Previous research on Israel's relations with the African states has focused almost entirely on descriptions of Israeli assistance programs of the 1960s and early 1970s and the break in diplomatic relations by twenty-two African governments after the outbreak of the 1973 Middle East war. 1 These accounts are not based on archival sources and deal little with the strategy Israel pursued in Africa in the 1960s. Recently declassified documents in the Israeli State Archive, as well as the archives of Britain and the United States, make possible an elucidation of Israel's strategy in Africa from 1961 to 1967, identification of the policies that Israel adopted to achieve its goals, and an evaluation of the measure of their success. This work argues that early achievements in Africa (the late 1950s and early 1960s) notwithstanding, Israel had by 1967 largely failed to attain its strategic objectives on the continent. Five themes in Israeli foreign policy provide the setting for this article. These are, briefly defined, Israel's diplomatic isolation during the early period of statehood and the geo-strategic dimension of the attempt to relieve that isolation; Arab-Israeli competition outside the Middle East; arms sales and the pursuit of influence; attempts to ally with Western objectives; and the quest for funding. The near-complete collapse of Israel's position in Africa came only with the "wholesale" severing of relations by the "black" African states in the wake of the 1973 war, and that rupture lies outside the scope of this research. Moreover, although the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967 had already brought the black African states to view Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula as an encroachment on African territory, that clash induced only Guinea to cut ties with Israel. Yet the documentary record demonstrates that the Israelis were, even during the "halcyon days" of their early success in Africa, highly aware that the Arab states, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China offered the Africans aid, diplomatic alternatives, and, for some of the African states, ideological and religious identification with which Israel could not compete. Israel knew that powers hostile to its presence in Africa would eventually bring to bear on the continent the greater resources at their disposal. Thus, as W. Scott Thompson writes, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser vied with African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana for sway in African organizations and told them how he thought the continent should be liberated. 2 Arab political influence, especially that of Egypt, manifested itself in increasingly effective fashion at the various Pan-African and non-aligned conferences. In April 1960, the Arab members of the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) prevailed on the participants at
In 1964 the USA decided that the Soviet Union's offer to supply Amman with modern arms left it no alternative to selling tanks to Jordan and in early 1966 added jets to the military hardware it consented to supply to that country. The decision to arm Jordan was a turning point in US Middle East policy, placing the USA in the role of its principal supplier, deepening the American commitment to King Hussein and at the same time accelerating US weapons sales to Israel. The article examines the reasons for the Johnson administration's desire to withhold advanced weapons from Jordan and the strategic exigencies that nevertheless brought the USA to sell it tanks and jets.
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