An Informal Political History of Israel

Backstory

            In response to anti-semitism, the modern Zionist movement arose at the end of the 19th century. Since at least 1492, Europe had sought to remove its minority Turkic (Moslem) and Jewish populations as it sought to consolidate its Christian identity. Theodore Herzl, the spiritual founder of Zionism, proposed that Jews could only be safe in their state in their historic homeland. In the  Bible, Zionists claim God promised the Land of Israel to the Jews.

            In 1906, the British government offered the Zionists a tract in Uganda. Canada, Australia, Iraq, Libya, and Angola were also explored but rejected. Jacob Schiff, the American financier, helped to settle 9,300 Jews in Texas between 1907 and 1914. The Zionist dream of a homeland in Palestine endured. Private entities started buying land there and settling Jews. In the Book of Exodus, God saves Jews from the Tenth Egyptian plague. Passover, the traditional celebration of this deliverance, ends with the prayer, "Next year in Jerusalem." Many people take it literally.

            Palestine was then part of the Ottoman Empire, the "sick man of Europe." One of the major impetuses for World War I was the European desire to colonize the Middle East. The Jewish organization in Palestine before World War I, the Yishuv, plainly told Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the United States Ambassador to the Sublime Porte (Constantinople), that removing the Arabs from Palestine was the sine qua non for the creation of the Jewish State. Palestine, however, was then ruled by the Ottoman Turks.

 

World War I

            Europe marched happily off to war in 1914, oblivious to the horror ahead. As total war descended on both the military and civilian populations, victory for the allied powers of France, the British Empire, and Russia, against the Central Powers of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, depended on keeping control of the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal was the Allies' lifeline with its access to the raw materials and manpower of their colonial empires. For example, 700,000 Vietnamese were brought to France to fight and work in munitions factories, of whom 80,000 were killed. They returned to Vietnam after the war without the putative rights for which they fought and died. Similarly, black American veterans were still denied the vote in the American South. Only the Communists in Russia, after the revolution and their exit from the war, said they supported independence for the capitalist colonies and equality for subjugated people.

            Control of the Suez Canal required that both the Palestinian Arabs and Jews be allied to Britain. So, Britain made two contradictory promises. It promised, if it won the war, to let the Arabs and the Jews each create an independent state in Palestine. Fighting for its life, Britain, naturally, saw these mutually exclusive promises as a necessary military expedient. All is fair in love and war.

Balfour Declaration

            On November 2, 1917, the British Foreign Secretary wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild that became known as the Balfour Declaration. It said:

 

                His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the

                Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being

                 clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of

                 existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any

                other country.

 

The reason for this declaration was not only to show its sincerity to the Jews who were fighting alongside the British in Palestine but also "to appeal to neutral opinion" in other countries. During World War I, Germans were the largest immigrant group in the United States, many of whom were Jewish. Fearing, not unreasonably, that German-American Jews might not be wholeheartedly behind the Allied war effort that America had entered the previous April, Balfour wrote his letter to give Jews a stake in a British victory.

 

The Importance of Borders

            For the three thousand years until World War I, there were no borders in Palestine. Borders are the creation of societies with plentiful rainfall. In the desert, land is useless and meaningless without water. That is one reason for the Arab tradition of extending hospitality to all strangers. Denying water to someone in the desert is a death sentence. It is the oases that matter. Gaza was the traditional caravan crossroads between Africa and Asia because it sits atop an aquifer.

            In 1920, the treaty of Sčvres between the Ottoman Empire and the victorious Allies ceded most of the area not inhabited by Turkic people to Britain, France, Greece, and Italy. Britain and France received Mandates from the League of Nations to govern the area. France took Lebanon and Syria, while Britain was given Palestine and Trans-Jordan. The British then put members of the Hashemite Monarchy on the thrones of Jordan and Iraq. Egypt was a British protectorate from 1882 until it declared independence in 1922, although British troops did not evacuate the country until after the Suez War of 1956.

            So, the Middle East was colonized in everything but name by the British and French after World War I. Nominally independent nations like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Palestine were carved out of the old Ottoman Empire. However, where there had been free movement and no borders between the administrative districts within the Ottoman Empire, with the coming of the Western governors, that changed.

 

 

The Inter-War Years

            The story of the Versailles Peace Treaty that ended World War I, the hyperinflation in Germany, the rise of Hitler, and anti-semitism in Germany is too well known to be repeated here. I will only add that even Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the organizer of the Jewish Legion that fought with the British in Palestine during World War I and the founder of the Betar and Irgun Jewish self-defense organizations, tried in 1938 to organize the evacuation of millions of Jews from Poland to Madagascar. Jabotinsky's warnings ignored as war clouds darkened over Europe, he wondered if the Zionist organization hadn't made a mistake by not accepting a temporary homeland in Africa when it was offered by the British in 1906. At least there would have been somewhere for the Jews to flee as war approached in Europe. Zionism's insistence that Israel had to include Jerusalem turned out to be an Achilles Heel. Current scholarship reveals that Hitler's original idea for a "final solution" of removing the Jews from Europe was to send the Jews to Madagascar, but when the exigencies of war rendered that plan unfeasible, the campaign of mass murder emerged in its place.

            It is important to note that the Germans knew that the concentration camps were not going to be popular, even in their own country, so the government went to great lengths to keep the whole operation secret. Secrecy was also necessary to keep deportees in the dark about their ultimate fate. That is why the reports of mass murder that were coming to the West were not believed, even in places like France, where the deportations to the camps were happening. When the first concentration camps were liberated by the Russians, their accounts were dismissed as anti-German propaganda.

 

Pre-Independence Zionism

            Jews were, naturally, traumatized by the slaughter of six million of their co-religionists and embarked on a campaign to make it unique by appropriating the word holocaust, which had been in the English language since 1647, to describe it. The effect has been to wipe the other six million deaths in the concentration camps: Catholics, birth defectives, homosexuals, gypsies, political opponents, and others out of the history of World War II. Twelve million people were killed in the concentration camps, not six.

            World War II was a mass slaughter. About 15 million soldiers and 45 million civilians, with 25 million wounded, was the butcher's bill out of a world population of 1.5 billion. That's 4% of the world's population killed and another 1.5% wounded. When Hitler invaded Russia in Operation Barbarossa, the Germans captured two million Soviet soldiers in the first months that they starved to death, not even bothering to use them as slave labor, so overconfident or incompetent were they. The attitude toward death in war is best described by Stalin, who said, "A single death is a tragedy, but one million deaths is a statistic."

            In the wake of the revelations about the mass slaughter of Jews in the concentration camps, the Zionists now embarked on the establishment of Israel with a will. The founding idea of Israel is that they can only trust themselves for security. Most of the inmates of the concentration camps who survived had no homes to return to, even if they had wished to do so. Millions of refugees were on the move in Europe as borders were redrawn. About 10 million Germans fled or were expelled from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia at the end of World War II.

             Israel sought and accepted the Jewish refugees. First, they needed to persuade the British to relinquish control. Irgun and Betar moved from self-defense to terror, famously blowing up the King David Hotel, the site of the British Military Command, killing 91 and injuring 45. A warning was given but ignored. After all, these were the same people who had been Britain's allies a short time before. Overall, the British lost 750 soldiers and police lives before relinquishing their mandate.

            On the political front, the Jewish Agency and its supporters claimed the right to occupy "A land with no people for a people with no land."  It was effective. The guilt of the West was on full display with the passage, on November 27, 1947, by the United Nations of Resolution 181, partitioning Palestine between the Jews and Arabs. The resolution called for the creation of two states with Jerusalem under international supervision. The vote was 33 to 13 with ten abstentions. However, none of the votes in favor came from the Middle East. Thirteen of the Yes votes came from Latin America and the Caribbean. Thirteen more came from Eastern and Western Europe. Two were from Africa, three were from Asia-Pacific, and two were from North America. The Yes vote closest to Israel was Ukraine, which is 1,500 miles away.

            The No votes were from all the nations affected by the decision: Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, and Greece. Great Britain, the Mandatory Authority in Palestine responsible for keeping the peace between the Jews and Arabs,  abstained. Clearly, Israel was imposed on the Middle East by outsiders.

            Although there was a United Nations arms embargo, the Jews, with their supporters, were more easily able to arm themselves. The Jewish Legion that had fought with the British were trained, battle-hardened European soldiers. In contrast, the Arab armies were ill-trained and ill-equipped peasants and herders. The Arab countries were vassels of Great Britain and France. The Jordanian Army was commanded and trained by the British Sir John Glubb. When American troops had invaded North Africa less than six years before, commanders discovered that the indigenous population was useless for military intelligence purposes because most could not count beyond twenty.

            Israel's Hagannah troops trained in secret camps in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, among other sites. American Jews raised money to buy arms and shipped bullets to Israel in bolts of cloth. Israel had a vast network of American supporters.

 

Independence

             Eight hours before Britain's governing mandate in Palestine expired on May 15, 1948, Israel declared its independence. At 11 minutes after midnight on May 14, 1948, over the objections of the State Department and George C. Marshall, Secretary of State, who was worried about alienating the Arabs and access to its oil, President Truman recognized the de facto independence of Israel. The United States was the first nation to recognize Israel's independence.

           

President Truman's Re-election Campaign

            President Truman had other things on his mind. Nineteen-forty-eight was a presidential election year. After fourteen years of continuous Democratic rule, in the 1946 off-year elections, the Republicans gained 55 seats in the House of Representatives and 12 seats in the Senate to give them control of Congress for the first time since 1928. Truman's chances for re-election in 1948 looked bleak.

            Not only did the tide seem to be trending Republican, but Truman faced defections from the left and right of his party. In response to the emerging civil rights movement, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond ran as the States' Rights (Dixiecrat) candidate for President. He hoped, in a replay of the 1876 presidential election,  to wring concessions from either Dewey or Truman by winning enough electoral votes in the South to deny both major party candidates an electoral college victory. That would force a contingent election into the House of Representatives, where each state has only one vote. On the liberal side, Henry Wallace, FDR's third-term vice-president, was running as a Progressive against the emerging anti-communist hysteria and was looking to continue the wartime cooperation with Russia. The smart money was on Dewey.

            Campaign finance laws require cash upfront to avoid having their services considered illegal campaign contributions. Truman didn't have enough money to pay the railroads for the special train needed for his whistle-stop campaign. Once he recognized Israel's independence, David Dubinsky, head of the overwhelmingly Jewish International Ladies Garment Worker's Union in New York, gave Truman the money that literally got his campaign moving again.

 

The War for Independence

            Immediately after declaring independence, the United Nations appointed Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat who had negotiated the release of prisoners from German concentration camps, to mediate the Israeli - Arab differences. He devised a plan, but fearing its acceptance by the Zionist leadership, Irgun radicals assassinated him in Cairo. Even before Israel had declared independence, the same Jewish terrorists perpetrated the Deir Yassin massacre of 107 Arabs, including women and children. This event terrorized the Arabs, who fled the fighting once the war began.

            It goes without saying that the Israelis won the War for Independence, but the peace that was supposed to follow has eluded it ever since. Israel ended up occupying more land than it was awarded by the United Nations, including half of Jerusalem. The Israelis lost 6,400 (4,000 soldiers and 2,400 civilians out of an armed force that eventually reached over 100,000 while the  Arabs lost between 6,700 and 20,000 out of a force of just over 60,000. The fact that there is no precise count of the Arab loses speaks volumes.

 

The Labor Zionists and the Arabs

            The Zionists who founded the State of Israel were mostly Labor Zionists who were social democrats from Eastern and Western Europe. They saw themselves as pioneers, settlers who were going to make the desert bloom. They were kibbutzniks, socialists who believed in common property. Given the attitudes of the Labor Zionists, it was not impossible to envision two nations, Jews and Arabs, occupying the same land in peace.

            The aftermath of the War of Independence displeased both sides. The Arabs, of course, resented the borders that created a new state with new laws and a new language. They most resented the fact that the Arabs who fled the fighting were not allowed to return to their previous homes, which were taken over, without compensation, by Jews. Most of the Palestinians who had lived before 1948 in what is now Israel and their descendants have lived in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Gaza ever since.

            The Israelis looked at the map of their new state, which was only nine miles wide at the narrowest point, strung out along the Mediterranean coastline, without any natural resources to speak of. Not only did Israel see the armistice lines as indefensible, but water, the life's blood of desert development, lay under the West Bank and Gaza. The first major postwar conflict with the Arabs was over the allocation of water from the Jordan River.

 

Immigration

            Jews and Arabs had lived together in the Middle East for centuries. After the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, they were invited to settle in the Ottoman Empire. In 1948, there were 150,000 Jews living in Iraq, 80,000 in Egypt, 50,000 in Yemen, and 200,000 in Iran and Turkey. Israel was of two minds on the subject. It wanted to rescue Jews who were in danger but was more ambivalent about accepting those who were not. A sizable Jewish minority in an Arab nation would have facilitated peaceful co-existence. On the other hand, Israel felt the need to rapidly increase its population, and getting the Jews from Arab countries seemed to be the easiest way. There was the pull of attracting Jews to migrate to Israel and the push of discrimination Jews experienced in the Muslim-majority countries. By 2019, only 12,700 Jews remained in Iran and 14,800 in Turkey.

 

Ben Shemen Village

            Here's what a traveler to Israel wrote to his in-laws in New York in 1953.

            "I am enjoying my stay here very much. Anyone, however, who should think that

            antique and biblical times surround you is totally mistaken. It seems that practically

            all the places where the visitor would like to go are in the Arab part of the country

            which is, from Israel, inaccessible since the frontiers are all closed. Israel is all new

            building and places where destruction from the war with the Arabs can be seen. Life

            for the Israeli citizens seems to be quite tough and austere. But there is among the

            people a great deal of confidence, and there certainly have been near miracles of

            accomplishment (even if Otto [father-in-law] should say that it was done with

            American money, which is true) if you see a photograph of some 40 or 50 years ago

            when Tel-Aviv was existing only as a set of sand dunes, and today there is a modern

            city of  Ľ million inhabitants, that is an accomplishment on anybody's pocketbook.

 

            "Yesterday, I visited a children's village, Ben Shemen, which is the first of that kind,

            and later on imitated many times. There, one can see the real strategy of Israel. To

            fully concentrate on the new generation and take good care that the old prejudices

            are not perpetuated. Such a village is inhabited mainly, though not exclusively, by

            children whose parents are still awaiting to immigrate. In the case of Moroccan,

            Yemenite and other oriental Jews, the agency is making a point to bring the children

            into Israel prior to the parents. The chief aim is to forestall the growing up of youth

             in self-styled ghettos so that within one generation, one will not say: Look

            at this Moroccan or at this Yemenite or at this Persian. Naturally, this is a humanistic

            experiment which is much farther reaching than the State of Israel, it is a determined

            attempt to erase prima facie prejudice and to build one instead of several societies.

            What I did not know when I came here is that there are some 70-odd nationalities

            from where Jews have come to Israel. And, needlesss to say, the Germans have

            contempt for the Moroccans, and the Polish joke about the Persians and all

             the occidentals feel vastly superior to the orientals.

 

            "With this generation, it would be a waste to even attempt re-education, but with

             the new blood it must be done, and it is being done in the most remarkable manner.

 

            "When I get back, I will show Otto some literature on Ben Shamen, and I would like

            him to put that particular village on his list ‒ through a "deductible" agency, of course."

 

            The purpose of Israel's program to create a "new Jew" was in response to the myth that during the Holocaust, Jews had gone "to the slaughter like sheep."

            Needless to say, there was no comparable American movement to help displaced Palestinians. Former Arab residents of Israel were kept in United Nations-supported refugee camps where they and their descendants remain three-quarters of a century later. The United Nations estimated that 711,000 Palestinians who had lived in what became Israel fled or were expelled during the war.

 

 

Coups

            While our traveler was touring Israel in 1953, momentous changes were sweeping the Arabs and the world in general. The Arab defeat in the war with Israel stoked revolutionary fervor in the Middle East. In July 1952, Egyptian colonels seized power, ousting King Farouk whom they blamed for the poor performance of the army in the war against Israel. Farouk left for a sybaritic retirement in Monaco and Italy. He would be joined there four years later by Bao Dai, the hereditary ruler of Vietnam who had been ousted by American-backed Nho Dhin Diem.

            Although Iran had not been a belligerent in the war with Israel, the United States and Britain were plotting the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh's government because of the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Iran's oil was an essential component of Britain's national defense posture.[1] Israel, with no oil deposits, needed British control of Iranian oil.

            The United States viewed every socialist government as a potential ally of the Communists. Mossadegh was removed from office in August. Thus began a quarter century of the Shah's American-backed dictatorship, culminating in the 1979-80 Embassy hostage crisis. The Shah secretly supplied Israel with its oil in the 1950s.

           

Bandung Conference and Decolonization

            As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union gathered strength in the 1950s, many of the new nations emerging from colonial domination organized themselves into the non-aligned bloc. Organized by India, Indonesia, Burma (Myanmar), and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), it was held in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia in 1955.  Twenty-nine countries, representing half the world's population, attended.

            Attendees from the Middle East were Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey. Pointedly, Israel was not invited due to the threat of a boycott by the Arab members. Israel presented itself as just another nation newly emerging from domination. As the Kingdom of Israel had been conquered in 538 BC, and the Bible had promised the Land of Israel to the Jews, Israelis saw themselves as the same as the other Middle Eastern nations laying claim to their historic homeland, like the Algerians expelling the French or the Egyptians ousting the English.

            Also, Israel was moving closer to the West for mutually beneficial reasons. France was Israel's major supplier of conventional weapons. Israel's neighbors, French-occupied Syria and Lebanon became independent after World War II, and the French lost Indochina after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. It is hard to overemphasize the importance of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Dien Bien Phu had the same effect as the Russian defeat by Japan in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War; it was the first time a guerilla army defeated a major military power.[2] 

            Algeria was France's last major possession in Africa, and it faced an internal rebellion. After Nasser came to power in Egypt, the Egyptians helped the FLN rebels in Algeria, so both France and Israel had difficult relations with Egypt.

            When the United States refused to sell weapons to Egypt, it got them from Czechoslovakia. This arms deal, signaling Egypt's friendlier relations with the Communist bloc, became a major motivation for French-Israeli cooperation.

            Although Egypt and Iran are nations, they are also ancient civilizations. Egypt had been ambivalent about joining the Arab attack on Israel in 1948. Nations with ancient cultural traditions tend to view themselves as above the fray and see newcomers like the United States and Israel as immature, arrogant, belligerent upstarts, though they feel threatened by and jealous of American cultural and military hegemony.

 

The Lavon Affair

            As previously mentioned, Egypt was negotiating with Britain to remove its troops from the country. Israel viewed such a development with alarm as it saw the British troops in the Suez Canal as protection against Egyptian aggression. Consider that within a dozen years, Israel had moved from fighting beside England in World War II to fighting against Britain to get it out of Palestine, to re-allying with Britain and France in a common cause against Egypt. To paraphrase British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, a nation has no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.

            Israel embarked on a covert operation to persuade the British to remain in Egypt by demonstrating that the Egyptians were unable to administer their own affairs and were a threat to the Suez Canal. The Israeli secret services recruited several Egyptian Jews to plant bombs inside American, British, and Egyptian libraries, movie theaters, and schools, timed to go off late at night when the buildings were empty. The Israelis hoped to put the blame on the Moslem Brotherhood.

            The plan went badly awry. The 11 operatives were exposed and arrested. Two were sentenced to death, two were acquitted, two committed suicide in prison, and five served prison sentences. Pinchas Lavon, Israel's Defense Minister, denied all knowledge of the affair, which caused a scandal in Israel. He was forced to resign nonetheless.

            Due to strict censorship of Israel's press, the arrest, conviction, and execution of the Egyptian Jews were presented to the Israeli public as just another manifestation of Arab anti-semitism. Israel denied any involvement until 2005 when the surviving operatives were given certificates of appreciation for their efforts on behalf of Israel.

            The ineptitude and amateurish nature of the destabilization plot was perplexing. It was absurd to think a few bombs that harmed no one would affect the seismic diplomatic and military forces reshaping the Middle East. The real purpose of the plot seems to have been to derail the secret negotiations between Prime Minister Moshe Sharrett and Nasser. Sharrett was Israel's first Foreign Minister and second Prime Minister. He had served in the Ottoman Army during World War I and was, first and foremost, a diplomat. Parts of his personal diaries are still classified. He lost the internal power struggle to the militarists David Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres, and Moshe Dayan. It would take three wars with 4,000 Israeli dead and 30,000 Arab deaths, tens of thousands of wounded, and untolled billions in destroyed munitions for Egypt and Israel to make peace ‒ a peace it probably could have secured at a far lower price in 1955.    

 

The Suez War

            The failure of the Lavon affair did nothing to dampen Israel's desire to stop the United States and Britain from supporting Nasser's negotiations to remove British troops from Egypt. Again, I won't recapitulate the series of events: the American refusal to sell arms to Egypt, the Czech arms deal, the reneging on America's commitment to helping build the Aswan Dam, and Nasser's seizure of the Suez Canal. The history of these events is well-known and not controversial.

            France, however, was the most threatened by these events. They had just lost their colony in Indochina and were facing an armed rebellion, assisted by the Egyptians, in Algeria. Also, France was the major stockholder in the Suez Canal Company. The canal had been built by Britain and France.

            Consequently, France invited Britain and Israel to join in a secret cabal, hatched coincidentally in Sčvres, to retake the canal and oust Nasser from power. The plan was for Israel to retaliate for one of the terror attacks by invading Egypt. Britain and France would then intervene by seizing the Suez Canal under the rubric of being peacekeepers who would separate the belligerents.

            The plan went off without a hitch. Israel, eight years old and allegedly surrounded by more numerous, stronger enemies, conquered the Sinai Peninsula in six days. The British and French bombed the Egyptian air force on the ground. Nasser retaliated by sinking ships in the canal, squeezing Europe's oil supply by closing it. And then, things started to fall apart.

            Britain and France appealed to the United States for emergency supplies of oil to replace those normally coming through the canal. President Eisenhower was enraged for several reasons. First, after warning the British not to use force, he had been kept in the dark about the operation.

            Anti-government riots were convulsing communist Poland and Hungary starting on October 23. Israel attacked Egypt on October 29, and the Soviets sent tanks to suppress the Hungarian revolution on November 4. When the British and French seized the   canal on November 5, it completely undercut the West's moral high ground in the Cold War vis-a-viz freedom for subjugated peoples.

            Furthermore, Ike was facing re-election on November 6. While the United States did supply Europe with emergency oil supplies, it was not enough to prevent gas rationing in France, which lasted for months. More seriously, Ike threatened fianancial disaster by blocking Britain's ability to borrow money and selling its holdings of British government bonds if the war didn't end. This marked the end of Britain as a major world military power as it could no longer act independently without American support.

            Israel was another story entirely. Once in possession of the Sinai Peninsula, it refused to evacuate. Demonstrations were held in Israel in opposition to the United Nations resolution calling for its return to Egyptian control. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion asserted that Israel had not invaded "Egypt proper", implying that Sinai was part of Erez Israel given to the Jews by God.

            Eisenhower, safely re-elected in a landslide, threatened to remove the tax-exempt status enjoyed by purchasers of State of Israel Bonds. Eventually, Israel complied, but not before it mapped the Sinai and secreted food, fuel, ammunition, and water supplies in anticipation of its return 11 years later.

            Nevertheless, in exchange for its evacuation of the Sinai, Israel received promises from the United States guaranteeing passage of its ships through the Straits of Tiran, an unprecedented reward to an aggressor. The Straits of Tiran is a seven-mile-wide passage between Egypt and Saudi Arabia that controls access to the Gulf of Aqaba from the Red Sea. The Israeli port of Eilat and the Jordanian port of Aqaba are on the gulf.

 

           

            Territorial waters are a subject of dispute. Some nations claim three miles, others claim 12, and still others claim 200. In the case of waterways like the Straits of Tiran, the entire opening or the passable channels may be in the claimed territorial waters of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The Gulf of Aqaba has been an international waterway since the fall of the Ottoman Empire because it is bordered by four nations. Maritime tradition has held that no sovereign nation can deny innocent passage to any international body of water, but this makes straits like Tiran, the Dardenelles, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Strait of Malacca potential military flashpoints.

            The Suez War is frequently omitted or barely mentioned in Israel's historical narrative.

 

A Personal Interregnum

           

            Our traveler from 1953 returned to Israel with his family in 1960. While our traveler conducted the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, his sons spent a week at Kibbutz HaZore'a, 15 miles southeast of Haifa, cutting sunflowers. Sunflowers were roasted and sold like popcorn as a snack in movie theaters. During the maestro's sons' orientation tour of the kibbutz, their guide showed them the cafeteria and administration building that had been financed by reparations from West Germany. They toured the fruit orchards, carpentry shop, chicken coops, and fields. The guide said they had to see the fish ponds and led them to a remote corner of the kibbutz where they saw pig pens. The guide explained they were called fish ponds to conceal their purpose from both the local Arabs and the religious Jewish benefactors, both of whom forbade eating pork as unclean. The pork raised at the kibbutz was subsequently exported as canned Polish ham.

            The Mann Auditorium had been a gift from the Philadelphia industrialist and philanthropist Fredric R. Mann, the benefactor of the Mann Music Center in Fairmont Park, Philadelphia. He had donated a new, 1959 air-conditioned Chrysler station wagon to the Israel Philharmonic to use as its official car for ferrying world-renowned artists to and from the concert hall. The car cost $4,500, but in order to accept it, the orchestra had to raise another $4,500 to pay import duties and the luxury tax, which was 100% at that time.

            The housing provided for the performers was pre-fabricated. Madame Shaoul, a refugee from Romania, was the housekeeper. One night, one of the maestro's sons got up to go to the bathroom and, turning on the light, screamed when he saw the entire wall undulating under an army of marching ants. Madame Shaoul came running, admonishing the boy to not touch the ants. If the train had been broken, all the ants left after the break in the rear would become lost and settle in the house. Left alone, the army would pass through.

            While the maestro rehearsed, his wife and children were shown the country. The road from  Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was still lined with burned-out school buses from the War for Independence. From the heights, white Jeeps with big blue U.N. initials on the roof could be seen patrolling the border.

 

The Six-Day War of Choice

            The maestro was back in Israel in May and early June 1967. One day, the maestro came into rehearsal to find that a handful of string players were missing. Israel, with an all-reserve army, was mobilizing. Nasser had requested the removal of the U.N. peacekeepers from Sinai and had closed the straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. War was in the air. Over the following days, more and more orchestra members disappeared, to the point where the program could not be performed. The State Department was advising Americans to leave.

            U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations, offered to move the peacekeepers from the Egyptian side of the border where they had been stationed to the Israeli side. Israel refused. International peacekeepers had never been permitted on Israel's side of the border as they were viewed as an encroachment on Israeli sovereignty. The white U.N. Jeeps seen in 1960 had been on Jordan's side of the border. But Israel's refusal showed they were not worried about being attacked, but, as subsequent events proved, as an impediment to their own aggressive designs.

            Back in Washington, President Johnson was talking of assembling a naval task force to reopen the Straits of Tiran. Meanwhile, he asked the CIA for its assessment of outcomes in the event of war. The CIA responded that in the event of hostilities, Israel would win in 10 days.   Still smarting from alleged CIA failures in Vietnam, where the U.S. was struggling, Johnson asked them to double-check. It returned with an unchanged assessment, even if Israel had to fight a multi-front war. Johnson may have been somewhat skeptical because the U.S. secretly sent Israel tanks in May, even though the war in Vietnam was still accelerating and troop levels there were approaching 450,000.

            The CIA knew that Egypt was not prepared for nor planning a war with Israel. Its crack troops were fighting in Yemen, supporting the Republicans in their civil war against the Royalists, who were supported by Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.

            The Israelis were not idle. Minister of Foreign Affairs Abba Eban came to Washington to consult with Johnson. He wanted to ensure that the United States would not force Israel to relinquish any gains from the war, as it had 11 years earlier. Eban was a diplomat and a moderate. The moderates had been persuaded to support the war with the promise from the hawks that after the war, land gained would be traded for peace with the Palestinians. This deal was viewed as a reification of the Arab State mentioned in the U.N. resolution that created Israel.

            Johnson's motives were transparent. The Vietnam War was going badly, and Jews were prominent in the anti-war movement. Johnson hoped his help to Israel would make Jews more sympathetic to his Vietnam policy. Also, in the world of the zero-sum Cold War with the communists, a win in the Middle East would compensate for the losing cause in Southeast Asia. An Israeli victory would also prove the superiority of Western armaments over those of the Soviet-supplied Egyptian ones.

            The imbalance ran deeper. Israel had two pilots for every one of its French Mirage III fighter-bombers. Israel tested all its students to find the most capable and put them in a special school where they trained as pilots beginning at age 15. Research determined that the optimum age for flying agility in those pre-computerized aircraft was 19. Israeli pilots were retired in their early 20s. Egypt, on the other hand, had two planes for every pilot.

            The trajectory of the Six-Day War is well known. On June 5, Israel attacked and, within three hours, destroyed 450 of the 600 aircraft in the combined Arab air forces. Having control of the skies assured victory. In six days, Israel reconquered the Sinai Peninsula, plus the West Bank and the Golan Heights of Syria. The Israel Defense Forces are an all-reserve military. When they mobilize, the civilian economy comes to a stop, so Israel could not afford to wait to be attacked. Israeli military strategy is to fight quick wars with overwhelming force to bring them to a quick conclusion. All people court trouble if they mobilize armies and then ask them to wait.

            Back in Washington, the Johnson Administration had to do damage control when, on June 8, halfway through the war,   the Israelis attacked the lightly armed American spy ship USS Liberty, killing 34, wounding 178, and almost sinking the vessel. Israel apologized, claiming it was an accident. A more likely explanation for the hours-long attack is Israel's mistrust, left over from the 1956 war, of American potential to thwart Israel's expansionist aims. The attack on the Liberty deprived the United States of real-time independent information about the conduct of the war.

            The whole story about the Johnson Administration's policies toward the Six-Day War will probably never be known because LBJ had an independent line of communication with the Israeli government.

            Arthur Krim was the President of United Artists and Orion Pictures. He was also chairman of the National Democratic Party's Finance Committee during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. The after party from President Kennedy's famous Madison Square Garden 45th birthday celebration, where Marilyn Monroe sang, "Happy Birthday, Mr. President," was held at Krim's New York apartment.

            For three and a half years, during the Johnson Administration, Krim and his wife Mathilda had a room in the White House and were discretely at Johnson's side constantly. They even were persuaded to build a vacation home in Texas adjacent to the LBJ ranch.

            When Mathilda Krim was a student at the University of Geneva Medical School, she met and married David Danon, a member of Irgun. During her time in Switzerland, Mathilda smuggled weapons and ammunition from the French resistance to the Irgun in pre-independence Palestine during the fight against the British. Mathilda and David had a daughter, moved to Israel, and promptly divorced. During the Six-Day War and at other times, Johnson used Mathilda Krim to communicate with the Israeli government without including either the State or Defense departments in the loop.

            The Egyptians again closed the Suez Canal by sinking ships in the waterway. It would stay closed this time for five years, not five months as previously. The Israeli government never delivered the peace negotiations that the moderates had been promised in exchange for their support for attacking Egypt. That is why Abba Eban, in his book Personal Witness: Israel Through My Eyes, advises readers not to count on external accomplishments to provide life's satisfactions but to have a family.

            The whole story of how the accepted narrative about the Six-Day War became one of Israel being attacked by Egypt deserves a book of its own. The short answer is that after the war, Israel blamed the U.N. for removing the peacekeepers from Sinai.

            Egypt was a sovereign nation, and peacekeepers are not permitted to be stationed in a nation without its consent; otherwise, they're invaders. Thant had offered to move the peacekeepers to the Israeli side of the border but was refused.

            Thant served as Secretary General from 1961 to 1971, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the American-Vietnam War, the Six Day War, the invasions of the Dominican Republic and Czechoslovakia, two wars between India and Pakistan along with the continuing conflict in the Congo.  Immediately after stepping down as Secretary General, he wrote his memoirs, View from the U.N.  Thant died of lung cancer in 1974.  View from the U.N. wasn't published until 1978, and the New York Times did not even bother to review it.

            By comparison, after Dag Hammarsjkold, the second Secretary General of the United Nations, was killed in an airplane crash in Zambia, a manuscript called Markings was found and published as his personal memoir.  On October 18, 1964, the entire front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, Section 7, was devoted to the review of Hammarskjold's book. The United States' other newspaper of record, the Washington Post, had this to say about U Thant's book:

 

U Thant's memoirs are a 508-page footnote to history. His 10 years as Secretary General of the United Nations included such international events as the U.N. intervention in the Congo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the war in Vietnam, the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, two wars between India and Pakistan, the 1967 war in the Middle East, the Nigerian civil war, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Peking occupation of the seat at the United Nations. The reader will learn nothing of importance and little of interest from this book.

            The author's personal opinion is that Astrachan never read the book before writing the review. Suppressing reviews of Thant's memoir is the American equivalent of censorship.

            In the book, Thant simply states flat out that Israel was the aggressor, documents the extent to which Israel thwarted a peaceful negotiated solution, and delineates the myriad misrepresentations of Israeli intentions for the future of the conquered territories and Jerusalem.  For people mystified by the wave of "terrorism" emerging from the Middle East, View from the U.N. provides a perfectly reasonable explanation.  The United Nations, allegedly created for the purpose of world peace, in almost its first act, created a situation that resulted in more than forty years (at that time) of conflict in the Middle East.  In the aftermath of the Six Day War, as Israel continued to deliberately flout U.N. resolutions concerning Jerusalem and the occupied territories of the West Bank, U Thant became so disheartened that he said during a speech to the Navy League at the Waldorf Astoria on October 28, 1969, "We may be witnessing in the Middle East something like the early stages of a new Hundred Years' War." (p. 328) Some say that Israel lost the Six Day War because, by conquering millions of Muslim Palestinians, the Jewish majority in Israel is at risk.

The Yom Kippur War

            Israel's victory in the Six-Day War persuaded the Palestinians that regaining their homes and land would never come from the Arab states of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan but only through their own efforts. In September 1970, the Palestine Liberation Organization, under Yassir Arafat, tried to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy and take over the country. As many of the residents of Jordan were Palestinians who had been displaced and expelled by the 1948 and 1967 wars, this strategy looked promising. Surprisingly, Israel intervened in support of King Hussein in the war that became known as Black September. At the end of the major fighting, Nasser dropped dead of a heart attack in Cairo.

            Nasser was succeeded as President by Anwar Sadat. After the 1967 war, Egypt's destroyed arsenal of weapons had been rapidly restocked by the Soviets, who also supplied trainers and advisors. Russians manned the missile sites that protected Egypt from Israeli air power as the two nations lobbed shells at each other across the canal.

            When the Russians refused to provide the advanced offensive weaponry requested by the Egyptians, Sadat expelled the Russian soldiers. This apparent tilt away from the Soviets was seen as a victory for the West. So, everyone was taken by surprise when Egypt crossed the canal on Yom Kippur October 6, 1973, and made substantial progress on the Sinai peninsula, while Syria attacked the Golan Heights.

            Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement,  is the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Jews fast and spend the day in the synagogue in prayer. Sadat's timing of the attack was genius. Everyone in Israel was fasting and in synagogue when Egypt attacked, so it took longer than planned to mobilize the citizen-based Israel Defense Forces.

            The war, where both the Americans and Soviets massively resupplied their client states, saw the biggest tank battle since the Battle of Kursk in World War II. The tanks fought muzzle to muzzle, which often meant that both were reduced to unidentifiable blobs of molten metal.

            Although Israel quickly regained its footing, pushing back the Syrians and threatening Cairo, the  Israelis wondered what they would do with 4 million Egyptians had they proceeded. Both sides ultimately recognized the need to normalize relations, and in due course, Egypt made peace with Israel in exchange for the return of Sinai. Notably, Egypt did not request the return of Gaza which it had administered as part of the British Palestinian mandate after the 1948 War. Gaza would henceforth be Israel's problem. However, the separate peace with Israel provided nothing for the Palestinians which enraged the Arab world. Egypt was expelled from the Arab League and its headquarters moved to Tunis from Cairo.

 

The Iran-Iraq War

            The March 29, 1979, peace treaty with Egypt was a tremendous boon for Israel. Without having to worry about security on its border with Egypt, it was free to deploy its forces elsewhere. It also constituted Egypt's de facto recognition of Israel's conquest of the West Bank, Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem. Syria not only fought alongside Egypt in the Yom Kippur War, but had actually been united with Egypt from 1958 to 1961. So, the separate peace was a disaster for Arab unity. One impetus for Israel to conclude the treaty was the fall of the Pahlavi Family dynasty in Iran three months before, on January 16, and the rise of the Islamic Republic.

            Sensing Iranian weakness amid the revolutionary chaos and ongoing American Embassy hostage crisis, Iraq had attacked Iran. Israel's policy was to keep the war going. Henry Kissinger, former American Secretary of State, said, "It's too bad they both can't lose."

            Given the ongoing Embassy hostage crisis that was destroying President Jimmy Carter's re-election prospects, the United States tilted toward Iraq, especially by supplying intelligence on the disposition of Iranian forces.

            Israel took this opportunity to bomb the Osirak nuclear reactor that the French were supplying to Iraq. The reactor had been slightly damaged by Iran, but Israel demolished it before it became operational. They also tried to once and for all destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization by invading and seizing a 328 square mile security belt extending three to 12 miles into  Lebanon. This was to protect northern Israel from PLO shelling.

            The PLO and other Palestinian organizations recognized after the 1967 war that they would never achieve victory if they depended on the other Arab states. So, they took on the job themselves and started murdering people in airports, hijacking planes, attacking Israelis abroad, and launching attacks on and within Israel. So, destroying the PLO was a top goal of Israel. But the Palestinians living in Israel and the occupied territories were also losing confidence in the PLO's ability to free them. With an entire generation of Palestinians having been born and grown to adulthood under occupation and discrimination with few prospects for their future, a spontaneous eruption of violence occurred in December 1987 called the Intifada.

            Israel was involved in the Iran-Iraq war in another way. American hostages were being held by Hizballah in Lebanon, and President Reagan worried that another Middle East hostage crisis would cost him re-election. The Reagan Administration asked Israel to sell to Iran TOW (tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided) anti-tank missiles from its prepositioned stockpile that would then be replenished. Iran was under an arms embargo at the time. The money from the sale of the weapons was then used to support the Contras fighting in Nicaragua, which circumvented the congressional Boland Amendment, prohibiting the use of appropriated funds to support the Contras. This became known as the Iran-Contra scandal that almost toppled Reagan as it was perceived as trading weapons to free the hostages. American policy dictated no negotiations with terrorists as that would only reward them and encourage more hostage-taking.

            Trying to free the hostages was one motive for the U.S. to send the Marines to Lebanon to help evacuate the PLO and prevent their annihilation by Israel. Hizballah attacked the Marine barracks with a truck bomb, killing 241. It was the bloodiest day for the Marines since Iwo Jima and the saddest day of President Ronald Reagan's life. After that, the United States still secretly supplied weapons to Iran. No wonder it had to be a secret.

            Giving TOW missiles to Iran had a profound effect on the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam Hussein awoke one morning to find his tanks being destroyed and soldiers being killed by munitions supplied by someone who was supposed to be on his side. After the Iran-Cotra scandal broke, an Iraqi jet accidentally attacked the USS Stark, which was patrolling in the Persian Gulf, killing 37, wounding 21, and almost sinking the ship.

            The U.S. got the message. The following year, the USS Vincennes allegedly accidentally shot down Iran Air Flight 655, a commercial Airbus flight from Tehran to Dubai, killing 290. Shooting down Iran's commercial airliner, combined with Vice-President George H.W. Bush's trip to Cairo to ask Hosni Mubarak to tell the Iranians that the United States would not accept an Iranian victory, brought the fighting to an end the next month.

 

The Liberation of Kuwait

            The end of the Iran-Iraq War left Iraq with the fourth-largest army in the world and a mountain of war-related debt. Most of the debt was owed to Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussein thought the debt should be forgiven as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait were all ruled by Sunnis, while Iran was Shiite. Iraq fashioned itself as the defender of the Sunnis from Iranian expansionism, having spilled blood in its defense, so the rich Gulf states ought to pay the bill.

            Not only did the Kuwaitis not forgive the debt, it demanded repayment while it slant-drilled into Iraq's petroleum reserves and exceeded its quota at a time when oil prices were already low. Saddam Hussein had had enough and invaded Kuwait.

            The entire Arabian Peninsula is populated by Arab Sheiks from nomadic tribes. The   Al-Sabah family has ruled Kuwait since 1756. Kuwait has been called a family business with a seat at the United Nations. Kuwait had a population of 2.2 million, about two-thirds of whom were foreign workers from places like Palestine and India. In the 1950s, Yassir Arafat, who was an engineer and would become the Palestine Liberation Organization's leader, lived in Kuwait and worked in the oil industry.

            The ruling families of Kuwait, the Al-Sauds of  Saudi Arabia, and the Al-Khalifa of Bahrain all descend from the 'Anaiza tribe that migrated from the Red Sea. The Kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain have small populations and are staunchly pro-western. Were it not for the oil under its sands, Americans would care about as much about the sparsely populated Arabian Peninsula as they do about West Africa.

            The war with Iran had been over the Shatt Al Arab waterway, Iraq's only outlet to the sea. Britain had negotiated a protectorate over Kuwait from the Ottoman Turks before World War I. This made Iraq a functionally landlocked country. Looking at the map, Kuwait is the natural port for Iraq. Even the British installed monarchs, the Hashemite Faisals I & II, called Kuwait Iraq's nineteenth province.

           

                       

            The United Nations swiftly condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The Saudi response to the invasion caused the split with Osama Bin Laden, son of one of the major construction magnates in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden told King Fahd that he and the mujahadeen fighters who had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan could defend the Saudi Kingdom from a potential attack from Iraq. The King opted instead to permit infidel American troops into the country, with the promise that they would leave after the war, but they didn't. So, Bin Laden embarked on a campaign against the United States that included the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the Nairobi Embassy bombings, the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 US airmen and wounded 498 others, the attack on the USS Cole, and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. If Egypt's peace treaty with Israel was a blow to Arab solidarity, Saudi Arabia's allowing America to launch a war from its territory against another Arab nation was its death knell. Even Turkey, a member of NATO, at the last moment, denied the U.S. permission to attack Iraq from its territory.

            Osama Bin Laden wasn't the only person opposed to America's military deployment to the Arabian Peninsula. There was plenty of domestic opposition as well. After Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait, the United Nations passed Resolutions calling for its withdrawal and setting a deadline. One didn't need to have a PhD in international relations to see the difference between the way Iraq was treated and the approach to Israel, which had invaded the West Bank and Syria twenty-three years previously. Not only was Israel not given a deadline for obeying United Nations resolutions, but it was floated away on billions and billions of dollars of economic and military aid, much of it used to settle Israelis in the conquered territories in flagrant violation of International Law.

            American domestic opposition to liberating Kuwait was overcome by news reports of Iraqi soldiers ripping infants from incubators. A teary-eyed Iraqi 15-year-old named Nayirah testified before a Congressional committee: "They are taking all hospital equipment, babies out of incubators. Life-support systems are turned off. ..." which received extensively media coverage. After the war, it was revealed that Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States and that her testimony, later shown to be substantially false, was the result of a $12 million publicity campaign created by the Hill and Knowlton, the giant, multi-national public relations firm.

            Real reason for the war was not only the liberation of Kuwait. The American tilt toward Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War had the unintended consequence of leaving a strengthened Saddam Hussein in power as a threat to Israel. Remember, Israel had destroyed the Isirak reactor. During the war, Iraq launched Scud missiles toward Israel in an attempt to force America's Arab allies out of the war. So, a top tactical priority was preventing the Israelis from retaliating and becoming a belligerent.

            In exchange for Arab support for the war, Bush promised to promote a peace process for the Palestinians, which was the source of the Oslo Peace process. Oslo created the Palestinian Authority with limited self-rule on the West Bank and in Gaza.

            On January 17, 1991, the United States and its allies launched a five-week naval and aerial bombardment of Iraq and Kuwait, culminating in the 100-hour ground war where the troops invaded from Saudi Arabia. The Iraqi troops fled Kuwait with $2 billion worth of booty, the Al-Sabah family returned to power, and the Shiites rebelled in Basra, but Bush made one major miscalculation. War planners supposed that if coalition troops invaded Iraq by even a few miles, combined with the widespread destruction of Iraq's infrastructure through a bombing campaign, the people would be humiliated and overthrow Saddam. That didn't happen. When coalition troops crossed the Saudi border into Iraq, no one cared. Lines on a map are meaningless when there's sand with no water on either side. So, the war ended with Saddam Hussein still firmly in place in Baghdad. An estimated 113,000 civilians were killed during the war, 60% children.

            After the war, there were no-fly zones and sanctions. As malnutrition and disease spread due to the destroyed electricity grid that was necessary for potable water and sanitation, an estimated 2 million out of a population of 20 million people died over the following decade, half a million who were children.

            During that decade, as the Oslo Peace Process progressed, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing fanatic opposed to Israel relinquishing any of the lands conquered in the 1967 war. Rabin, the first native born Israeli Prime Minister, had been the commanding general in the Six Day War. He was committed to the Oslo Peace Process with the Palestinians and negotiated the peace treaty with Jordan. Once again, the right-wing religious Jews used assassination to derail the peace movement.

 

The 2000 Presidential Election and 9/11

            The attack on the USS Cole took place five days before the final debate between Governor George W. Bush and Vice-President Al Gore in the 2000 election. Except for Gore and Bush expressing condolences to the families of the 17 sailors who died and the 37 injured, the Cole incident was ignored during the debate.

            The Clinton Administration had burned a lot of political capital trying to make Middle East peace at the Wye River Plantation in Maryland. Gore defended the administration of which he was a part, running on the platform of moving the peace process forward. Bush said, " We can’t put the Middle East peace process on our timetable. It’s got to be on the timetable of the people that we’re trying to bring to the peace table." This was Bush's way of saying, after 33 years of occupation, that accommodation with the Palestinians could wait. Then he continued, "Saddam Hussein still is a threat in the Middle East. Our coalition against Saddam is unraveling. Sanctions are loosened. The man who may be developing weapons of mass destruction, we don’t know because inspectors aren’t in." Bush was laying the groundwork for the war in Iraq before 9/11.

            The people voted for peace with Gore. But because of mistakes, malfeasance, and outright fraud, Bush stole the election. The close Florida vote would determine the winner. Only the Governor, Bush's brother Jeb, had the authority to order a full recount, which he declined to do. Bush's father, the former President, George H. W. Bush, had been head of the Central Intelligence Agency whose stock in trade is overthrowing governments like Iran's, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, etc. In 2000, it overthrew its own. For the full details of Gore's win read: Gore Won the Election by 538,948 votes, https://www.leinsdorf.com/Gore%20Wins%20the%20Election%20by%20538.htm and It Was Really A Tie: How Voting Machine Choice Determined the Winner in Florida. https://www.leinsdorf.com/itsatie.htm. Florida used 11 different voting systems in 2000, returning error rates of presidential votes not read from 0.24% to 12.4%, yet the Supreme Court stopped the vote count because it claimed Florida didn't have a uniform standard for assessing recounted ballots when it didn't have a uniform standard in the first place. Then the court treated the election like a sports contest, whoever is ahead when the clock stops is the winner. Election laws are supposed to serve only one purpose: to accurately count all the valid votes to determine who won. But the Supreme Court stopped the recount, a novel way of deciding a democratic election.

            Of course, the Electoral College exists specifically to provide a mechanism for defending the national interest in presidential elections from local shenanigans, but Gore declined to pursue his victory through all available means.            

            There were plenty of post-election indications that putting Bush in the White House was wrong.  Bush's selection created the first all-Republican administration in 48 years. With both polls and election results showing a closely divided nation, a 50-50 nominally Republican Senate and a 221-211 Republican House, the idea that the voters intended an all-Republican administration with a president who lost the popular vote by 538,948 votes strains credulity.

            Further proof that the decision was controversial came both immediately and years later. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg omitted the traditional "respectfully" that dissenters attach to the end of their dissents. Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissent, said, "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." According to the Gallup Polling organization, in 2000, before the Bush v. Gore decision, 47% of the people had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the Court, with only 15% having very little or none. By 2024, 27% have a great deal or a lot of confidence, and 35% have little or none. That's a net change of 20% from great confidence to little or none.

            In 2015, seven years after leaving the bench, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said, "Maybe the court should have said, 'We're not going to take it, goodbye.'" She freely admitted that the decision had done serious damage to the Court's reputation by intervening in a current political dispute. The Constitution does not mention the Supreme Court in resolving contested presidential elections, not to mention the Court's putative philosophy of deferring to state legislatures and state courts in state matters.

            Scott McClennan, Bush's deputy press secretary while he was Governor and traveling press secretary during the 2000 campaign, before serving as White House Press Secretary from 2003 - 2006, wrote a memoir in which he says the Bush campaign talked about the 2000 election result as "bringing it in for a landing." Bush was so miffed by McClellan's memoir that McClellan is not mentioned in Bush's book. In fact, Bush never said he won that election. All he said was,"I'm going to be the President."

            The election had left the Senate with a 50-50 tie giving control to the Republicans through Vice-President Dick Cheney's tie-breaking vote. But on May 24, 2001, barely four months after Bush's inauguration, Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, holder of the most continuously-held Republican seat in history, resigned from the Republican Party and announced he would caucus with the Democrats, giving them control, thereby restoring the divided government for which the people had voted on Election Day. The Republicans had held Jefford's seat for 155 years, since before the Civil War. After Jeffords retired in 2006, independent Bernie Sanders succeeded him.

            Another indication that the decision was flawed was dissenting Justice David Souter's resignation from the Court. Souter had been appointed to the bench by Republican President George H. W. Bush in 1990 when Souter was just 51 years old. His disenchantment with Washington was well known. However, he waited until after Bush had left office to announce his resignation at the relatively young age of 70, thereby giving a Democrat a chance to fill a Republican seat on the Court, clearly giving the finger to his Republican colleagues. Obama filled Souter's seat with Sonia Sotomayor.

            All the elections where the popular vote loser wins the White House are controversial. Little noted in the media is that a relative of a former president was a candidate in each of these minority victories except for 1876: Adams, the son of a president in 1824, Harrison, the grandson of a president in 1888, Bush, the son of a president, in 2000 and Clinton, the wife of a president, in 2016. This pattern implies an inside-the-beltway interference in the normal resolution of election contests.

            During the fight over the outcome in Florida, this author, a non-partisan psephologist persuaded of Gore's victory, told several people, "If Bush is selected, we'll be at war in six months." His prediction was based on the following logic. The United States fashioned itself as a democratic nation, often invading other countries and overthrowing tyrants in the name of freedom and democracy. For that nation to then have a stolen presidential election itself, counterpoised with the undeniable double standard toward Arab and Israeli aggression and occupation in the Middle East, would be too much for any reasonably sentient being to tolerate. Secure in the delusion that there was nothing "they," meaning the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters, could do about it, most people in the American foreign policy establishment thought they would just have to suck it up and accept the flawed election and the more decades of subjugation that came with it. 9/11 was a rude awakening.

            President Bush claimed that the nineteen suicide bombers (fifteen Saudis, two from the United Arab Emirates, and one each from Egypt and Lebanon) who carried out the 9/11 attacks "hated our freedoms." Please note that all the attackers came from America's friends or, put another way, places where the United States supports dictatorships that won't fight Israel. Not a single hijacker was a Palestinian or from Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan. The hijackers' hatred of our hypocrisy is a more reasonable explanation. Had the attackers truly hated America, they would have crashed their planes into three or four nuclear power plants, killing perhaps millions and turning swaths of the United States into an uninhabitable wasteland for decades or centuries.

            Instead, they mounted an atrocity that was also a huge publicity stunt for the cameras in New York, the media capital of America, to screw with the minds of the television-watching public. Andrei Gromyko, the long-serving Soviet Foreign Minister during the Cold War, wrote in his Memoirs of American anti-communism as being "mass ideological psychosis." Now that the Cold War is over, that psychosis has been transferred to Muslims.

            Bush ordered the attack on Afghanistan allegedly because he felt the public wanted him to act immediately. The irony here is that the stated reason for attacking Afghanistan and deposing the Taliban was that they had given safe harbor to Osama Bin Laden for training and planning Al-Queda's attacks. So, the United States attacked Afghanistan for doing what the United States did for pre-independence Israel, provide the wherewithal and safe place for Haganah troops to train. And here's the other rub. The author generally supports peaceful resolution of disputes. But in March 2001, the Taliban destroyed two 1,300-year-old World Heritage Site statues of Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley northwest of Kabul, Afghanistan. This author thought at that time that the Taliban should have been deposed after destroying the Buddha statues, but then laughed at himself at the imagined impossibility of trying to persuade anyone that an act of cultural vandalism should serve as an excuse for going to war. In hindsight, as things turned out, attacking the Taliban for destroying the Buddhist statues would probably have prevented 9/11.

            The Afghanistan war was under-resourced from the start, as Bush's true desire was to overthrow Saddam Hussein.          It was rumored that George W.'s desire to invade Iraq stemmed from the plot to assassinate his father with a car bomb when the former President was awarded an honorary degree by Kuwait University in 1993. And, of course, destroying Iraq was in Israel's interest.

            All through the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, Israel claimed it couldn't settle with the Palestinians because of Egypt. After the peace treaty with Egypt, it couldn't settle because of Iraq. After Iraq was neutralized by the American wars, it now can't settle because of Iran. Perhaps the time has come to consider that the Israelis are the obstacle to peace.

            In 2011, the author was teaching in a high school where military recruiters came to talk to students during lunch. The author asked one soldier, who had tattoos on his arms, "Do you think the Israelis are trying to get the United States to fight its wars in the Middle East?" He replied, "Everyone is trying to get America to fight its wars," and then added, "We'll have to fight Iran eventually."

 

Conclusion

            The purpose of this paper is to show the extent the United States has played in the creation and sustenance of the State of Israel. It also shows the history of Israeli terrorist acts in thwarting moves toward peace. Israel was created as a haven for Jews from oppression in Europe. After World War II, many concentration camp survivors had nowhere to return to, so the creation of Israel made some sense. However, Israel's claim that it is the homeland for all Jews, even those born and raised in the United States, is a case of the tail wagging the dog. Claiming that American Jews have a right to come to Israel and become instant citizens while Palestinian Arabs who fled the war or were forcibly expelled have no right to compensation or to return to the places where their families had lived for decades or centuries is a recipe for non-stop warfare.

The United States is using the fruits of a democratic, non-sectarian government to impose a religious apartheid state on the Middle East. In the process, this support for Israel is backfiring domestically by eroding democratic norms and the separation of church and state in America.

            There is a core population of 15.7 million Jews in the world, 7.2 million in Israel, and 6.3 million in the United States. The government of Israel mistakenly arrogates to itself the role of speaking for all Jews. The 0.2% that Jews comprise of the world's population compares with 2.4 billion Christians, 1.9 billion Moslems, 1.2 billion Hindus, 500 million Buddhists, and 1.2 billion secular/agnostic/atheists. These five categories make up 92.6% of the world's people. That said, some Jews are delusional to believe that the Jewish State of Israel better protects them than the United States of America.

 

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[1] The Mossadegh overthrow is one of the main sources of conflict between the United States and Iran today. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961, Kennedy was considering dismantling the CIA. Defending its record, the CIA pointed to the successful installation of the Shah in Iran as proof of its competence. This enraged the Mullahs, who felt they had not been given credit by the spy agency for producing the crowds that forced  Mossadegh  out.

[2] Europe had been rattled by the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. The Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt, was generally viewed as fair to Japan. So Japan became allied with the US, Britain and France in World War I. When the Japanese were refused a racial equality clause in the Treaty of Versailles by President Woodrow Wilson, it set the Japanese on the path to Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics can poison foreign policy.