The Golden Lariat: Explaining American Aid to Israel by MASSACHU SETTS INSTrItE OF TE CHNOLOGY Richard Kraus 0 5 2009 B.A., Political Science (2001) OCT University of Chicago LIBLIBF ARIES Submitted to the Department of Political Science in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ARCHIVES September 2009 © 2009 Richard Kraus All rights reserved The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. -,/I A i / I Signature of Author.................................c Denartment of Political Science September 14, 2009 Certified by....................... ....... °° o o............................................ ° ° o o o ° , o o * o , °o ° o Stephen Van Evera Ford International Professor of Political Science Thesis Supervisor Accepted by................. Roger Petersen Chair, Graduate Program Committee The Golden Lariat: Explaining American Aid to Israel by Richard Kraus Submitted to the Department of Political Science on September 14, 2009 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Political Science ABSTRACT An observational study was conducted to determine the most likely explanation of American support for Israel. Several extant hypotheses were considered, most particularly, and at greatest length, that of a pro-Israel domestic lobby in the United States, but also that it had to do with Cold War containment, common values, or precedent. It was ultimately concluded that the domestic lobby hypothesis could not account for American support, since the level of that support correlated negatively with the resources of the lobby, and because sudden, temporary changes in the level of American support did not coincide with any similar changes in the resources of the lobby. Furthermore, statistical analysis indicated that there was on balance no benefit for politicians who supported the lobby's agenda, and no cost for those who opposed it. Likewise, the other explanations also proved unsatisfactory. The containment hypothesis, for instance, could not explain why American support continued after the Cold War ended, while the common values hypothesis could not explain why American support did not begin until 1971, nor why it peaked in 1979 and began to decline in the eighties. Finally, it was concluded that the best explanation of American support was that it gave the United States the leverage to restrain Israeli belligerence, for which the United States was blamed by the Arab states. In this way, the U.S. was able to minimize damage to its relations with the Arabs resulting from the Arab-Israeli conflict. Thesis Supervisor: Stephen Van Evera Title: Ford International Professor of Political Science Table of Contents Introduction ...................................................................................... page 5 History of American Aid to Israel ............................................................ page 9 The Domestic Lobby Hypothesis ......................................................... page 14 Summary Preview of Tests and Evidence ..................................... page 17 Testing the Lobby Hypothesis .................................................... page 24 Tests Based on Arms Sales........................................................... page 32 The I-HAWK Debate in the House ............................................... page 36 The I-HAWK Debate in the Senate ................................................ page 51 The 1978 F-15 Sale in the Senate..............................................page 59 The House Debate on the F-15 Sale ............................................. page 70 The 1981 AWACS Sale in the Senate ........................................... page 79 The 1981 AWACS Sale in the House ........................................... page 92 Results for All Sales Concatenated ..............................................page 105 Summary of Arms Sales Data ................................................... page 121 Summary of Lobby Hypothesis and Other Possible Objections .............page 132 The Common-Values Hypothesis ......................................................... page 136 The Precedent Hypothesis ................................................................ page 142 The Containment Hypothesis .............................................................. page 148 Combining the Containment and Lobby Hypotheses .......................... page 154 The Restraint Hypothesis .................................................................. page 156 Blaming America First ........................................................... page 157 Oil Markets .......................................................................... page 158 Land for Aid.....................................................page 160 Step-by-Step...........................................page 163 The Airlift.........................................................................page 165 Pre-1970 Aid ............................................................ .......... page 168 Speech Evidence for the Restraint Hypothesis ................................. page 169 Sticks and Carrots.................................................................. page 171 Criticism of the Restraint Hypothesis .......................................... page 172 Restraint viv-a-vis the Soviets........................................................... page 173 Conclusion.... ...........................................................................page 176 Evaluating the Hypotheses ........................................................ page 176 The Future of U.S.-Israel Relations ..............................................page 177 Policy Prescription ............................................................... page 179 Bibliography ................................................ page 181 I. Introduction Why does the United States support Israel? It is widely believed that the United States supports Israel because of the efforts of pro-Israel lobbyists within American domestic politics.' There are, however, some dissenters from this conventional wisdom: one critic of the domestic-lobby hypothesis, A.F.K. Organski, has argued that the United States has supported Israel not because of the Israel lobby, but because of the well- established American desire to contain the expansion of Soviet influence during the Cold War. 2 Another critic, Michael Barnett, has argued that the foundation of the America- Israel alliance is a sense of shared norms and identity. 3 Warren Bass, in his recent book on the history of the U.S.-Israel alliance, implies that the ongoing alliance is caused by a precedent set by the Kennedy administration. 4 While it might seem that there is a surfeit 11 have relied on Edward Tivnan's The Lobby, Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv's Friends in Deed, and Steven Spiegel's The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict as general histories of American support for Israel, and of lobbying efforts on Israel's behalf in America. Tony Smith's Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making ofAmerican Foreign Policy is a study of domestic lobbies for foreign governments in general, although it not surprisingly gives much attention to the Israel lobby in specific. Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Siege is a general history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but it also serves as an explication and advocate of the domestic-lobby hypothesis. Michael Lind's "The Israel Lobby," available on-line at http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&DoclD=779 and in the April 20, 2002 edition of Prospect,in addition to explicating very clearly the different elements of the domestic-lobby hypothesis, also exemplifies the criticisms often made of the lobby. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer make an argument similar to Lind's in their article "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," available at http://web.hks.harvard.edu/publications/workingpapers/citation.aspx?Publd=3670, and in their book of the same title. Fortunemagazine's "Power 25" survey, its list of Washington's most powerful lobbying groups, published May 28, 2001, places the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, as the fourth most influential lobby in Washington, behind only the National Rifle Association, the American Association of Retired Persons, and the National Federation of Independent Business. Former congressman Paul Findley has written two books advancing the lobby hypothesis, from a highly critical point of view: They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel'sLobby, and Deliberate Deceptions: Facingthe Facts about the U.S.-IsraeliRelationship. Richard H. Curtiss has made an argument similar to Findley's in Stealth PACs: Lobbying Congressfor Control of U.S. Middle East Policy. 2 A. F. K. Organski, The $36 Billion Bargain. Also Michael Handel in "Israel's Contribution to U.S. Interests in the Middle East," in Israel,the Middle East, and U.S. Interests, Harry Allen and Ivan Volgyes, eds. Interestingly, Noam Chomsky, in The Fateful Triangle,makes an argument not dissimilar to Organski's, although one that is obscured by his violently anti-Israel polemic. 3 Michael Barnett, "Identity and Alliances in the Middle East," in The Culture of NationalSecurity: Norms and Identity in World Politics, Peter Katzenstein, ed. 4 Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy's