Zionism’s Last Card and Hope For Palestine
President Kennedy was so concerned by the possibility of a superpower confrontation being provoked by Israel’s arrogance of power that he saw merit in the idea of the Jewish state being “neutral”, meaning non-aligned. We know that from an off-the-record interview he gave to Amos Elon, Washington correspondent of Ha’aretz, Israel’s daily newspaper for seriously thoughtful people. The interview took place in August 1961 (when Zionist lobby pressure on Kennedy was intense), but it was not published until two days after Kennedy’s assassination. According to Elon, the President said he would be pleased to see a neutral Israel if that would lead to improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and, as a consequence, to improved relations between Israel and the Arab world.
That was explosive political stuff. In my analysis there is no better or more dramatic illustration of the great gulf that existed between President Kennedy and the vested military-industrial interests named by President Eisenhower. The MIC would have regarded Kennedy’s concept of a neutral Israel as heresy. How so? The MIC in America had wanted the Soviet Union to be drawn into the Middle East, in order to have a much bigger board on which to play the Cold War Game. (Could that have been one of the reasons why Dulles refused to provide Nasser with arms for defense?)
Though there were moments of great tension and extreme crisis – the Cuban missile crisis, for example – when one of the two superpowers did not play by the rules, the Cold War really was more of a game than not, played for the purpose of creating jobs and generating wealth by the production and selling of weapons. What Kennedy really wanted (and what Gorbachev would come to want for the Soviet Union before it fell apart) was an end to that nonsense, and for the vast resources of all kinds that went in waging the Cold War to be diverted to the long twilight struggle of his inaugural speech – the struggle “against the common enemies of man” including “poverty and disease and war itself.”
Golda left her meeting with President Kennedy believing that if Ben-Gurion continued to defy him on Dimona, Israel would be on a confrontation course with him for the remainder of his first term and all of his second; and that, she knew, would be disastrous for the Jewish state and no doubt Jews everywhere. If Ben-Gurion could not be persuaded to change his mind and agree to IAEA inspection of Dimona, he would have to go.
That was the message Kennedy wanted Mother Israel to get. She got it
END OF QUOTE FROM MY BOOK
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