Summary
President of the United States (1953-1961) who, in Christison’s account, had no emotional commitment to Israel and exerted the heaviest U.S. pressure on it of any president, while his impartiality assumed the post-1948 status quo and so left the Palestinians politically nonexistent (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 1046-1074).
Details
- Eisenhower had, in Abba Eban’s recollection, thought of Jews as unreal biblical characters: the Bible “spoke of cherubim and seraphim and other creatures who, to the best of his knowledge, no longer existed. He [had] thought the Jews were in this category of extinct species”; as late as 1956 his diary referred to Israelis as Israelites (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 1046-1058).
- During the 1956 Suez crisis he wrote that he had given “strict orders to the State Department that they should inform Israel that we would handle our affairs exactly as though we didn’t have a Jew in America”, kept no “Jewish portfolio” at the White House, and held that “to take sides” “could do nothing but to destroy our influence” (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 1046-1058).
- His administration’s overriding concerns were preventing Soviet penetration and guaranteeing access to oil; it enlisted the CIA in 1953 to overthrow Mussadegh in Iran, opposed the British-French-Israeli invasion of the Suez Canal zone in 1956 and forced Israel to withdraw from Sinai, and sent Marines to Lebanon in 1958 (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 1060-1074).
- By 1958 he was musing with foreign visitors about how to “get at the underlying Arab thinking”, and in the end more or less ceased trying to win Arab friendship; after Suez he deemphasized a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 1076-1084).
Related pages
Perceptions of Palestine, John Foster Dulles, Abba Eban, United States