LYNDON B.JOHNSON AND THE POLITICS OF ARMS SALES TO ISRAEL IN THE SHADOW OF THE HAWK LYNDON B.JOHNSON AND THE POLITICS OF ARMS SALES TO ISRAEL IN THE SHADOW OF THE HAWK ABRAHAM BEN-ZVI Tel Aviv University FRANK CASS LONDON • PORTLAND, OR First published in 2004 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS Crown House, 47 Chase Side, Southgate London N14 5BP This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” and in the United States of America by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS c/o International Specialized Book Services, Inc., 920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300 Portland, Oregon, 97213–3786 Website: www.frankcass.com Copyright © 2004 Abraham Ben-Zvi British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Ben Zvi, Abraham Lyndon B.Johnson and the politics of arms sales to Israel 1. Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908–1973 2. Defense industries—United States—History–20th century 3. Arms transfers—United States—History–20th century 4. M48 (Tank)—History 5. Skyhawk (Jet attack plane)—History 6.Phantom II (Jet fighter plane)—History 7. United States—Foreign relations—Israel 8. Israel—Fòreign relations United States 9. United States—Politics and government— 1963–1969 10. United States—Foreign relations–1963–1969 I. Title 382.4’562374’0973’09046 ISBN 0-203-64607-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-67794-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-7146-5580-5 (cloth) ISBN 0-7146-8463-5 (paperback) ISSN 1368-4795 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book. iv Contents Foreword vii Preface and Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations xii 1 Introduction Lyndon B.Johnson and the Politics of Arms Sales 1 to Israel: In the Shadow of the Hawk 2 The Road to the M-48A Patton Tank 27 3 The Road to the A-4E Skyhawk Fighter-Bomber 87 4 Beyond the F-4 Phantom Fighter-Bomber: The Changing 1 11 Dynamics of the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel Selected Bibliography 1 25 Index 1 33 In memory of Rosa and David Rosenbaum, beloved grandparents who perished in Auschwitz Foreword This book is a continuation of Abraham Ben-Zvi’s earlier path-breaking studies of the politics of arms sales to Israel in the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations. Taken together, this body of work constitutes a fundamental and definitive re-examination of this decisive period in the building of the close US-Israel relationship that became, and remains, a fixed point of reference in Middle Eastern diplomacy. Despite the controversies and contestations that attach to this topic, Ben-Zvi’s trilogy will stand the test of time because he has dug deeply into the primary sources and allows them to speak for themselves, while combining this meticulous research with a sophisticated conceptual framework and a penetrating analysis that plays no favorites. Each stage of this project has corrected prevailing stereotypes about the birth and early childhood of the US-Israeli alliance. The first volume showed how the initial turn to a more supportive US stance toward Israel, often credited to the Kennedy administration, actually began in the later Eisenhower years and reflected changing realities in the Middle East. The Kennedy-era study focused on the first major arms sale to Israel, the 1962 Hawk anti-aircraft missile deal, connecting it persuasively to a historic shift in strategic thinking within the defense community rather than to transient political factors, and showed that the critical transition took place well before the 1967 war, rather than after it. The book in hand covers the culmination of this process during the Johnson years: with the beginning of an on-going arms supply relationship. Ben-Zvi concentrates on the two major arms sales—M-48A Patton tanks in 1965 and A-4E Skyhawk fighter-bombers in 1966—with some attention to the 1968 sale of Phantom fighters. Even here, however, previous perceptions need to be qualified. Ben-Zvi points out that there was not a simple linear process of growing cooperation, but rather a series of tendentious bargaining situations with different strategic and political components in each. viii This close analysis of policy-making inevitably underlines the role of bureaucratic, cognitive, and other subjective elements in the policy process, despite the overwhelming strategic and security concerns of US policy in the Cold War era. The Johnson years appear to exhibit these influences even more strongly. perhaps because the basic strategic choice—working with Israel in order to keep a balance and have a moderating influence—had been made, and what remained were questions of finetuning, in which internal forces could be more influential. Be that as it may, Lyndon Johnson’s pronounced sympathy for Israel, and growing distrust of Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, did not translate simply and directly into greater support of Israel. Not only did there remain the ‘traditionalists’ who had resisted the policy shift from the outset, but the ‘pragmatists’ who wanted to try a new approach also expected a ‘quid pro quo’ from Israel for key arms transactions, and were quite ready to play hardball in order to secure this reciprocity. We now know, thanks in large part to the work of Avner Cohen, that the major US concern in these tough behind-the-scenes encounters was Israel’s likely development of nuclear weapons, following the earlier revelation of the existence of the Dimona reactor and US pressure for Israel to join the Nuclear Non-ProliferationTreaty. Ben-Zvi puts all these elements in place, providing an arresting case study of how and why bargaining between a superpower and a local power does not always favor the former. In this case, the many competing concerns of US policy, in the Middle East and elsewhere, militated against the kind of brutal singlemindedness that would have been needed to bludgeon Israel into submission on an issue as critical as building a nuclear deterrent. The cumulative impact of the three arms sales, despite the inevitable contretemps, was ‘the establishment of a de facto patron-client strategic relationship in the American-Israeli sphere before the outbreak of the June 1967 Six Day War.’ The story of this relationship, in all its nuances, has never been better told. Professor Alan Dowty University of Notre Dame 2003 Preface and Acknowledgements This manuscript was written as a sequel to an earlier endeavor,1 which attempted to reconstruct and elucidate President John F.Kennedy’s decision, of August 1962, to set aside the traditional American posture of refusing to sell advanced weapons systems to Israel and to approve the sale of Hawk short-range, anti-aircraft missiles to the Israeli Government of David Ben-Gurion. As was the case in John F.Kennedy and the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel, which was largely based on documentary material (primarily from the John F.Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston), so will the following chapters rely extensively on primary sources, particularly those available at the Lyndon B.Johnson Library in Austin and the Israeli State Archives (ISA) in Jerusalem. Furthermore, the earlier analysis of the Hawk decision viewed the Kennedy Administration not as a unitary entity, whose main actors were fully and invariably committed to the same vision of the world and derivative policy preferences and recommendations, but rather as an extremely heterogeneous machine, whose components fiercely competed with one another for influence and dominance. Similarly, the present effort to shed light on the actual dynamics of the decision-making process concerning the issue of arms sales to Israel, as it unfolded during the Johnson era (and which culminated in three major Presidential decisions to sell Israel tanks and planes), will rely upon the ‘bureaucratic politics’ paradigm as its central analytical tool or conceptual prism. It is through this paradigm that the evolution of American arms sales policy between November 1963 and January 1969 (with particular emphasis on the M-48A Patton tank and the A-4E Skyhawk fighter-bomber deals) can be most persuasively illuminated and explained. In view of the fact that the decision-making process concerning the sale to Israel of 50 Phantom fighter-bombers, concluded on 7 November 1968, was closely patterned on the M-48A Patton tank sale and the A-4E Skyhawk fighter-bomber