Since the relationship between U.S.S.R. and Egypt posed a threat to American strategic interests, Britain and France partnered Israel in invading Egypt in the October of 1956, which resulted in the Suez Crisis. Although Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza strip, President Eisenhower pressurized that it retract its troops from these lands. Eventually, Israel acquiesced to the demands. This was a singular event when Israel succumbed to diplomatic pressure from America. (McGeary 40)
The volatile situation escalated into a war a few years later. In the month of June, 1967, the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were invaded by Israel. This set-off the six day war. The defenses of the Arab countries were less advanced compared to the state-of-the-art Israeli artillery and transport. So, the Arab States were thoroughly defeated within the span of six days. With it, the geopolitical stakes of the United States in the Middle East changed. (McGeary 38)
The United Nations adopted Resolution 242 to ease Arab-Israeli tensions in November 1967. It called for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories of recent conflict … a just settlement of the refugee problem”. The United States’ indifference to UN Resolution 242, further demonstrates its principle of providing Israel unconditional support (Ash 41). Also, the ambiguity of certain clauses in the resolution led to opposing parties interpreting the meaning as they saw fit to their cause. As could be expected, the resolution failed to bring a lasting solution to the region, leaving Arabs and Israelis in a perennial state of hostility. In the meantime, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), formed in 1964 with the backing of the Arab nations, started its insurgency operations against Israel so as to establish a separate Palestinian state. (Fernandez)
“After the June 1967 and October 1973 wars, even these secondary calculations – how the United States could blunt and best the Soviet Union in the Middle East, how Israel could enhance its military advantages over the Arabs and wear down their political nihilism – began to take on a new form. The two competitions were complicated by ameliorative diplomacies and especially by their intersections: detente to the one side and the peace process to the other.” (Ash 44)
Richard Nixon was elected to the office of President in 1968. The then Secretary of State William P. Rogers, acknowledged UN Resolution 242 and pressurized Israel to adhere to the UN recommendations. The National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was skeptical and worried about a greater Soviet influence in the region and advised to drop the plan. This encouraged Israel and increased its determination not to yield to the dictates of the UN. The Arab states, however, would exploit the cold-war rivalry to change the geopolitical landscape of their region. Kissinger’s diplomacy was not effective enough to prevent the war of 1973, although it restored peace temporarily in the region. The brokering by United States in the following decades, which led to the Camp David accord and Oslo accord, would still not result in a lasting peace to the region due to the same political compulsions and conflicts of interests of the involved parties. (McGeary 38)
Years later, while American diplomacy served as a stumbling block for the peaceful settlement of the conflict, Palestinians began to engage in widespread demonstrations and civil disobedience to voice their resistance to Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (Ash 44). The First Intifada (1987-93) became an important political mechanism to force Israel to abandon the occupied territories and to gain support from the world at large for the predicament of the Palestinians. During the early 1990s, the First Intifada forced Israel to recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization as the lawful political representative of the Palestinian people and to try to settle Palestinian-Israeli differences with that entity. The 1993 Oslo accord, however, was undermined from the same shortcomings as the Camp David accords, leading Palestinians and Arab states to again charge that Washington had betrayed the Middle East peace process. (Atherton 1203)
Israel has relied on military aggression as the primary tool in responding to demands from the Palestinians. The United States too had tacitly supported Israel the last few decades due to its strategic importance in the Middle East. This had further angered the Arabs and escalated tension between Israel and Palestine. As a matter of fact, the United States had been and continues to be the chief broker of peace in the region and owes that responsibility (Garfinkle 562). Of course, the U.S.-Israeli relationship was always dynamic. The most basic of the bilateral agreements was that Israel should survive and grow strong, but that has always been a more or less abstract issue. Only for a few days in late 1973, since the War for Independence began, did the Israeli military suffer defeat. Otherwise, Israel’s self-defense capability was sufficiently advanced and effective that secondary matters took pride of place in the geo-political strategies of both sides, and here too, there was an overlap but not a coincidence of interest. (Fernandez)