Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S. – Israeli Covert Relationship

excerpt Magazine article Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

The premise is that there’s a side to the relationship between the U.S. and Israel which goes much beyond just the sentimental links and the links forged by supporters of Israel in this country.

What we say, what we explain is that there has been since almost the earliest days of the Israeli state and the earliest days of the CIA a secret bond, a secret link between them, basically by which the Israelis — the Israeli intelligence — did jobs for the CIA and for the rest of American intelligence.

You can’t understand what’s been going on around the world with American covert operations and the Israeli covert operations until you understand that the two countries have this secret arrangement. Andrew Cockburn

Two hundred pages into this 416-page fact-filled book, I recognized that it is the best compendium of information about the multifaceted secret relationships between Israel and private American citizens, and with the U.S. government itself, ever assembled.

This is reason enough to recommend the book. As I continued reading the second half, however, I found it also contained much information that was new to me, despite 30 years of full-time involvement in U.S.-Middle East affairs.

For a serious student of the history of Israeli dirty tricks, U.S. voluntary and involuntary involvement in them, and their results in making the Middle East into what it is today, there can be no more useful book.

This husband-and-wife journalistic team sketches in seven short sentences the essential fact about the U.S.-Israeli relationship that could give the U.S. the power to control it, instead of being controlled by it. Describing a contemptuous reaction by Israeli journalist Gideon Levi to a live-ammunition performance by Israel Defense Force soldiers on the Golan Heights for the edification of busloads of American Jewish tourists, the authors write:

“What Levi called the `masses of women with blue hair and pseudo-athletic men’ and many others like them back in the U.S. contribute at least $1 billion a year in private donations to Israel.

These donations are tax-deductible. The state raises another $500 million a year through the sale of Israel bonds. U.S. commercial banks lend an additional $1 billion.

Such generosity is dwarfed by the contributions of U.S. taxpayers overall, which amount to almost $4 billion in military and economic aid, at least, even in peacetime. All this adds up to well over $6 billion a year, or $1,300 for each and every Israeli.

Israel’s gross national product amounts to some $24 billion a year, so the country is receiving one quarter of its total income in the form of gifts from U.S. citizens, acting either as philanthropists or taxpayers.”

Closer to the theme of the book, the Cockburns point out that “the weapons trade accounts for almost 40 percent of Israel’s export earnings — S1.5 billion a year.”

How Israel has developed those weapons, with stolen U.S. technology, and markets for them, by selling arms and technology to world pariahs ranging from South Africa to Colombian drug lords while the U.S. looks the other way, is part of what the book is all about.

Ironies of tiny Israel’s gigantic weapons trade are illustrated by the book’s description of Shaul Nehemiah Eisenberg, the richest man in Israel, who, the Cockburns report, “represents the ultimate confluence of arms, intelligence and political power.”

Eisenberg supervised modernization of the Chinese army’s weaponry, an upgrading of the entire Chinese tankforce, and even an improvement of the Chinese “Eastwind” ballistic missiles, which ultimately were purchased by Saudi Arabia, “whose defense purchases from the United States have always met with strenuous Israeli objections.”

The fact that while the Israeli government, through its Washington, DC lobby, blocks the access of major Arab states to U.S. weapons, it actually works with the other arms-producing countries which ultimately get the arms orders of some of the same Arab countries is the kind of thing that is unbelievable to most Americans, but carefully documented in this book.

The Cockburns present seldom-recalled historical facts. Most of the founding fathers of Israel “were born within 500 miles of the city of Minsk.”

The best known among them, Plonsk-born David Gruen, who renamed himself David Ben-Gurion upon arriving in Palestine in 1906, was “an atheist who refused to attend a synagogue; he adopted Zionism as his religion.”

Among those early leaders who became Israeli prime ministers, Ben-Gurion rival Menachem Begin’s Irgun Zvai Leumi had split from its revisionist parent group, Lehi, over the issue of opposing Hitler during World War II. …