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The sometimes alliance: U.S. and Israel

By JAMES CHAPIN, UPI Political Analyst

NEW YORK, Nov. 24 (UPI) -- Never has so uncertain an alliance between

two states attracted as much attention as the relationship between the United States and Israel.

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Of course, much of this attention rests on a misconception: Americans and Arabs alike believe the United States is all that stands between Israel and destruction. It isn't.

Israeli developed its supremacy over the Arabs in the two decades between 1947 and 1967, largely without American help or more precisely, without a

great deal of help from the U.S. government.

In these earlier years, when Israel was in peril, the United States was not always there. In fact, the U.S.S.R. was more supportive of the establishment of Israel than was the U.S. government, which was heavily influenced by the

long-time "Arabists" in the State Department.

President Harry Truman switched in a pro-Israel direction only after American Labor Party candidate Leo Isaacson -- the ALP by then was a Communist front -- won a special election by 2-to-1 against the Democrat for Congress in a heavily Jewish East Bronx district in February 1948. It was this election that helped trigger Henry Wallace's defection from the Democrats. And it

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propelled Truman into overriding the cautions of his secretary of state, George Marshall, and to recognize Israel.

In 1956, when Israel joined with Britain and France to attack Gamel Abdul Nasser's takeover of the Suez Canal, and subsequent closing of that

canal to the Israelis, it was the U.S. President, Dwight Eisenhower, and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who saved Nasser, promising the Israelis they would be allowed to transit the Red Sea instead. Of course, when Nasser a decade later closed that route also, the U.S. government didn't lift a finger to help the Israelis.

In U.S. politics, down to the 1967 war, it was the left that supported Israel as the underdog and the right that was less sympathetic. Israel,

was after all, a country run by secular socialists.

The U.S. government didn't become Israel's major arms supplier until 1965. The United States provided only a limited arms to Israel, including

ammunition and recoilless rifles, prior to 1962. In that year, President John F. Kennedy sold HAWK anti-aircraft missiles, but only after the Soviet

Union provided Egypt with long-range bombers. That was the first year in which the United States sold tanks to Israel -- it sold the same tanks to Jordan. Also, 1966 was the first year in which the United States sold aircraft to Israel, and the same planes were sent to Morocco and Libya.

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During the Six-Day War, the United States embargoed military shipments to Israel, while

the U.S.S.R. sent materiel to the Arab states. It was only toward the end of 1968, when it became clear Israel no longer had other sources of

arms -- Germany stopped selling arms to Israel in 1965, and france in 1967 -- and that the Soviet Union intended to re-equip the Arab states, that President Lyndon Johnson agreed to sell Israel the Phantom jets that gave the Jewish state its first major advantage in equipment. On Nov. 4 of that year, Paul Warnke, assistant secretary of defense, told Israeli Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin, "We will

henceforth become the principal arms supplier to Israel, involving us even more intimately with Israel's security situation and involving more

directly the security of the United States."

Now that Israel was an established fact, the United States committed itself to preserve

that state, and made one major contribution to Israeli survival -- to keep the Soviets away. But that wasn't done for Israel's sake.

Everything changed after that -- once Israel was on top, the Right -- including many right-wing religious Jews who had opposed the formation of the country -- rushed forward to "save" it, while the Left, embarking on its third world course, came to the defense of the Palestinians.

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From 1968 on, the United States has pursued a policy of maintaining Israel's qualitative edge. The Americans have also armed Arab nations, providing sophisticated missiles, tanks and aircraft to Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Saudi

Arabia and the Gulf states. Thus, when Israel received F-15s in 1978, so did Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In 1981, Saudi Arabia, for the first time,

received a weapons system that gave it a qualitative advantage over Israel - AWACS radar

planes.

Today, Israel requires near top-of-the-line U.S. equipment, but many Arab states also receive some of America's best tanks, planes and missiles.

Israel's qualitative edge may be intact, but it is also narrow.

Ironically, the coming to power of Israeli rightists starting in 1977 has made relations between the two countries more fraught. Every Likud administration since the first has been pressured by the United States into making

accommodations with the Arabs. Menachem Begin had to be bullied and cajoled into the Camp David agreements; George Bush's father ended up pushing

Yitzhak Shamir from power, and Binyamin Netenyahu didn't do much better with Bill Clinton.

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Indeed, the present right wing American administration, which started with a pro-Ariel Sharon bias, has quickly found itself closer to Israel's Socialist Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, than to Sharon.

The existence of Israel is certainly an inconvenience for an American policy, which otherwise is based on supporting autocratic regimes in the Middle East.

If the United States stood back, the result might well be a huge war which Israel would win again -- and which the Arabs would still blame on the United States. America has used its support as a way of making Israel do things it might not have

done on its own, and will continue to do so. But the idea that it can force Israel into peace with the Palestinians (which has been U.S. policy for at least a decade) is not being stopped by the Israelis, but by the Palestinians.

Palestinians are suicide bombing in Israel, not in America. Whether or not their people cheer American disasters, the Palestinian leadership knows their only hope lies here, no matter what lies they may tell their own people.

At the height of the Oslo "peace process," when the United States was more pro-Palestinian than it has ever been, was when Osama bin Laden set off his bombs in East Africa. Ironically, what the Palestinians want from us now is our

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intervention -- what they are mad at is our abstention. Anything the United States does

-- even if it's nothing at all -- is a policy. We're just too big and too strong, as compared to anyone else.

The establishment -- and continuation -- of Israel is seen by most Arab Muslims -- the Muslims further east or west have other problems and other

enemies -- as an affront and as a clear statement of how weak they are -- bad enough to lose to Christians, but to lose to Jews?

Unless the United States made it its policy to destroy Israel, Israel will continue to exist, and as long as it does, it makes sense for Arabs to blame its existence on the United States. That way they can get more from America for their "cooperation," however limited it may be.

Clearly, by the way, Israel is part of the West -- if it wasn't, it would have "solved" its Palestinian problems in the way its Middle Eastern

neighbors have taken care of their minorities.

In the two months since the World Trade Center disaster, we have seen once again that the United States government, as it has many times before, is

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quite willing to put it's own interests ahead of those of Israel, and to force Israel to acquiesce.

The Israeli-American alliance remains, but most people in the world don't seem to understand its terms. They believe that the alliance is a

lopsided advantage for Israel, but in fact it is an alliance which may cost Israel more than it costs the United States.

That makes sense, given the power imbalance between the two nations. But it is a reality that remains unknown.

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