Decade of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the Origins of the American-Israeli Alliance

Historians have long held that the Kennedy administration forged the American alliance with Israel as a way of courting political support from American Jews. In contrast, the Eisenhower administration is believed to have considered Israel a political and strategic liability. In this text, Abraham Ben-Zvi challenges these assumptions and offers a different account of Eisenhower’s true agenda. Ben-Zvi now shows that the Eisenhower years were an incubation period during which the groundwork was laid for the eventual American-Israeli alliance. As a result, President Kennedy’s Israeli policy is understood as not the beginning, but a continuation of a process with foundations in the prior administration.