The War of Attrition entered a new phase in early 1970 when the Soviet Union secretly increased its military involvement in Egypt with Operation Kavkas.13 In response to Israeli air raids, and using the situation to its geopolitical advantage, the Kremlin substantially increased its military presence in Egypt by sending more than ten thousand “instructors” and “advisers,” along with numerous SA-3 surface-to-air missile systems, which were quietly installed along the Suez Canal. The Soviet Navy strengthened its presence in the Mediterranean, and Soviet pilots became actively engaged in Egyptian air defense.14 Soviet involvement reached a new level on April 18, when Soviet pilots chased down two Israeli jets that had been conducting reconnaissance inside Egypt. The Israeli jets were not attacked, but the Soviet willingness to directly challenge Israeli planes—and by extension the United States—brought with it the possibility for superpower confrontation in the Middle East.
Israel sought to advance its strategic alliance with the United States, but President Nixon responded coolly. Israeli officials asked to purchase an additional 125 planes (one hundred Skyhawks and twenty-five Phantoms) in September 1969. But Nixon declined to meet the new request. Nixon declined the same request again in March 1970, even after it became known that Moscow had increased its military involvement in Egypt. Nixon and Rogers believed that the existing order of fifty Phantoms was enough to keep the military balance of power in Israel’s favor; however, the administration reserved the right to sell new aircraft if the situation changed significantly.15 The administration viewed the Soviet weaponry as defensive in nature and wanted to avoid a further escalation unless it appeared that offensive weapons were being employed.16
Nixon declined to sell additional Phantoms to Israel for several reasons. For one, he believed that U.S. foreign policy in the region had been too biased in favor of Israel. He told Rogers, “I believe that an even-handed policy is, on balance, the best one for us to pursue as far as our own interests are concerned.”17 Second, Nixon recognized that Israel had secretly become a nuclear power and did not want to provide a vehicle to deliver such weapons. Third, he resented the influence of pro-Israel forces in Washington and was determined to conduct U.S. foreign policy apart from domestic influences. Fourth, he hoped peace discussions in the Middle East could advance détente with the Soviet Union.18 Finally, Nixon feared that if Israel had a steady supply of Phantom jets, it would be even less inclined to work with Jarring to implement Resolution 242. In short, by denying further Phantom sales to Israel, Nixon hoped to cultivate better relations with the USSR and Arab states while maintaining leverage with Israel. Therefore, Nixon was unreceptive to repeated calls for the sale of additional F-4s to Israel. But as it had for Johnson, the decision to withhold Phantom sales to Israel put Nixon on a collision course with Congress.
Henry “Scoop” Jackson and William Fulbright
The Democratic Party started to fracture on Israel, and an emerging conservative bloc in Congress, which included hawkish Democrats and some Republicans, proved able to redraw the contours of U.S.-Israel relations. That split was best exemplified by the contentious relations between Henry “Scoop” Jackson and James William Fulbright.
Jackson and Fulbright were senatorial colleagues, but the two were not friends. “Indeed,” says Jackson biographer Robert Kaufman, “the two men detested one another.”19 According to Helen Jackson, Henry’s wife, “The only thing that Scoop and Senator Fulbright agreed on was where to buy wing-tip shoes in London.”20 Fulbright referred to Jackson as “the congressional spokesman for the military-industrial complex,” while Jackson regarded Fulbright as “arrogant and a hypocrite”—someone who claimed to have sympathies for people abroad who were hurt by the “arrogance of American power, yet voted for the Southern Manifesto of 1956 and against every major piece of civil rights legislation that came before the Senate.”21 After Fulbright lost the Arkansas Democratic primary to Dale Bumpers in 1974, Jackson and his staff celebrated with a case of whiskey.22
In terms of U.S. foreign policy, Jackson and Fulbright represented the different ends of the political spectrum in the Democratic Party. Jackson was a realist and Cold War liberal who wanted nothing to do with détente and insisted on using military power to challenge the evil designs of the Soviet Union. Fulbright, on the other hand, was an idealist in the Wilsonian tradition who advocated a “new internationalism”—rooted in educational and cultural programs, reduced military spending, détente with the Soviet Union, and a more activist United Nations—to facilitate increased international understanding and a stronger position abroad. Fulbright hoped that a settlement to the Arab-Israeli crisis could be completed through the United Nations, which he explained in a speech on “A New Internationalism” to Yale University on April 4, 1971, as well as in his book about U.S. foreign policy, The Crippled Giant.23
The two had very different ideas about military sales and the Vietnam War. Jackson had long supported federal spending (especially defense spending) as a way to both contain communism and fuel the U.S. economy. Some officials, like Robert McNamara, labeled Jackson “the Senator from Boeing” for his efforts to secure defense contracts for the giant aviation company from his home state.24 Sen. George Aiken (R-VT) once remarked that “other areas benefit from government contracts, too, but not all their elected members of Congress are as ardent in their endeavors as Scoop Jackson is.”25 Jackson supported U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War until very late and sought to counterbalance the influence of the New Left by supporting federal defense spending in order to challenge communist aggression abroad.
While Jackson sought to expand defense spending and supported U.S. military involvement in East Asia, Fulbright took the opposite position. Although he actually sponsored the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that granted President Johnson virtually unlimited powers to wage a war in Vietnam, Fulbright soon withdrew his support and eventually emerged as one of the leading voices against U.S. military involvement in East Asia.26 Because he was head of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Johnson administration much disliked Fulbright’s opposition to Vietnam.
Perhaps the greatest source of conflict between Jackson and Fulbright was about U.S. involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Jackson was one of the loudest and strongest senatorial voices in support of a pro-Israel policy. He regarded Israel as a strategic asset that could protect U.S. interests in the region and prevent, or at least limit, Soviet involvement in the Middle East. Although Fulbright continually stressed his support for Israel, he sought a more evenhanded policy in which Israel would not be given much preferential treatment. He viewed U.S. support for Israel as a liability because it soured relations with Arab states and could potentially undermine efforts to work constructively with the Soviet Union.
Jackson had supported the State of Israel from his childhood years. He recalled that his mother first instilled in him a desire to defend Jewish people. He described her as “a Christian who believed in a strong Judaism. She taught me to respect the Jews, help the Jews! It was a lesson I never forgot.”27 In May 1944, Jackson publicly pledged: “If in any way, through my offices as a Congressman, I can forward the work of making the dream of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine come true, my most earnest efforts in this great humanitarian cause can be counted on.”28 While a congressman in 1945, Jackson and seven fellow congressmen traveled to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany upon invitation from Dwight Eisenhower to see firsthand the horrors of Nazi atrocities. According to Kaufman, this experience, along with Jackson’s philo-Semitism, help to explain the senator’s strong support for the Jewish state.29 Naturally, Jackson supported Harry Truman’s decision to immediately recognize the State of Israel in May 1948, and even before the Suez Crisis in the fall of 1956, provoked in part by Egyptian