Green, Stephen. Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with a Militant
Israel. New York: William Morrow, 1984. 370 pages. Includes an 84-page
appendix of declassified documents.
Ever since Truman's support of the birth of Israel in 1948, U.S.
relations have favored its aggressive policies, even at the expense of
U.S. interests in the region. Much of this was encouraged in the name of a
secure Jewish homeland -- something which few U.S. politicians dared to
criticize -- but behind the public facade there existed a world where the
CIA became dependent on Mossad for intelligence, Israel's economy became
dependent on profits from arms transfers, and policy itself was exercised
through proxy wars.
Green filed 100 FOIA requests with 22 government agencies to fill in
his history, but the bulk of "Taking Sides" is described by him as a series
of "carefully-selected historical vignettes." These include chapters on
U.S. intelligence and the Zionist underground, the 1953 aid cutoff, the
Suez War of 1956, Israel's nuclear weapons program, the Six-Day War of
1967, and the USS Liberty incident. He concludes that were it not for
U.S. policies that favored the militarists within Israel, particularly
from 1964 to 1967, the Palestinian problem might have been solved.
ISBN 0-688-02643-5
Extract the names from this source
Back to search page