when Assistant Secretary of State Henry A. Byroade threatened him that if Israel did not make territorial concessions to the Arabs (within Israel’s already-narrow contours), the U.S. administration would present “our own peace plan,” which Israel might not like.
Soon afterwards, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles proposed that Jerusalem should not be Israel’s capital, but should be ruled by “the world religious community”; and that Israel should stop emphasizing its Jewishness and instead “become a part of the Near East.”
Dulles subsequently told the Israeli ambassador, Abba Eban, that Israel must “re-examine its policy of encouraging large-scale immigration,” refrain from counter-terror raids, and “bear her share of the Arab refugee burden.” Byroade then delivered several speeches demanding that Israel become “a Middle Eastern state” and describing aliya as a central obstacle to peace (since it supposedly made the Arabs worry that Israel was planning “a future attempt at territorial expansion”).
The knives really came out in late 1956. Egypt’s huge military buildup, its threats to annihilate Israel, and its sponsorship of repeated terrorist raids into Israel from Sinai and Gaza compelled Ben-Gurion to launch a pre-emptive strike against the Nasser regime.
Professor Isaac Alteras, in his definitive study, Eisenhower and Israel, describes Eisenhower’s response in language that calls to mind what Prime Minister Netanyahu has been experiencing at the hands of President Obama. Eisenhower let it be known that he regarded Ben-Gurion as an “extremist.” In one conversation with a prominent American Jewish leader, the president questioned the Israeli leader’s “balance and rationality.”
During the first days of the war, Eisenhower and other U.S. officials refused to even meet with the Israeli ambassador, Abba Eban, or any other Israeli representatives. (Israel’s current ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, was not the first to be given the cold shoulder.) When Ben-Gurion requested a meeting with the president to discuss their differences, Eisenhower refused. “The president in his punitive mood was not about to award Ben-Gurion with the prestige of a summit meeting,” Alteras writes.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has been on the receiving end of some salty comments from unnamed U.S. officials. So was Ben-Gurion. New York Times columnist James Reston reported: “The White House crackled with barracks room language the like of which had not been heard since the days of General Grant.”
The Eisenhower administration branded the Ben-Gurion movement “the aggressor” and moved quickly to impose sanctions. In those days, U.S. aid to Israel was minimal, but Secretary of State Dulles found some ways to squeeze Jerusalem: postponing a trip to Israel by emissaries of the Export-Import Bank, which would obstruct Israel’s request for a $75-million loan; holding up U.S.-Israel talks on a Food Surplus Agreement; and blocking technical assistance programs that benefited Israel.
In 1975, it was Yitzhak Rabin’s turn. The new prime minister resisted demands by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to withdraw from strategic mountain passes and oil fields in the Sinai, because Egypt was offering only a few years of “non-use of force” in exchange. President Gerald Ford responded by publicly blaming Rabin for the breakdown of the talks, and announcing a “reassessment” of American Mideast policy, which actually consisted of a suspension of U.S. aid to Israel.
Kissinger, meanwhile, met with journalists, Congressional leaders, and America’s Mideast ambassadors to complain that the “cold-blooded” Rabin had “lied” to him, “smashed” and “destroyed” U.S. policy, and was “bringing the world to the edge of war.” In what is now an all-too-familiar tactic, Kissinger repeatedly complained that the Israelis had insulted the president. He called Israel’s stance ” an indignity to the United States” and charged that American questions to Israel were met with “nagging semi-insolent replies.” Ironically, Kissinger himself hurled more than his share of insults at the Israelis, for example accusing Rabin and his cabinet of just trying “to prove their manhood.”
White House transcripts show Ford summoning a prominent American Jewish leader, Max Fisher, to complain about Rabin’s “inflexibility.” In what Kissinger later praised as a “powerful performance,” Ford assured Fisher that “some of my best friends are Jews.” Ford insisted to Fisher that Rabin’s stance had devastated him — “nothing has hit me so hard since I’ve been in this office,” he declared. It was a remarkable statement given that the previous nine months (since Ford first became president) included the onset of the worst recession since the Depression of the 1930s; the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, leading to Greece’s withdrawal from NATO; a major clash between the White House and Congress; and midterm elections in which the Democrats won a veto-proof majority in the House of Representatives.
Kissinger assured Ford that this “psychological warfare against Israel ” would “create a state of mind in Israel” that would be more conducive to concessions. This, combined with the “reassessment,” would make Rabin “crack,” Kissinger predicted. And, as it turned out, he was right.
Whether the current controversy will produce a similar result remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: occasionally strong disagreements between Washington and Jerusalem are as old as the State of Israel itself, and Labor Party prime ministers in Israel have been just as often on the receiving end of an American president’s anger as have their Likud rivals.
Rafael Medoff is the author of fifteen books about Jewish history, including the Historical Dictionary of Zionism (coauthored with Chaim I. Waxman).
