Reconstructing Cold War Political Culture: Cold War Critics in Congress and their Views on Israel, 1967–1974

Abstract

This study examines the ways in which the Middle East and the Israeli question were placed in debates over US Cold War foreign policy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This period constituted a critical moment when alternatives to the Cold War seemed possible. A broad Cold War consensus, which had been dominant in American political culture for decades, began facing severe criticism because of the US quagmire in Vietnam, and Congressional activism grew in response to the war. Anti-Vietnam War Congressmen and women claimed that the war was not exceptional but a logical consequence of a Cold War foreign policy that supported any Third World ally including right-wing dictatorships that could contain Communist inroads in Third World regions. Reformist representatives in both houses designed a way to judge the legitimacy of foreign assistance on the grounds of the extent of the recipients’ democracy so that problematic governments that were unconcerned with the welfare of their people would not receive US aid. But they urged the Executive Branch to provide Israel with substantial military and economic aid. This congressional pressure played a major role in cultivating the tight US-Israeli relationship that grew dramatically after the Arab-Israeli war in 1967. This article investigates how these two, seemingly contradictory, moves—supporting both the increase of financial and military aid to Israel and the reduction of similar aid to the South Vietnamese government and several other US allies in the Third World—went together, by focusing senators and representatives who were dovish on Vietnam but hawkish in the Middle East.

Investigating this wing of lawmakers sheds new light on the significant impact that the events in the Middle East had on the political culture of 1970s America. Previous studies have shown that New Right intellectuals and politicians and military specialists mobilized militarized images of Israel, which were strengthened by Israel’s military strength and uncompromising anti-terrorist measures, in their effort to recover a “strong America,” using these images as a model for the United States to overcome a sense of public aversion to military interventionism. These studies, however, ignore that liberal critics of US Cold War foreign policy also referred to Israel to depict what they believed America should stand for. Reformist Congressmen and women depicted Israel as a modern and democratic nation deserving US military and economic aid to differentiate Israel from other Third World allies, counterposing “democracy” with “dictatorship.” This article demonstrates that for Cold War reformers in Congress, providing military and economic aid to Israel complemented their effort to recover US moral authority that they believed the US involvement of the war in Vietnam had undermined. It concludes that the mobilization of the binary world view and repetitive mentions of Communist-backed aggression in the Middle East for supporting Israel led to the discursive survival of the Cold War even among many anti-Cold War lawmakers at a time when shattering that consensus seemed possible.