[Ifroham4]

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/72346.html

Much has been written in recent weeks of the Obama administration's possible tilt toward a more evenhanded U.S. Middle East policy. Contrary to popular perception, however, if such a change were indeed implemented, it would constitute not so much a new and revolutionary approach as it would an old and reactionary one.

It would, in fact, be several giant steps backward to the approach pursued by the U.S. for the first decade and a half of Israel's existence, never more faithfully than during the eight-year tenure of Dwight Eisenhower, who died 40 years ago on March 28 at the age of 78.

Everyone, as the popular slogan went, liked Ike - everyone, that is, but the majority of American Jews, who in the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956 overwhelmingly preferred his Democratic opponent, former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson.

To all outward appearances, Eisenhower was the personification of the typical American at mid-century: a non-ideological moderate uncomfortable with extreme partisans of any ideology; a genial sort whose greatest concerns centered on improving his golf score and reeling in a really big fish.

That might have been the Eisenhower image, but it belied a shrewd political mind and a stubborn streak that vexed friend and foe alike. As would be true of Ronald Reagan three decades later, Eisenhower was often slighted for being nothing more than a jocular pitchman whose aides saw to the serious side of government. Disdain for Ike was a fact of life in academic and literary circles during his presidency and for years after he left office.

Gradually, historians began to develop a new appreciation for Eisenhower. Nostalgia for a more innocent time in America, even among cynical intellectuals, may have contributed to this changed perception. But what really opened eyes in the mid- and late-1970s was the declassification of Eisenhower-era government documents.

Scholars discovered that Ike had been the master of what the historian Fred Greenstein dubbed the "hidden-hand presidency"; that behind the smiling, grandfatherly exterior there lived a highly-competent chief executive who was indeed his administration's ultimate decision-maker.

It follows, then, that the Eisenhower administration's attitude toward Israel - one that can only be described as irritable ambivalence straining for proper cordiality - must have come directly from the man at the top.

* * *

Eisenhower remarked on more than one occasion that, had he been president in the late 1940s, he would not have supported the creation of Israel. He added, however, that since the Jewish state was now a reality, he wished it well. And though it is impossible in all fairness to question the sincerity behind the latter sentiment, the record of the Eisenhower administration toward Israel does at least call it into question.

In the summer of 1952, Senator Richard Nixon, whom presidential candidate Eisenhower had just chosen as his running mate, was only too prescient when he remarked to some friends active in Jewish organizational life that in the event of an Eisenhower victory in November, it would be a mistake to expect Ike's likely secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to be friendly toward Israel.

Dulles (who would serve as Eisenhower's secretary of state from 1953 until his death in 1959) and his brother Allen (who headed the CIA during the same period) were pillars of the American foreign policy establishment, a rarefied club of well-born WASPs who moved in the kind of circles where the mere sighting of a Jew was an unusual occurrence.

Reports through the years about the extent of their anti-Semitism have often been unreliable, with some of the more negative stories coming from anonymous or questionable sources. But one can say with a reasonable amount of certitude that the welfare of the Jewish people was not something to which the Dulles brothers devoted a great deal of thought.

As for Eisenhower, no serious allegation of personal anti-Semitism has ever been leveled against him. Though he was not known to have had any close Jewish friends - growing up in Abilene, Kansas, he certainly had no contact with Jews in his formative years - he was not a man given to trafficking in casual ethnic or religious slurs.

Eisenhower was genuinely horrified by what he saw when Allied troops liberated the Nazi concentration camps. "The visual evidence of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering," he said about one such camp. "I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.' "

Long after the war he reminisced about his standard procedure in those days for dealing with officers who made anti-Jewish remarks: The offending individual would be sent on a detailed tour of Dachau or Auschwitz - "and that," said Eisenhower, "would cure him."

* * *

Relations between the Eisenhower administration and Israel got off on the wrong foot soon after Ike assumed the presidency in January 1953. That summer, Israel undertook an ambitious effort to divert water from the Jordan River to irrigate the arid Negev. The project was loudly denounced by Jordan and Syria as an act of thievery that would cost them their share of the river's water.

The United Nations, with the U.S. in full agreement, demanded an immediate halt to the project. The Israeli government refused, and the tone in U.S.-Israel relations was set for the next eight years. The Eisenhower administration, from that early skirmish on, viewed Israel as an unpredictable nuisance at best, a threat to the region's stability at worst.

It was a negative assessment that would be reinforced in the midst of the Jordan River controversy as Israel stumbled into a public relations disaster entirely of its own making.

Incursions into Israel by Arab saboteurs had been going on for several years, and retaliation by the Israeli army was a given. Because these attacks and counterattacks were relatively small-scale operations, carried out not in Israel's cities but in and around the country's borders, they hardly drew the attention of the outside world. That would all change with what happened in an Arab village called Qibya.

In October 1953, a unit of Israeli commandos, under the leadership of a young colonel named Ariel Sharon, crossed over the border into Jordan after Arab terrorists killed an Israeli mother and her two young children. In Qibya, which had been a base for terrorists preparing attacks against Israel, Sharon's men blew up a number of buildings thought to be empty. When it was over and dozens of civilians were found dead in their demolished homes (hundreds of other residents had been allowed to leave the area), international condemnation quickly rained down on Israel. Even the country's staunchest defenders found it difficult to explain away the tragedy.

Rather than leave bad enough alone, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, according to Israeli journalists Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, "instructed Ambassador [Abba] Eban to tell Washington and the UN that the raiders had not been Israeli soldiers but enraged farmers and settlers."

The story was too obvious a concoction. "No one," write Raviv and Melman, "believed that tale, and it only fueled the Eisenhower administration's anger."