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Middle East Review of International Affairs
Armored Breakthrough: The 1965 American Sale of Tanks to Israel
by David Rodman
*
Abstract
In late July 1965, the United States sold 210 M-48 Patton tanks to Israel. Though the Kennedy administration had already agreed to provide Israel with heavy weapons, this sale constituted the first occasion on which the United States consented to transfer offensive arms. The Johnson administration's decision to do so proved to be a complex one, motivated by a number of interrelated considerations, including Soviet arms deliveries to Arab states, Israeli research into long-range surface-to-surface missiles and nuclear weapons, Israeli inability to acquire conventional arms in Western Europe, potential Arab-Israeli hostilities, and American arms transfers to Jordan. Domestic politics in the United States, on the other hand, did not play a central role in administration decisionmaking.
Full Text (PDF, 15 pages, 78.7 KB)
Note *: David Rodman has published articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict in a number of journals, including MERIA Journal, Israel Affairs, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Defence Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies (forthcoming). He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Struggle for Survival: Defense and Diplomacy in the Israeli Experience.
The author would like to thank Neil Caplan for his insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article. The author would also like to thank Regina Greenwell for her kind assistance in obtaining documents from the LBJ Library. Sole responsibility for the contents of the article, of course, rests with the author. Back