Carter And Bush Senior: Two Real Friends Of Israel

Stephen Walt makes the case:

Ben-Ami has a revealing passage where he says something like Carter was a ‘rare bird’ among politicians, because he just wasn’t all that sensitive to domestic lobbies. He wasn’t connected to the American Jewish community, he came from Georgia, and he just didn’t care as much about placating them. And I think Bush Senior and Baker were operating from a world-view that said, ‘We’re just going to push the American national interest here, and this is going to be good for Israel too.’ They believed that in the aftermath of the first Gulf War that the US was in a very powerful position to make some progress, and they used that position effectively. Now, if you compare Carter and Bush Sr to both the Clinton administration and the more recent Bush administration, the latter two Presidents tended to be very deferential to Israeli sensibilities.

The result, unfortunately, was a total of 16 years with virtually no genuine progress, except that the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank nearly doubled. The Clinton administration did try to make progress but, as Aaron Miller notes in his book, ‘too often the US acted as “Israel’s lawyer”’. That’s why Oslo failed, and that’s why the situation got even worse under George W Bush. And we are now in a much deeper hole.