Friends in Deed: Inside the U.S. - Israel Alliance - Softcover

Melman, Yossi; Raviv, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786880902 ISBN 13: 9780786880904

Publisher: Hyperion, 1995

Synopsis

The best-selling authors of Every Spy a Prince journey behind the scenes to examine the four-decade evolution of the complex political, strategic, and economic relationship between Israel and the United States.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

CBS correspondent Dan Raviv and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman (Every Spy a Prince, 1990) explore the special but often troubled relationship between Israel and the US. America's involvemnt with Israel, despite periodic rifts, dwarfs its ties to any other nation. The authors cite estimates that Israel has received some $100 billion in various forms of aid from the US since the tiny state's 1948 birth. To that figure must be added a web of relationships between the two countries' military and intelligence communities, and the inordinate amounts of time successive administrations have devoted to the Middle East in general and Israel in particular. Raviv and Melman attribue this special relationship to a complex of factors, including American feelings of guilt for the Holocaust; the role of Israel in the prophetic visions of Christian evangelicals; the political effectiveness of the American Jewish community; and the strong personal feelings of some presidents, especially Carter and Reagan. The book is well researched but not scholarly. Rather, Raviv and Melman have spun a yarn filled with gossip and inside accounts, and even an occasional bombshell (they reveal how Israeli intelligence obtained Krushchev's seminal, top-secret anti-Stalinist speech for the CIA). Throughout, they have attempted to be scrupulously evenhanded, a difficult task in recounting events in which there were--and remain--sharp disagreements. On the negative side, especially for people with some prior knowledge, this volume's occasional superficiality will be disappointing (the complex of events, for instance, that led to Israel's involvement in the Iran- Contra affair). Also, virtually all attributions are in notes in the back of the book, making it difficult to find the sources of particular bits of information. The book's strength, on the other hand, is in its compilation of eyewitness accounts of historical moments. A good read that sheds light not just on US ties with a particular country, but on the personal and even idiosyncratic ways in which US foreign policy is sometimes made. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The Israeli alliance with the U.S. has seemed incongruous (and unwise) to many. The U.S. is a superpower, a Christian nation, and a staunch promoter of free-market capitalism. Israel is a Jewish state founded by committed socialists who often looked with disdain at American materialism and commercialism. Raviv, a CBS correspondent, and Melman, an Israeli journalist, lay out the development of this "unlikely" partnership from Israel's prestatehood days to the Gulf War. They view the alliance as a product primarily of Cold War politics, with a bit of American guilt and sympathy over the Holocaust thrown in. Of course, the ceaseless lobbying by American Jews was a factor, and here the authors provide some fascinating details of that process. For example, Teddy Kollek, later the much revered mayor of Jerusalem, cultivated ties with Jewish gangsters such as Bugsy Siegel to gain their financial support in the early 1950s. In laying out the realpolitik behind the alliance, Raviv and Melman make a convincing case; however, one wonders if they haven't given short shrift to the common democratic ideals that bind the people of both nations. Jay Freeman

About this edition

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0786880902
• ISBN 13: 9780786880904
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 560