US Wasn’t Always Israel’s Strongest Ally – What Changed and Why?
The US was the first country to offer de facto recognition to the new Israeli government when the Jewish state declared independence on 14 May 1948. Seventy-five years later, Washington has long been Israel’s strongest military and diplomatic ally.
But it wasn’t always that way. For the first two decades after independence, Israel’s primary foreign ally was France, which supplied almost all of its major weapons including planes, tanks and ships as well as building the nuclear plant from which it developed atomic weapons.
Neither did the US offer the same diplomatic cover it does today. When Israel invaded Egypt with the British and French during the 1956 Suez crisis, Washington joined Moscow at the United Nations to force Israel and its allies to withdraw.
For many years, US aid to Israel was limited to loans to buy food through the economic hardship in the years after independence.
So what changed and why?
As tensions rose ahead of the 1967 six-day war, Paris imposed an arms embargo on the region and refused to deliver 50 fighter jets Israel had paid for. After the war, France sided with Arab countries, in part to improve relations after its defeat in the colonial war in Algeria.
President Lyndon Johnson was sympathetic to Israel’s position but hesitant about supplying large amounts of weapons out of concern about a regional conflict drawing in the Soviet Union.
Following Israel’s stunning victory and occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Washington concluded that Arab nations had moved into the Soviet camp and so increased weapons sales to the Jewish state, including Phantom jet fighters.
Johnson committed the US to maintaining Israel’s “qualitative military edge” and opened the door to decades of weapons sales that helped build the Israeli military into the strongest force in the Middle East.
Did the US support Israel’s development of nuclear weapons?
In the late 1950s, France built Israel a larger reactor capable of producing plutonium and a reprocessing plant at a secret facility at Dimona in the Negev desert which provided the basic tools to develop a nuclear weapon. Israel told the US the nuclear plant had only a “peaceful purpose” but in 1960 the CIA concluded that it would be used to produce plutonium for weapons.
In 1963, President John F Kennedy demanded Israel allow regular US inspections of Dimona and warned that failure to present “reliable information” about the nuclear plant would “seriously jeopardise” Washington’s support for Israel, according to a 2019 report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Israel agreed to inspections but, after Kennedy’s assassination, the Johnson administration was less firm on the issue and the inspections stopped in 1969. By then, US officials concluded that Israel was indeed developing an atomic bomb despite its claims to the contrary.
When did the US get into the business of trying to broker peace agreements?
When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur holiday, President Richard Nixon was alarmed by Israeli hints about using nuclear weapons as its forces were initially forced into retreat. Nixon ordered an airlift of military supplies to Israel.
After the tide of war turned, the US was keen to limit the scale of Egyptian losses in part to keep the Soviets out of the conflict but also to bolster American influence over the Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat. That in turn laid the ground for the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement later in the decade.
The failure of the Israeli government to pre-empt the Yom Kippur war forced a political realignment that saw the rightwing Likud party take power for the first time with Menachem Begin as prime minister. Begin extended an invitation to Sadat, via the US, to visit Jerusalem and the Egyptian president addressed the Israeli parliament.
President Jimmy Carter engineered months of negotiations that culminated in the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel, and laid the ground for the final Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in March 1979 which saw Israel withdraw from the Sinai. But Begin rebuffed Carter’s attempts to reach an agreement for Israel to give up the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967.
