famous speech from the 1963 March on Washington, in which he articulated the dream of a nation where the country’s inhabitants would be judged by the “content of their character” rather than the color of their skin, might not have been achieved completely—but it no longer seemed like a shot in the dark.
Not surprisingly, the feelings of hope stirred up by Obama’s improbable success in the 2008 presidential race had many of us, both within the United States and abroad, eager to move forward instead of looking back. Obama himself had repeatedly articulated this desire, even to the extent of implying in the weeks leading up to his inauguration that he was not keen on seeing the Bush administration held accountable for its perceived misdeeds. However honorably motivated, though, this was a perilous impulse. Regardless of whether it would prove fruitful to pursue the Left’s long-simmering desire to see criminal charges brought against Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other White House officials, it was crucial to make sense of the past eight years, lest we continue unwittingly down the path they had laid for us.
It is no accident that the Israel Defense Forces’ incursion into Gaza, heavily protested in Europe and the United States, came to a halt on the eve of Obama’s assumption of the presidency. Whatever other motivations Israeli leaders may have had for launching their assault, the timing of the attacks indicates that they were desperate to use political capital that might no longer be available after Bush vacated the White House. While many commentators indeed noted that they were taking advantage of a lame-duck American president, the quid pro quo nature of this action went largely unnoticed. To those few experts on Israel not blinded by their own feelings, it was obvious that Israel was redeeming credits it had earned by reluctantly accommodating the Bush administration’s agenda in the Middle East. In other words, the concentrated force of the assault on Hamas and the Palestinian civilians who were unable to flee from its strongholds was another legacy of the Bush era.
Although it is never easy to put recent history in perspective, the scope of that legacy has proved particularly difficult to comprehend. George W. Bush’s detractors are fond of claiming that he was one of the worst presidents in American history. Yet unlike the predecessors to whom they typically compare him, such as Warren G. Harding and Franklin Pierce, Bush accomplished a great deal while in office. The statement he made in his last presidential address—that he had been willing to “make the tough decisions”—was an attempt to remind everyone that his term had been defined not by hesitancy but activism. And, for better or worse, he was right. For the most part, though, it was a message that people were unwilling to hear. In their eagerness to break new ground, they failed to acknowledge the degree to which the Bush administration reshaped the entire political landscape.
If this is true wherever the Bush administration intervened, from its refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol to its radical curtailment of domestic civil liberties, it is particularly obvious in the Middle East. Even if Barack Obama were to make good on his campaign pledge to pull American troops out of Iraq as rapidly as possible, the long-term effects of their presence will last for decades. Simply put, the presidency that so many people are practically willing themselves to forget is one that we must force ourselves to remember. For my part, the insight that Bush was not really the unequivocal friend of Israel that he claimed to be, but rather an enemy of its best interests, is one that I worked hard to sustain in the heady first days of the Obama administration. In this regard, it is important to think critically about the way that the 2008 presidential campaign was received in Israel, for the perceptions formed then, while the Bush administration still held sway, are bound to condition the relationship between the United States and Israel in the years to come.
OBAMA MEANS MUSLIM IN HEBREW
By the time Barack Obama locked up the Democratic nomination to run for president in June 2008, the relationship between the United States and Israel was shaping up to be of unprecedented significance in the American political process. Despite Obama’s effort to cultivate the impression that he was as pro-Israel as the next Democrat, the suspicion that he might bend where previous American leaders had stood firm still permeated the Jewish community. All manner of rumors circulated about him: He was a Muslim. He was part of Chicago’s large Palestinian community. He was a leftist bent on punishing Israel. He was beholden to an African American community notorious for its anti-Semitism. He was a foreigner who wanted to undermine the United States from within.
Not coincidentally, these were the same rumors being spread on the Right. The fears articulated by Jewish voters, particularly among senior citizens, mirrored the sort of comments being floated by conservative talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. To an unprecedented degree, their brand of hyperbolic conjecture was being targeted at a community that had long been a pillar of the Democratic Party. And, in the weeks during which she refused to concede the nomination to Obama, Hillary Clinton seemed to have no qualms about letting the attention being paid to Jewish voters work to her advantage. For a good while, it seemed as if the resistance they expressed toward Obama’s candidacy might help derail his campaign for president.
Because Barack Obama ended up winning 78 percent of the Jewish vote, outperforming John Kerry’s 2004 results in many places, and won the crucial swing state of Florida with surprising ease, liberal political analysts breathed a huge sigh of relief. Many made arguments about how the loyalty of traditionally Democratic Jewish voters was far more steadfast than Republican strategists had realized. What these optimistic assessments overlooked, however, was the highly unusual combination of circumstances that helped propel Obama into the White House. Had the price of petroleum products not skyrocketed and then collapsed, had the stock market not plunged precipitously, had the housing crisis been contained, had terrorism loomed larger in the autumn news, Republican nominee John McCain might well have prevailed. As a number of conservative commentators noted, Republicans had faced a “perfect storm” in the campaign and still managed to avoid the sort of landslide defeats experienced by Democrats like Walter Mondale and George McGovern. From this perspective, Karl Rove’s contention that the United States remains an essentially conservative nation may not be mere wishful thinking.
Similarly, in the aftermath of the election, many of Obama’s cabinet nominations and the comments he made about international affairs in general (and the Middle East in particular) suggested that he remained acutely aware of how close he came to being defeated by wild rumors about his identity and motives. It was telling that upon taking the oath of office on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln had used, right-wing conspiracy mongers immediately claimed that the massive book was a Koran. Even if Obama had wanted to reprimand Israel for its incursion into Gaza, political prudence demanded that he move forward without paying the assault too much attention. Just as the nation’s financial crisis had limited his freedom of movement on domestic policy, Obama’s political autonomy had been sharply restricted by both the Israeli offensive and the Bush administration policies that had, in effect, inspired it.
It is important to be mindful of the fact that this quandary was not only the product of the Bush administration’s previous policies, but of a specific effort to put Obama on the spot. In his May 15, 2008, address to the Knesset in celebration of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary, Bush went out his way to develop the Republican Party line that the McCain-Palin ticket would later deploy in the fall:
Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.
Although careful not to name Obama directly, Bush’s clear allusion to statements the candidate had made early in the Democratic primary season about being willing to talk with the leaders of countries like Iran and North Korea was powerfully reinforced by the example of
