As he disembarked from his Boeing 707 at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz seemed the soul of optimism. "The friendship and ties between Israel and the U.S. have never been so strong," he declared. "The time is right to move ahead. The time is right, together, to make decisions of historic proportions."
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir quickly brought Shultz's lofty rhetoric down to earth. "The timing is not particularly good for anything," he told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot. The remark got Shultz's latest Middle East mission off to an inauspicious start. Rarely, in...
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