Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US–Israel Relationship

There has long been a debate about whether the central factor in US–Israel relations are strategic ties or whether common values are at the heart of the relationship. David Tal comes down squarely on the side of values in this debate in a very well-researched and well-written book. While there is a lot of valuable information in the book, particularly in Tal’s description of the very extensive web of links that tie the two countries together; in my view, the author makes his case a bit too strongly and he glosses over such events as the Pollard affair while downplaying the genuine importance of security ties.Tal begins his book with a description of US President Woodrow Wilson and his endorsement of the Balfour Declaration. He notes that “Religion, shared values, and history were the foundation upon which the Zionist and later [the] Israel-American relationships were forged” (7). He goes into considerable detail about the Protestant ethos that was dominant in the United States at the time of Wilson’s presidency and cites the numerous towns and cities in the US with biblical names such as Bethlehem and Salem (short for Jerusalem) and emphasizes the biblical link that stipulated God’s promise about giving to Abraham and his descendants the land of Israel. Tal notes that US presidents such as Wilson, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter attended Sunday schools that were associated with the Protestant view of the world that cites God’s promise to Abraham (9). It should thus come as no surprise that Wilson supported the Balfour Declaration as he noted “To think that I, the son of the manse (the home of a Protestant minister), would be able to help restore the holy land to its people” (12). Similarly, Harry Truman, looking on his role in the establishment of the State of Israel, cited God’s promise to Abraham (44).On a different note, Tal also cites “American Orientalism” for US support of the Jewish return to Palestine as it had a highly negative view of the Ottoman Empire, which was seen as “beset by Oriental despotism, economic squalor and intellectual stultification” (18–19).It wasn’t only Wilson who supported Zionism, however. The US Congress, also permeated with Protestant theology, on June 30, 1922, passed the Lodge-Fish Resolution that stated that the “United States of America favors the establishment in Palestine of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people” (31).Of course, such declarations did not come at a cost to the US in the 1920s. The situation was to radically change in 1947–48 when such leading US government officials as Secretary of State George Marshall and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal argued against the US supporting the establishment of the State of Israel, asserting that such an action would put US oil needs in danger and could push the Arab states over to the side of the Soviet Union in the rapidly developing Cold War. While Truman overruled Marshall and Forrestal and de facto recognized the State of Israel after it was proclaimed, Tal never adequately explains why Truman then supported an arms embargo even as the UK was supplying arms to Egypt and Jordan, which had invaded Israel in 1948.Still, although the US at that time did not supply arms to Israel, it did provide critically needed economic aid to Israel in its early years, a development Tal explains in great detail (61–66).Tal’s description of US–Israeli relations during the Eisenhower years (1953–61) raises a number of questions. As is well known, after the 1956 Suez war, Eisenhower exerted heavy pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Sinai and Gaza Strip, something Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion reluctantly agreed to.While, as Tal notes, Eisenhower cited the Judeo-Christian tradition as the source of the bond tying together the United States and Israel, it did not stop him from pressuring Israel when he thought it was in the US interest to do so (80). Indeed, Eisenhower, like Marshall eight years earlier, feared that the Arabs would go over to the Soviet Union. While Tal cites US concerns about Israeli actions undermining the UN (85), the real reason was related to the US–Soviet Cold War, and the Eisenhower Doctrine, proclaimed in January 1957, clearly indicated this. I also find it hard to believe Eisenhower’s comment to Jewish leader Max Fisher in 1965, “Max, If I had a Jewish adviser working for me, I doubt I would have handled the situation the same way. I would not have forced the Israelis back” (87).One of the great strengths of the Tal book is his discussion of how the US–Israeli military relationship grew. Beginning with Dulles’s agreement to provide 100 anti-tank recoilless rifles, through John Kennedy’s sale of Hawk anti-aircraft weapons to the supply of F-35 fighter bombers, Tal meticulously describes the back and forth between US and Israeli officials on arms sales. Israel, as Tal correctly notes, wanted US arms almost as much as a show of US support as for the defensive capabilities they gave the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). However, Tal tends to downplay the strategic assistance that Israel provided to the US. A case in point is the Jordanian crisis of 1970. At that time, in what has become known as “Black September,” Syria, a Soviet ally, invaded Jordan, a US ally, to aid the PLO, which had become involved in a war with King Hussein who was seeking to crush the state-within-a-state that the PLO had created in Jordan. At the request of the United States, Israel mobilized its forces on the Golan Heights and put its fighter planes in the air near the Syrian border. The then Syrian air force commander (and later the Syrian President) Hafiz al-Asad, not willing to lose his Soviet supplied aircraft after Syria’s heavy aircraft losses in the 1967 Six Day war, decided not to send the Syrian air force to provide cover for the invading Syrian tanks. The end result was that the Jordanian air force attacked the invading tanks and forced them back into Syria. This, in my view, was the real beginning of strategic cooperation between the US and Israel, as Israel helped a US ally defeat a Soviet ally. The cooperation was manifested three years later when the US resupplied Israel during the Yom Kippur war and prevented the USSR from intervening in the conflict.Tal also highlights the impact on US public opinion of Leon Uris’s 1958 novel Exodus (later made into a movie) that painted the Israelis as heroic figures battling the Arabs. As Tal notes, the book had two major effects. First, it reinforced the ties of US Jews to Israel. (I recall the two rabbis of my synagogue in Philadelphia fulsomely praising the book.) Second, it presented a very sympathetic portrait of Israel to America’s non-Jewish population. Indeed, Tal cites former US Secretary of State John Kerry’s memoirs in which he described Exodus as “The story of a people fighting for a place in the world, a struggle for survival and recognition” (90).Another strength of Tal’s book is its detailed description of the various joint committees, joint projects, and other bilateral ties that have developed between the US and Israel over the past seven decades. Tal argues that it is precisely these ties that have enabled the US–Israeli relationship to survive conflicts, especially over West Bank settlement expansion since 1977 but also disputes with Jimmy Carter over the peace process, Ronald Reagan over the Israeli bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor and invasion of Lebanon, George H. W. Bush over loan guarantees linked to a stopping of settlement construction, George W. Bush over his call for a Palestinian State, and Barack Obama over the settlement issue. In making such an assertion, Tal tends to gloss over such incidents as the Pollard affair, where a Jewish US government employee was arrested for spying for Israel (285). As someone who served as a consultant to several US government agencies during the Pollard affair, I can attest to the fact that the Pollard affair had a much more serious effect on US–Israeli relations than Tal indicates.While, as noted, I am in agreement with much of what Tal has written in his book, there is one area in which I have to take serious exception. Tal deprecates the efforts of Dennis Ross and other US diplomats to forge a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians as a “formula for frustration repeated over and over again” (308). However, one could argue that, especially with Netanyahu as Israel’s Prime Minister, the situation (at least until October 7, 2023) would have been far worse without US pressure. Indeed, for those interested in a balanced view of US–Israeli relations, I would recommend reading Tal’s book in tandem with Ross’s study of US–Israeli relations, Doomed to Succeed.1In sum, despite some flaws, Tal’s The Making of an Alliance is a very useful book and one well worth reading.