Biden isn’t the 1st president to cut off weapons to Israel
The president was livid. He had just been shown pictures of civilians killed by Israeli shelling, including a small baby with an arm blown off. He ordered aides to get the Israeli prime minister on the phone and then dressed him down sharply.
The president was Ronald Reagan, the year was 1982, and the battlefield was Lebanon, where Israelis were attacking Palestinian fighters. The conversation Reagan had with Prime Minister Menachem Begin that day, Aug. 12, would be one of the few times aides ever heard the usually mild-mannered president so exercised.
“It is a holocaust,” Reagan told Begin angrily.
Begin, whose parents and brother were killed by the Nazis, snapped back, “Mr. President, I know all about a holocaust.”
Nonetheless, Reagan retorted, it had to stop. Begin heeded the demand. Twenty minutes later, he called back and told the president that he had ordered a halt to the shelling.
It would not be the only time he would use that power to rein in Israel. Reagan used the power of U.S. arms several times to influence Israeli war policy, at different points ordering warplanes and cluster munitions to be delayed or withheld. His actions take on new meaning four decades later as President Joe Biden delays a shipment of bombs and threatens to withhold other offensive weapons from Israel if it attacks Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Even as Republicans rail against Biden, accusing him of abandoning an ally in the middle of a war, supporters of the president’s decision pointed to the Reagan precedent. If it was reasonable for the Republican presidential icon to limit arms to impose his will on Israel, they argue, it should be acceptable for the current president to do the same.
But what the Reagan comparison really underscores is how much the politics of Israel have evolved in the United States since the 1980s. For decades, presidents and prime ministers have quarreled without permanently damaging the robust relationship between the two countries.
Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened economic sanctions and an aid cutoff to force Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula after it invaded Egypt in 1956. Gerald Ford warned that he would reevaluate the entire relationship in 1975 over what he considered Israel’s recalcitrance during peace talks with Egypt. George H.W. Bush postponed $10 billion in loan guarantees in 1991 in a dispute over settlements in the West Bank.
In Reagan’s day, Democrats were thought to be the party that was more supportive of Israel. By Reagan’s own account, “they’ve never had a better friend of Israel in the White House.” And yet it was a friendship that was tested again and again.
In June 1981, less than five months after Reagan took office, Israel used U.S.-made F-16 warplanes to bomb the Osirak nuclear plant in Iraq, a surprise attack that outraged many in Washington. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, considered a friend of the Arabs, urged Reagan to halt the arms flow to Israel. Secretary of State Alexander Haig Jr., considered a friend of Israel, argued against it.
In the end, Reagan agreed to vote to condemn Israel at the U.N. Security Council and to delay the delivery of four F-16s due that summer – what Patrick
Tyler, in “A World of Trouble,” his history of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, characterized as “a minimal rebuke.”
But just weeks later, an Israeli airstrike killed an estimated 300 civilians in Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut, prompting Reagan to hold back another 10 F-16s and two F-15 jet fighters. Still, the standoff did not last long. By August, he lifted the freeze.
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 forced another confrontation. Reagan halted the shipment of cluster-type artillery shells out of concern that such munitions were being used against civilians in violation of agreements. Around the same time, he delayed the delivery of 75 F-16 warplanes without explanation until March 1983, when he announced that he would not release the jets until Israel withdrew forces from Lebanon.
The move caused no wave of criticism like that seen in Washington this week. “Maybe it was a necessary signal to Israel,” Reagan wrote mildly in his diary that night in describing his decision.