Equally important, successive U.S. administrations provided Israel with invaluable diplomatic support. Since 1982 the United States vetoed thirty-two significant resolutions critical of Israel: this was more than all the numbers of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. U.S. diplomatic support had also included blocking the efforts to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s agenda—which would have laid Dimona open to inspection. Time and again America supported Israel in time of war and used its influence when negotiating peace. Successive U.S. administrations had protected Israel against Soviet threats and later played a crucial role in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Meir Amit, the former Mossad chief and in 2006 still an “elder” of the intelligence community, recalled (to the author): “There may have been occasional bumps along the way, but Washington consistently supported our position.” Rafi Eitan, Mossad’s retired director of operations and in 2006 the head of a small political grouping of pensioners in the Knesset, remembered: “Time and again Israel has found Washington functioning as our unpaid lawyer on the world stage.”
Eitan was among those who believed that Israel, for its part, had been a “valuable asset” to the United States during the Cold War. “In many ways we had acted as Washington’s proxy by helping to contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicting heavy defeats on Soviet client states like Egypt and Syria. We had also helped to protect another U.S. ally, like Jordan, and, of course, we passed on important intelligence about Soviet intentions.”
But Israel had also provided sensitive military technology, either sent directly from the United States to the Jewish state or developed within its own defense industry, to countries like China and South Africa. The State Department’s inspector-general had described this as “a systematic, and continuing to grow, pattern of unauthorized transfers. Israel also remains the most aggressive in running operations against the U.S. of any ally.”
Since 9/11 Israel and the United States has become even closer enjoined—“like identical twins” Meir Dagan said—due to the war against terrorism. Part of that relationship has been to allow Tel Aviv a free hand on how it would deal with Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah’s threat on Israel’s northern border.
It was against that background that the Houston discussions began. Much of the initial tension revolved around Uri Saguy. While he was seen in Israel as a hawk who had turned dove and the first to detect what he called “a sea of change in Damascus,” it was a judgment which made him unpopular in Israel together with his argument that the Golan Heights must be surrendered. But to Fatah he was also the man who had approved Mossad assassinations including attempts on Yasser Arafat’s life. Jibril Rajoud, for one, felt that “the jury is still out” on how Arafat had died. “Natural causes or murder, we may never now know,” he said.
At the end of each meeting, using secure communication links provided by the U.S. State Department, Rajoud reported to President Mahmoud Abbas and Saguy briefed Ehud Olmert. That briefing, by agreement, had included Meir Dagan. It was in every sense Olmert’s first real taste of international politics. The rise of the sixty-one-year-old lawyer had been meteoric as it was unexpected. Injured while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces as a combat officer, Olmert had completed his military service as a journalist on the Force’s
