Between Franklin Roosevelt’s victory in 1932 and Donald Trump’s loss in 2020, only two incumbent US presidents—one Democrat and one Republican—failed to win reelection. Not at all coincidentally, both found themselves facing the electorate on the wrong side of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the leaders of the American Jewish establishment. Obviously, multiple factors contributed to their losses, and it is impossible to attribute responsibility to just one. But with 45 percent of the Jewish vote in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s was the worst performance by a Democrat since 1920. And George H. W. Bush’s 11 percent share of the Jewish vote in 1992 proved to be easily the worst by a Republican since Barry Goldwater’s blowout in 1964.1
The first Bush’s tenacity in taking on Israel during his presidency remains rather mysterious, given the ideological flexibility that characterized his political career. The Texan by way of Greenwich Country Day School, Phillips Academy, and Yale had readjusted his positions so frequently that by the time Ronald Reagan named him as his running mate in 1980, people joked that Bush had placed “his principles” in a “blind trust.” He prided himself on his ability to bond with leaders of other countries. But early on, Bush came to hate the Israeli prime minister that he had to deal with as president—Yitzhak Shamir—with an uncharacteristic passion. Robert Gates, who served as Bush’s deputy assistant for national security affairs before being named CIA director (during what would become decades of service in national security positions under Democratic and Republican presidents), later noted that of all the presidents he had served, literally “every” one of them would, at some point in his presidency, “get so pissed off at the Israelis that he couldn’t speak.” They would all “rant and rave around the Oval Office” out of “frustration about knowing that there was so little they could do about it because of domestic politics.” But when asked if he could think of a single leader Bush “actively disliked,” Gates named only Shamir. This lack of sympathy opened the door for Bush’s secretary of state and lifelong close confidant, James Baker, to treat Israel pretty much as the State Department had almost always wished to, but had been stymied from doing so by the president’s own wishes, together with the calculations of his political advisers about where his true interests lay.2
Shamir had replaced Menachem Begin as both head of the Likud party and prime minister in 1983, serving in the latter role just for a year before becoming prime minister again from 1986 to 1992. A former pre-state terrorist, and later, a Mossad agent, Shamir had chosen his Hebrew name after a mythological worm, or perhaps a substance—the text is unclear on this point—described in the Talmud as having the ability to burrow through stone, iron, and diamond. Taciturn by nature, he was also uncomfortable speaking English. Shamir communicated none of Begin’s old-world charm, moral seriousness, or disarming honesty. More substantively, his political views had apparently been fired in the kiln of some of the most uncompromising of the pre-state Jewish terror cells.
At an April 1989 meeting, during Shamir’s second term as prime minister, Bush told the Israeli leader that his plans for accelerated settlement construction in the West Bank were “an issue of great concern to us.” Shamir responded that “the settlements ought not to be such a problem.” This was what every Israeli leader had told every American president since the settlement-building process had begun soon after the 1967 war. The “problem” was always Arab recalcitrance, Palestinian terrorism, and the lack of an acceptable partner for peace—whatever. But just as Jimmy Carter had misunderstood Menachem Begin at Camp David on this very issue and felt himself to have been betrayed afterward, so, too, did Bush when he learned that Shamir was merely giving him a brush-off. When Shamir went back home and announced the creation of even more settlements on the West Bank, Bush felt Shamir had played him for a “fool.”3
The source of the problem was the influx into Israel of over a million Soviet Jews in the wake of the slow-motion collapse of the Soviet Union. With the unflinching support of AIPAC, neoconservatives, and evangelicals, Shamir sought to exploit the housing crisis as an opportunity to not only defuse the “population bomb” that threatened the state’s Jewish majority but also to further entrench the occupation. Bush, according to aides, went “ballistic” when he learned that Shamir was planning to house massive numbers of Soviet immigrants in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem. He had understood from Shamir that fewer than 1 percent of the new immigrants would be housed in all the territories combined.4
As the United States knit together a multinational coalition to expel Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, following the Iraqi dictator’s August 1990 invasion of that tiny, oil-rich nation, Bush and Baker succeeded in keeping Israel out of the Gulf War—a necessity for retaining the support of the Arab and Muslim-majority nations in the coalition. This was not easy to achieve, as Iraq had launched forty-two Scud missiles into Israel proper. While they did little material damage, the missile threat forced much of the country’s population into bomb shelters with gas masks at the ready. The Israelis longed to retaliate but agreed to hold back in return for a $2 billion bump in their annual US aid package.5
High on the drug of a smashing military victory, Baker took the opportunity of a newly scrambled postwar political order—owing not only to the invasion, but also the chaos in what was about to become, in December 1991, the “former Soviet Union”—to try to pick up where Jimmy Carter had left off and solve the Arab/Israeli conflict. Baker was not much on scripture, and his heart surely did not bleed for the plight of the Palestinians. But he liked making deals, and he thought he saw an opening. Bush expected to coast to reelection in 1992 with or without significant Jewish support. Moreover, as lifelong Republicans who had made their fortunes in the Texas oil industry, both Baker and Bush came into office with few ties, both in terms of personal relationships and in terms of ideological concerns, to Israel and the American Jewish community. They were uniquely willing, therefore, to put the screws on Israel.
Meanwhile, the PLO had continued its nearly perfect record of terrible political judgment by noisily taking the side of Saddam Hussein during the war. The United States had already cut off all dialogue with the PLO following a series of particularly brutal terrorist attacks both in Israel and against Jews abroad. Yasser Arafat had not ordered them, but he also refused to condemn them. Iraq’s quick collapse in the five-week war, ending in February 1991, left Arafat and company weakened by every measure: morally, diplomatically, and financially. Baker likely reasoned that it was a propitious time to get the Palestinians to accept conditions they had hitherto been unwilling to consider. Why he thought he could steamroll Shamir into offering them anything at all, however, is likely explained only by hubris.
Baker revived Jimmy Carter’s idea of a Geneva conference for all concerned parties, including the Russians, with the hope of settling everything once and for all. The only Palestinians the Israelis would agree to talk to, however, were those without direct ties to the PLO who did not live in East Jerusalem. Following painstaking negotiations, the sides agreed to allow East Jerusalemites to be included in a Palestinian/Jordanian delegation. It took eight trips back and forth to the nations in question, coupled with considerable bouts of screaming, cajoling, and (likely) lying, but Baker finally got his conference. It began in Madrid on October 30, 1991, and would continue in the form of topically based working groups in various locations through November 1993. Bush and Baker touted the fact that they had, for the first time, succeeded in gathering all the parties involved to meet face-to-face—an implicit recognition of Israel by its neighbors. With regard to “facts on the ground,” however, nothing changed. Shamir had gone along with Baker’s plans for a conference, albeit after imposing demanding conditions, but he proved unwilling to consider parting with even a millimeter of the West Bank, thereby strangling any hopes for a “land for peace” deal in its metaphorical cradle. Israel was going to continue expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank and expected US taxpayers to lay out the cash to make it happen.
Conflict between Shamir and Bush and Baker had been simmering well before the failed conference began. In June 1990, Baker all but invited it by going public with, for a diplomat, remarkably undiplomatic language before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. After complaining of what he considered to be a series of needlessly provocative Israeli actions, he theatrically announced the phone number for the White House switchboard and added, “When you’re serious about peace, call us.” When he heard that Israel’s deputy foreign minister had accused the United States of building its Israel policy “on a foundation of distortion and lies,” he had the fellow barred from even entering the State Department building. Robert Gates, then the deputy national security adviser, had met the same Israeli official and been so “offended” by what he termed to be his “glibness,” and his “arrogance and outlandish ambition,” that he told his boss, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, that he ought not to be allowed on White House grounds either. The gentleman’s name: Benjamin Netanyahu.6
Yet another conflict between the United States and Israel arose in June 1991, when Israel asked the United States to guarantee $10 billion in loans to build housing for newly arriving Soviet immigrants. Bush and Baker had made clear that any loan guarantees had to be conditioned on a halt to Israeli settlement in the occupied territories—trading settlements for resettlement, wags put it. The Israelis had been assured by their allies at AIPAC that Congress could make the loans happen with or without Bush and Baker’s support. But relations between Bush, Baker, and AIPAC had begun badly and got worse from there. Baker had first addressed the group’s annual conference in May 1989, speaking more bluntly than any secretary of state had done before him. He called on Israel to “lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a greater Israel,” to stop all settlement construction, to forget about the annexation of any part of the occupied territories, and to reach out to the Palestinians “as neighbors who deserve political rights.” All of these positions were consistent with those of previous administrations, and Baker followed them with a similar list of necessary concessions to be asked of the Palestinians, including an end to the intifada, a change in the PLO charter calling for Israel’s destruction, and a willingness to reach out to the Israelis. But the businesslike presentation and the lack of fulsome praise to which all AIPAC audiences had become accustomed set heads spinning and clearly presaged trouble ahead.7
AIPAC began organizing in Congress to pass legislation to give Israel its unconditional $10 billion loan guarantee. It appeared to have the votes until Bush asked for a 120-day delay. Jewish leaders organized a “fly-in” of pro-Israel activists to tell their congressmen to ignore the settlement issue and approve the loans unconditionally. On September 12, a furious Bush called a press conference in which he complained of being “up against some powerful political forces” in Congress who were fighting to undermine his administration’s policies on behalf of Israel. These “forces” enjoyed what the president called “a thousand lobbyists” in Congress, while he was just “one lonely little guy” seeking to do what was right. He reminded everyone that the United States gave Israel “the equivalent of $1,000 for every Israeli citizen.” At the time, Bush was enjoying a post–Gulf War approval rating of nearly 70 percent, and he was not about to lose a key foreign policy vote in Congress. His “remarks punctured [Congress’s] balloon like a blowtorch,” one journalist reported. The loan guarantee legislation died, and even the Israeli population eventually obliged. Ending a lengthy period of political instability, in June 1992 Israelis voted to replace Shamir with Washington’s old friend, Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin.8
With Shamir gone, the deal went so smoothly one had to wonder what all the fuss was about. In order to get the loan guarantees, Rabin agreed to cancel construction of six thousand planned housing units in the West Bank but was given permission by the Bush administration to finish building the eleven thousand already begun. These could be added to as necessary to accommodate the “natural growth” of the population already living in the settlements as well as whatever Israel decided constituted a “security area”—all of which would end up covering roughly half of the entire West Bank and the entirety of East Jerusalem. In other words, in the post-Shamir agreement the Bush administration almost completely caved in to the Israelis. Its terms clearly demonstrated that the administration’s problem had been less about Israel’s desire to deepen and extend its occupation than about Shamir’s unwillingness to provide the necessary fig leaf to hide it. And yet Israel’s champions were so angry at Bush and Baker that they were blind to what had just happened. One could hardly imagine a more tasteless criticism than that leveled by Norman Podhoretz, who complained, in Commentary, that “if one might reasonably say that with Shamir in power Israel was being raped, one might also say that with Shamir out of the way the victim decided to lie back and enjoy it.”9
In March 1992, the histrionic Jewish ex–New York mayor Ed Koch, who after his three terms in office had become a motor-mouthed pundit, “reported” that Baker had privately told Jack Kemp, a Republican congressman from New York, “Fuck the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway.” The New York Post trumpeted the alleged quote in a front-page banner headline: “BAKER’S 4-LETTER INSULT.” Koch almost certainly had the story wrong (as did the New York Times’ William Safire, who relied on him). Baker’s version of the conversation had him replying to the prediction that AIPAC would not appreciate the administration’s position on the loan guarantees by saying, “Screw them, they don’t vote for us,” meaning AIPAC, not “Jews.” Kemp’s version was even milder, failing to include the expletive and portraying Baker as merely explaining that there was no need for the congressman to campaign within the Jewish community because, “Well, they don’t vote for us.”10
But despite the frequent disconnect between his brain and his mouth, Koch was considered a credible source by Jewish leaders and laity alike. And while he (and therefore Safire) may have been wrong in the details, they were not wrong in the bigger picture. In the eyes of most Jewish leaders, most members of the mainstream media, and most inside-the-beltway politicos, AIPAC did equal “Jews.” Refusing, therefore, to give Israel the money it wanted for the expansion of settlements in the occupied territories (thereby further reducing the potential for a two-state solution) was understood to be the equivalent of saying, “Fuck ’em.” And so even though he ended up extending the loan guarantees on extremely generous terms, Bush in 1992 lost more than half of the Jewish vote he had earned in 1988, and the election along with it.11
Ironically, Bush’s tribulations coincided with a low point for AIPAC, as Israel’s new (and old) prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was all but telling it (yet again) to get lost. When he met with AIPAC’s leaders not long after defeating Shamir, he attacked them bitterly for siding with Likud in all matters. As J. J. Goldberg put it, he “dismissed as a fraud their claim that they supported whatever government Israel chose.” Rabin let AIPAC know that he would be grateful if it allowed Israel to handle its relations with the US government without its help. This was just the first of a number of pins the Israelis had at the ready to puncture the self-importance of American Jews and the organizations they supported on Israel’s behalf. Rabin’s finance minister, Avraham Shochat, observed that Israel had no need for the “Israel Bonds” that American Jews were so fond of buying and selling, because it could find better borrowing rates on the open market. Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin informed Americans that Israel no longer needed their contributions at all; Israel was now a rich country. Speaking to members of the Presidents Conference, he twisted the knife even more deeply when he instructed them to stop stifling dissent among Jews. “We want you to disagree with us,” he told them. These sentiments were apparently too shocking for the Jewish leaders to hear, much less obey. Hadassah ex-president Ruth Popkin replied, “We can’t do that. Our job here is to defend you.”12
Israel’s most admired cultural figures were also sending similar signals of impending divorce, laced with the usual contempt for the whole idea of diaspora life. Amos Oz told American Jews that they were curating a museum of Jewishness, while in Israel they were living the real thing. A. B. Yehoshua called American Jews “neurotics,” owing to the sad circumstances of their “divided existence.” And Shlomo Avineri, who had mocked what he believed was American Jews’ hypersensitivity about Jonathan Pollard’s spying, went so far as to suggest that they were living no less a life of “exile” than those Jews in the Soviet Union or Iran.13
A similar loosening of ties was underway within the larger American Jewish community. Writing in 1996, Steven M. Cohen, then the leading analyst of American Jewish social and political trends, found that “journalists, social scientists, Jewish communal leaders, and Israeli officials, among others, have surmised that American Jews have grown less enamored of Israelis, less interested in Israel, and less active in supporting Israel by way of travel, study, political activism, and philanthropic contributions.” He attributed these developments to what he termed “four major flash points.” These were the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, Jonathan Pollard’s 1985 arrest, the late 1987 and early 1988 intifada, and “the post-election bargaining in the winter of 1988–1989, which raised what became known as the ‘Who is a Jew?’ question.” As it stood, the definition of “Jew,” for Israeli politicians, appeared to delegitimize the authority of all but the most ultra-Orthodox of American rabbis, and with it, mainstream American Jewish religious practice. The increasingly narrow legal definition of the term was implicitly insulting to all but the most traditionally Orthodox American Jews.14
Arnold Eisen, a scholar of Judaism and American Jewish culture who would soon become the first non-rabbi to lead the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary, noted in an essay for the American Jewish Committee that “the ‘myth’ of Israel that nourished the American Jewish imagination and helped to sustain American Jewish identity for much of this century no longer function[ed] with anything like its former power.” Gone were the “larger-than-life images of a people reborn, a desert reclaimed, the weak grown strong, and the ideal made actual.” They had been replaced by “TV news accounts of occupation and intifada, [and] resurgent religious fundamentalism.” Eisen might also have mentioned that Israel’s origin story had become unsustainable for many young Jews. As the Israelis opened their archives to a new generation of historians, the myths they had created about the nation’s founding—with enthusiastic American Jewish cooperation—fell by the wayside. As Eisen concluded, the result was that “many American Jews born since 1948, let alone students born since 1967, do not really know what to do with Israel.” What they needed in order to support the foundation of their Jewishness was “an Israel which in its existence, vitality, and might validates our still fragile sense of Jewish life in the shadow of the death camps. We need a country that supports our claim to higher moral standards, illustrating for all to see Jewish teachings of social justice and compassion in action.” But that was not the Israel they had. And the commitment, both political and psychological, of American Jewish leaders to a clearly mythical vision of Israel—the Israel of Leon Uris’s and Otto Preminger’s Exodus—left them ill prepared to deal with a world in which Israel would come to be understood by many Jews, especially young American Jews, as more of a burden than an inspiration. These conflicting forces would only grow in the coming years, as a new Democratic administration attempted to negotiate the changing world of American Jewish politics and an even more complex—and confusing—constellation of forces defining the apparently never-ending Israeli/Palestinian conflict.15