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Writing in the Boston Globe "Ideas" section, Geoffrey Wheatcroft remembers when Israel was the darling of the European left, France gave Israel nuclear technology, and US-Israeli relations were chillier:
Update: And The Forward reports that the Bush administration is working to bolster Sharon against Netanyahu....But the problems that Israelis now fight over date less from the kingdom of David, or from the scissions of the 1920s, than from the Six Days' War of 1967. And the truly remarkable turnabout in regard to Israel by both America and Europe can also be dated to the 1960s.
What critics of Israel still don't recognize is that she was not fighting a deliberate war of territorial conquest. To the contrary, we now know that Moshe Dayan, the military hero of the war, recalled to the colors by popular acclaim, warned against the danger of going into Gaza, with its teeming Palestinian population. And Levi Eshkol, the prime minister and political hero, told his cabinet colleagues while the fighting raged, ''Even if we take the West Bank and the Old City, we will eventually be forced to leave them."
Having won them, Israel has found it very hard to leave them, and has certainly not been ''forced to," least of all by Washington. And here is the strangest change of all, in the respective attitudes to Israel of America and Europe. Rather like the Hollywood producer who said he was so old he could remember Doris Day before she was a virgin, some of us are old enough to remember the days when Israel was not only politically close to Europe but revered there, especially on the liberal left. For nearly 20 years after the creation of Israel in 1948, one of her closest allies was France, the first country to furnish her with nuclear technology as well as jet fighters.
In the 1956 Suez adventure, Israel conspired with the British and French governments against Colonel Nasser of Egypt. Their caper miscarried in any case, but the conspirators had quite reckoned without Washington, which pulled the rug from under them. The Eisenhower administration was engaged in an all-consuming Cold War with Russia, and saw the Middle East as a tiresome distraction from that greater conflict.
What seems more extraordinary today is that the White House then was not so much neutral as thoroughly cold toward Israel. President Dwight Eisenhower told the State Department to let the Israelis know that he would conduct his policy as if there were no Jewish voters in America, and John Foster Dulles, his Secretary of State, told Senator William Knowland that he was going to try to have ''a policy not approved by the Jews," however hard that was.
Of course Israel was entitled to pursue her own interests, said Dulles, but those were not necessarily America's, and ''We cannot have our policies made in Jerusalem." If that had been said publicly at the time it would have been adduced-maybe it still will be-to prove their anti-Semitism, although there is no evidence to suggest that Ike or Dulles harbored such prejudice. (Harry Truman, who recognized Israel against the wishes of the State Department, and Richard Nixon, who gave Israel unconditional support, really were anti-Semitic in private.)
Quite apart from the Suez conspiracy that bound Israel with London and Paris, there has been a dramatic turnaround in public opinion. Fifty years ago Israel was revered by the European left as a model social democracy, and was indeed the most statist political economy outside the eastern bloc. In those days, David Ben-Gurion could be profiled in a leftist British magazine like the New Statesman in well-nigh hero-worshipping tones, with nothing said about the Palestinians.
The ''diplomatic revolution," or change of partners, began in 1961 with the inauguration of John Kennedy, who believed that he owed his election to Jewish voters, and asked Ben-Gurion-to the latter's irritation-what he could do for the Jews in return. And yet even as Washington drew closer to Israel, the politics were startlingly different from today.
Last year, as part of the elaborate maneuvers that made Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza possible, the Republican administration of President Bush gave Sharon a letter of approval. In effect it conceded-against previous American policy-that in any final settlement there would be no going back to the pre-1967 borders, which would, by implication, be heavily revised in Israel's favor to incorporate many of the West Bank settlements; and that the Palestinians could forget about any ''right of return" for those expelled in 1948 or their descendants.
And yet in the 1950s-one writes this almost with disbelief-the Republican administration of President Eisenhower regularly rebuked Israel for reprisal raids (sometimes led by the young Arik Sharon), demanded border concessions-at Israel's expense, that is, from the pre-1967 frontier-and took very seriously the rights of those 1948 refugees.
Even under Kennedy, when the United States had turned towards Israel and supplied her with Hawk missiles, Washington still kept up pressure on the question of refugees...