Customer Reviews

Friends in Deed: Inside the U.S.-Israel Alliance

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This is one of those books which you wished included a bit more information, at times. The authors recount the history of Israel's relationship with the United States from the founding of Israel (1949) to the mid-90s. Especially in the early part of the book, I was constantly curious for more information with regards to various issues, for instance the early Soviet support for Israel and its evaporation (was the US involved in that?), earlier espionage by Israel in the US (when we weren't that friendly), and other issues. The authors tend to skim over this period some. Then, later, the book stops approximately when it was written (in the mid-90s) so of course you're wishing it would continue on through the various gyrations that the Peace Process took in the late 90s, and of course the second Gulf War and the war on Terror are in the future from this perspective.

That makes this a good book, but somewhat dated. I'd be interested to see if the authors had any thought of revising and updating the work, and what they would say about current events.

This is a good book covering the history of the Israeli-American relations with a great deal of emphasis on the impact of AIPAC on American policy makers. The biggest negative for me was the constant referencing to conservatives as "right-wingers" with the blaring absence of thus referring to liberals as "left-wingers". This and the overt portrayal of mainstream conservatives in a negative light is a bitter pill to swallow, but one most American readers are used to and smart enough dismiss as typical deep-ceded liberal bias. The book is predictably unkind to the Likud party and subsequently minimized the threat of Arafat to Jews and his effect on the two great nation's relations. Overall, I recommend this book because the history of Judeo-Christian relations is the second most important factor in keeping Israel alive and thriving; the first is obviously, the God of Israel.

Melman and Raviv maintain that it is odd for the US a capitalist nation to be so staunchly allied to the "Socialist" Israel. They fail to realize that the socialist zionism is essentially a dead concept, that zionism has become a right-wing capitalist ideaology. It's simple, we finally created a nation based on zionism and where did it tend to capitalism or communism? capitalism...