Politics & Power Quote by George Ball

“Until 1956” is doing the real work here: it draws a bright line and dares you to ask what snapped. George Ball, a patrician Democratic policymaker and chronic skeptic of romantic foreign policy, is smuggling in an argument about American habit: the U.S. didn’t start out with a quasi-familial bond to Israel; it arrived there through crisis, bureaucracy, and domestic politics.

The phrasing is careful, almost bloodless. “Treated” implies policy posture rather than affection; “not much differently” minimizes drama while still conceding a shift; “friendly states” frames Israel as one partner among many, stripping away the later aura of exception. Ball’s intent isn’t to deny early sympathy for Israel after 1948, but to puncture the myth of inevitability. He’s saying the “special relationship” was made, not born.

The obvious pivot year is 1956: the Suez Crisis, when Israel, Britain, and France attacked Egypt and Eisenhower forced a withdrawal. That episode is the hinge between a U.S. determined to police old colonial reflexes and a U.S. that, over subsequent years, increasingly folded Israel into Cold War strategy and into America’s domestic moral narrative. Ball’s subtext is also institutional: foreign policy is not just values, it’s precedents. Once a state is treated as exceptional, it becomes politically expensive to treat it normally again.

Coming from Ball, the line reads like a warning disguised as history: when “friendly” becomes “unique,” criticism starts to look like betrayal, and diplomacy shrinks into ritual.