Although it has been almost 15 years since the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, it is only natural that his death has sparked a spate of commentary on his performance in office – including, of course, his policies with respect to the State of Israel and, even more particularly, to the dispute between Israel and her Arab neighbors.
Recognizing that Reagan was not the president of Israel and that, as Menachem Begin once pointed out, Israel is not a “banana republic,” it is fair to conclude that Reagan’s attitude toward Israel was, in general, a positive one. To me, the real issue is “why” – what was there in Reagan’s background, experience and world view that resulted in his administration’s Middle East position?
I had the privilege of serving as chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations during the period 1982-84, which fell during the Reagan presidency. The insights I derived from my meetings with him, as well as his senior advisers, particularly Secretary of State George Shultz, led me to the following conclusions:
First, Reagan’s policy had nothing whatsoever to do with his having worked for many years in Hollywood and, consequently, having had close relationships with Jews in the movie industry. (I have never understood why people assume that if non-Jews work with Jews, that factor automatically converts the former into Israel-lovers.)
Similarly, Reagan’s feelings toward Israel did not spring from a religious belief that the existence of the State of Israel serves a prophetic eschatological purpose.
Rather, Reagan’s attitude toward Israel developed out of two interrelated principles about which he felt very strongly — a clear distinction between friends and foes and an equally clear delineation between democracy and dictatorship. Fuzziness resulting from lack of clarity as to how a state defines itself in these two categories was a “no-no.”
Let me illustrate. Prior to Reagan’s presidency it would be fair to say that the nations of the world could be divided into three groups: the United States and its allies; the Soviet Union and its allies and satellites; and a broad, somewhat amorphous group loosely denoted the Third World. In that construct, a continuing battle was waged between the United States and the Soviet Union for the “hearts and minds” of the Third World. Those countries were continuously importuned by both rival camps.
Then a new American president arrived, one who refused to accept this tripartite division of the world and asserted that there were really only two categories in which nations belonged. For Reagan, it boiled down to: Either you’re with us or you’re against us. Israel made no bones about being “with us,” while the Arab countries were not prepared to do so.
An incident that occurred during my tenure as chairman of the Conference underscores the point. Secretary of State Shultz asked me to meet with him to discuss a meeting he had had in Madrid with Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko. When I arrived in Washington, Secretary Shultz informed me that he had fulfilled his commitment to the Jewish community to raise the issue of Soviet Jewry whenever he met with a representative of the Soviet Union, but that Gromyko’s curt response (phrased, of course, diplomatically) was that it wasn’t any of America’s business.
Shultz then assured me that he would continue to raise the issue whenever the occasion arose but that, in all candor, it wasn’t likely to be productive in light of the cold relationship between the United States and the USSR at that time. He suggested an alternative route: to work through the Third World. He felt that the Soviet Union might be more inclined to react favorably to a plea for Soviet Jewry if the request came from a Third World country.
Faced with that reality, but recognizing that the American Jewish community had relatively little to do with the leaders of the Third World, Secretary Shultz suggested that Prime Minister Thatcher of Great Britain might be able to open some doors for us.
When I and other Jewish community leaders met with Mrs. Thatcher in London, she offered to see what she could do to engage Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India, in the effort; and she added a few comments concerning the relationship between the United States and India which reflected her analysis of President Reagan’s position toward the Third World.
Mrs. Thatcher told us that Mrs. Gandhi had complained to her that America’s attitude toward India was nowhere near as positive as she would have expected it to be toward a fellow democracy. As she put it, whenever India reached out to the United States (for example, in an effort to obtain armaments), there was no immediate positive reaction. On the other hand, according to Mrs. Gandhi, when India’s arch-enemy, Pakistan, came to Washington with a similar request, it left with a proverbial suitcase full of arms.
To my mind, whether overdramatized or not, the underlying principle was the same: India had gone out of its way to assume a leadership role for the uncommitted Third World, playing one super power against the other — and Reagan wanted none of that. Either you were with us or you were not.
What all this boils down to is that the relationship of the United States and Israel during the Reagan years flowed directly from the president’s view of the world at large. Israel was fortunate in that it never equivocated as to where it belonged in Reagan’s bipolar world, and Reagan responded accordingly.
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