- Dec 29, 2008
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No other government pressured Truman to force Israel to accept a cease fire in 1949. There was no other country in the world that had that kind of clout with us then. Again, in 1956, America's two closest allies, Britain and France were Israel's partners in the Sinai campaign, and Eisenhower threatened to use US military force, if necessary, against all three if they didn't withdraw.
It is true that in 1967 and in 1973, the USSR did threaten to intervene if Israel did not stop its advance and While LBJ had already committed US forces to the region to repulse such a Soviet intervention, he certainly did not want it to happen. But Carter was under no pressure to limit West Bank settlement expansion other than the demands coming from Egypt in the context of the Israel-Egypt peace negotiations, and considering his screwball foreign policy, if he had been under pressure, he probably wouldn't have even known it, and Clinton was under no pressure to force the collapse of the Shamir government other than from his own ego maniacal belief that he could solve this intractable problem by sheer force of his personality.
Israel no longer receives any explicit economic aid from the US, but it does receive about $2.5 billion in military credits, mostly mandated by treaty obligations signed by Carter as a part of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, it redeems by buying military hardware from US companies, thus generating taxes that almost equal the face value of the credits. This may seem strange since Israel is the world's fourth or fifth largest exporter of weapons, itself, and produces and exports most of the same kinds of ordinance it buy from US companies with those military credits as well as some of the world's most sophisticated weapons systems such as the radar and missile system it recently sold to India in a multi billion dollar sale or the airborne radar system that some say is superior to the US AWACS system that it sold to China but then was forced by the US to pull out of the contract and pay a multi billion dollar indemnity to China for breach of contract. When one considers that before Israel began buying US fighter bombers, it was, itself producing one of the world's best fighter bombers, it becomes clear that part of what the US gets for its support of Israel is considerable leverage over who gets to buy some of these very sophisticated weapons systems.
