Support any friend: Kennedy, Nasser, and the origins of the United States-Israel alliance

The literature on U.S.-Israel relations sometimes glides past the Kennedy period---treating it as a mere place-marker between Suez and the Six Day War, between the martial frostiness of Dwight Eisenhower and the Texan warmth of Lyndon Johnson. But the increasingly complete documentary record on America's Middle East decisions from 1961--63 shows that the Kennedy administration constitutes the key hinge in U.S.-Israel relations, swinging from the chilly association of the 1950s to the full-blown alliance we know today. By expanding the limits of what was thinkable with Israel and reaching the limits of what was doable with Egypt, Kennedy set the parameters for America's Middle Eastern policy for decades to come.;Chapter I, "Four and a Half Presidents," surveys the contours of the U.S.-Israel special relationship from 1917 until 1960. Chapter II, "Uncle Sam and Mister Big," explores Kennedy's attempt to get America back on a firmer footing with the key actor in the Arab world, the pan-Arabist Nasser---the last sustained, major American overture to revolutionary Egypt until the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. Chapter III, "Nasser's Vietnam," shows that the Kennedy administration reached the limits of rapprochement as Nasser blundered into a far-flung quagmire of his own: his ill-fated and futile intervention in Yemen. Chapter IV, "Israel's Missile Gap," finds the root of today's U.S.-Israel military alliance: Kennedy's groundbreaking 1962 decision to sell Hawk missiles to the Jewish state. Chapter V, "The Delicate Matter," traces the Kennedy administration's concern that weapons of mass destruction could destabilize the Middle East and the New Frontiersmen's suspicions about the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona.;With the arms embargo broached, the nuclear irritant cooled, and the regional landscape clarified, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon could build upon the foundations laid by Kennedy. The resultant edifice is the U.S.-Israel alliance as we know it today---a far cry from the relationship when Kennedy took office in 1961. The origins of the U.S.-Israel bond as we know it lie not in one simple shift of presidential will but amid the complex diplomatic triangle between Kennedy, Nasser, and Ben-Gurion.