town of Metulla. From 1958 to 1975 Israeli-Maronite relations fell
to an all-time low with only sporadic personal meetings, mostly
abroad. Israel’s relations with the Maronites had been conducted
mainly by the Mossad.
Turkey was the first country with a Muslim majority to recognize
Israel, although positive relations with Israel were not a general pri-
ority for much of that country’s history. Only with the end of the
Cold War and the subsequent geopolitical developments in the
1990s did Turkey and Israel grow closer. In 1996 they formalized an
accord cementing military ties between the two countries. Driven by
common security interests, these states forged one of the most sig-
nificant alliances in the Middle East. Both were regionally isolated,
pro-Western, secular democracies fearful of the specter of radical Is-
lamic groups, facing common enemies in Syria, Iran, and, at the
time, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Elsewhere, under the premise of the Periphery Doctrine, where
“the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Israel over the decades has
helped southern Sudanese, Iraqi Kurds, Yemeni royalists, Moroccans,
Ethiopians, and the shah’s regime in Iran, all with the goal of weak-
ening the Arab mainstream. Relations with Iran especially were
developed by the Israeli intelligence community, where Ya’acov
Nimrodi, who represented the Mossad, contributed to the buildup of
the Iranian National Organization for Intelligence and Security
(SAVAK)—a sound strategy in the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s
pan-Arab vision and all-out Arab wars against Israel. Israeli assis-
tance to peoples on the Arab periphery who were themselves locked
in struggle with the Arab mainstream began in Ben-Gurion’s day in
the late 1950s and also provided nonmilitary benefits: oil from Iran,
as well as immigration to Israel of beleaguered Jewish minorities in
Iraq and Ethiopia. And it corresponded closely with the U.S. strate-
gic priority of opposing Soviet-influenced regimes in the greater
Middle East.
But some drastic changes transformed the region during the late
1970s. Periphery friends such as the shah of Iran and Ethiopia’s Haile
Selassie were overthrown by radicals, while the Arab mainstream, led
by Anwar Sadat, began to make peace with Israel. If Jerusalem had
to choose between peace, however cold, with Egypt, and aid to Haile
Mariam Mengistu’s Ethiopia or the southern Sudanese—both seen by230 • PERIPHERY DOCTRINE06-102 (03) H-P.qxd 3/24/06 7:25 AM Page 230