Gaza and JFK

                                       Gaza and JFK

Much justifiable attention has been given to the strife, violence, and slaughter going on in Gaza due to the Hamas attack on Israel in early October.  Needless to say, it is a lamentable state of affairs which has led to this horrendous outcome.  Perhaps no one person can chronicle this very long and wide path through the decades, or even tell you where it all began and why.  I hope to just open up a narrow window to show that it need not have come to this.

At Cyril Wecht’s fine conference in Pittsburgh in November, I devoted a section of my talk to this issue. The overall title of my speech was “The Death of Kennedy and the Rise of the Neocons”. What I was trying to do in that talk was to show that from the end of World War II, there were really two wings of the Democratic Party in foreign policy.  As Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick pointed out in their TV series and book  The Untold History of the United States, Harry Truman severely altered what was Franklin Roosevelt’s postwar vision of the world.  Nowhere was this made more clear than in an interview Anthony Eden did with author  Robert Sherwood who was preparing a book about FDR and Harry Hopkins. Eden was a foreign policy advisor under Winston Churchill and eventually became prime minister. He was no wild liberal. In fact he was one of those who plotted to overthrow a main subject of this essay, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in 1956.  But since Eden was so close to Churchill, he had a front row seat at the relations between the Big Three during and after the war. 

Eden told Sherwood that FDR had a remarkable ability to handle the Russians and, in turn, the USSR had tremendous respect for Roosevelt.  He noted FDR’s acute subtlety and how this contrasted with both Churchill and Truman. Eden flatly stated that “the deplorable turning point in the whole relationship of the Western Allies with the Soviet Union was caused directly by the death of Roosevelt.” After 1945, “had Roosevelt lived and retained his health he would never have permitted the present situation to develop.” He concluded that FDR’s passing, “therefore was a calamity of immeasurable proportions.” (Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances, pp. 1-2)

I don’t think we have to review what Truman did after Roosevelt’s passing that tended to upset the relationship with the USSR. But I will say that some think that Truman’s dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan was not just unnecessary, but was partly aimed at sending a message to Moscow. If so, his prognostication that Russia would never develop the bomb was colossally wrong. (Stone and Kuznick, pp. 177-79) When Hiroshima was incinerated, Truman declared “This is the greatest thing in history!”  (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 1)  Let us compare that with President Kennedy’s actions during the Missile Crisis. There, unlike defeated Japan, the Russian arming of Cuba with all three branches of the triad—ICBM’s, plus nuclear equipped bombers and submarines—did really pose a threat to the USA. Kennedy refused to countenance  even bombing the missile silos.

Most serious chroniclers of Kennedy would say that he began his career as a Truman Democrat and then navigated over to the Roosevelt side. As historians like Richard Mahoney have demonstrated, it was his 1951 journey to Asia, specifically his visit to Vietnam, that began his transformation. (See James Norwood’s, “Edmund Gullion, JFK and the Shaping of a Foreign Policy in Vietnam”, at Kennedysandking.com) That metamorphosis culminated in Kennedy’s watershed speech in the senate about the French/Algerian conflict in 1957.  As biographer John Shaw noted, that speech tried to break out of the confines of Cold War thinking and made Kennedy a leader in his party concerning foreign policy. (Kennedy in the Senate, p. 110). Kennedy prepared for that speech by studying the subject for over a year.  He had his wife translate articles from French and Spanish, and he harkened back to some of Roosevelt’s speeches and dictates on European colonialism and British influence in the Middle East. (Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy, pp. 72-73; Allan Nevins, The Strategy of Peace, pp. 65-80)

Once he became president, a significant point about Kennedy’s foreign policy was that he told National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy that he wanted to make a relationship with Nasser a high priority. (Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, p. 125). This was clearly a break with Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles.  They had decided to shun Nasser since he had refused to join the Baghdad Pact, and then recognized Red China. Nasser knew that England would be a silent partner in the former.  He did not want to associate Egypt with the greatest colonizing power in the world. He also wanted the freedom to choose who his country associated with on the national stage. (Muehlenbeck, pp. 11-14). Therefore Nasser became a major part of the Non-Aligned Movement which had its first meeting in Bandung in 1955. Nasser then hosted what many consider the follow-up to Bandung, the Cairo Conference of 1957.

 Dulles strongly disagreed with this. (Robert Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson and the Non Aligned World, p. 52)  For him one was either with America all the way, and if you were not, you became a target. So as a result of all this, Foster Dulles pulled the USA out of the Nile River/Aswan Dam deal.  Quite naturally Nasser turned to Moscow for help. Russia also supplied Egypt with aid and arms in the late fifties. Dulles and Eisenhower now began to tilt toward Saudi Arabia to negate Nasser’s overwhelming pan-Arab appeal in the area. (Muehlenbeck, p. 14)

Kennedy looked at all this with disdain.  He thought it was counterproductive to push Nasser into the arms of the Russians. Both men were also predisposed against supporting the kind of extreme Islamic fundamentalism practiced in Saudi Arabia. (Muehlenbeck, p. 122) In fact, JFK had warned against this danger in his 1957 Algeria speech. Kennedy thought that Foster Dulles was minimizing the power of nationalism at the expense of a Red Scare that did not really exist in the area. He also realized that Nasser represented anti-colonialism, especially when, after he nationalized the Suez Canal, he stood up to England, France and Israel during the following 1956 crisis.

Kennedy appointed the man who was probably the most knowledgeable person in America about Egypt to be his ambassador there, Dr. John S. Badeau. Kennedy then offered Nasser ten million to preserve the ancient monuments of the Nile Valley, which Nasser accepted.(Muehlenbeck, p. 125) This was the beginning of a real attempt by Kennedy to change the Dulles/Eisenhower policy toward the man who was clearly the most influential Arab leader in the Middle East; and perhaps, along with Mohammed and Saladin, one of the three most influential Arabs in history.  As Kennedy said during the 1960 campaign, singling out the Dulles opposition to Nasser:

But if we can learn from the lessons of the past—if we can refrain from pressing our case so hard that the Arabs feel their neutrality and nationalism are threatened, the Middle East can become an area of strength and hope. (Muehlenbeck, p. 124)

One of the things that Nasser found appealing about Kennedy was his support for Algerian independence  expressed in his 1957  senate speech.  At the end of that address Kennedy said it was time to liberate Africa. Nasser took up that cause, and he stated that it was Egypt’s responsibility to liberate all Africans from European colonialism. (See the journal West Africa, January 4, 1958, p. 7) Another point that appealed to Nasser was Kennedy’s backing for the Joseph Johnson repatriation plan. Johnson had been tasked by the United Nations to formulate a plan for the repatriation of the Palestinians who had lost their homes through the Nakba. Johnson’s plan included three options for the refugees: they could stay where they were, they could move elsewhere, or they had the right to return to their original locations. Although Johnson had given up on the plan by 1962, declassified documents secured by Malcolm Blunt show that Kennedy never abandoned it. Blunt has shown that Kennedy was pushing for this through his ambassador to Israel in the summer of 1963. This would appeal to Nasser since he considered the Palestinians part of the Arab cause.

Nasser and Kennedy exchanged a number of letters, the total number of which is disputed. But it is clear that Nasser appreciated Kennedy’s consideration of his desire to make choices based on Egypt’s national interests.(See the site Egyptian Streets, September 27, 2018, article by Mirna Khaled Sayed.) In one of his letters, JFK wrote that “We are willing to help resolve the tragic Palestine Refugee Problem on the basis of the principle of repatriation or compensation for properties.”

 One might ask: From where did this kind of empathy originate?  In her fine book, Monica Wiesak located it in letters young Kennedy wrote his father dating from 1939. JFK was visiting Palestine and told his father that the western media was not giving readers the whole story. He wrote that, even at this early date, the Zionist aim was to take over Jerusalem as capital of their new land. (Wiesak, America’s Last President, p. 6). He even noted the use of  false flag operations: “Jewish terrorists bomb their own telephone lines and electric connections and the next day frantically phone the British to come and fix them up.” (ibid). As Wiesak noted, Kennedy understood where Nasser was coming from:

For several years now the Middle East has been in revolt.  That spirit of revolt is not only resistance now become active rebellion to the domination of Western powers, not only its hurt and vengeful reaction to the rise of Israel to nationhood, but it stems also from a deep-seated desire to lift to some degree the pall of famine and injustice that for so long has characterized this area.

Kennedy also pointed out that the American cooperation with England to secure its investments in Iran, England’s imperial occupation of the Suez, and the Western powers’ inability to deal with the plight of 700,000 Palestinian refugees, these were all matters that weighed against any relationship with the Arab nations.

Kennedy understood that Nasser stood in opposition to Saudi Arabia. Not just the fact that the Saudis practiced an extreme form of Islam promoted by the terrorist group the Muslim Brotherhood, but also because it was an oligarchy and a monarchy. Nasser was a socialist who thought that the oil in the Middle East belonged to all the Arabs.  This is why he decided to fight a war against the Saudis for control of Yemen, since one of his followers had toppled the ruling Imam. (Muehlenbeck, p. 133).

England and Israel, as well as the Saudis, all feared what would happen if Nasser won: Saudi Arabia would be next.  Israel  feared, from that position, Nasser could unite all the Middle East against them. Kennedy offered to mediate the dispute, but the Saudis used the war to drive a wedge between Cairo and Washington. But even at that, in 1962 Prince Talai of Saudi Arabia defected to Egypt and started the Free Princes Movement. (Devil’s Game by Robert Dreyfuss, p. 139-41) Thus was the enormous appeal of Nasser, which the State Department worried about, but Kennedy wanted to explore.

When Kennedy passed on Nasser was terribly chagrined.  He could not sleep upon hearing the news, fell into a mild state of depression, and had Kennedy’s funeral shown four times on Cairo television. (Meuhlenbeck, p. 228). To show the almost incredible appeal of Nasser, when he died, over 5 million people poured into Cairo.  Trees collapsed because so many people were standing on the branches to see his casket float down the Nile.  That is the kind of hope Nasser represented to the Arab world.  Kennedy hoped to use that immense leadership quality to guide the Middle East away from fundamentalism.

After Kennedy’s death, Lyndon Johnson moved Washington so far toward Israel that Egypt broke relations with the USA.  This continued under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and the Arabs responded when OPEC raised oil prices, which has plagued the American economy ever since.

The deal was sealed when the proteges of Senator Henry Jackson went into the Reagan administration. Jackson was a Truman Democrat all the way: liberal on social issues but hawkish on foreign policy and national defense. The adage goes that he never saw a defense program he did not like.  What very few people know is that the Neocon Revolution really went into high gear when Jackson’s staffers were appointed to the Reagan Administration. In other words, a Democrat was really responsible for the rise of the Neocons.  The following people all came from working with Jackson: Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Frank Gaffney. 

And once that revolution was installed, it clearly spread to the Democratic Party.  Does anyone think that Kennedy would have sanctioned the bombing of an African country by NATO, as Hillary Clinton was allowed to do with Libya?  Gaddafi was inspired by Nasser.  President Obama then approved a huge CIA program—Timber Sycamore-- to displace another secularist leader in the Middle East, Assad of Syria.  The Agency reportedly used something called the Al Qaida affiliated Al Nusra Front and  even ISIS, as funded by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. (New York Times, June 29, 2016; “The Jihad Next Door” Politico, June 23, 2014).

In other words, America was using Islamic Fundamentalists to dislodge a secularist leader in the Middle East.  And this was a Democratic president. The worst part is that it was the Russians who came to Assad’s aid to repel the Moslem extremists. It seems superfluous to mention the Neocon disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Recall, both President Biden and Hillary Clinton voted for the war in Iraq. A war based on a lie over which 650,000 innocent civilians were killed.

This is how far the Democratic Party has fallen from JFK. As Dreyfuss once mentioned, the last time you could have had peace in the Middle East was under Nasser.  Kennedy recognized that. Neither Eisenhower nor Johnson came close. It was a downhill race to Hades after that. To arrive at the mess we have in Gaza today.