The Kennedys and the Middle East; a counterfactual question
I'm always very surprised to find people maintaining that American links with Israel have always been overriding or that something changed on the left after 1967. The reason I write this is because of a reflection on John Kennedy's 'Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country' formulation from 1961.
Kennedy and Sorensen wrote more speeches more or less symbiotically; but it was an eye-opener to me to find that the phrase appears to correspond exactly to one on the necessity for a new Arab nationalism in Kahlil Gibran's 1925 essay on 'The New Frontier'. Coincidences like that are immediately suspicious.
Robert Kennedy, of course, was once held hostage by Jewish groups when travelling in the late 1940s in Palestine, I think that I am right in saying, if only for a matter of hours. Nevertheless, he admired the Israelis tremendously. I've found his despatches from the British Mandate in Palestine--he was there before it was called Israel--here. Both Kennedys were deeply annoyed, by all accounts, by the nuclear goings-on at Dimona in the early sixties.
The cliche--and what would this blog be without cliches?--is that America turned solidly to Israel when Harry Truman upheld its independence in 1948. It didn't, as survivors of the USS Liberty would no doubt have told you.
But consider the counterfactual; after Suez, after Dimona, after an opening to support a sort of Abba-Eban-in Lebanon approach that a surviving Kennedy might have adopted--avoiding the 1967 war in the process--would America ever have allied itself so closely with the Israeli right had Kennedy lived or had his brother made it to the White House in 1968?
I'm always very surprised to find people maintaining that American links with Israel have always been overriding or that something changed on the left after 1967. The reason I write this is because of a reflection on John Kennedy's 'Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country' formulation from 1961.
Kennedy and Sorensen wrote more speeches more or less symbiotically; but it was an eye-opener to me to find that the phrase appears to correspond exactly to one on the necessity for a new Arab nationalism in Kahlil Gibran's 1925 essay on 'The New Frontier'. Coincidences like that are immediately suspicious.
Robert Kennedy, of course, was once held hostage by Jewish groups when travelling in the late 1940s in Palestine, I think that I am right in saying, if only for a matter of hours. Nevertheless, he admired the Israelis tremendously. I've found his despatches from the British Mandate in Palestine--he was there before it was called Israel--here. Both Kennedys were deeply annoyed, by all accounts, by the nuclear goings-on at Dimona in the early sixties.
The cliche--and what would this blog be without cliches?--is that America turned solidly to Israel when Harry Truman upheld its independence in 1948. It didn't, as survivors of the USS Liberty would no doubt have told you.
But consider the counterfactual; after Suez, after Dimona, after an opening to support a sort of Abba-Eban-in Lebanon approach that a surviving Kennedy might have adopted--avoiding the 1967 war in the process--would America ever have allied itself so closely with the Israeli right had Kennedy lived or had his brother made it to the White House in 1968?
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