Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories

The cooling U.S. commitment to the architecture of nuclear arms control, created over decades of painstaking negotiations with the Soviet Union, is no longer in question. Democrats and Republicans alike, driven by the technological innovations heralded in Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program and their own concerns about the reliability of the strategy of deterrence, have signaled an intention to move U.S. policy away from nuclear stability based on a policy of mutual assured destruction.

Until recently, relationships between countries in the Middle East and their arms suppliers outside the region did not intrude upon the strategic, non-conventional calculations of either buyer or seller. Moscow could sell weapons to Syria or Washington could transfer arms to Israel in discreet, self-contained packages while pursuing, on a separate track altogether, policies of nuclear and missile restraint or expansion.

On October 31, 1998, a U.S. Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) was signed by President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The agreement is the latest in a series of accords dating from 1975, but it is the first one to be signed by the president of the United States.

Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, in a speech marking the Fall 1999 opening of the Knesset, reaffirmed his intention "to maintain [Israel's] strategic deterrent capability even in peacetime, for whatever geographical or time range is required."

Israel and the United States are well on their way toward cementing relations meant to assure Israel's military- strategic preeminence throughout a nuclearized Middle East.

In August 1999, Brig. Gen Amos Gilad, chief of Israel's Military Intelligence, submitted a briefing on MI's multi- year assessment of the regional strategic environment over the next five years to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.