Big League Politics By
Henry Kissinger’s death on November 29, 2023, sparked all manner of political takes that ranged from praise in diplomatic circles to outright scorn in anti-war circles. The latter sentiments were largely justified due to his geopolitcal tinkering abroad.
Kissinger, nevertheless, was a complicated man whose occasional dabbling in geopolitical realism, won him unlikely enemies.
According to a report by Daniel Boguslaw of The Daily Intercept, Kissinger was supposedly the target for assassination plots among members of Israel’s hard-right Likud party. In the present, the Likud party dominates Israeli politics and has been one of the most zealous proponents of turning Israel into a Jewish supremacist state.
Kissinger was a shrewd diplomat, but he could never fully tame Israel on the world stage when it came to submitting to the US’s geopolitical demands.
Some of his efforts to get Israel to bow down to the US earned him enemies within Likud’s most fanatic faction.
“A die-hard clique of Israeli right-wingers has put out a $150,000 ‘contract’ for the assassination of Secretary of State Kissinger,” the New York Daily News reported back in 1977. The report cited veteran State Department officials. When reports of a possible assassination attempt on Kissinger first surfaced, it was initially believed to be Palestinian militants behind this plot. However senior officials said to the news outlet that they were certain that the threat was coming from the Likud party.
These Likud fanatics were described as “a small, radical splinter faction within Israel’s Likud opposition bloc.” They were constantly frustrated by Kissinger’s diplomacy towards the end of the 1973 Arab–Israeli War. Kissinger played a key role in disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria that witnessed Israel withdraw from territories it had seized. Likud’s rivals in the Labor Party had worked with Kissinger to hammer out the compromises.
For context, the 1973 war spurred Arab states to impose a massive oil embargo against the United States — Israel’s primary patron. Against the backdrop of this economic crisis, Kissinger was willing to reach a compromise in order to keep oil flowing thereby taming energy prices. The 1974 disengagement deals accomplished this.
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