What Israeli Prime Minister Said When JFK Cut Off All American Support ht
It is the spring of 1963 and John F. Kennedy has had enough. He has been sending letters to David Bengurion for 18 months. Careful letters, diplomatic letters, letters written with the precision of a man who understands that what he is asking for is explosive and that the way he asks for it matters almost as much as the asking itself.
letters about the Negev nuclear research center at Deona, the facility in the southern Israeli desert that the CIA has been watching with growing alarm and that American intelligence has concluded with the confidence that comes from multiple independent sources pointing in the same direction is not the textile factory that Israel initially claimed it was. The letters asked for inspections.
American scientists visiting the facility, examining what is being built there, confirming or denying what the CIA believes is happening inside those concrete walls in the desert. Ben Gurion’s responses have been everything except cooperative. He has delayed and deflected and offered inspections that are inspections in name only.
visits so constrained in their scope and so managed in their access that the American scientists who conduct them come back with reports that confirm nothing because they were shown nothing that would confirm anything. He has argued that Israel faces an existential threat from Arab states that have publicly declared their intention to destroy it and that a small country surrounded by enemies cannot be expected to answer questions about its defensive capabilities to the satisfaction of outside powers even friendly ones. He has invoked the Holocaust. He has invoked the 6 million dead. He has invoked every argument available to a man who has decided that a certain conversation is not going to happen and who is skilled enough to keep it from happening while appearing to engage with it. Kennedy is not fooled. Kennedy is many things and one of them is a man who recognizes when he is being managed and he has been watching Bengurion manage him for 18 months and he has decided that the management is over. The letter
he sends in the spring of 1963 is different from the ones that preceded it. This one has a deadline. This one says that if Israel does not permit genuine unrestricted American inspections of Deona, the United States will have to reconsider the entire relationship. The aid, the diplomatic support, the security guarantees, everything that constitutes American backing for the Jewish state that Truman recognized 15 years earlier and that every administration since has supported with increasing depth and commitment. Everything. Kennedy is not bluffing. This is the thing that Bengorian has to decide sitting in Jerusalem with the letter in front of him. Is the American president bluffing? And the answer that Bengorian arrives at after reading the letter and reading the man behind the letter and reading the intelligence that his own services have gathered about the state of Kennedy’s thinking on this question is that Kennedy is not bluffing. And what Ben Gurion says in response is what this video is about.
But first, you need to understand what Deona is and why Kennedy cares about it enough to threaten the entire relationship. Deona is Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Not officially. Officially, Deona is a research reactor, a facility for the peaceful development of nuclear technology.
the kind of thing that a small technologically sophisticated country might reasonably build in the late 1950s when nuclear energy is being promoted as the future and when the atoms for peace program that Eisenhower launched in 1953 has made nuclear technology a symbol of modernity and progress rather than exclusively a weapon of mass destruction.
Nobody in the American government believes the official story. The CIA begins receiving intelligence about Deona in 1958, the year construction starts, and the intelligence accumulates through 1959 and 1960 in ways that point consistently toward a weapons program rather than a peaceful research facility. The scale of the construction is wrong for a research reactor.
The security measures are wrong for a research reactor. The involvement of French nuclear expertise, France being the country that is providing the technical assistance for the Israeli program under an agreement that is itself kept secret is wrong for a research reactor. Everything about demona looked at with the attention of people whose job is to understand nuclear programs, says weapons.
Eisenhower’s administration knows this and handles it with the particular combination of awareness and deliberate incuriosity that characterizes the management of uncomfortable facts about allied countries. The special relationship with Israel is developing during the Eisenhower years. Not yet the deep military and intelligence partnership it will become in later decades, but already substantial enough that the political cost of confronting Israel directly about its nuclear program is considered too high for the available benefit. Kennedy does not share this calculation. Kennedy has a specific and serious concern about nuclear proliferation that is not merely rhetorical but reflects a genuine strategic assessment of what the spread of nuclear weapons means for American security. He has watched the Soviets test their first hydrogen bomb. He has lived through the Cuban missile crisis, which ended 6 months before the spring of 1963, and which has left him with a direct personal understanding of how close the world can come to nuclear war
when nuclear weapons are involved in a regional confrontation between powers with conflicting interests. He does not want Israel to have nuclear weapons, not because he is hostile to Israel, but because he believes that an Israeli nuclear weapons program will trigger an Egyptian nuclear program and that a nuclear Middle East is a danger to American interests and to global stability that the relationship with Israel does not justify.
This is the strategic logic. It is serious and it is coherent and it leads Kennedy to the letters and the letters to the deadline and the deadline to the spring of 1963. Bengurion has been the dominant figure in Israeli politics since before the state existed. He declared independence in May 1948.
He led Israel through its first war. He built the institutions of the new state with the particular combination of vision and ruthlessness that founding moments require. He retired in 1953, came back in 1955, and has been shaping Israeli policy with the authority of a man whose relationship to the state is so foundational that disagreeing with him requires a level of conviction that most Israeli politicians do not possess.
He is also in the spring of 1963 a man who has staked his historical legacy on demona. The nuclear program is not for Bengoran a policy option among other policy options. It is the insurance policy that makes every other policy possible. It is the thing that guarantees that what happened to European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s cannot happen to the Jews of Israel because a country with nuclear weapons cannot be destroyed without consequences that no adversary is willing to accept.
Bengurion does not say this publicly. He does not say it in his letters to Kennedy. He does not need to say it because the logic is so fundamental to his understanding of what Israel is and what Israel requires that it does not need articulation. It is the premise from which everything else follows.
Kennedy’s ultimatum is therefore not from Bengurion’s perspective a request about inspection arrangements or diplomatic protocols or the management of bilateral relationships. It is a demand that Israel abandon the thing that makes its survival certain. And Bengurion’s response to that demand is shaped entirely by this understanding.
He does not give Kennedy what Kennedy is asking for. Before we get to what Ben Gurion actually writes, we need to understand the specific pressure that is building inside the American government in the weeks before his response arrives. Because that pressure is the context that makes his response so remarkable and so carefully constructed.
Kennedy is not operating alone on this. The letter that arrives on Bengurion’s desk in the spring of 1963 is not the product of presidential conviction acting in isolation from the broader machinery of American foreign policy. It is the product of months of internal debate within the administration.
A debate in which the people pushing for harder pressure on Israel have been gaining ground against the people urging caution. And the letter represents the point at which Kennedy has decided that the people pushing harder are right. The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has been the most aggressive voice inside the administration on the Daimona question.
Its director, William Foster, has been arguing since 1961 that the American inspection arrangement is a fiction. That the visits American scientists are conducting are not producing the information they are supposed to produce, and that a president who is simultaneously negotiating the limited test ban treaty with the Soviet Union cannot credibly pursue nuclear non-prololiferation as a global objective while quietly tolerating a nuclear weapons program in an allied country.
The argument is logically coherent and Kennedy finds it persuasive, which is part of why the spring 1963 letter is harder than the ones that preceded it. The State Department is more divided. The Near East Bureau, the part of the State Department whose professional focus is the relationships with the countries of the Middle East, including Israel, has consistently argued for a softer approach on the grounds that the relationship with Israel is too strategically important to risk over an issue that may ultimately be unresolvable, regardless of how much pressure is applied. The Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs understands something that the arms control people do not fully weigh, which is that Bengurion’s commitment to the nuclear program is not a negotiating position that can be moved by sufficient pressure, but a foundational conviction that pressure will harden rather than soften. Pushing too hard in this view risks the relationship without achieving the objective, the worst possible outcome.
Kennedy has heard both arguments. He has heard them in the formal meetings of the National Security Council and in the informal conversations with advisers that shape presidential thinking in ways that the formal meetings do not fully capture. And he has decided that the nicarist bureau’s caution, while understandable, reflects a preference for the comfortable management of the relationship over the harder work of actually changing Israeli behavior.
And that comfortable management of the relationship is exactly what has produced 18 months of inspections that inspect nothing. The CIA’s latest assessment has landed on his desk the week before the letter goes out. It is not reassuring. The language is measured in the way that CIA assessments are always measured.
Careful about the distinction between what is known and what is assessed and what is suspected. But the direction of the assessment is clear. Deona is not a research reactor and the program is moving faster than previous estimates suggested. Kennedy reads the assessment. He picks up his pen and he writes the letter that Ben Gurion will spend the next several weeks deciding how to answer without answering.
He gives Kennedy something else. He gives Kennedy a letter that is a masterpiece of diplomatic resistance. A document that takes Kennedy’s ultimatum and responds to it with a combination of partial concession, historical argument, and subtle repositioning that manages to appear responsive while being in the ways that matter completely unresponsive.
He agrees to inspections, but the inspections he agrees to are the same constrained, managed visits that American scientists have been conducting and reporting as inadequate. He does not agree to the unrestricted access that Kennedy’s letter specified. He agrees to the form of inspections while refusing the substance.
And he does it with the skill of a man who has been navigating the difference between the form and substance of diplomatic agreements for 40 years. Kennedy receives the letter and Kennedy understands exactly what Bengurion has done. And then something happens that changes everything. Bengurion resigns. On June 16th, 1963, David Bengurion announces his resignation as prime minister of Israel.
The resignation is not primarily about Kennedy or Deona. It is about a domestic political controversy, the Leavon affair, a complex and painful episode in Israeli political history involving a botched intelligence operation in Egypt in 1954, and the subsequent dispute about responsibility for it that has been consuming Israeli political energy for years and that has finally produced a crisis that Bengurion cannot manage.
He resigns and the question of who replaces him becomes among other things the question of who inherits the demona problem and the Kennedy ultimatum. The answer is Levy Eshkol. Eshkol is not Bengurion. This needs to be understood clearly because the difference between the two men is central to what happens next.
Bengurion is a founder, a figure of mythological stature in the Israeli national imagination, a man whose authority derives from his relationship to the state’s creation and whose confidence in his own judgment is essentially complete. Eshkol is a politician, a skilled and experienced one, a man who has served in multiple cabinet positions and who understands the machinery of Israeli governance with great sophistication, but who does not have Bengurion’s foundational authority and who approaches the Kennedy problem with a pragmatism that Bengurion’s ideological certainty did not permit. He is also inheriting a situation that has reached a crisis point. Kennedy’s letters have been accumulating. The American position has been hardening and the intelligence that the CIA is generating about Deona has been moving in a direction that is making the political management of the issue in Washington increasingly difficult. Members of Congress are asking
questions. The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency is pushing for a harder line. The State Department is divided between the people who think the relationship with Israel is too important to risk over the nuclear question and the people who think the nuclear question is too important to ignore for the sake of the relationship.
Kennedy himself is clear. He wants the inspections, real ones. And he has communicated in the letter that Eshkall inherits when he takes office that the consequences of continued Israeli non-compliance are not theoretical. The support, the aid, the hawks missiles that Israel has been requesting, the entire apparatus of American backing is contingent on Israeli cooperation on Deona. Eshkol reads the letter.
He reads it carefully with the attention of a man who understands that what he says in response is going to determine the trajectory of the most important bilateral relationship Israel has. and he makes a calculation that Bengurion with his foundational authority and his absolute certainty about Israel’s nuclear requirements could not have made.
He decides to negotiate, not to concede, not to give Kennedy the unrestricted inspections that Kennedy is demanding, but to engage with the American position in a way that is substantively different from the managed non-engagement that characterize Ben Gurion’s responses. Eshole understands something about the Kennedy ultimatum that Bengurion either did not understand or chose not to engage with, which is that Kennedy’s concern about nuclear proliferation is genuine and that the only way to manage it without surrendering Deona is to give Kennedy enough of what he is asking for to satisfy the political requirements of the American position without giving him enough to actually verify what Israel is doing. This is a very narrow path. It requires understanding exactly where Kennedy’s red lines are and staying just on the acceptable side of them while the program continues on the other side of the inspections. It requires a diplomatic sophistication that can engage with American concerns without resolving them in a way that would
actually constrain Israel’s program. Eshkol writes back to Kennedy. His letter is different in tone from Bengurion’s responses. It is more consiliatory, more explicitly engaged with Kennedy’s stated concerns, more willing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the American position even while not fully accepting its demands.
He agrees to semianual inspections. He frames the agreement in language that emphasizes IsraeliAmerican partnership and shared concerns about regional stability. He does not say yes to everything Kennedy is asking, but he says yes to enough that the immediate crisis, the existential confrontation between the American ultimatum and Israeli refusal is reduced to something more manageable.
Kennedy accepts the arrangement, not with complete satisfaction because the arrangement does not give him the unrestricted access he asked for, but with enough satisfaction to step back from the ultimatum and allow the relationship to continue on terms that both sides can live with. The Hawks missiles that Israel has been requesting are approved. The aid continues.
The relationship survives and Deona continues. The inspections that happen under the Eshkol Kennedy arrangement are the same kind of managed visits that characterize the earlier period. American scientists given access to portions of the facility while other portions remain unavailable. Reports produced that confirm nothing because the things that would confirm the program’s nature are not shown.
The inspectors know they are not seeing everything. The Israelis know, the inspectors know. The Americans in Washington who read the inspection reports know they are incomplete. And everyone involved makes the calculation that the form of the arrangement is serving purposes that the substance is not required to serve.
This is the diplomatic settlement of the demon crisis. It is not a resolution. It is a management, an agreement to conduct the relationship on terms that allow both sides to maintain positions that are mutually incompatible by simply not looking directly at the incompatibility. Kennedy gets inspections that he can point to as evidence of Israeli cooperation.
Israel gets the continuation of American support that its security requires and Deona gets the time it needs to reach the capability that Ben Gurion always intended it to reach. Kennedy does not live to see the outcome. He is assassinated in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, 5 months after Eshko’s letter and the arrangement that followed it.
Lynden Johnson, who succeeds him, has a different relationship to the Israel question than Kennedy did, warmer and less focused on the nuclear dimension. And under Johnson, the pressure on Deona, relaxes in ways that make the already inadequate inspections even less consequential. The program continues through the 1960s.
By 1967, the year of the 6-day war, American intelligence assesses with high confidence that Israel has nuclear weapons capability. By 1968, the CIA produces a report concluding that Israel has already produced nuclear weapons. The report is classified and its conclusions are not acted upon in any meaningful way because by 1968 the political and strategic landscape has shifted enough that the confrontation Kennedy was willing to have is one that Johnson and then Nixon are not willing to have. Nixon and Kissinger reach what historians call the Nixon mayor understanding in 1969. a secret arrangement by which Israel agrees not to test nuclear weapons publicly, not to declare a nuclear capability and not to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East in a way that would require an American response. In exchange, the United States agrees not to press Israel on its nuclear program and not to
require Israel to sign the non-prololiferation treaty. The arrangement is never written down. It is conducted entirely in the oral tradition of diplomacy between two parties who understand each other well enough that written agreements are unnecessary. It is the final resolution of the question that Kennedy raised in his letters to Ben Gurion, not the resolution Kennedy sought because Kennedy’s resolution would have required Israel to open Daimona to genuine inspection and to accept constraints on its nuclear program that would have been verifiable. The actual resolution is the opposite. an American acceptance of Israeli nuclear capability combined with a mutual agreement not to discuss it. The policy that Washington still officially maintains. The policy of deliberate ambiguity that has governed the American relationship with Israeli nuclear weapons for more than 50 years. Ben Gurion did not give Kennedy what Kennedy asked for. Eshko did not give Kennedy what Kennedy asked for. and Kennedy’s
ultimatum, the most serious American pressure on Israel’s nuclear program in the history of the relationship, produced inspections that did not inspect and arrangements that did not constrain, and eventually the quiet American acceptance of exactly the outcome Kennedy was trying to prevent. The question this raises is the one that historians of the period keep returning to.
What would have happened if Kennedy had lived? Would the pressure have continued? Would a second term Kennedy, no longer concerned about reelection, have pushed harder than the arrangement with Eshkol allowed? Would the relationship have survived a genuine confrontation over Deona? Or would the strategic logic of the alliance, the Cold War requirement for a reliable partner in the Middle East, have produced the same accommodation that Johnson and Nixon reached, just on a faster timeline? Nobody knows.
History does not run the counterfactuals. What history shows is what actually happened which is that the most powerful man in the world wrote letters to David Bengurion for 18 months and Bengurion responded with managed non-compliance until he resigned and then Levi Eshkol responded with sophisticated partial concession that satisfied the political requirements of the American position without satisfying its substance.
And the program that Kennedy was trying to stop continued and produced the outcome he was trying to prevent. And the world did not end. And the Middle East did not go to nuclear war. And the relationship between the United States and Israel survived and deepened in ways that Kennedy’s ultimatum had it been enforced might have permanently damaged.
Whether that outcome is a vindication of Ben Gurion’s stubbornness and Eshko’s diplomatic skill or a failure of American non-prololiferation policy that has consequences still unfolding in the region is a question that depends entirely on what you think the right answer to the Dimona question was. Kennedy thought he knew the right answer.
He was willing to threaten everything to get it. He did not get it. And the man who told him no was a 76-year-old former farmer from Poland who had been building the Jewish state since before Kennedy was born. Who had survived things that Kennedy had not survived. Who understood what nuclear weapons meant for a small country surrounded by enemies in a way that the American president for all his intelligence and all his sophistication could not fully share.
Bengurion looked at Kennedy’s ultimatum. He looked at the deadline and the consequences and the weight of everything the United States represented for Israel’s security and survival and he said no. Not dramatically. Not with a declaration or a press conference or any of the apparatus of public defiance. He said no in the language of diplomatic letters in the managed concessions and the constrained inspections and the partial agreements that appear responsive while being in the ways that matter completely unresponsive. He said no in the way that a man says no when he has decided that a certain thing is not negotiable and is skilled enough to keep it from being negotiated while appearing to negotiate it. It is one of the most consequential nos in the history of the modern Middle East. And 60 years later the thing that Ben Gurion protected is still there unagnowledged and undeclared. The open secret that everyone knows and nobody officially discusses. The program that
Kennedy tried to stop and couldn’t. the reason that Israel has survived in a neighborhood that has tried repeatedly to destroy it. If you had been sitting where Bengurion was sitting with Kennedy’s letter in front of you and everything Israel needed from America on one side of the scale and everything Deona represented on the other, what would you have done? Let me know in the comments and click the video on screen for the next