Achievements and Advances in the United States-Israeli Relationship

. . . We meet today at the end of a most remarkable year, a year full of surprises, unexpected twists of the plot, and challenges that we have never faced before. For the American pro-Israel community, I think it is fair to say that it has been a year Israel was tested by a series of events and stories that put Israel in a negative light with U.S. -Israel relations on a lower plane than when the year began. Voices declared that we had seen "the end of the honeymoon;" the beginning of a new era in which U.S. -Israel relations had supposedly "passed their peak" and would be headed downward.

But the most remarkable fact about the 13 months that have passed since we last assembled is that this "new conventional wisdom" has been proven flat wrong.

Thomas A. Dine is executive director of AIPAC. This is the text of his speech given on 17 May 1987 to the AIPAC Conference.