The JTA news service in their article on the death of Henry Kissinger stated “Regarded as a brilliant diplomatic strategist, Kissinger was one of the most influential Jewish figures of the 20th century…”
Influential? Yes. Pro-Israel? No. Despite the many pundits who now wish to recast Kissinger as a proud Jew who proudly supported Israel the facts are that the exact opposite is true.
Kissinger brokered agreements based on the idea that Israel should give up tangible assets in exchange for something less than actual peace. Thus in 1975, he pressured Israel into surrendering the Mitla and Giddi passes in the Sinai and the Abu Rodeis oil fields there in exchange for a brief “non-belligerency” pledge from Egypt.
After Kissinger left office, the dynamics of Arab-Israeli diplomacy changed, in ways that Kissinger – for all his reputed brilliance – never expected. Egypt’s Sadat realized the only way to get back the entire Sinai was to sign a peace treaty with Israel, and so he did. Yasser Arafat realized the only way to get an almost-sovereign territory and a de-facto army was to sign a peace agreement with Israel, so he did. Jordan, and then more recently several Gulf kingdoms, decided it was more advantageous to them to sign peace treaties with Israel, so they did.
But two essential problems haunt both the Kissinger-brokered agreements and the ones that came later. The first is that a treaty signed with a dictator can be tossed out at any moment, for any reason. That happened during the brief rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It also happened when Israel agreed to give Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, and then shortly afterward Hamas took over. And now after October 7 we can see the results of a Hamas-controlled Gaza.
But the second, and also a very serious problem, is that not a single one of the aforementioned Arab regimes has undertaken genuine peace education. They have not taught their citizens to embrace peace and coexistence with Israel. They have likewise made no effort to teach their children in this regard. So anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist hatred still simmers just below the surface among the Arab masses in all of those countries, ready to explode. Thus the extraordinary concessions Israel made for each of those treaties, in the end, secured for the Jewish State what are little more than ceasefire agreements.
As far as Kissinger himself it is actually even more enlightening to go back to the day before Israel was attacked in 1973 – the day Kissinger prevented Israel from launching a preemptive strike.
We know what happened on the eve of the war and the days to follow from three reliable sources: Walter Isaacson’s well known Kissinger: A Biography; long-time Haaretz chief diplomatic correspondent Matti Golan’s The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger; and from former Obama administration Middle East envoy David Makovsky.
On Yom Kippur morning, hours before the 1973 Arab invasion, Golda Meir was informed by her military intelligence officials that Egypt and Syria were massing their troops along Israel’s borders and would attack later that day. The Israelis immediately contacted Kissinger.
Golan describes what happened next: “Till the very outbreak of the fighting, Kissinger remained more concerned with the possibility of an Israeli preemptive strike than an Egyptian-Syrian attack.” Kissinger instructed the US ambassador in Israel to personally deliver to Meir “a presidential entreaty” – that is, a warning, in the name of President Nixon “not to start a war.”
Abba Eban, who was the Israeli foreign minister then, confirmed in his own autobiography that IDF chief of staff David Elazar proposed a preemptive strike, but Meir and defense minister Moshe Dayan rejected it on the grounds that “the United States would regard this as provocative.”
As soon as the Arab nations attacked, the Israelis requested an U.S. airlift of military supplies. Kissinger stalled them – for an entire brutal week. Kissinger’s strategy was to orchestrate “a limited Egyptian victory,” Makovsky wrote in The Jerusalem Post in 1993. The Secretary of State feared an Israeli victory “would cause Israel to strengthen its resolve not to make any territorial concessions in Sinai.”
“Kissinger opposed giving [Israel] major support that could make its victory too one-sided,” Isaacson confirms. Kissinger told Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, “The best result would be if Israel came out a little ahead but got bloodied in the process.”
A “little bloodied”? Try 2,656 dead Israeli soldiers.
In the aftermath of the war, Kissinger undertook “shuttle diplomacy” aimed at getting Israel to surrender parts of the Sinai to Egypt. When Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister, initially hesitated, Kissinger announced a brutal “reassessment” of American support for Israel. That meant a total cutoff of U.S. arms shipments to Israel during the summer of 1975, until Rabin finally gave in.
What’s more it is very seldom recalled that during those same years, Kissinger also viciously undermined efforts to save Soviet Jewry. In an attempt to block the Jackson Amendment – which linked U.S.-Soviet trade to the emigration of Soviet Jews – Kissinger threatened Jewish leaders that he might cut off American aid to Israel unless they withdrew their support for Senator Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson.
It was not until December 2010, that we learned just how low Kissinger went in his attempts to harm Soviet Jews and that was when a White House tape recording was released revealing Kissinger advising president Richard Nixon that the persecution of Soviet Jewry “is not an American concern.” Kissinger said, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.”
Blasting American Jews for trying to link trade and human rights, Kissinger told Nixon, “And I think that the Jewish community in this country on that issue is behaving unconscionably. It’s behaving traitorously.”
Kissinger didn’t even have the decency to offer a genuine apology in 2010 when his remarks were exposed. He insisted he had just been speaking in “shorthand” and complained that his critics were taking his statements “out of context.”
Henry Kissinger is responsible for causing grave damage to both the State of Israel and to Soviet Jewry. That’s what should be recalled when we discuss Kissinger and Israel.
