He Who Wrestles: Israel and Executive-Legislative Relations in the United States

Abstract

The United States maintains a “special relationship” with Israel that has lead to substantial pieces of pro-Israel legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by the president. On occasion, however, the president and Congress fall into disagreement over the direction that U.S. policy toward Israel should take. In this thesis, I examine three high-profile clashes between Congress and the White House over Israel policy: President Gerald Ford’s announcement of a “reassessment” of U.S. Middle East policy after a failure to reach a second Sinai disengagement agreement in 1975, President Ronald Reagan’s sale of five AWACS surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia in 1981, and President George H. W. Bush’s postponement of a request from Israel for $10 billion in loan guarantees from the United States in order to help settle an influx of Jewish refugees from Ethiopia and the Soviet Union. Considering executive-legislative relations in the United States under the lens of these three case studies, this thesis argues that traditional approaches that hold that either the president or Congress alone have dominance over foreign policy fail to account for contextual factors that shift the balance of legislative power between Congress and the president. Instead, when it comes to Israel policy, Congress and the president act according to a model of executive-biased codetermination. A determined president willing to spend significant political capital can often see his policy through to implementation. Congress, particularly when bolstered by the pro-Israel lobby (namely, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), can force a president to fight for his policy, but cannot guarantee its defeat. Acknowledgment of this dynamic is important for all involved actors—the president, Congress, AIPAC, the Israeli government, and the American public—for future instances in which the strength of the “special relationship” is tested.