Israel and the US: The End of the ‘Special Relationship’

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump. (Design: Palestine Chronicle)

It took a long time, but the ‘special relationship’ between the United States and Israel has finally begun to end.

It began with Henry S. Truman in the 1940s. He supported unlimited Zionist settlement in Palestine. He overrode the advice of professional policymakers in the State Department and proclaimed US recognition of Israel in 1948. This followed the manipulation of the vote on partition. Without US intimidation of vulnerable states a year earlier, it never would have passed.

By early 1948, the US had walked back from its commitment to a two-state division of Palestine. The reason was the rapidly spreading bloodshed across the still British-occupied territory. The new policy was to place Palestine under a UN trusteeship for the time being.

This was the official policy up to May 1948, when Truman unilaterally declared recognition of Israel in a statement from the White House. Even as the news spread through the UN General Assembly, the US delegation had still not been officially informed.

Someone was sent to the Secretary-General’s office to find out what was going on, and the ticker tape announcement of recognition was found screwed up and tossed into the wastepaper basket.

There was fury in the US delegation at this betrayal. One person was so enraged he had to be held down in his chair. The head of the delegation, Warren Austin, walked out and went back to his hotel (the Waldorf Astoria), leaving it to his deputy to step forward and confirm the news.

Truman had sucker-punched his own senior officials to please the Zionists and win their support in the coming elections, but his opponent, Thomas Dewey, was just as strong in his support for a Jewish state in Palestine and there is no evidence that the ‘Jewish vote’ affected Truman’s narrow victory one way or the other.

Succeeding Truman in 1953, Eisenhower complained of his problems with the Zionists. Whenever he said or did something they didn’t like, the White House would be bombarded with letters and telephone calls of protest.

Deceived by Britain, France and Israel in 1956, he forced the western partners in the ‘tripartite aggression’ against Egypt to end their war a little over a week after they started it.

Under US pressure, Israel also retreated from Sinai, destroying everything in its path but refused to leave Gaza, which Ben-Gurion claimed belonged to Israel. He backed down only when Eisenhower threatened to allow a UNSC resolution calling for the end of all political, economic and military assistance to Israel to pass without US intervention.

The Israelis had by this time massacred hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, including 111 on one occasion in the Rafah refugee camp.

John Kennedy won the presidency in 1960 with strong Jewish support. The Zionists had their own ‘point man,’ David Niles, inside the White House during the Truman presidency and Kennedy had to accept another, Meyer Feldman, who was authorized to monitor all White House and State Department cable traffic on the Middle East. Kennedy regarded him as a “necessary evil” and a political debt that had to be paid.

He wanted Dimona to be opened up for outside inspection. Kennedy knew – as he remarked to a friend – that the Israelis were “sons of bitches who lie to me consistently about their nuclear capability.”

In 1963, he forced them to agree to a US inspection of the Dimona reactor. This finally took place in 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination. In Seymour Hersh’s narrative in The Samson Option (1991), Dimona had been turned into a nuclear Potemkin village for the occasion, with a fake control room constantly monitored to make sure it appeared to be genuinely working only for peaceful purposes.

The Americans were not allowed near the nuclear core “for safety reasons.” The Zionist lobby’s front man, Abe Feinberg, another burr in Kennedy’s sock, apart from Feldman, remarked that “it was part of my job to tip them (the Israelis) off that Kennedy was insisting on this [the inspection] so they gave him a scam job.”

Despite its deception, Israel still got the Hawk missiles it wanted. The US had raised the level of economic aid to Israel, had given it security guarantees, had supported its claims to control of water resources, but, according to Robert Komer, a senior NSC staff member, “in return we’ve got nothing for our efforts …. The score is 4-0.”

Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, set out to prove he was Israel’s best friend by giving it everything it wanted, including US tanks and warplanes, without it having to give anything in return despite his administration’s strong bargaining position.

The tradeoff should have been Israel’s ratification of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the opening of the Dimona plant to genuine outside inspection. The Israelis still routinely lied about their purposes, but intelligence was convinced they were moving towards the development of nuclear weapons. By the time of the 1967 war, they either had one fully assembled or could quickly assemble it.

Like Truman before him, Johnson deceived his own senior officials. In a private meeting at the White House, he told the Israeli ambassador, Yitzhak Rabin, that Israel would get the weapons it wanted without having to sign the NPT.

Armed with this assurance, Rabin refused to give ground in ‘negotiations’ with State Department officials. As late as May 1967, Johnson was being told that Israel was producing enough plutonium to build two nuclear weapons, but he still gave Israel what it wanted – tanks and warplanes – without demanding anything in return.

Then on June 6 came the war- for which Johnson had given the green light – and the Israeli air and sea attack two days later on the USS Liberty, officially designated as a “technical research ship” but more commonly acknowledged as a ‘spy ship’ able to monitor battlefield movements. The attack continued for hours. The ship was shot to pieces but still managed to stay afloat: 34 sailors were killed and 170 wounded.

Israel knew the Liberty was an American ship, and Johnson knew it was being attacked but prevented US warplanes from coming to its defense on the basis of the lie that the attack was a ‘mistake.’

He described himself as the best friend Israel had ever had and proved it by his complicity in the attack on the Liberty. He wanted the ship sunk, with no survivors left to tell the tale.

This was treason of the worst kind at the highest level of government. There remains no precedent in US history for such a crime. The normal due process would be arrest, trial and – under US law for such a heinous offense – execution, but Johnson got away with it.

Israel’s next best friend was Richard Nixon. In private, he spoke of the Jews as “kikes,”; in public, he was an even better friend of Israel’s than Johnson. He continued the lie over Dimona. Under the shared policy with Israel of ‘opacity,’ he claimed that the US did not really know whether Israel had nuclear weapons or not when it knew perfectly well that it did. The flow of weaponry to Israel continued unabated.

The ‘special relationship’ continued with some fluctuations. Carter and Clinton tried to draw Israel into a ‘peace process’ which allowed Israel to consolidate its hold on the occupied West Bank at the cost of dismantling settlements in Sinai. Eventual withdrawal from Gaza was never a withdrawal or the end of occupation but only its continuation at a distance, with regular massacres committed under the heading of ‘mowing the lawn.’

The dislike of Israel’s hold on US foreign policy was distilled in the exchange between Obama and French President Nicholas Sarkozy in 2011. They didn’t realize the mic between them was still on when they spoke of their dislike of Netanyahu.

Sarkozy: “I can’t stand him. He’s a liar.”

Obama: “You’re tired of him. What about me? I have to deal with him every day.”

In public, the ‘special relationship’ was still special, but the cracks were beginning to show. A special friend wouldn’t kill US citizens (apart from the murdered Liberty crew, Rachel Corrie in Rafah in 2003 and then Furkan Dogan in the attack on the Mavi Marmara in 2010) or steal your plutonium and steal your secrets, as the Mossad agent Jonathan Pollard did. All of this is surely what enemies do.

In 2007, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published The Israeli Lobby, the first full-length critical study of the US-Israel relationship. The fact that it could be published at all, and in New York by Farrar, Straus and Giroux no less, was itself a sign of changing times.

The basic conclusion of the authors was that there should be no special relationship, that Israel should be treated like any other country. Morally and legally, the relationship was damaging to the US. The message hit home, despite the slanderous attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer by the Israeli lobby and its outliers.

So we move forward to Trump. If Johnson and Nixon sold themselves as Israel’s greatest friend, Trump set out to prove that he was the greatest. He gave Israel everything it wanted, including the transfer of the US embassy to occupied Jerusalem. He pulled the US out of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran – as insisted upon by Israel. He cut funding to the Palestine Authority and withdrew funding from UNRWA.

He was fully complicit in the Gaza genocide, irrespective of how many Palestinians were massacred. His ‘peace plan’ was drawn up by real estate developers. A replica of Miami would be built over the bones of Palestine and its people.

Getting away with genocide in Gaza, Israel widened its scope on the West Bank and introduced it to Lebanon with mass bombings of Beirut and the pager attacks that Netanyahu commemorated as a joke by giving Trump a golden replica.

Now intent on wiping out all its enemies in West Asia in one go, Israel turned to Iran and hoodwinked Trump into launching two wars. By the time the first was launched in June 2025, the bombing of hospitals and the mass murder of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza had caused revulsion around the world. Nothing more inhumane had been seen in modern history, and even in the US, support for Israel plummeted.

Failing to win the first war on Iran, Trump launched a second. That failed, too. Looking for a way out, the only agreement Trump could get was one that ended the Israeli attacks on Lebanon but Israel continued to murder civilians every day in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. The signing of the ‘deal’ still went ahead, even as Israel was destroying it on the ground.

Trump’s anger was out in the open and genuine. He wanted out, and Israel was blocking the way. It was minimal, but at least he said the bombing of entire apartment blocks in Beirut to get at one person was “overkill.”

Vance reminded Israel that if it had the ‘right’ to defend itself, “whatever it takes,” so did others. “If I was in the Cabinet of the Israeli government,” he said, “I might not be attacking the only powerful ally I have left anywhere in the world (the US).”

All the cats were now out of all the bags. One of them was the sexual violence listed in the UN’s annual conflict-related sexual violence report released in May 2026. It specifically mentioned Israel’s ‘defense forces’, its prison services and its infamous border police. UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres had already labeled these entities as being “credibly suspected of committing or being responsible for patterns of rape or other (acts of) sexual violence.”’

The Israeli ambassador at the UN screamed with unhinged rage at Vanessa Frazier, the Secretary-General’s special representative for children and armed conflict when she raised the issue. The recent rapes on the flotilla are another cat in this same bag.

All the money in Miriam Adelson’s investment accounts is not going to save Israel now. Israel is acting outrageously, and may even feel it but the plain truth is that it has brought all of this on its own head. It eventually bit the British hand that fed it and now it is biting the American hand. As always, it is the victim, not its victims.

Morally, legally, and in the eyes of the world, it has nothing to fall back on now, not the lie of the beleaguered little state that worked for so long, and not even public support in the US. American sympathies lie with the Palestinians now and this is not going to change despite the efforts of US ‘Israel firsters’ to hold back the tide.

Once unshackled from Israel, the US will realize that it could have had a good relationship with Iran all along. It will also realize that the problem was never Iran but Israel.

The US is now engaged with Iran in the effort to end their war, but through murder and mayhem in Lebanon, Israel is doing all it can to sabotage the negotiations.

Like Eisenhower in 1957, Trump could pull the plug on Israel by blocking aid and throwing it to the wolves at the UNSC.

Needless to say, Trump is no Eisenhower. He is not threatening Israel but Hizbullah and Iran. “You close it (the Strait of Hormuz), and you won’t have a country” was the message he sent to Iran while the negotiators in Switzerland were told that they “won’t even make it back to your f …….. country.”

After this threat to assassinate them, the negotiators walked out of the negotiations, while in response to the Israeli attacks in Lebanon, their government closed the Strait of Hormuz.

The ball is now back in Trump’s court. He has told Israel to scale back the level of its attacks but if they continue, Iran will eventually strike back. It will only be a question of time. Will Trump allow Israel to pull the US into the vortex of another full-scale war with Iran or will he tell it that ‘this time you’re on your own?’

This is hard to imagine, but it would surely go down well with the American people. They’ve had enough of Israel. The latest Nate Silver poll shows 56 percent against the war. The latest CBS news poll shows 78 percent of the American people want the war ended right now.

Is Trump their president or Israel’s? Whatever he decides, the failure to destroy the Iranian government is a momentous event in world history, but so it is the end of the ‘special relationship.’

At the moment, perhaps it’s just the beginning of the end. The roots will take time to wither and die despite the constant watering with Miriam Adelson’s cash, but there will be no recovery – no going back to where this twisted relationship was just a few years ago.

– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.