Zionism’s Last Card and Hope For Palestine
To give readers of this article something of the full flavour of what Kennedy said to Golda and the considerations which made him say it, I am now going to quote two and a bit pages from Chapter 11 of Volume Two of the American edition of my book which is sub-titled David Becomes Goliath. The title of the chapter is Turning Point – The Assassination of President Kennedy. The conversation between the young president and the aging Mother Israel took place on 27th December 1962 on the veranda of the Kennedy holiday home in Palm Springs. The only other person present to keep a note of what was said was Philips Talbot, an assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. He had he been relieved the day after Kennedy entered the White House to get a message from the new president saying that although he had received nearly 90 percent of the Jewish votes, he was “not in their pockets”. For his part Kennedy really trusted Talbot. Only selected parts of his eight-page memorandum of the conversation were de-classified in 1979. Some of what he wrote was deleted and some remains classified, for which read suppressed, to this day for “security reasons”. (Ha! Ha!). The text I am quoting and the whole chapter from which it comes begs the question of how different the history of what used to be called the Arab-Israeli conflict might have been if Kennedy had been allowed to live and serve a second term.
QUOTE FROM MY BOOK
President Kennedy’s message to Golda was to the effect that he was ready, willing and able to give Israel an irrevocable commitment that America would guarantee Israel’s security and survival, but that the giving of such a commitment was conditional. The U.S. could not and would not give it to a nuclear-armed Jewish state. Israel had to agree to IAEA inspection of Dimona and if that proved, as he suspected it would, that Israel was in the process of producing a nuclear bomb of its own, work on the project would have to be stopped. Terminated. And… if that meant Golda and her colleagues getting rid of Ben-Gurion, they should do it.
That was not, of course, how President Kennedy would have put it. No American President could have spoken in such terms, even in private on the secluded veranda of his holiday home. But it was the message Golda could extract from what he did say to her; and he knew she was more than smart enough to do the extracting.
The known record of what Kennedy said to Golda indicates that he started out by defining what he called “the limitations of America’s relationship with Israel.” It was the case, he said, that “the United States has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East really comparable to that which it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs. But for us to play properly the role we are called upon to play, we cannot afford the luxury of identifying Israel as our exclusive friend.”
The best way for the United States to effectively serve Israel’s national security interests, he went on, “is to maintain and develop America’s relations with other nations in the region. Our influence could then be brought to bear, as needed in particular disputes, to ensure that Israel’s essential interests are not compromised. If we pulled out of the Arab Middle East and maintained our ties only with Israel this would not be in Israel’s interests.”
The idea of America “pulling out” of the Arab Middle East was not on anybody’s public agenda, so why did President Kennedy feel the need to talk about it? The implication is that he was under mounting pressure from the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress to abandon Eisenhower’s policy of even-handedness, and to look upon Israel as America’s only true friend and reliable ally in the region.
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