Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance (review)

Warren Bass has written an excellent historical study of America's Middle East foreign policy. Scholarship in this area has recently grown not only in quantity, but also in the quality of research, which increasingly incorporates sources in regional languages.¹ Bass advances this trend through his use of the partially declassified records in the Israeli State Archives and the Ben-Gurion Archive. He combines these documents with research in the U.S. and Britain to test what he regards as the myths surrounding his topic: the abiding U.S.-Israeli "special relationship"; the influence of the Israel lobby; and John F. Kennedy's Camelot. Bass gives Kennedy high marks for managing U.S. foreign policy though some of the most dangerous years of the Cold War, when the stakes were too high and the options too limited to base decisions simply on political calculation. Though electoral politics were never far from JFK's mind, the Israel lobby was not the force in the early 1960s that it became in subsequent years. In Bass's view, "domestic politics had a voice, not a veto" (7). His most important argument is that Kennedy's was the "pivotal presidency" that opened the door to a close U.S.-Israeli relationship (3).

Bass is not simply concerned with bilateral diplomacy, but with relations among the U.S., Israel, and the Arab states in the context of the Cold War. JFK inherited strained relations with both Israel and the Egypt of Gamal 'Abd al-Nasser. Dwight D. Eisenhower had opposed the Suez War launched by Israel, France, and Britain against Egypt. But Nasser had traded Egyptian cotton for Soviet arms, and Ike's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, came to regard Nasser as a Communist dupe. Kennedy, however, appealed to the Egyptian president in an effort to steal the Soviets' most important regional client, a policy developed by such "best and brightest" advisors as the National Security Council's Robert W. Komer. The U.S. offered Egypt substantial economic assistance, mostly in the form of food aid, but Nasser's disastrous intervention in the Yemeni civil war, what Nasser himself called his "Vietnam," wrecked the U.S.-Egyptian rapprochement. With Egypt and U.S. ally Saudi Arabia backing different sides in Yemen, Egyptian raids onto Saudi territory prompted the U.S. to send fighter planes to defend the kingdom. Bass argues that by choosing pan-Arab ambition over his relationship with Washington, Nasser greatly reduced the cost to the U.S. of close relations with Israel. Nasser's rejection of JFK's overture appeared to establish the limited possibilities for U.S.-Arab cooperation. While clients such as King Hussein of Jordan and Crown Prince Faysal of Saudi Arabia might object to closer U.S.-Israeli ties, their vulnerability to Arab nationalist revolution left them with no alternative to cooperating with Washington.

After examining JFK's failed opening to Nasser, Bass devotes a chapter to each of the two major issues in the U.S.-Israeli relationship during the Kennedy years: arms and Israel's nuclear program. Israel's prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, desired arms from the U.S. not only for their military value but also for their implied political commitment. Until 1962, the U.S. had refused major arms sales to Israel, encouraging third-country military aid instead. But administration figures such as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Bundy, whose brother McGeorge served as JFK's National Security Advisor, became convinced that Israel required American missiles to defend against Egypt's Soviet-made warplanes. Bass calls JFK's decision to provide Hawk missiles to Israel "perhaps the most underappreciated milestone in the U.S.-Israel special relationship," the first significant breach in the American refusal to arm Israel directly and the beginning of...