“We live under a system of tacit understandings. But the understandings are

not always understood.”

This quote offers a sketch of the context to the strange and unique period of U.S.-Israeli

foreign relations in early 1975, a period referred to as reassessment. As the previous

chapters have discussed, the central figures were the leaders: Gerald Ford, president of

the United States, his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister

of Israel. These men, how each understood each other, and the role their nations

were to each other; meanwhile in this chapter how each were responsible for the resulting

crisis is explained and crucial in explaining current U.S.-Israeli relations including the

recently characterized frosty relationship between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu

government since 2009.