Arms to Israel

In December 1947, in deference to the U.N.'s appeal to avoid inflaming the Palestine situation still further, Washington imposed an arms embargo on the Middle East. This move hurt Jewish efforts to arm while having no impact on the Arab states—Transjordan, Egypt, and Iraq—which were armed and trained by Britain. Czechoslovakia had a highly developed and sophisticated arms industry as well as overstock from former wartime production for the Germans. This made the small country a highly coveted, potential arms supplier for the Jewish state in the making. In addition, with the traditional Czech arms markets in Argentina and Turkey shrinking, Prague found its market largely limited to the Middle East.

United States policy for denying American arms to Israel was based on the following arguments: 1) the country was strong enough to defend itself without U.S. arms; this belief was reinforced by Israel’s success during the Suez campaign; 2) Israel had access to arms from other sources; 3) the United States did not want to appear to be starting an arms race in the Middle East; 4) the U.S. sales of arms to Israel would lead the Arabs to ask the Russians and Chinese for arms; 5) the U.S. did not want to risk a Middle East confrontation with the Soviet Union; and 6) U.S. military aid to Israel would alienate the Arabs.

On December 24, 1947, the Jewish Agency's "foreign minister" Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) sent a telegram to the Hagana representative in Prague, Ehud Avriel, stating that "the Syrians had been sent weapons" but that "Nahum" was helping the Jews. Nahum, a Biblical prophet, was the Hagana code name for Masaryk.

Fortunately for the Jews,the Syrians could only pay in British sterling, a currency at that point economically and financially weak. In contrast, the Jews could pay in dollars, raised by Golda Meyerson (later Meir) in the United States, from her fund-raising tour of seventeen cities. Championed by former U.S secretary of the treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., chairman of the United Jewish Appeal, Meyerson eventually raised some $50 million.

On January 14, 1948, Avriel and Masaryk signed a $750,000 deal for the sale of 4,570 Mauser rifles, 225 light machine guns, and five million bullets to the Jews. But according to Czech regulations, arms could only be transferred to a state, not to an organization like the Hagana. The Jewish state would not yet exist for another four months.

Avriel soon found a solution. Earlier in Paris, he had purchased three unused letterheads of the Ethiopian consulate, originally meant for transit visas. Masaryk himself "helped Avriel to falsify cover Ethiopian documents" to show Ethiopia as the recipient of the weapons. The foreign minister's deputy, Vladimir Clementis, a lawyer, labored over "other technical, legal and bureaucratic hurdles." The agreement was concluded in the name of the government of Ethiopia.

In 1948, as the British withdrew from Palestine, and five Arab nations prepared to invade Israel, a ragtag group of young men from around the globe volunteered to defend the new country. Called Machal, or volunteers from abroad, many were World War II veterans from the US. Because of an embargo imposed by the Truman administration, Americans risked losing their citizenship by joining the fight. Produced by Nancy Spielberg, younger sister to Steven, this film celebrates the pilots who laid the foundation for the Israeli Air Force. It combines extraordinary archival footage and interviews with scholars, survivors and their descendants. Interviewees range from Shimon Perez to Paul Reubens (aka Pee Wee Herman), whose father Milton Rubenfeld flew combat missions. The bravery of these volunteers was incredible. The only aircraft available to them were American and German jets junked after the war, constantly liable to deadly mechanical failure. Amenities were equally scarce (many had to make do with discarded Nazi flight suits.) Despite their shoddy equipment, they exercised enough skill and trickery to persuade the invaders that their small squadron posed a far bigger threat than it really did, helping turn the tide of the war. North American Premiere

The Israeli lobby (consisting of those individuals and organizations which attempt directly and indirectly to influence American policy to support Israel) was largely unaware of any U.S. military aid to Israel. In 1956, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Abba Eban, told the president of the American Jewish Committee, Irving Engel, that the main source of weapons was France. In fact, it was U.S. encouragement of third-party arms suppliers which had enabled Israel to meet its defense needs.

The French-Israeli relationship began in the mid-1950s, when Israel became a major customer for the French arms industry. But the bond was not merely commercial: at the time France was trying to quash a rebellion in Algeria, and it shared with Israel a strategic interest in combating radical Arab nationalism. In 1956, France and Israel even fought together against Egypt in the Suez crisis.

The tacit alliance, championed by Israel’s deputy defense minister, Shimon Peres, deepened during the late ’50s and early ’60s through military cooperation and cultural exchanges. French technical assistance helped Israel get nuclear weapons, and France supplied the advanced military aircraft that became the backbone of the Israeli Air Force.

The relationship only grew warmer when Charles de Gaulle, the World War II hero, took over as French president in 1959. He recognized the historic justice of a Jewish “national home,” which he saw “as some compensation for suffering endured through long ages,” and he heaped praise on David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, as one of the “greatest leaders in the West.”

The bilateral bonds ran outside the government, too, with strongly pro-Israel public opinion, both among French Jews and non-Jews. But with the end of the Algerian war in 1962, de Gaulle began mending France’s ties to the Arab world and the relationship came under strain. Eventually France and Germany imposed a total weapons embargo on Israel.

Israel was now facing a dilemma!

The geopolitical drama of the Middle East is acutely linked to the Cold War because the Soviet Union was arming and funding Middle East regimes, notably Egypt and Syria. The Middle East was a pawn on the chessboard of America vs. the Soviets during the Cold War because influential dominance of the region was a key goal of both nations. Of course, the obviously oily nature of Middle East natural resources was considered a prize, not only to the United States, but to France and Germany.

When Lyndon Johnson became President, the Israeli lobby was encouraged not only by the fact that he had pledged to carry on the work of John Kennedy but also by Johnson’s own record of support for Israel which dated back to his leadership in the Senate during the Eisenhower Administration.

Like most U.S. presidents, Johnson’s support for Israel was based on a combination of realism, romanticism, and cold political calculation. Viewed realistically, Israel was a relatively powerful, pro-Western democratic nation in a region of strategic importance where Communism and Pan-Arabism were seen as serious threats to U.S. interests. Although the United States did not yet perceive Israel as a strategic ally, it recognized that a strong Israel was a deterrent to the forces of radicalism in the Middle East.

Johnson’s dependability was tested immediately when the Israelis began to pressure the Administration to sell them tanks and planes. As early as January 1964, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Komer was complaining that Myer Feldman was badgering him about supplying Israel with tanks. Feldman, the holder of the “Jewish portfolio” as an aide in the Administration, meanwhile wrote to the President in May that he had “rarely been exposed to as much pressure as I have had recently on the question of tanks for Israel.” In the same memo, however, Feldman reveals how the White House successfully exerted its own pressure: “It has only been after considerable effort that members of Congress have been restrained against making speeches on the question, the Anglo-Jewish press has killed several articles and responsible leaders of the Jewish community have demonstrated their confidence in the Administration by keeping silent.”

The U.S. unsuccessfully pursued diplomatic efforts to recruit Israel government support for its Vietnam policy. At the same time, it mounted a similar effort at home to make Johnson’s support for the Israel lobby’s objectives conditional upon that lobby’s support on Vietnam. On September 9, 1966, for example, the National Commander of the Jewish War Veterans, Malcolm A. Tarlov, paying his annual courtesy call to the President, was told that “Jews who seek U.S. support for coreligionists in Russia and for Israel should vigorously identify with Administration actions in Vietnam.” The President could not understand why the American Jewish community was not supporting his Vietnam policy when he was improving U.S.-Israel relations.

Although Administration officials denied that Johnson had made support for his Vietnam policy a condition for U.S. support for Israel, the President’s obsession with protecting his own credibility led him to suspect Israel lobby demands were somehow responsible for the opposition to Vietnam. When it comes to Israel, he told Israeli Minister Evron, American Jews are interventionists, but when it comes to Vietnam, they want the United States to be a pacifist. Johnson could not understand the contradiction and believed that the Jewish community was too selective. Abba Eban recalled being told by Johnson how a group of rabbis who had come to visit him in May 1967, asked him to put the whole American fleet in the Gulf of Aqaba to show the U.S. flag in the Straits of Tiran. In the meantime, Johnson asserted, they didn’t think he should send a screwdriver to Vietnam.

The rise of Arab nationalism was also heating up as Egyptian President Gamal Nasser and the Marxist styled Baathist movements were flourishing. Syria and Iraq had shed western imposed monarchs and were raising their own brand of dictators. Israel was becoming America’s unofficial 51st state as the Evangelical movement was rising in anticipation of fulfilling Biblical prophecy now that Israel existed for the first time since Biblical times.

The bellicose rhetoric blossomed as Arab leaders publicly vowed to destroy Israel. This was nothing new and even the Israelis perceived that such utterances were an appeasement to the neurotic Arab Street rather than an actual threat.

The Middle East was a pawn on the chessboard of America vs. the Soviets during the Cold War because influential dominance of the region was a key goal of both nations. Of course, the obviously oily nature of Middle East natural resources was considered a prize.