Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at the age of 100 – but if his predecessors in Israel’s ruling Likud party had their way, he might not have even made it to the half-century mark.
Despite his reputation as a geopolitical kingmaker, Kissinger never managed to impose full U.S. authority on Israel, but he did try to exploit U.S. influence — sometimes against what the right-wing Likud party saw as its interests.
In the 1970s, Kissinger was so hated by the Likud party, which now controls Israel’s far-right coalition government, that some of its members tried to have him assassinated, according to a news report at the time.
“A hard-core clique of Israeli right-wing extremists negotiated a $150,000 ‘contract’ for the assassination of Secretary of State Kissinger,” the New York Daily News reported in 1977, citing senior State Department officials. When reports of a possible attack on Kissinger first emerged, it was believed to be the work of Palestinian militants, but senior officials told the newspaper they were certain the threat came from the Likud party.
The Likud hardliners who provided the money – described as “a small, radical splinter faction within Israel’s Likud opposition bloc” – were reportedly angered by Kissinger’s diplomacy near the end of the Arab-Israeli War in 1973. Kissinger was instrumental in the withdrawal agreements with Egypt and Syria, which provided for Israel’s withdrawal from the conquered territories. On the Israeli side, the rival Likud Labor Party had worked with Kissinger to agree to the compromises.
The 1973 war had also led to a damaging oil embargo by Arab states against the United States, and Kissinger was prepared to make any necessary arrangements to close the tap again – which was achieved by the 1974 withdrawal agreements.
The Daily News reported on the attack: “The motive was said to be revenge against Kissinger for allegedly selling out Israel during his Middle East shuttle diplomacy.”
The Likud firmly rejected the claim at the time, as did the Foreign Ministry. (The reported plot to assassinate Kissinger is just one of several cases in which Israelis showed intense hostility toward their strongest ally, including an attack on an American spy ship in 1967 and a spy operation in the 1980s.)
While Kissinger achieved his short-term goal of ending the oil embargo and returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, his statesmanship intentionally hindered efforts to find a long-term solution to the permanent occupation of Palestine.
As my colleague Jon Schwarz wrote today, Kissinger violated Richard Nixon’s own instructions to find a path to lasting peace when anything and everything was on the table. Kissinger believed that a constant state of conflict and instability gave America the upper hand in the Middle East. “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] “No catastrophe is best,” Kissinger told his subordinates at the start of the Yom Kippur War.
Despite his Jewish heritage, Kissinger showed little regard for the Israeli state or the Jewish people, beyond their benefit to the American empire. Helping Soviet Jews escape to the United States to escape Russian action was “not a goal of American foreign policy,” Kissinger told Nixon in 1973, “and if they put Jews in gas chambers in the Soviet Union, that is not a goal.” American concern.” . Maybe a humanitarian cause.”
Whatever hostility existed between the Likud party and the former foreign minister was long gone. Today the party is led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was first elected to the post in 1996. (This election was triggered by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, who many believe was the last great hope for lasting peace in Israel.)
Netanyahu has followed Kissinger’s example, using endless conflict to stay in power and inviting more extremist politicians into the Likud coalition. In September, just weeks before Israel began its all-out war on Gaza, the two met affectionately in New York.
Israel’s bombing of Gaza in recent weeks rivals the concentrated bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia that Kissinger oversaw decades ago.