Sixty-five years ago, at 9 p.m. on February 20, 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower spoke to the world about the Middle East. He asked from the Oval Office: “Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its own withdrawal?” If so, that would be a case for settling all international differences by force. Therefore, he pledged to use “maximum U.S. influence” to compel Israel—the attacker and occupier—to leave Egyptian territory, where its soldiers remained after the previous fall’s short, sharp Suez War.[1]
At stake, Eisenhower believed, was not only international law, but also, as John Foster Dulles, his capable secretary of state, framed the problem, the fact that “we could [not] have all our policies made in Jerusalem,” the location of Israel’s foreign ministry.[2]
Eisenhower ignored political pressure to confront a nation which his administration believed was undercutting U.S. strategic and moral interests. What unfolded for that administration, and its successors, is germane in 2022: Israel is entrenched in Occupied Palestinian Territories; and, whereas Palestinians in Israel lived under martial law until 1966, today, according to Amnesty International—which corroborates longtime warnings by Israeli prime ministers Rabin, Barak, and Olmert, as well as by former heads of Shin Bet—they are subject to “apartheid” in areas under Israeli control.
U.S.-Israeli relations abraded following President Harry Truman’s decision of May 1948 to recognize Israel’s independence, over the protests of Secretary of State George Marshall and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. Once that year’s presidential elections were safely over, Truman came down hard on Israel, and Truman’s dilemma in 1949 was akin to Eisenhower’s later one.
By late December 1948, during the final months of the First Arab-Israel war, an Israeli assault force had penetrated into the Sinai. Egypt was then under British hegemony and Truman instructed the U.S. ambassador in Tel Aviv to hand Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion a note on London’s behalf: “Unless Israeli forces withdrew from Egyptian territory,” it asserted, Britain would enter the war against Israel, evidently with U.S. approval.[3] Those Israeli units left within a week.
Armistice agreements followed in 1949 but did not codify borders. Moreover, Truman wrote to an aide of his “disgust” over how “the Jews are approaching the refugee problem.”[4] His administration threatened, inconclusively, to cut off Export-Import Bank loans to Israel. Therefore, when Eisenhower entered office in January 1953, he inherited the region’s shaky partition lines and seething belligerents.
Eisenhower dominated U.S. foreign policy for eight years, with Dulles an able executor. In May 1953, the president dispatched Dulles on a three-week trip as the first secretary of state to visit the Middle East. The journey began in Cairo where Dulles spoke of U.S. recognition of Israel five years earlier, assuring Egypt’s prime minister that “the Republican Administration does not owe the same degree of political debt as did the Democrats to Jewish groups.”[5] Israel would be Dulles’s next stop, so he explained his views on Jerusalem as well: To him, as a Christian, Jerusalem was a sacred place; he had always believed that any Arab-Israeli solution would require a “large measure of internationalization.”[6]
Once in Jerusalem, “all went well,” reported the U.S. Consul General. Dulles visited the Israeli side of the divided city, and then passed through “no-man’s land” to the section controlled by Jordan.[7] However, politicians in both Tel Aviv and Amman, as in Cairo, belabored Dulles with accounts of violence along the porous borders.
By the fall of 1953, little was going well between the United States and Israel. Dulles that month refused to accept Tel Aviv’s propaganda that Israel was dedicated to “humanity’s struggle to reclaim the waste spaces of the earth,” and he instructed diplomats to shun a “Conquest of the Desert” exposition in Jerusalem (those “waste spaces” having been Mandatory Palestine). An early lobbying group, the American Zionist Council, denounced his decision, but was ignored.[8]
In fact, the Eisenhower Administration suspended economic aid to Israel for diverting water from the Jordan River and, graver still, it compelled the UN Security Council to censure Israel for its brutal “reprisal” against the Palestinian village of Qibya in October 1953.
Between 1951 and 1956, border clashes would result in what Israel tabulated as 880 of its citizens killed or wounded. Meanwhile, according to later scholarly estimates compiled by the Israeli author Benny Morris, “upward of 2,700 Arab infiltrators, and perhaps as many as 5,000, were killed by the Israeli Defense Force, police, and civilians. . . the vast majority of those killed [being] unarmed.” These “infiltrators” were shepherds, farmers, Bedouins, and refugees trying to return to their villages.[9]
The Qibya attack took place after militants from the Jordanian-controlled West Bank murdered an Israeli woman and her two children in their home in an Israeli village near the Green Line. On the night of October 14, some 275 IDF soldiers, led by future prime minister Ariel Sharon, struck Qibya, seven miles northwest of Ramallah.
“They shot every man, woman, and child they could find,” while dynamiting houses, a school, and a mosque, reported Time magazine.[10] Tel Aviv first denied any IDF involvement, then denounced foreign critics as antisemites, and finally declared the slaughter to be a mistake, although insisting that its army had behaved no worse than those of other nations, referencing British colonial officials in Kenya.
Dulles expressed America’s “deepest sympathy” for Qibya’s sixty-nine dead, and six weeks later, came the U.S.-backed censure in the United Nations. Dulles and Eisenhower were also concluding that Israel regarded cooperation with Washington as “a one-way street.”[11]
During March 1955, they pushed a second censure through the Security Council. After Egyptian authorities had executed two members of what Tel Aviv called one of its “terror units” embedded in Cairo, the IDF retaliated by killing thirty-eight Egyptian soldiers in Gaza, the 140-square-mile sand strip then inhabited by 219,000 impoverished Palestinian refugees.[12] Still hoping to restrain Israeli “reprisals,” the United States delivered a third UN censure in January 1956 following another IDF attack, this one against Syrian positions near the Sea of Galilee which killed 56 soldiers and civilians.
Sanctions, Dulles warned Tel Aviv, would be next.
Throughout, the Eisenhower Administration dismissed Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban’s claims of self-defense. In addition to the wildly asymmetric body count, Dulles worried about the world’s millions of other “brown people” outside the Middle East whose sympathies were not yet held by Moscow.[13] Eisenhower was similarly attuned to third world opinion. For instance, he spoke to Dulles of India’s condemnation of colonial aggression. When it came to the Middle East, according to Eisenhower, India’s Prime Minister Nehru meant any issue of “white over colored people.”[14]
Undeterred, Israel launched a full-scale assault on Egypt in fall 1956 to oust strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose military junta had toppled the pro-British monarchy in 1952.
Nasser too had conducted cross-border retaliations—though nothing on the scale that demanded a UN censure. It was more worrying to Tel Aviv that Nasser was receiving sophisticated weaponry from the Soviet Union. However, Dulles concluded, “it was difficult to be critical” of the Egyptians for buying arms which “they sincerely need for self-defense.”[15]
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Throughout 1956, Israel had other reasons to be rid of Nasser. It was working covertly with France to crush Algeria’s war of independence, and Nasser was aiding the rebellion with money, small arms, and propaganda. After all, Jews in Algeria were by and large French citizens, unlike Arabs who composed nine-tenths of the population, and the Israelis armed and trained Jewish-Algerian militias, shared intelligence with French officials, and helped break codes between the rebels and Cairo. In turn, Israel received its jets, tanks, artillery, ammunition, and napalm-drop equipment from France.
Additionally, Nasser had taken over the Suez Canal Company during July. The Canal was Egyptian, and ran 120 miles through Egyptian territory, but it was managed by the company. To this end, Eisenhower concluded “no one could question” Cairo’s legal right to nationalize it.[16] Yet, regardless of U.S. attempts to mediate, Nasser was courting a violent, colonial-era response by the primary stockholders of this pioneering enterprise—the governments of Britain and France, which, unknown to Washington, were colluding with Israel to invade Egypt and install a puppet regime.
“We are going to apply sanctions,” Eisenhower told Dulles after IDF armor and paratroopers plunged into Egypt on October 29, 1956, adding that the Israelis had attacked to expand their territory.[17] Dulles focused on the fact that the world’s “non-white” nations (soon labelled the “third world”) had come quickly to Egypt’s side—including Iran and Iraq, as well as India. The Americans again went to the United Nations once Britain and France, the next day, launched the second phase of the invasion scheme by bombing airfields and dropping paratroopers.
As Election Day in America approached, Israel counted on its U.S. supporters to subdue the Administration. But, in a national address on October 31, Eisenhower explained the crisis to voters, and rallied the country behind him. He halted agricultural aid to Israel, and, when Britain and France pounced, he moved to cut off their oil and loans. This torpedoed the offensive, and fighting ceased by Tuesday, November 6, when Eisenhower won in a landslide, with the Democrats keeping their majority in Congress.
Yet the problem remained of prying all three invaders from Egyptian territory.
A combination of threats and promises compelled Anglo-French forces to evacuate by December 23. Still, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s right to retain Gaza and Sharm el-Sheikh. Doing so, he argued, would end guerrilla insurgency, and allow freedom of navigation in the Gulf of Aqaba, which Egypt had indeed impeded. By now Eisenhower knew the background of these conflicts and didn’t sympathize.
Step by step, the president adopted harsher measures. On February 10, his ambassador to the UN, Henry Cabot Lodge, asked Dulles about the prospect of imposing sanctions. Lodge was anticipating trouble from Israel’s bipartisan supporters in Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas, and Senate Minority Leader William Knowland, Republican of California.
However, the Administration devised an approach to quell “the idea of everybody picking on poor Israel,” as Lodge phrased the concept.[18] Egypt, could be threatened with sanctions as well, to be imposed if it resumed belligerency once Israel withdrew. Meanwhile, White House political operatives briefed Eisenhower about the volume of mail and advertisements being generated by Israel’s American supporters. He was nonplussed. Nor was he alarmed that Israel’s supporters in Congress would undercut him. As he told Dulles, any motion in Congress that opposed sanctions initiated at the United Nations would have no legal effect.
Dr. Ralph Bunche, who had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for bringing about the original Arab-Israeli armistice, concluded that “cutting [the Israelis] off would do the trick.”[19] All concerned knew the consequences of sanctions. To sanction private business and financial dealings with Israel, Dulles acknowledged, “would be fatal,” but would only be a slap on the wrist for Egypt. “Israel can’t survive without proceeds of bonds,” he informed Lodge that winter. “Israel’s life is at stake.”[20]
Ambassador Eban meanwhile scrambled to avert the showdown. Dulles was also moving fast. “The Israeli Embassy is practically dictating to the Congress,” he told the head of the World Council of Churches, while seeking support.[21] Likewise, he convinced his fellow Republican, Senator Knowland, an ardent supporter of Israel, that everything short of sanctions had been tried.
Eisenhower and Dulles played another card. Suddenly brought before the public were details of the Truman Administration’s late December 1948 ultimatum to Ben-Gurion over quitting Egypt that had had immediate results. The message from the White House was clear: this would not be the first time a president acted determinedly against Israel.
Eisenhower met with the congressional leaders of both parties in the Cabinet Room one hour before he spoke from the Oval Office on February 20, 1957. Dulles and Lodge attended. In severe tones, all three explained why they favored sanctions. Ten days later, Israel’s foreign minister, Golda Meir, announced her country’s readiness to withdraw from all Egyptian territory, with the UN Emergency Force left to supervise a supposed cessation of hostilities.
Israel’s embittered supporters reviled Dulles for the strong-arming—not that he minded being cast as the blamable medieval minister to the beloved grandfatherly figure in the White House. But, of course, it was all Eisenhower, who acted skillfully by suggesting sanctions even on financial services, yet who ultimately did not need to apply them.
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A cold peace descended on these borders. In Washington, President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, the attorney general, compelled a slightly-renamed American Zionist Council to register itself as a foreign agent. But a U.S. administration would not have Israel censured again until November 1966 when the IDF launched the largest military offensive since the Suez War, this time against the Jordanian controlled West Bank, near Hebron. “The Israelis have done a great deal of damage to our interests and to their own,” concluded Johnson’s national security adviser, Walt Rostow, “they’ve wrecked a good system of tacit cooperation.”[22]
Seven months later, another Arab-Israeli war erupted, in June 1967.
Political pressure by Israel’s U.S. supporters grew more effective after Israel’s victory of 1967, in part because Tel Aviv was a staunch Cold War ally. One of Israel’s subsequent ambassadors—the Netanyahu-appointed historian, Michael Oren, whose scholarly acumen overlooks the history of U.S. censures—has addressed this evolution. Israel’s supporters, he writes, achieved “the financial and political clout necessary to sway congressional opinion,” and that political trend was cemented decidedly after yet another Israeli victory in the war of 1973.[23] Meanwhile, U.S. diplomacy was basically reinforcing Israel’s grip on the conquered territory of 1967, which had the effect of perpetuating the settlement project seen today.
Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1978, and one would later follow with Jordan, but the core dilemma of the 1950s remained: How would Washington respond to Israeli “reprisals” in which the dead were largely Palestinian civilians? With state-to-state conflicts apparently defused between Arabs and Israelis, U.S. politicians hesitated to counter Israel on most any issue.
Washington did nothing even when the CIA determined, in 1980-81, that Israel was “absolutely vital” to South Africa’s apartheid regime building six atomic bombs.[24] The Americans were equally hapless in summer 1982 when Israel conducted a saturation bombing of West Beirut—in an attempt to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization—that President Ronald Reagan described pointedly to Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin as “a holocaust.”[25]
The end of the Cold War in 1991, and the ensuing Oslo Accords, brought minimal change in Israeli-occupied terrain. One reason, observed a deputy U.S. special envoy for Middle East regional security, was that “They [the Israeli government] tried to game us throughout.”[26] During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, it proved easy, for instance, to get National Security Council officials to focus on the minutiae of those accords, such as which West Bank crossing points might Israeli authorities agree to open at ten or eleven A.M. next week?
Given Israel’s involvement with apartheid South Africa, it was ironic when, in the early 2000s, South Africa’s Bishop Desmond Tutu began to speak of “the marks of apartheid in the policies of the Israeli government.” Before long, he was reminding hesitant Americans that “‘segregation’ is a word seared in your own nation’s experience.” He cited the eradication of Jim Crow, and asked, “are you being called to do so again on behalf of a deeply oppressed people” in Palestine?”[27] Bishop Tutu made himself a unique moral witness, within the Anglican faith, and to the Palestinian struggle. He came to be echoed by a range of Americans, including by Marine Corps General James Mattis, a future secretary of defense, who warned in 2013 that the result of Israel’s ongoing settlement construction “will be apartheid.” [28] Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem have in the last year provided evidence in their reports with that conclusion.
Ultimately, Bishop Tutu would tell Americans the obvious: as toward apartheid South Africa, “only economic pressure can force the powerful to the table,” this time to remedy “the inhumane policies inflicted by the state of Israel on the Palestinians.”[29] The Episcopal Church calls that step “economic screening.”
Yet, unlike the 1950s, killings of unarmed civilians—worse than at Qibya or at Sharpeville, in Transvaal—have provoked no tangible condemnations from Washington. Consider the 254 Palestinians killed in Gaza during 2018 (149 uninvolved in hostilities according to B’Tselem). Most were picked off by IDF snipers using American-made telescopic sights. And the Palestinian body count continues into 2022, with no U.S. censure.
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Israel’s foreign minister, Yair Lapid, claimed at the start of 2022 that charges of “apartheid” have the “potential to cause significant damage.”[30] This might apply most of all to Israel’s relations with the United States. The only certain thing in American politics is that opinion has a way of changing at lightning speed—the national reassessment sparked by the “Black Lives Matter” movement being one example. To label Israel’s rule of Palestinians as “apartheid” adds a new, volatile element to the Occupation—particularly so when that presence is infused with what Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, the IDF commander in the West Bank, calls “settler terrorism.”[31]
Acute analysts write that mainstream conversation in America about Israel-Palestine has shifted more in the past year than ever before.[32] Surely this debate will be intensified by the matter of “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians,” as framed most recently by Amnesty International. The upshot may be that Israel’s next Qibya-type “reprisal”—or the one after that—will elicit a quite different U.S. response than in recent years, from America’s grass roots if not the Oval Office. That is what Bishop Tutu anticipated, given America’s own fraught history. However, it is also a history in which successive U.S. presidents have successfully confronted expansion and state terror in this conflict. In 2022, the debate can’t be fully joined without knowing that.
[1] Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in the Middle East,” Feb. 20, 1953, American Presidency Project.
[2] Call from Senator Knowland, Feb. 16, 1957, 6:40 p.m., JFD telephone transcripts.
[3] The Acting Secretary of State to the Special Representative of the United States in Israel (McDonald), Dec. 30, 1948, in FRUS, 1948: The Near East, South Asia, and Africa, Volume V, Part 2.
[4] FRUS 1949, “Mr. Mark F. Ethridge to the President,” (Jerusalem) April 11, 1949, pp. 905-06
[5] No. 5, Memorandum of Conversation, Prepared in the Embassy in Cairo, May 12, 1953, in FRUS, 1952–1954: The Near and Middle East, Volume IX, Part 1.
[6]. No. 3 Memorandum of Conversation, Prepared in the Embassy in Cairo, May 11, 1953, in FRUS, 1952–1954: The Near and Middle East, Volume IX, Part 1.
[7] No. 14, The Consul General in Jerusalem to the Department of State, FRUS, 1952-1954, The Near and Middle East, Vo. IX, Part 1.
[8] The American Jewish World, 2 October 1953, p. 4, “Zionists Deplore Dulles Boycott”
[9] Israel’s Border Wars, Benny Morris, p. 147
[10] “Israel: Massacre at Kibya,” Time, Oct. 26, 1953; censuring is found at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/mid009.asp
[11] Morris, op. cit., p. 265
[12] On “terror unit,” see “IDF Declassifies Docs,” Haaretz, May 11, 2015, quoting documents from Nehemiah Argov, Ben-Gurion’s military secretary
[13] The Fifty-Year Wound, Leebaert, p. 212
[14] MemCon With the President, White House, Washington, November 5, 1956, in FRUS, 1955-1957: Eastern Europe, Vol XXV
[15] Devil and John Foster Dulles, Townsend Hoopes, p. 328
[16] Eisenhower to Hazlett, Nov. 2, 1956, cited in FRUS, 1955–1957: Suez Crisis, July 26–December 31, 1956, Volume XVI, 944.
[17] Isaac Alteras, Eisenhower and Israel: U.S.-Israeli Relations, 1953–1960 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993), 224
[18] Call from Ambassador Lodge, Feb. 11, 1957, 4:30 p.m., JFD telephone transcripts
[19] Call to Ambassador Lodge, Feb. 12, 1957, 2:22 p.m., JFD telephone transcripts, in which Lodge tells of Bunche’s conclusion
[20] Ibid
[21] Dulles MemCon
[22] Rostow transcript
[23] Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, p. 536
[24] Leebaert interview of Tyler Drumheller in the Globalist, April 2013
[25] Strober and Strober, Reagan, p. 231
[26] Michael Durkee, interviewed and quoted in Leebaert, Magic and Mayhem, p. 252.
[27] Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, “Foreword,” to Leebaert, et al, The Episcopal Church’s Response to the New Political Landscape in Israel/Palestine, August 2015
[28] Mattis quote, Aspen Institute, July 2013, as cited in Haaretz, Apr. 24, 2018, “James Mattis, Trump’s Reported Pick for Defense Post, Sees Israel Turning Into an Apartheid State”; https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
[29] Op. cit., in Church’s Response
[30] Yair Lapid, press conference, Jan. 7, 2022
[31] New York Times, Feb. 12, 2022, “As Violence Rises in the West Bank, Settler Attacks Raise Alarm”
[32] Washington Post, May 14, 2021, “The History of Israel ‘Mowing the Grass’ in Gaza”; Peter Beinart, “2021: The Year Palestinians Entered America’s Debate Over Israel-Palestine,” Jan. 3, 2022, Beinart Notebook, substack.com