Support For The State Of Israel example essay topic

Hunter 1 Since the State of Israel was founded in 1948, the United States government has supported them through war and turmoil. The roots of America's participation on the side of Israel can be traced back directly to Harry Truman's presidential administration. Eleven minutes after the founding of Israel the United States recognized it as a sovereign nation. Since that day, U.S. politics have balanced in policy between supporting Israel and access to Middle Eastern oil (Grier 1-2).

In October of 1973, President Richard Nixon met with his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger to discuss the current war in the Middle East. Just one day earlier the armies of Egypt and Syria had launched a surprise attack on the Israelis. Kissinger informed the president that Israel was requesting logistical support in the form of sidewinder missiles and ammunition. Confident that he was picking the winning team, President Nixon agreed to grant Israel's request (Grier 5). It was predicted that Israel would win the war quickly; as they had in the Six Day War of 1967. The victory, however, did not come quickly.

After 16 days of intense fighting, and with the support of American transport planes and F-4 Phantom Jets the Israeli army emerged as the victors. But, Hunter 2 in order to calm the raging tensions in the Middle East, there would have to be negotiations for the return of the lands captured by Israel. Again the United States took a piece of the action (Grier 6). The end of the Yom Kippur War was the beginning of the American hard-bargaining mediator phase. This era was marked by difficult, seemingly successful negotiations, followed by dramatic agreement, handshaking, and soaring hopes, and then a crash back to earth as neither side followed through on what they agreed to.

Peter Grier of The Christian Science Monitor notes: Consider the Camp David accords -still the most important Middle East pact to which the US has served as midwife. President Jimmy Carter had taken office promising a new look for US foreign policy. The hard realpolitik of the Nixon-Ford era, when everything was seen through the lens of the cold war, would be modified. In its place would be an attempt to deal with regional Hunter 3 problems on their own terms. In the Middle East, that meant a comprehensive approach to Israeli-Arab differences, including some sort of solution solution for the problem of displaced palestinians (Grier 7). At that time the United States' relations with Israel peaked.

Support for Israel accounted for a whopping thirty-four percent of total United States foreign aid. In 1981 The United States supported Israel with nearly two and one half billion dollars in aid. Of that figure, less than half was a loan to be repaid (U.S. Assistance 1). Also in 1981, on seven June, the Israeli Defense Forces launched a lightning fast airstrike comprised of F 15 and F 16 fighter jets toward the Os irak nuclear facility near Baghdad, Iraq. One minute and twenty seconds after the assault had begun, the nuclear reactor lay in ruins (Raid 1). That July, after fighting between Israel and the Palestinians in Lebanon, President Reagan's special envoy, Philip C. Habib helped secure a cease fire agreement (Background 14).

Ten years later, as the Allied Coalition Forces were removing Saddam Hunter 4 Hussein and his troops from Kuwait, Iraq launched multiple missile volleys toward Israel. As opposed to entering the war directly, Israel relied on the United States Army to deflect the missile attacks (Background 15). The Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, a branch of the U.S. State Department reported: On September 13, 1993, Israel and the PLO signed a Declaration of Principles (DOP) on the South Lawn of the White House. The declaration was a major conceptual breakthrough achieved under the Madrid framework. It established an ambitious set of objectives relating to a transfer of authority from Israel to an interim Palestinian authority. The DOP established May 1999 as the date by which a permanent status agreement for the West Bank and Gaza Strip would take effect.

Israel and the PLO subsequently signed the Gaza-Jericho Hunter 5 Agreement on May 4, 1994, and the Agreement on Preparatory Transfer of Powers and Responsibilities on August 29, 1994, which began the process of transferring authority from Israel to the Palestinians (Background 17). Obviously, the historic peace accords would not hold their water in the long run, as the turmoil continued into the twenty-first century. On a videotaped statement released on seven October 2001, Osama Bin Ladin said, "Neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine" (qty. on CNN). By this it can be understood that the United States will be plagued by terrorism as long as it allies itself with and provides support for The State of Israel (Grier 9).