Eisenhower successfully stood up to Israel... and so can we!

President Dwight D. Eisenhower demonstrated in 1956 that you can stand up to Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism or losing elections.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower — colloquially known by his nickname “Ike” — demonstrated in 1956 that you can stand up to Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism or losing elections.

I know this from my own life story.

Growing up hearing about Ike:

My maternal grandmother Rita, a staunch liberal, once told me that in the 1956 election, my paternal grandfather — the aforementioned Republican who nevertheless admired the intellectual Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson — defected from the GOP that year in part because he was “disappointed” with President Dwight Eisenhower’s position on Israel during the Suez Crisis. (Of course, he had also voted for Stevenson in 1952, when Israel wasn’t an issue, because of Stevenson’s intellectual “egghead” image.)

Because I first heard this as a teenager, when I subsequently read Eisenhower’s two-volume presidential memoirs and processed his account of the Suez Crisis, I vehemently disagreed with him. Mere weeks before Eisenhower faced off against Stevenson on Election Day 1956, Israel began making militaristic overtures toward her Arab neighbors. Fearing that Israel might invade Jordan because its leaders “overestimate my desire to avoid offending the many voters who might have either sentimental or blood relations with Israel,” Eisenhower sent Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion a memorandum through Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

Growing up to believe that any criticism of Israel was at best suspicious, and at worst anti-Semitic, I bristled when I first read Ike’s Memorandum for the Record in the late 1990s, even though he had written it more than four decades earlier. Returning to it over the years, as I became more left-wing and more well-informed about the Arab-Israeli conflict, I regard it as a remarkable act of presidential courage and statesmanship.

“I have told the Secretary of State that he should make very clear to the Israelis that they must stop these attacks against the borders of Jordan,” Eisenhower said. “If they continue them, and particularly if they carry them on to the point of trying to take over and hold the territory west of the Jordan River, they will certainly be condemned by the United Nations, and not only Arab opinion but all world opinion will be brought to bear against this little country.”

If Israel expected Eisenhower to allow this to happen simply so he wouldn’t risk his reelection, they needed to clear up that misapprehension.

“Ben-Gurion should not make any grave mistakes based upon his belief that winning a domestic election is as important to us as preserving and protecting the interests of the United Nations and other nations of the free world in that region,” Eisenhower said.

Although Israel soon thereafter ceased its hostilities toward Jordan, it wasn’t because they had been persuaded by Eisenhower’s letter. Instead it was because they decided to join forces with the United Kingdom and France to launch an unprovoked attack for land against Egypt. The three nations claimed that they had to do so for national security reasons because Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president from 1954 to 1970, nationalized the Suez Canal. Instead of allowing one of Egypt’s most valuable economic resources to be controlled by the collapsing British and French empires, Nasser — to the applause of democratic socialists all over the world — declared that the Suez Canal should be owned by Egyptians and profit Egyptians.

The United Kingdom and France saw a threat to the profit margins of their nations’ most powerful oligarchs. Israel saw an opportunity to grab the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, both then under Egyptian control. And Eisenhower saw this with crystal clarity right away, despite the three nations’ claims that Egypt was Soviet-controlled (it wasn’t) or that Egyptians weren’t qualified to operate the canal (they were). Even though he was a capitalist himself and therefore felt deeply dismayed by Nasser’s decision to nationalize the canal (he later made it US policy to keep Soviet influence out of the Middle East), Eisenhower also believed America had no right to interfere in Egypt’s domestic policies.

What I learned from Ike:

Therefore, even as Zionist lobbies in America pressured the government to supply Israel with more weapons to conquer the Suez Canal, Eisenhower refused. As my grandmother recalled, Stevenson then blasted Eisenhower for his policy, accusing the president of not fulfilling America’s obligation to protect Israel from potential annihilation. Eisenhower’s response, given both through his statements on foreign policy and his subsequent actions, was that America would protect all of its allies from unprovoked aggression — including Israel as well as its Arab neighbors. Because Israel was the aggressor on this occasion, Eisenhower would not lend it any support; indeed, if Israel became too aggressive, Eisenhower would even consider an economic blockade to rein in the wayward Jewish State.

The president’s actions worked on every level: Israel and its two European allies backed off, Egypt was able to keep its canal and Eisenhower was handily reelected despite Zionist opposition. As political scientist Kevin Phillips wrote in 1969’s “The Emerging Republican Majority,” “Always ready to suspect the GOP of hostility to Jewish interests, some Jews read exactly this attitude into the Administration’s diplomatic moves to halt the (successful) Franco-British-Israeli invasion of the Suez Canal area… the President’s Jewish losses were minor, but they ran counter to the considerable gains he scored elsewhere in the urban Northeast.” Eisenhower opposed Israeli aggression without losing either his presidency or being branded by history as an anti-Semite, and even his losses among Jewish voters were minimal. Indeed, Jews ultimately backed Ike in both of his elections more than any other Republican presidential candidate in recorded history.

Viewed with the hindsight of 70 years — during which America has sent a practically uninterrupted flow of arms to Israel which it uses to impose apartheid on the Palestinians — it is clear that Eisenhower was taking a stand for the international rule of law, for human rights and for anti-imperialism. Even though Ike hated socialism and would have deplored having his ideas used to advance an anticapitalist message, one doesn’t have to oppose capitalism to see how capitalists created that crisis. Israel sought land and the money that could come from owning it; the world’s most powerful empires wanted to control a key global waterway; and American arms manufacturers wanted to profit from selling to Israel.

Remember: Ike played a key role in chronicling the Holocaust!

Seven decades later, Eisenhower isn’t derided as an anti-Semite for his criticism of Israel. Quite to the contrary, Eisenhower played a critical role in making sure the 6 million Jews who died during the Holocaust would be remembered. After liberating the Ohrdruf concentration camp in 1945, Eisenhower demanded that the Allies meticulously document the Holocaust.

“The things I saw beggar description,” Eisenhower wrote at the time to Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. “I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”

Perhaps because he saw firsthand what happens when a military-industrial complex seizes all the levers of power, sixteen years later Eisenhower offered a different legendary quote, one that is still used by people of all political persuasions when critiquing American imperialism.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower said. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

This incident also reminds one that Zionism, the ideology which holds that the Jewish people must have their own state, is fundamentally illiberal. Historian Carl E. Schorske demonstrated this in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 book “Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture.” Writing about “Politics in a New Key: An Austrian Trio,” Schorske compared Zionist founder Theodor Herzl with pan-German nationalist Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Vienna Mayor Karl Lueger, the latter two notorious anti-Semites. Despite their different perspectives on subjects involving Jewish rights, Schorske noted that they all derived their philosophies from reactions against liberal ideology.

“For Schönerer, the German national liberals were the most treasonous of Germans and the most dangerous of liberals,” Schorske wrote. “For Lueger, the pusillanimous but well-entrenched liberal Catholics offered the strongest obstacle to Catholic-social renewal. So too for Herzl: the ‘enlightened’ liberal Jews were on the one hand part of his own intellectual and social class and on the other blindly refused to recognize the nature of their own problems as Jews. Liberalism: voila l’ennemi! [Here is the enemy!]”

I am proud of my Jewish heritage, but I’m under no illusions that Zionism is incompatible with any consistent left-wing philosophy. Because Israel exists, and more than 7 million Israeli Jews live there, the state’s reality is an established fact and the inhabitants lives must be protected. Yet anyone who opposes right-wing politics cannot ignore that Israel is, to its core, a right-wing state. This is reflected in the apartheid conditions under which Palestinians continue to live. It is not anti-Semitic to criticize individual Jews when they do bad things, and when Israel grabs Palestinian land under the guise of religion, they act strictly as capitalists and theocrats. They do not represent Jews as a whole.

More importantly, neurodivergent people have the same responsibility to oppose injustices against Palestinian as they do injustices against other marginalized groups. We are all in this together.

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Back Seat Socialism

Back Seat Socialism is a column by Matthew Rozsa, who has been a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently, he is writing a book for Beacon Press, “Neurosocialism,” which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.