Fateful alliance: Lyndon Johnson and American policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1963--1969

President Lyndon Baines Johnson was responsible for decisively turning American policy towards the State of Israel from one of lukewarm acceptance and recognition of its right to exist towards an unabashedly pro-Israeli stance that sought to take partial responsibility for Israeli security vis-a-vis its Arab neighbors. This policy led the United States to unofficially look the other way even when Israel's actions critically clashed with stated official American policy on such matters as the return of the territories occupied during the Six Day War of 1967 or Israel's pursuit of a nuclear deterrent. A strong case can be made that the Johnson Administration was deliberately if not openly pursuing a pro-Israeli stance as early as 1964, and that this pro-Israeli turn was taken overwhelmingly because of the domestic political benefits that this brought to the White House for a president facing national election efforts in 1964 and 1968. In addition to the evangelical Christian religious background he inherited from his family which strongly reinforced his sympathy towards Israel, Johnson self-identified with Israelis as fellow pioneers, hard-workers and self-made men and women. As such, for both political and personal reasons, the Johnson Administration at the direction of the president would covertly pursue a pro-Israeli policy that amounted to a de facto American political and military alliance with the Jewish state before 1967 that was intended to reap the maximum domestic political gain and satisfy Johnson's own personal need to feel that he had aided a people he found particularly admirable. At the same time, the administration maintained the superficial appearance of even-handedness in the Middle Eastern conflict, essentially a policy of "keeping up appearances," to serve the United States' broader strategic interests of containing Soviet influence in the region and avoiding charges of hypocrisy in its desire to get other nations to sign the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.