The president was furious. He had just been shown photos of civilians killed by Israeli bombings, including a small baby whose arm had been torn off. He ordered his aides to telephone the Israeli prime minister, then abruptly dressed him.
The president was Ronald Reagan, it was 1982 and the battlefield was Lebanon, where the Israelis were attacking Palestinian fighters. Mr. Reagan’s conversation with Prime Minister Menachem Begin that day, August 12, will be one of the few times his aides have heard the usually mild-mannered president demonstrate such exercise. .
“It’s a holocaust,” Mr. Reagan told Mr. Begin angrily.
Mr. Begin, whose parents and brother were killed by the Nazis, retorted: “Mr. Begin. President, I know everything about a holocaust.
Nevertheless, Mr. Reagan retorted, it had to stop. Mr. Begin responded to the request. Twenty minutes later, he called back and told the president that he had ordered the bombing to stop. “I didn’t know I had this kind of power,” Mr. Reagan later marveled to his aides.
This wouldn’t be the only time he used it to subdue Israel. In fact, Mr. Reagan used American gun power on several occasions to influence Israeli war policy, at different times ordering that warplanes and cluster munitions be delayed or withheld. His actions take on new meaning four decades later, as President Biden delays a bomb delivery and threatens to deny Israel other offensive weapons if it attacks Rafah in southern Gaza.
Even as Republicans lash out at Mr. Biden, accusing him of abandoning an ally in the middle of war, supporters of the president’s decision pointed to Reagan’s precedent. If it was reasonable for the Republican presidential icon to limit arms to impose his will on Israel, they argue, it should be acceptable for the current Democratic president to do the same.
But what the Reagan comparison really highlights is how far Israel policy has evolved in the United States since the 1980s. For decades, presidents and prime ministers have argued without doing much harm. permanent way to solid relations between the two countries.
Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened economic sanctions and aid cuts to force Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula after Egypt’s 1956 invasion. Gerald R. Ford warned he would reevaluate the entire relationship in 1975 due to what he saw as Israel’s recalcitrance during this period. peace talks with Egypt. George HW Bush delayed providing $10 billion in loan guarantees in 1991, amid a dispute over West Bank settlements.
In Mr. Reagan’s era, Democrats were seen as the party most supportive of Israel, a perception he wanted to change. By Mr. Reagan’s own account, “they never had a better friend of Israel in the White House.” And yet, it was a friendship that was tested again and again.
In June 1981, less than five months after Mr. Reagan took office, Israel used American-made F-16 military planes to bomb the Osirak nuclear power plant in Iraq, a surprise attack that outraged many people in Washington. Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, considered a friend of the Arabs, urged Mr. Reagan to end the flow of arms to Israel. Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., considered a friend of Israel, opposed it.
In the end, Mr. Reagan agreed to vote to condemn Israel in the United Nations Security Council and to delay the delivery of four F-16s expected this summer – something Patrick Tyler, in “A World of Trouble,” his history of American foreign policy. policy in the Middle East, described as a “minimal rebuke”.
But a few weeks later, an Israeli airstrike killed about 300 civilians in Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut, prompting Mr. Reagan to hold back 10 more F-16s and two F-15 jet fighters. However, the impasse did not last long. In August, the freeze was lifted.
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 forced a new confrontation. Mr. Reagan halted the shipment of cluster munitions, fearing that the munitions would be used against civilians in violation of the agreements. Around the same time, he delayed delivery of 75 F-16 warplanes without explanation until March 1983, when he announced that he would not release the planes until Israel withdrew his forces from Lebanon.
This decision did not provoke any wave of criticism like that observed in Washington this week. “Perhaps it was a necessary signal to Israel,” Mr. Reagan wrote quietly in his diary that evening in describing his decision. In the days that followed, New York Times articles contained no criticism from members of Congress of either party. It was only a week later that William Safire, a conservative Times columnist, called Mr. Reagan’s decision “a tragic about-face toward Israel,” as he put it.
“Reagan had public support for withholding aid because the bombing of Beirut was seen on American television,” recalls Lou Cannon, Reagan’s biographer. “Like in Gaza, it was horrible. »
Since then, of course, Republicans have repositioned themselves as the party that unquestioningly supports Israel, while Democrats, angered by the long conservative rule of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have become more divided on the issue. Today, there is no longer the tempered deference that Mr. Reagan enjoyed from across the aisle on foreign policy.
The bombings of August 1982, in particular, had a considerable impact on Mr. Reagan. Whatever his politics or politics, he reacted viscerally to the images he saw.
“Reagan was deeply upset by the bombing of Beirut,” recalled Richard Murphy, his ambassador to Saudi Arabia, in an oral history written by Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober. “He made it clear he wanted this to stop when the human side was thrust in his face.”
Mr. Reagan did not hold back and was willing to risk everything. “I was angry,” he wrote in his diary last night, describing the tense conversation with Mr. Begin. “I told him this needs to stop or our entire future relationship will be in jeopardy.” And I stopped that, at least temporarily.
News Source : www.nytimes.com
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