Excellent insights - backed up by careful research - of events between the '48 and '67 wars. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy worked to find accommodation between Israel and the Arabs, the most effective track being the denial of weapons to either side to give them offensive capabilities. France, however, was more accommodating as it wished to see Nasser crushed for his support of the rebels in Algeria and supplied the IAF with advanced fighter aircraft - and the Dimona reactor that was the lynchpin in Israel's nuclear weapons program. The military maximalists represented most notably by Ben-Gurion and Dayan ceaselessly sought ways to insight the country's Arab neighbors, the most effective tactic being reprisal raids where there was a wholesale slaughter of civilians. Other tactics involved open provocations, such as Israeli tractors encroachment on the DMZ set up between Israel and Syria. As Dayan later noted in his memoirs, these were armored tractors pretty much immune to Syrian mortar and light arms fire, but presented an excellent pretext to lay a heavy dose of artillery and airstrikes on the Syrian positions. Ariel Sharon's infamous Unit 101 carried out the civilian massacre at Kibya in the West Bank and later (1954) a raid into Gaza that killed 40 Egyptian soldiers. The first raid garnered international approbation, but the second had wider consequence - Nasser, realizing he was totally out gunned turned to support from the Soviet Union, an arms buildup that led directly to the '67 War when Israel decided it had to crush the Egyptian military before it grew greater in strength.
Countering the militarists-territorial expansionists was (pretty much alone) Moshe Sharett, at various times either PM or foreign ambassador. In 1954-55 he held negotiations with Nasser on reaching a lasting peace, an effort totally opposed by Ben-Gurion/Dayan, leading to the Lavon Affair that totally destroyed relations between Israel and Egypt - as planned. The '56 War reflected poorly on Israel; Eisenhower simply would not stand for this blatant aggression and forced the IDF out of the Sinai. Despite Ben-Gurion's constantly changing lies about Dimona that morphed from a textile plant, an irrigation facility, and finally into a research site to study desert flora and fauna (the last one given to JFK at their first meeting) the official position of the USA remained that of an impartial arbiter in the Israeli-Arab dispute; Kennedy was only willing to supply Israel with Hawk anti-aircraft missiles. (Just to sidebar and go back in history, the USSR via Czechoslovakia was a major arms supplier to Israel in the '48 War; these supplies, plus those purloined from U.S. war surplus stocks gave Israel a clear military edge; the David and Goliath tale about this conflict is pure bunk.)
When Johnson became president, the restraint shown by his predecessors was thrown to the wind - in one year more military aid was given Israel than since the country's founding, and these were heavy-duty offensive weapons, including the then state-of-the-art Phantom jets. Johnson wanted to see Egypt crushed and provided Israel with overwhelming firepower. Exactly why is one of the few weaknesses of the book. It's suggested that this was a back-door way of slapping the USSR around, just like our backing of the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan twenty years later, partially out of desperation as things in Vietnam were turning brown very fast. What the U.S. foreign policy establishment did not anticipate was that Israel would use the fog of war to seize the West Bank and the Golan Heights (the latter after a cease-fire was called), nor that it would launch multiple air and torpedo boat attacks against the USS Liberty signals intelligence ship, killing 35 on board and wounding over a hundred, yet here we are 57 years later forking over $3.5 billion a year to the Israeli military machine. As Ariel Sharon said, "Nobody tells us what to do; we tell others what to do." The U.S. Congress, for endless decades, has made a most excellent poodle.
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