Beyond Alliance: Israel in U.S. Foreign Policy.

This rigorous work subscribes to mainstream meta-theoretical commitments and illustrates how American interests and the Jewish lobby have both influenced U.S. Middle Eastern policy. Mansour privileges (in the post structuralist terminology as favoring "x" over "y") American culture as a determinate of Israel's place in U.S. strategic doctrine.

Chapter one, "The Doctrine of Israel as a Strategic Asset," classifies the services attributed to Israel by the Strategic Asset Doctrine (SAD) supporters. These services (geographic location, infrastructure and logistics; experimentation, R & D, intelligence; defensive capability and intervention capability) are then discussed and presented with figures and graphs that represent Israel as an "Intrinsic" (active, dynamic, relatively autonomous) asset at the top of the ladder of services, and "Extrinsic" (passive, static, auxiliary) asset at the bottom. The SAD advocates privilege the "Intrinsic" attributes. The political implications of this are that the SAD advocates identify Israel with the West and deny any instrumental role for other pro-Western Middle Eastern states.

Mansour points out contradictions in this community of values and interests argument: (1) There is no mention of a U.S. "moral commitment" to Israel, which would imply Israel's vulnerability and dependence and its inability to defend western interests; and (2) possible Israeli-American divergences that advocacies refuse to admit. The SAD advocacies deny that the Arab-Israeli conflict would transform Israel into a liability. SAD's essential function is to be a counter-weight to the idea of Israel,s dependence on America. Finally, the Gulf war, and the collapse of the Soviet Union constitute gaping holes in the SAD argument despite its claim that Israel is still a strategic asset because of the Arab-Muslim threat.

In Chapter two, "A Doctrine of Israel as a Burden," the proponents of this doctrine advance a "Guarantee Linked to a Settlement" (GLS) and argue that U.S. policy must take Arab interests into account. They are also critical of Israeli intransigence but do not call for abandoning it. SAD advocates refuse a GLS as an instrument of control. However, SAD and GLS advocates display "pro-Israeli sensibility and an identical, strongly negative vision of Arabs in general" (p. 49).

Mansour then discusses the different types of guarantees and paybacks to Israel in order to determine if these variants reduce the distance between SAD and GLS: (1) Guarantee as "Moral Commitment: (MC). Here Ullman emerges as a third pole while Waldavsky emphasizes Israel as a "moral asset" which is at the heart of America's raison d'etre. SAD advocacies think that the moral commitment is antithetical to their position. GC, GLS, and SAD reflect pure positions that are modes of articulation between strategy and culture; interest and values; and (2) Intermediate guarantee, which has three forms: (a) functional; (b) Israel's admittance to NATO; and (c) linkage to strategic cooperation. Whether Israel's role is linked to or conditioned by its acceptance of a settlement, is what differentiates these three forms.

Chapter three, "Forging a Strategic Role for Israel, 1948-1973," bases the analysis almost exclusively on the American-Israeli agreements and memoirs of political leaders. The sub-period 1948-67 demonstrates the slow emergence of the strategic relationship. Israel could not impose itself as a strategic asset and was reticent to become an extrinsic asset to be used against the USSR. America, however, increased cooperation with and effectively gave de facto guarantees, while selling arms to Israel.

America pressured Israel to withdraw from the Sinai, after the Suez war, in exchange for free passage in the Gulf of Aqaba, while seeing in Israel a counterweight to Egypt, and included the former in the Eisenhower Doctrine.

Israel also launched the 1967 war (after receiving a green light from President Johnson) that catapulted it to a strategic asset even though victory was negative (Israel was a burden) regarding American interests. Both outlooks (strategic asset and burden) existed simultaneously in the American administration. But there was agreement on Arab concessions and the maintenance of military superiority of and economic assistance to Israel. Two reasons, one ideological, the other practical, privileged the asset outlook.

Chapter four, "Israel's Recovery After the October Wae, 1973-1980," examines Israel's status that plummeted from a high point to a nadir, then rose again but never to its previous level. In the 1973 war, Israel was dependent on the U.S. for arms and security; therefore, it was a protege requiring defense as though it had a U.S. guarantee.

Modifications in U.S. Middle East strategy centered around preventing: (1) a superpower confrontation while delinking oil from the conflict, and (2) an outbreak of another Israeli-Arab war. American interest would be advanced by having Israel make concessions in order to defuse the explosive aspects of Arab demands (Israel was an extrinsic asset).

In the American-Israeli memorandum of 1975 and the Sinai Agreement, Israel was given a guarantee in exchange for its withdrawal from a few kilometers of territory. American policy reflected an intermediate position between SAD and GLS supports that was a "functional guarantee."

America was moving toward a comprehensive approach that was derailed by regional and domestic factors. President Carter revived the comprehensive approach that included: security and peace for Israel and Palestinian self-determination. But this initiative also failed. Carter then pursued a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that eventually brought the former into the U.S. fold. The new American orientation, with its willingness since 1979 to intervene militarily in the Gulf, showed that America looked at Israel as an extrinsic asset but with an intrinsic role to play on the eastern front. Reagan's presidency, however, allowed the resumption of public cooperation between American and Israel.

Chapter five, "The Strategic Alliance and the New World Order, 1981 - 1992," shows how the notion of strategic consensus, among Israel, America and pro-U.S. Arab regimes, emerged as a common denominator between pro-Israeli individuals and pragmatists in the Reagan administration. The consensus favored Saudi Arabia over Egypt.

America and Israel signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), at the latter's initiative, in the military field and Research and Development (R&D) that was "more a declaration of intentions than a precise program of cooperation" (p. 148). However, the application of Israeli law to the Golan led Washington to suspend the MOU. Yet the already existing cooperation between the two countries continued.

Mansour also discusses America's answer to the effects of Israel's planned invasion of Lebanon on the former's Middle East policy. Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon misrepresented the invasion plan to the U.S. by couching it in Cold War terms. At that point though, America wanted to avoid an East-West polarization which led it to rein in Israel. But changing regional realities led America to reverse its position and to give a green light for the Lebanon invasion.

The U.S.-Israeli victory led to a conflict of interests in the settlement of the Palestinian question and the nature of the Lebanese state. Washington had to intervene directly in Lebanon in order to protect its interests. But, once again, changing realities caused the U.S. to elevate Israel to a strategic asset.

Several U.S.-Israeli accords (1983-89) solidified and expanded the cooperation that involved risks because Israel was at once an intrinsic and extrinsic asset. After the demise of the U.S.S.R., the U.S. pressured Israel to enter peace negotiations. Consequently, cooperation effectively turned to technical matters.

Chapter six, "The instrumental Explanation," deals with the reasons for the enduring relationship and why American leaders have never contemplated abandoning Israel even if that seemed injurious to U.S. interests. Israel is not an instrument of imperialism, a concept that involves "unjustified generalization and hazardous simplification" (p. 1978). Mansour argues for a contextual and non-instrumental use of the concept of imperialism" (p. 204), which he still finds inadequate to account for the Israeli-U.S. privileged relationship, unless it is developed further.

To this end, Mansour discusses the model of decision making rationality and "assumed rationality," which led to the concept of "utility." This explanation is useful and its validity is approximate only in a global perspective of American interests. Support to Israel is, on balance, useful since it is "calculated only in dollars, not in American lives" (p. 223).

But is there an American project regarding Israel? Or is that project underpinned by an Israeli one? An American design exists only in the area of Israeli superiority (over the Arabs). Insofar as an Israeli project is concerned, historical survey demonstrates that despite its dependency on external aid, Israel is "the craftsman of its own supremacy" (p. 223). Israeli power (with services rendered to the U.S.) allows it to resist possible pressure or to exercise it on America.

Chapter seven, "The Domestic Dynamics Explanation," aims to "search for the causes of American support to Israel" (p. 236) since neither the implicit or explicit intentionality explanations are adequate. Mansour gives a history of the Israeli lobby and describes its operation. The lobby's influence is derived from the force of its organization and goes beyond the quantitative aspects of the Jewish vote or the lobby's financial contributions. The lobby is directly influential in foreign policy because of its ties to Congress. The executive is also mindful of the lobby's power and avoids confrontation except in rare cases when the executive determines that a pro-Israeli stand would unquestionably harm American interests.

The lobby's demographic and financial limitations, on the one hand, and its huge power, on the other, leads Mansour to look for a full explanation of its power. He does this in three areas: the ideology and culture of American society; Israel's prestige in the U.S. and America's global role.

Sharing the values of the dominant culture, the Jewish community is highly integrated in American society. Ideological factors unfavorable to Israel are generally either latent or non-dominant. This perceived commonality of cultural values is the context that gives the lobby so much power. The ideological-cultural factor coincides with the external and utilitarian factors to produce a pro-Israeli policy.

The book concludes: Should the Madrid peace process lead to peace and stability, it is plausible that, in time, "the exclusiveness of U.S.-Israeli ties might then erode to the extent that Israel integrates politically, economically, and culturally in its environment" (p. 293).

The paradigm and methodology that Mansour employs are his work's strengths and weaknesses. Mansour is encyclopedic and superb in exposing the inconsistencies and biases of advocates' arguments. His formalistic and positivist approach, however, almost exclusively depends upon a technical analysis of documents and works of authors close to the foreign policy establishment. These methodological and paradigmatic commitments do not consider the political economic context. Further, what little history exists has a technical, descriptive slant to it. This technical analysis at times conceals the real reasons behind particular events. Two cases in point: (1) instead of analyzing why the U.S. had sought an Israeli-Egyptian settlement, Mansour claims that the U.S. pursued it simply "to avoid paralysis"; and (2) in discussing the peace process after the Gulf War, he implies that the U.S. leaned heavily on Israel to negotiate. A political economic discussion, on the other hand, would have rendered a different and deeper understanding of these events. At times, the inertia of technical analysis unnecessarily compels Mansour to delve into a discussion of documents to arrive at a conclusion that could have been achieved independently of such analysis. A case in point is the November 1981 Memorandum of Understanding (pp. 151-54).

But this is not all, Mansour has put additional constraints upon himself beyond those inherent in his paradigm. He overwhelmingly quotes Western but rarely Arab or Arab American writers, perhaps, because he is writing for a Western audience for whom he does not want to jeopardize the analysis by including "non-credible" non-Western authors.

While it may be elegant to illustrate issues and concepts using graphs and figures and then to discuss them, these should not be, in every case, in addition to analyses already presented of the same issues. Eliminating duplicate analyses would not have harmed the work's rigor. In fact, it would have made the work more lucid.

Could another study have been written with the same rigor utilizing a different paradigm that would eliminate the main weaknesses of this work. Perhaps. But no one has done it yet. Certainly, Mansour's analysis is far stronger than that presented by Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman in Friends in Deed: Inside the U.S.-Israeli Alliance (1994). Mansour's work provides a valuable addition beyond mediocre advocacy to our understanding of Israel and American foreign policy.