With Friends Like These...

"When Israel, in the summer of 1985, proposed renewed links between Washington and Tehran, Secretary of State George P. Shultz futilely warned that Israel's agenda regarding Iran should be regarded as 'having a bias built in' and 'is not the same as ours'...Besides Shultz, many US experts understood that Israel had separate interests, but the White House ignored this fact."—Bob Woodward & David Hoffman, Washington Post, Feb. 8, 1987

Ronald Reagan is not the first American President whose dreams shattered against Middle Eastern realities. Everyone saw what the Ayatollah's intransigence in holding American Embassy hostages for 444 days did to Jimmy Carter's re-election prospects. Those who watched closely, however, also saw Israel's American supporters hard at work to forestall the second term in which Carter had promised Anwar Sadat to push along with the other half of the Camp David agreement—a just peace for the Palestinians. Remember how the story of brother Billy's connection with the Libyans broke just before the election? Somebody paid a fortune to an Italian intelligence operative to put that information into the hands of American Michael Ledeen (yes, that Michael Ledeen) who just happened to be a paid consultant to Italian intelligence in 1980. Ledeen broke the whole sordid story in the US press—just before election day.

Gerald Ford changed, almost overnight, from an unthinking Congressional supporter of Israel to a concerned US President, determined to support Anwar Sadat's bid for an overall Middle East peace. Ford didn't get a chance, however, and the entire American pro-Israel establishment—fund-raisers, media supporters, and one-issue voters—celebrated their 1976 election victory with a collective sigh of relief.

And there was Richard Nixon, who had spent his first term arming the Israelis to the teeth so that they would feel secure enough during his second term to accept an ultimatum to start trading land for peace. After his reelection in 1972, he told Henry Kissinger to crack down on the Israelis to make them shape up. And suddenly Watergate began to grow and grow and grow. The biggest Woodward and Bernstein revelation, someday, will be the identity (or identities if they're plural) of "Deep Throat," whose leaks from inside the White House first crippled and then aborted the second Nixon term. If a Deep Throat has gone on to become an important cog in Washington's mighty pro-Israel machinery, it will be obvious that the motive for bringing Nixon down hard was to prevent him from making Israel an offer it couldn't refuse.

Now, however, we have an American President ruined not because he was increasingly skeptical of Israel, but because he was never skeptical enough. A few of Israel's American supporters are smart enough to realize that an uncritical US President like Reagan, who has permitted Israeli leaders to get away with anything they wanted, is the greater danger to the Jewish state's long-term survival. On April 28, 1985, Richard Straus, editor of Middle East Policy Survey and a former American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) staffer, sounded the first alarm when he wrote in the Washington Post:

"Israel and AIPAC...pushed hard through the 1970s for more American aid, weapons and diplomatic support for Israel...Then one day, sometime in the mid-1980s, Israel and AIPAC realized...they were pushing against a door that was already open."

The door was certainly open in early 1982 when Ariel Sharon told Reagan's first Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, Israel was going to invade Lebanon to get at the Palestinians there. Haig's "green light" cost 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, 600 Israelis, and more than 250 Americans their lives, fractured Israeli society, and got Haig fired. Everyone learned something except President Reagan. At the height of the 1982 Beirut bloodbath he astonished his staff, according to Straus, by telling them that "once we get this matter cleaned up we can get on with our natural relationship (whereby) Israel protects the oilfields and our interests throughout the region."

His new secretary of state, George Shultz, at first disregarded the boss's softheadedness about Israel. Right after the Sabra-Shatila massacres, when the President sent the Marines back, too late, into Beirut, Shultz announced the "Reagan Plan" for Mideast peace. Like Nixon's Rogers Plan, it would have the Israelis give back Arab lands seized in 1967 in return for Arab recognition of Israel's right to exist in peace within its June 5, 1967 borders. The Israelis rejected the US peace plan but at a summit meeting in Fez, Morocco, the Arabs announced it was "compatible" with their own.

Instead of capitalizing on this breakthrough, however, Shultz worried about his own lackluster image in the US media. Advisers suggested it might improve if he backed away from his initial insistence that the unsolved Palestinian question was at the root of US Middle East problems.

"Somewhere between January and May 1984 Shultz underwent a complete transformation," Strauss has quoted a State Department official as saying. "In doing so, Shultz became the first senior administration official while in office to shift away from the Arabs and not the other way around."

The rest is history. AIPAC executive director Thomas Dine soon was describing Shultz as "the architect of the special relationship" between the US and Israel and "US project manager for Israel's economy." The Secretary of State got his media exposure, but squandered it in verbal meanders ascribing American problems overseas to a seemingly causeless "terrorism." When he learned that at Israel's suggestion his President was pursuing deals with the very terrorists Shultz was denouncing, he should have resigned, thereby alerting the President to the terrible mistake he was making. Instead, Shultz passively awaited the disclosures that have discredited them both.

The pro-Israel cancer in the American body politic may already have doomed Vice President George Bush as well. According to Strauss, Bush was "known to share many of George Shultz's original Middle East views." The Israeli Government therefore sent Amiram Nir in mid-1986 to brief Bush on its dealings with Iran. If the record eventually shows that Bush did not then speak out forcefully against them, future voters will question his judgment.

Journalist H.L. Mencken once remarked that no one ever went broke underestimating the good taste of the American public. American showman P.T. Barnum observed that a sucker is born every minute. Even the suckers are becoming uneasily aware, however, that an uncontrolled Israel, long a disaster for its Arab neighbors, has become a disaster for the United States and American Jews as well. A catastrophic burden for supporters as well as skeptics, and for both kinds of American Presidents. —Richard Curtiss

Richard Curtiss, a retired US Information Agency Foreign Service Officer, is author of A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute.