Tag: John F. Kennedy

Special Relationships

On By Martin Kramer

This post first appeared on the Commentary blog on December 2.

Last week, John Kerry appeared with British foreign secretary William Hague in London, and they congratulated one another on concluding their nuclear deal with Iran. Kerry expressed American gratitude for Britain’s support. “We are determined to press forward,” he said, “and give further life to this very special relationship and to our common objectives.”

It was President John F. Kennedy who first extended the concept of a “special relationship” beyond Britain to include Israel. In December 1962, Kennedy met with Israel’s then-foreign minister, Golda Meir, in Palm Beach, Florida, and the American memorandum of conversation reported his assurance in these words: “The United States, the President said, has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East really comparable only to that which it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs.”

The State Department disliked this. A few months earlier, the Near East and South Asia Bureau had put together a memo on U.S.-Israel relations. “Israel’s proposals for a special relationship with the U.S. would be self-defeating if executed,” it argued. “We consider it important not to give in to Israeli and domestic pressures for a special relationship in national security matters.” But Kennedy spoke the words, and even if their definition remained foggy, they provided some reassurance to Israel every time an American president or secretary of state uttered them.

Which is why it’s worth noting that John Kerry doesn’t utter them. To the best I can determine, in his present job, he hasn’t ever described the U.S.-Israel relationship as “special.” Susan Rice, while at the UN, did so on several occasions, and Senator Kerry did it when he ran for president back in 2004 and again to AIPAC in 2009. But as best as I can tell (and I would welcome contrary evidence), he hasn’t done it as secretary of state, and that stands in striking contrast to his repeated invocation of the “special relationship” with Britain.

For example, last February he visited London and said this (Hague beaming at his side):

When you think of everything that binds the United States and Great Britain—our common values, our long shared history, our ties of family, in my case, personal and friendship—there is a reason why we call this a special relationship, or as President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron wrote, really, a partnership of the heart. It is that.

In June, Kerry (again with Hague at his side) stressed the “special relationship,” which he declared to be “grounded in so much—our history, our values, our traditions. It is, without question, an essential, if not the essential relationship.”

And in September, when Britain’s parliament voted down a motion to join the U.S. in the use of force in Syria, Kerry rushed to declare the “special relationship” intact:

The relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom has often been described as special, essential. And it has been described thusly, quite simply, because it is. It was before a vote the other day in parliament, and it will be for long afterwards after that vote. Our bond, as William [Hague] has just said, is bigger than one vote; it’s bigger than one moment in history. It’s about values. It’s about rules of the road, rules by which human beings try to organize their societies and offer people maximum freedom and opportunity, respecting rights, and finding a balance in a very complicated world. And we have no better partner in that effort than Great Britain, and we are grateful for that.

Quite early, the Obama administration earned a reputation in British public opinion for showing insufficient respect for the “special relationship,” and Kerry may see his mission as repairing that impression. But then the Obama administration stands no higher in Israeli public opinion, and Kerry sees no need to do any work of repair (and a few things he has said have heaped insult on injury).

President Obama does refer to the “special relationship” with Israel, but coming from him, the phrase means a bit less than it once did. That’s because he’s upgraded Britain to something even higher. On the eve of Obama’s visit to Britain in May 2011, he and British prime minister David Cameron published a joint op-ed in the London Times that included this sentence: “Ours is not just a special relationship, it is an essential relationship—for us and for the world.” (The headline: “Not Just Special, But An Essential Relationship.”) Suddenly, the word “essential” started cropping up in references to the relationship with Britain (see also two of the Kerry quotes above). “Essential” is now the new platinum card in relations with the United States, and Britain alone holds one. (That’s why having Britain on board the Iran deal was so important to the Obama administration, and it’s why Hague was assigned the role of setting Israel straight: “We would discourage anybody in the world, including Israel, from taking any steps that would undermine this agreement and we will make that very clear to all concerned.” How pleased he must have been to categorize Israel among the world’s “anybodies.”)

Still, while Obama may have promoted Britain, he didn’t demote Israel. And as John Kennedy made clear more than fifty years ago, the two belong in a league of their own. Just what makes a “special relationship”? It’s more than democracy—the world is full of democracies. It’s not “shared values,” since American values are widely shared around the world. What compels the United States openly to acknowledge two “special relationships” is that two foreign states embody old cultures to which the American public feels profoundly and uniquely indebted.

Given that debt, the U.S. government assumes the obligation to show a bit of respect and work a little harder to make its case, when its biggest-knows-best policies impinge on the interests of those two states. When they dissent, as Britain did over Syria and Israel now does over Iran, it’s their privilege to do so and still win American praise as “special” friends who are entitled to speak their minds freely. For an example of how it’s done, see the Kerry quote above, following the British balk on Syria. So far, there’s no equivalent for Israel over Iran.

The U.S. government’s recognition of a “special relationship” doesn’t create a fact, it acknowledges a debt felt deeply by the American people. John Kerry apparently doesn’t fully grasp that reality in regard to Israel. But then, little in his Mideast diplomacy suggests that reality constrains him anyway.

“No Democratic president has ever strong-armed Israel”

On By Martin Kramer

Whenever the United States has put serious, sustained pressure on Israel’s leaders—from the 1950s on—it has come from Republican presidents, not Democratic ones…. Despite the Republican Party’s shrill campaign rhetoric on Israel, no Democratic president has ever strong-armed Israel on any key national security issue.

— Efraim Halevy, “Who Threw Israel Under the Bus?,” New York Times, October 24

Former Mossad head Efraim Halevy likes Barack Obama and dislikes Mitt Romney. He’s entitled to his opinion. What he isn’t entitled to do is make categorical statements that do violence to the historical record.

I’m teaching a graduate course this semester on relations between Israel and the United States, and one of my purposes in following a historical approach is to fortify my students against people who misrepresent the past for some present purpose. Just the other week, we spent two hours discussing how President John F. Kennedy (yes, a Democrat) put the screws on Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi Eshkol, over Israel’s nuclear end-run. The story has been told at considerable length elsewhere, most ably by Avner Cohen, Zaki Shalom, Michael Karpin, and Warren Bass, so I’ll just recap it here. It’s relevant not only as a corrective to Halevy’s erroneous claim. It’s essential background to the renewed debate over Israel’s nuclear posture that the Obama administration has helped to prompt.

When Kennedy entered the White House in January 1961, the CIA had just concluded that the facility under construction in Dimona, with French assistance, was destined to become a nuclear reactor. U.S. intelligence had been one to two years behind the curve on the pace of Israel’s nuclear program, and Kennedy was worried. He had campaigned on a promise to stop proliferation. In his third debate with Richard Nixon, he had warned that “there are indications because of new inventions, that 10, 15, or 20 nations will have a nuclear capacity, including Red China, by the end of the Presidential office in 1964. This is extremely serious.” The CIA would soon list Israel right behind China as a potential proliferator.

In May 1961, just months after his inauguration, Kennedy raised the issue of Dimona with visiting Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and received a boilerplate assurance that the project had a peaceful purpose. Kennedy and his advisers continued to suspect otherwise, given the size of the plant. Israel allowed informal visits, but they were far from thorough, and in May 1963, Kennedy finally decided to press the issue and insist on regular inspections. He wrote a letter to Ben-Gurion (May 18), warning that an Israeli weapon would throw open the gates of proliferation everywhere:

We are concerned with the disturbing effects on world stability which would accompany the development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel. I cannot imagine that the Arabs would refrain from turning to the Soviet Union for assistance if Israel were to develop a nuclear weapons capability—with all the consequences this would hold. But the problem is much larger than its impact on the Middle East. Development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel would almost certainly lead other larger countries, that have so far refrained from such development, to feel that they must follow suit.

Then came the threat. Kennedy, noting the ways the United States had assisted Israel, warned Ben-Gurion that the U.S. commitment to his country “would be seriously jeopardized in the public opinion in this country and in the West as a whole if it should be thought that this Government was unable to obtain reliable information on a subject as vital to peace as the question of the character of Israel’s efforts in the nuclear field.” Years later, Yuval Ne’eman, the physicist who helped Ben-Gurion write his replies, told a journalist that “Kennedy was writing like a bully. It was brutal.” Kennedy’s “Scylla and Charybdis-like letter,” writes Zaki Shalom, “made it absolutely clear that he wanted Israel to accede to his demands unconditionally and immediately, and a request of this sort from the pinnacle of American power, in language so blunt, left Israel no space for maneuvering.”

Within a month, Ben-Gurion had resigned. He had already been weakened politically, but there has long been a suspicion that Kennedy’s pressure contributed to his decision. (Ne’eman believed it was the main cause.) Kennedy did not relent, and after allowing Levi Eshkol ten days to settle in as new prime minister, he reissued his threat (July 5). Kennedy demanded of Eshkol that the United States be allowed to conduct visits

as nearly as possible in accord with international standards, thereby resolving all doubts as the the peaceful intent of the Dimona project…. As I wrote Mr. Ben-Gurion, this Goverment’s commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized if it should be thought that we were unable to obtain reliable information on a subject as vital to peace as the question of Israel’s effort in the nuclear field….. It would be essential… that our scientist have access to all areas of the Dimona site and to any related part of the complex, such as fuel fabrication facilities or plutonium separation plant, and that sufficient time be allotted for a thorough examination.

Avner Cohen writes of this letter: “Not since President Eisenhower’s message to Ben-Gurion, in the midst of the Suez crisis in November 1956, had an American president been so blunt with an Israeli prime minister…. Since the United States had not been involved in the building of Dimona and no international law or agreement had been violated, Kennedy’s demands were unprecedented. They amounted, in effect, to an ultimatum.” Israeli journalist Michael Karpin writes that “no American president had ever threatened an Israeli prime minister so bluntly during political negotiations in time of peace.”

Inevitably, Eshkol agreed to the inspections. He had little choice; to borrow Halevy’s words, he had been “strong-armed.” But the change in administration following Kennedy’s assassination in November created a gap that Israel exploited. During the course of the 1960s, Israel succeeded in turning the U.S. “inspections” of Dimona into hurried affairs scheduled well in advance. Parts of the facility were concealed from American scrutiny. By 1968, the CIA had concluded that Israel had built a bomb. It was Richard Nixon (a Republican) who finally sat down with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir on September 26, 1969, to finalize the U.S.-Israel understanding that exists to this day. Israel would keep its capabilities under wraps—nuclear “ambiguity” or “opacity”—and the United States would look the other way. The United States would not pressure Israel to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Thus was born the Israeli exception to the American rule.

Why is this relevant now? The debate over Israel’s nuclear exception is about to be renewed in full vigor. Kennedy wrote to Ben-Gurion: “Development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel would almost certainly lead other larger countries, that have so far refrained from such development, to feel that they must follow suit.” Now Iran is cast in the role of the “larger country,” and the idea of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East is gaining momentum. Israel would be called upon to disarm, in exchange for Iran’s disavowal of its nuclear ambitions. Obama’s own vision of a “nuclear-free world,” articulated in 2009, is the context.

An American-supported “Middle East WMD-Free Zone Conference” (with the unpronounceable acronym MEWMDFZ) may or may not take place in December as scheduled. The head of Israel’s own nuclear energy agency has described the conference initiative as “futile,” and the meeting may be postponed. But as former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon has said, “after the U.S. elections, this issue of the Middle East as a nuclear-free zone will be back on the table.” And Israel’s leading authorities on the subject believe that in light of Obama’s commitment to non-proliferation, Israel “might face new pressure from the administration down the line.”

I’m reasonably certain that Halevy knows the history. Perhaps as a former head of the Mossad, he’s barred from discussing it. That’s understandable, but it’s inexcusable to pretend that the battle over Dimona never happened, and to do so for a purpose—playing American partisan politics—that’s unseemly for a man in his position. I’m now immersed in teaching precisely this subject, and I detect no systemic difference in the approaches of Democratic and Republican presidents to Israel. But when it comes to “strong-arming” Israel on the “key national security issue” of its nuclear posture, the unsurpassed record is held by a Democrat.