• Corpus ID: 153296691

The U.S.-Israeli Relationship in the Reagan Era

@article{Cobban1989TheUR,
  title={The U.S.-Israeli Relationship in the Reagan Era},
  author={Helena Cobban},
  journal={The Journal of Conflict Studies},
  year={1989},
  volume={9}
}

• H. Cobban
• Published 3 March 1989
• Political Science
• The Journal of Conflict Studies

INTRODUCTION During the first seven years of the Reagan administration, the kinds of justification publicly adduced by U.S. officials for their government's support for the State of Israel shifted significantly from the moral reasoning that had previously prevailed in U.S. public discourse, toward a cluster of strategic justifications. This shift in the official rhetoric was accompanied, furthermore, by concrete policy moves which tied the defense structures of the two countries much closer together than ever before. Most prominent among these moves was the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on strategic cooperation, concluded between the two sides in November 1981. (The MOU was suspended by the American side after Israel extended its jurisdiction into the occupied Golan Heights in December 1981; but it was reinstated in late 1983). The MOU was followed by a number of other agreements of significant security-related agreements, such as Israel's 1986 inclusion in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) research program, and the Reagan administration's designation of Israel, in late 1987, as "a major non-NATO ally". In the last year of Reagan's term, the eruption and continuation of the Palestinian intifada (uprising) in the West Bank and Gaza, and more particularly the means by which the Israelis tried to end it, provoked a wave of soul-searching in many sectors of the American public, including the American Jewish community. In many of the discussions that resulted, the moral content of the United States' ties to Israel re-emerged as a theme of major public concern. Despite this new climate of public opinion, however, and despite the administration's identification of a major disagreement with the Israeli government over the applicability of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, strategic collaboration continued on its previous course during 1988. Indeed, while the disagreement over Resolution 242 was at its sharpest, in the spring of that year, a Memorandum of Agreement was signed simultaneously in Washington and Jerusalem that codified and further institutionalized the existing strategic agreements between the two states. ' The shift in the foundation of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, from one based primarily on moral considerations on the U.S. side to one based on strategic considerations, provoked significant debate inside Israel. There, several analysts openly queried the value to their country of too close an alignment with the United States in general, or with the strategic agenda of the Reagan administration in particular. In the United States, by contrast, the claims of those who vaunted Israeli's contribution to U.S. national security met with little serious or informed comment in the public arena. This allowed a situation to develop in which those inside the U.S. administration—and under Reagan they were many—who had