Zalman Shoval is perhaps the last remaining member of Israel’s diplomatic corps with insider knowledge of every major geopolitical event from early statehood to the present
Photos: Ezra Trabelsi, GPO, Personal archives
Z
alman Shoval knew he had to hit the ground running once he officially assumed his sensitive post as Israel’s ambassador to the United States in November of 1990. It also didn’t take him long to discover how easy it was to get tripped up out of the starting gate.
Shoval was grappling with two major diplomatic dilemmas that were muddling the US-Israel relationship at that time.
One was the George H.W. Bush administration’s insistence that Israel not retaliate against Iraq, which had begun firing Scud missiles daily into Israel in January 1991, during the Gulf War. The Iraqis were attempting to induce Israel into the war to create a schism between the United States and its Arab allies, who had come to the defense of Kuwait after it was invaded by Iraq.
The Gulf War served to complicate and delay a resolution to the second dilemma — Israel’s immigration crisis — and Jerusalem’s urgent request for $400 million in US funding to resettle hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews who had flooded into Israel as the Soviet Union disintegrated.
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