Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s very public confrontation with President Barack Obama over his reluctance to go to war with Iran in order to halt its nuclear program brings to mind a confrontation that nearly twenty-five years ago occurred between President George H. W. Bush and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir over the settlements that Israel’s government was establishing in the occupied Palestinian territories.
At the time, the government of Israel and American Jewish organizations were seeking US housing loan guarantees to help finance Israel’s absorption of Jewish refugees who were leaving the Soviet Union in large numbers. President Bush agreed to provide the guarantees, but asked Israel to cease its illegal settlement construction. He pointed out that given the fungibility of money, US financial assistance would be going to fund an activity the US and the entire international community deemed illegal and intended to preempt negotiations over the disposition of the occupied territories by creating irreversible “facts on the ground.”
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