Summary
Rose’s name for Israel’s mid-1950s pact with the region’s most right-wing regimes — Ethiopia, Turkey and the Shah’s Iran — encouraged by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, as part of Israel’s offer to serve as the Western powers’ military watchdog against radical Arab nationalism (Israel: The Hijack State — America’s Watchdog in the Middle East, lines 393-399).
Details
- The pact was concluded in the mid-1950s with Ethiopia, Turkey and the Shah in Iran, in the account Rose takes from Ben-Gurion’s biographer, and was encouraged by John Foster Dulles (lines 395-397).
- The pact with the Shah of Iran was cemented by the Americans in the 1950s, and relations between Israel and Iran were always close: when the Shah was toppled, the Israeli ambassador in Iran revealed that the entire upper echelon of the Israeli leadership had visited the Shah over the years, including four former prime ministers — Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Itzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin — and former Chief of Defence Moshe Dayan (lines 455-459).
- The Shah’s secret police SAVAK arranged those visits, and the links between SAVAK and the Israeli secret service MOSSAD were very close and had co-operated since the 1950s; a former head of MOSSAD, Jacob Nimrodi, spent time in Iran as an Israeli military attache (lines 459-463).
- On E.A. Bayne’s account, based on discussions with the Shah, virtually every general officer in the Shah’s army visited Israel and hundreds of junior officers underwent some aspects of Israeli training (lines 461-463).
Related pages
Israel: The Hijack State — America’s Watchdog in the Middle East, Watchdog state, Imperialism, John Foster Dulles