On March 25, the United States took the highly unusual step of abstaining in a vote at the U.N. Security Council that called for a cease-fire in Gaza after six months of a relentless Israeli military campaign. However, immediately and controversially, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. made sure to deem the resolution “nonbinding.” Other Biden administration officials have also taken pains to “talk down” the significance of the vote.
The curious imbalance in the U.S.-Israel relationship has come into focus in recent weeks as the Biden administration slowly sharpens its criticism of Israel—and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains defiant. Israel continues to restrict aid trucks carrying water, food, and medicine to the 70 percent of Gazans facing a catastrophic, man-made famine.
Despite representing the world’s preeminent military power, on whom Israel depends for weapons, funds, and diplomatic cover, U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have resorted to performative workarounds, airdropping aid and building a floating pier off the shores of Gaza.
But there is an alternative. Rather than undertaking symbolic half-measures, the Biden administration could draw upon vast U.S. leverage and take its cue from a Republican Party predecessor: former President George H.W. Bush. In 1991, Bush Sr. and his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, made it clear that if Israel wanted to receive an aid package of $10 billion in loan guarantees, it had to stop using U.S. money to build Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
The ensuing faceoff between the White House and the Israeli government, involving presidential veto threats and furious congressional lobbying from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), was one of the most fraught periods in U.S.-Israeli relations.
Of course, the starting points of the two cases are different, in that Israel was not engaged in a full-scale war in 1991. However, political courage in Washington is arguably more necessary in wartime—particularly as charges of war crimes, including genocide, are taken seriously by the International Court of Justice and even in U.S. courts.
But unlike Biden and Blinken, Bush Sr. and Baker were firm in conditioning aid to Israel on respect for international law. The president told journalists in 1992 he would “not give one inch.” Washington should summon similar resolve today.
The fraying ties between the two nations—which then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir would later describe as a “major explosion”—began in May 1991, when Israel’s ambassador to Washington warned the Bush administration that Israel would soon be requesting $10 billion in loan guarantees. The money would be used primarily to help Israel in its absorption of Soviet Jews, a task that would inevitably involve building more housing in the occupied territories as part of the Shamir government’s hardline settlement expansion policy. However, Baker believed that providing loan guarantees to Israel at that time, for that purpose, would be detrimental to U.S. interests.
A $400 million U.S. loan had been agreed the year before on the condition that it would not be used to build settlements on Palestinian land, but the Israelis violated this commitment as soon as the loan was released. Indeed, Israel’s settlement policy was moving forward at breakneck speed; in 1990 alone, under Housing and Construction Minister Ariel Sharon, between 6,000 and 7,000 Israelis settled in the occupied territories.
But Baker was also diligently laying the ground for a Middle East peace conference to be convened in Madrid that October—and he knew the prospect of billions of dollars of U.S. aid funding illegal Israeli settlements would certainly alienate the Arab delegates.
Baker called Shamir on Sept. 1, asking him to delay his request for the $10 billion. Shamir said no—and that he would continue to expand settlements as well. Bush Sr. then called a press conference to announce that he would ask Congress to defer action on any Israeli loan request for 120 days. Immediately, the Israelis put in the loan request. Simultaneously, pro-Israel organizations went into overdrive, mobilizing a thousand AIPAC supporters to march on Capitol Hill.
As Bush Sr. described it at the time, “I’m up against some powerful political forces. … We’ve got one lonely little guy down here doing it.”
The president appeared on national television on Sept. 12, making the impassioned argument that Israel’s insistence on the loan request was a threat to peace and that he was prepared to veto the legislation if it was passed by Congress. He also noted how U.S. soldiers had recently risked their lives in the Gulf War defending Israel against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles, and how in that fiscal year alone, the U.S. government had provided the equivalent of $1,000 in aid to every Israeli man, woman, and child. Arguing that he was not going to shift U.S. national policy for political expediency, Bush Sr. said the question wasn’t “whether it’s good 1992 politics … I don’t care if I get one vote. I’m going to stand for what I believe.”
Although Israel and its supporters went into a frenzy, with one Israeli cabinet minister calling the U.S. president an “antisemite” and a “liar,” Bush Sr. prevailed. On Oct. 2, 1991, the U.S. Senate formally acceded to Bush’s request for a 120-day postponement. Furthermore, because of Shamir’s determination to expand settlements, the loans were not released until well beyond the postponement period, after the election of a more moderate Israeli government led by Yitzhak Rabin.
When I spoke to him in 2003, Baker told me, “We said to Rabin, ‘we’ll release the $10 billion if you agree to substantially restrict settlement activity,’ and he did.”
During the Gulf War of 1990-1991, Israel had been, in Bush’s words, “very carefully placed outside the coalition” to keep Arab members on board, revealing the limitations of Israel’s strategic value in a strategic region.
However, more importantly, Saddam had unleashed “the mother of all linkages” by suggesting that Iraq might withdraw from Kuwait if Israel withdrew from all occupied Arab lands. While this parallel was rejected outright by U.S. officials, Saddam’s opportunism did highlight the similarities between the two cases.
The linkage resonated more widely, including in the statements of British, Italian, and Australian leaders. The United States had, after all, justified its military intervention in Iraq based on the self-determination of Kuwaitis, and the Palestinians claimed an identical right. Furthermore, if invasion, occupation, and annexation were wrong somewhere, surely they were wrong everywhere. As then-French President François Mitterrand observed in October 1990, in a statement with contemporary resonance: “[O]ne cannot try to defend human rights here and neglect them there. Rights are rights.”
There was also an overarching moral framework in play. In September 1990, with the end of the Cold War, Bush Sr. himself had heralded the emergence of a so-called new world order, “a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. … A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.” Global consensus against Iraq’s aggression in Kuwait inspired some optimism. However, Arab leaders were quick to announce their skepticism, pointing to a flagrant double standard with Israel.
Almost immediately, the credibility of Bush’s vision was at stake. On Oct. 8, 1990, Israeli police committed a massacre at Haram al-Sharif, also called the Temple Mount, marking the bloodiest day in Jerusalem since 1967. A radical Jewish group had been trying to reclaim the site for Jews alone in defiance of the Israeli Supreme Court. Palestinians gathered to protect their holy space. As tensions soared, Israeli police opened fire on the crowd, killing 21 unarmed Palestinians and wounding 150 more, including children.
In the face of wall-to-wall criticism globally, Israeli leaders remained unmoved. “What do you want us to do? Give them presents?” asked Sharon, then Israel’s housing minister. French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas worried that failure to condemn Israel would be proof of Western hypocrisy. The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution that condemned the Israeli security forces and requested a mission to report on protecting Palestinians.
Not only did the Bush Sr. administration vote in favor of the strongly worded resolution— having only ever voted for two Security Council resolutions censuring Israel—but it had introduced it. “I was personally aggrieved when the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] killed a lot of people it didn’t have to kill,” Baker told me.
The George H.W. Bush administration’s unapologetic determination to reclaim its status as the senior partner in the U.S.-Israeli relationship contrasts markedly with the permissive stance of the Biden administration, which has only drifted from outright support toward mild rebuke after the killing of 32,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children.
However, there are remarkable historical parallels. In 1991, Saddam’s aggression in Kuwait was the backdrop; today, there’s the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the same perception in the global south of an intolerable double standard benefiting Israel. Back then, there was the new world order at stake; now, it’s the West’s supposedly reinvigorated commitment to defending democracy and the rule of law.
With his legacy on the line, one former U.S. president flexed the muscles of a superpower —defending its national interests and refusing to capitulate to a client state.
I asked Baker in 2003 what his abiding motivation was for withholding the loan guarantees, despite all the risk and the drama.
“Because it was the right policy,” he answered.
With the stakes so much higher now, the Biden administration has yet to show signs of that same moral clarity.
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