Final_Judgment

[68] Final Judgment 129
Given the configuration of the [Israel Defense Forces], these were anything
but defensive weapons.
"The $92 million in military assistance provided in FY 1966 was
greater than the total of all official military aid provided to Israel
cumulatively, in all the years going back to the foundation of that nation in
1948." 188 Green summarizes the massive extent of Johnson's giveaways:
"Seventy percent of all U.S. official assistance to Israel has been military.
America has given Israel over $17 billion in military aid since 1946,
virtually all of which—over 99 percent—has been provided since 1965." 189
ISRAEL'S INTERESTS FIRST
It was clearly Lyndon B. Johnson who set the precedent for unlimited
aid to Israel. All told, however, the death of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon
Johnson's assumption of the Oval Office marked a major change in overall
U.S. policy. As Stephen Green writes, in all too clarifying detail in Taking
Sides: America's Secret Relations With A Militant Israel:
"In the years 1948-1963, America was perceived by all of the
governments in the Middle East as a major power that acted upon the basis
of its own, clearly defined national self-interest. Moreover, U.S. Middle
East policy was just that—Middle East policy; it was not an Israeli policy
in which Arab countries were subordinate actors.
"In the years 1948-1963, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy
firmly guaranteed Israeli national security and territorial integrity, but just as
firmly guaranteed those of Jordan, Lebanon, and the other nations of the
region. That was what the Tripartite Declaration of 1950 was all about.
"For successive Israel governments in this period, the boundary line
between U.S. and Israeli national security interests was drawn frequently,
and usually decisively. Truman's policies on arms exports to the middle
East, Eisenhower's stands on regional water development and on territorial
integrity during the Suez Crisis, and Kennedy's candor with Mrs. Meir—all
of these were markers on this boundary line.
"Nevertheless, during this time U.S. financial support for Israel far
exceeded that given any other nation in the world, on a per capita basis. And
U.S. diplomatic support for Israel in the UN and elsewhere was no less
generous.
"But the limits to U.S. support for Israel were generally understood by
all of the countries of the region, and it was precisely these limits that
preserved America's ability to mediate the various issues that composed the
Arab-Israeli dispute.
"Then, in the early years of the Johnson administration, 1964-1967,
U.S. policy on Middle Eastern matters abruptly changed. It would perhaps
be more accurate to say that it disintegrated. America had a public policy on
the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, but suddenly had a covert policy of
abetting Israel's nuclear weapons program. We had a public policy on arms
balance in the region, but secretly agreed, by the end of 1967, to become
Israel's major arms supplier.