Saturday will mark the 40th anniversary of Dwight Eisenhower’s passing, and the interesting thing about Ike is that this stodgy symbol of mid-20th century Chamber-of-Commerce-style Republicanism may soon look like a man ahead of his time. Because if the Obama administration really does tilt to a more “evenhanded” Middle East policy, it would be taking not so much a revolutionary approach as a reactionary one, reaching back to the neutral course pursued by the U.S. for the first decade and a half of Israel’s existence, never more faithfully than during Eisenhower’s eight-year tenure.
The Eisenhower administration’s main foreign-policy objective was the containment of Soviet expansionism, which in the Middle East meant keeping the Russians away from the oil resources so critical to the West. For much of Ike’s first term the U.S. attempted, with mixed results, to create coalitions of like-minded nations in regions deemed geographically and politically strategic. The linchpin of any such regional alliance in the Middle East was Egypt, and the Americans went out of their way to solicit the affections of the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Eisenhower vowed that his approach to the Middle East would never be dictated by political pressure, which was a polite way of saying he wasn’t about to be influenced by the Jews — or, as he put it in such wonderfully euphemistic language in his diary, “our citizens of the Eastern seaboard emotionally involved in the Zionist cause.”
Eisenhower’s disregard for domestic politics was more than evident in October 1956, just a month before the presidential election. Responding to the retraction by the United States of an offer to refinance work on the Aswan Dam, Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal Company, which was under British and French ownership, and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. The prime ministers of Britain and France hatched a plan to retake control of the canal by force and convinced Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to join in.
Israel captured the Sinai before the short-lived plot sputtered. Eisenhower, furious at what he saw as Israeli (and French and British) duplicity, demanded that Israel immediately withdraw. When Ben-Gurion balked, the administration let it be known it was ready to support a UN plan for sweeping sanctions that would cripple Israel’s economy in a matter of weeks. There was also talk of ending the tax-deductible status of charitable contributions to Israel by American Jews.
Ben-Gurion finally buckled, and on March 1, 1957, the official announcement was made that Israeli troops would leave the Sinai.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles boasted that most Americans supported the Eisenhower policy and — presaging by several decades the Walts and Mearsheimers and their ilk — added: “I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to have a foreign policy not approved by the Jews… I am going to try to have one.”
Dulles made that statement, it bears noting, at a time when Israel was receiving a relatively small amount of financial assistance and no military aid at all from Washington; a time when Jewish organizations were keeping a considerably lower profile than what would be the case years later; a time when Israel existed behind the precarious 1949 armistice lines while Jordan and Egypt controlled, respectively, the West Bank and Gaza.
In 1965 Eisenhower told Jewish organizational leader and Republican fundraiser Max Fisher that he had come to “regret what I did. I should never have pressured Israel to vacate the Sinai.” Two years later, Israel retook the Sinai after Nasser, declaring his “basic objective” to be “the destruction of Israel,” had massed more than 100,000 troops there and once again closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping — and after the U.S. government proved itself unable to enforce Eisenhower’s guarantee, made ten years earlier, that the Straits would remain open.
