With the potentially decisive Florida primary less than a week away, that same phenomenon appears to be playing out among Jewish party heavyweights. A Tablet review of campaign-finance records for 175 major Republican Jewish donors shows that, according to the most recent campaign filings, more than 55 percent have yet to give to any primary candidate. Of that 55 percent, nearly two-thirds—64 donors—had already given to a candidate by this time in the 2008 presidential cycle. Among them, more than a dozen have not repeated their support for Romney this year, a group that includes high-profile figures like Richard Fox, a Pennsylvania developer who co-founded the Republican Jewish Coalition; California real-estate mogul Fred Sands; and Ronald Krancer, an heir to the Annenberg fortune who has been a major Republican player in Pennsylvania.

“I like him, but I’m just not sure which Romney’s going to show up, and I think that’s a problem a lot of voters have with him,” said Joel Hoppenstein, an attorney in Miami Beach and Republican Jewish Coalition board member who was among Romney’s earliest donors in January 2007. Hoppenstein said he only recently made what he described as “a very insignificant” donation to the campaign. “Most people are looking for a Reagan figure who can bring social conservatives and fiscal conservatives together, and Mitt Romney is supposed to be that person today—but the public electorate hasn’t embraced him.”

That reality appears to have given some big donors pause. There certainly are major donors who are sitting out the primaries because of other commitments—among them, James Tisch, the CEO of the Loews Corporation and an early Giuliani donor, who is now on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But others who gave early and generously in 2008—not just to Republican primary candidates, but to the party—have yet to emerge from the wings. Sheldon Kamins, the Washington developer who chaired Gingrich’s PAC in the late 1990s—and who gave to Romney in the 2008 primaries—declined to comment on his lack of involvement this year because he has relationships with too many of the candidates. When I asked whether that was also why he had so far declined to give, he replied: “That would be a good surmise.”

The difference between this primary campaign and the last is striking. In the 2008 cycle, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was the early favorite among the Jewish donors reviewed by Tablet. Giuliani won primary support from nearly as many of the donors as Arizona Sen. John McCain and Romney combined—partly because of his hometown status among Republican Jewish donors from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, but also because he seemed like a credible candidate from the outset. “There were more clearly viable candidates in 2008 than today,” said Morton Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America, who has attended fundraising meetings between Republican presidential candidates and potential Jewish donors. “So, people had a choice between people who had a real chance, rather than four or five people who might have a chance.”

In June, Gingrich’s campaign imploded with the mass resignation of his staff, in part because the former speaker had decided to go on vacation in Greece instead of heading to Iowa. It seemed, briefly, that he might not make it into autumn. But as former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry faded out, Gingrich re-emerged as a popular favorite in the final weeks of 2011. People who might have been ready to plump for Romney before the primary season now had another option.

So far, Gingrich’s main benefactor has been Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who gave $5 million to the pro-Gingrich super-PAC Winning Our Future earlier this month. (Adelson is also a generous backer of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and, like so many of the Jewish donors we reviewed, was a Giuliani supporter in the 2008 primary.) He has also enjoyed the backing of Lawrence Kadish, a Long Island real-estate investor who was also a founder of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Gingrich wasted no time canvassing for support once his star began to rise after restaurant mogul Herman Cain dropped out of the race in December. Before Christmas, Gingrich attended a meeting of Jewish leaders in New York and reportedly won backing from another key figure: George Klein, an investor and a Republican Jewish Coalition board member who had been expected to back Romney.

On Monday, following the speaker’s South Carolina win, Adelson’s wife Miriam ponied up another $5 million for the same pro-Gingrich super-PAC her husband had supported. Abetted by the Adelsons’ largesse, Gingrich’s persistence has inspired donors who had been on the fence to take a second look. “I’ve given a contribution to Romney, but I intend to give to Gingrich,” said Kenneth Bialkin, a partner at Skadden, Arps in New York who has been chair of the Conference of Presidents. Last fall, Bialkin gave to Texas Gov. Rick Perry—the price of attending a private meeting, Bialkin said—but he was loath to commit. “I think Romney is a fine candidate, and if he were the candidate, I’d cheerfully vote for him,” Bialkin told me. “I also think the same of Gingrich,” he added.

Still, Romney has received steadfast support among some formidable Jewish donors, including Mel Sembler, a Florida shopping-center developer who chairs Romney’s Florida finance committee, and Sam Fox, a George W. Bush Pioneer who helped underwrite the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004 and gave $90,000 to Restore Our Future, the super-PAC supporting Romney, last spring. He has also won significant backing from Boston philanthropist Ted Cutler, one of Sheldon Adelson’s original business partners, who has given $100,000 to the pro-Romney super-PAC in the past year.

And while Romney might have preferred to be the crowd favorite from the outset, he has steadily won support by attrition, beginning in August when Pawlenty departed the race. In December, Roger Hertog—initially a Pawlenty backer and a major donor to Jewish causes—held a $2 million fundraiser for Romney in Manhattan with hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, a partisan of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who declared in October that he would not run for the presidency this year. Pawlenty backer Bernard Marcus, the Home Depot founder and Republican Jewish Coalition board member, recently agreed to give to Romney’s campaign after spending months declining to engage with the remaining candidates, according to Fred Zeidman, a Texas oilman and former McCain finance chairman who is spearheading Romney’s Jewish outreach.

“I don’t think there’s any question that the overriding consideration is that we have to beat Obama,” said Zeidman. “So, there has to be a kumbaya moment at some point, because this can’t go on.”

Divided Assets
Which candidates are Jewish Republicans supporting? A sample of 20 prominent donors.

List includes major donors and board members of the Republican Jewish Coalition; campaign donations as reported by the Federal Election Commission as of Jan. 24, 2012, via OpenSecrets.org.
*Does not include donations not yet reported in Federal Election Commission data provided by OpenSecrets.org as of Jan. 24, 2012. Adelson and his wife have given an additional reported $10 million to the pro-Gingrich Winning Our Future super-PAC.

• In a false flag operation that made President George W. Bush livid, Mossad agents reportedly posed as U.S. intelligence agents to recruit members of a Pakistani terrorist group into conducting operations, including assassination, in Iran. Huge scoop. [FP]

• Frequent Tablet Magazine contributor James Kirchick links the contemporary use (typically on the left) of terms like “Israel-firster” and “dual loyalism” to the anti-Semitic far-right. [Haaretz]

• Entering roughly the same debate, Eric Alterman defends his own record and accuses critics of think tanks like the Center for American Progress and Media Matters of practicing “Jewish McCarthyism.” [Forward]

• Iran continued to allege that Israel and the United States were responsible for yesterday’s and other assassinations of nuclear scientists (which the U.S. strongly denies) and hinted at reprisals. [NYT]

• Yet weirdly the head of Iran’s nuclear agency showed up at the scientist’s funeral, almost as though the scientist had not been merely a scientist. [Golnaz Esfandiari Twitter]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu acknowledged that sanctions are indeed harming Iran’s economy and possibly working toward their goal of making the country compliant with international nuclear standards. [Haaretz]

• The head of the Kremlin’s Security Council accused Israel of pushing the U.S. toward war with Iran. [Haaretz]

• The Palestinian Authority set a Jan. 26 deadline for concrete progress or else it will pull out of the series of talks in Amman. It’s … unclear what the stick is here. Or the carrot, for that matter. [JPost]

• PolitiFact says that the Democratic accusation that the leading Republican candidates (excepting Paul) would “zero-out” aid to Israel is ridiculous. [JTA Capital J]

• Which religion, out of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, offers the best average pay for clergy in America? Hint: Don’t over-think this one. [Slate]

• Tila Tequila is going to convert to Judaism. I am ashamed to admit that I have heard of Tila Tequila but proud to boast that I have no idea who she is. [TMZ]

• The Frugal Traveler (aka Matt Gross) visits Jerusalem! Now if only Bourdain would go. [NYT]

• According to American Airlines, Tel Aviv is the Middle East’s best gay city (well, duh). That’s just to distract you from the occupation, though. [ThinkProgress]

• Saad Hariri’s tweet “@” an Israeli Defense spokesperson could make things … awkward for the former Lebanese prime minister. [Abir G Twitter]

I imagine this video, starring Mayor Michael Bloomberg and with a cameo by former Mayor Ed Koch and set to the music of Lady Gaga, lets you feel what it’s like to take a lot of acid.

Emanuel, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Rahm Emanuel: On Nov. 4, 2008, a mainstream Greek paper infamously heralded the election of Barack Obama as “the end of Jewish domination.” The elation, however, was short-lived: A few months later, President-Elect Obama would tap Rahm Emanuel, congressman from Illinois, as his first chief of staff. Few choices could have been better designed to incense global anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists. After all, unlike even the staunchest of Jewish or pro-Israel politicians, Emanuel is the only one who can credibly say that “Israel” is his middle name.

Emanuel’s pride in his religion and national identity is well-documented. His parents used to take the entire clan to Israel for the summers, and Emanuel served as a civilian volunteer at an Israeli military base during the 1991 Gulf War. In 2005, as part of a political fundraiser poking fun at his future chief of staff, Obama noted that “Rahm is very serious about [his faith]. He keeps the Sabbath. He goes to synagogue. He doesn’t just talk about the Ten Commandments, he lives them. With some modifications. The one ‘thou shalt not kill’—unless he’s a target. ‘Thou shalt not covet’—unless absolutely necessary.” (Obama then added that “every year, Jews celebrate Passover recalling the day that the angel of death passed over their homes in ancient Egypt; today, Republicans celebrate when Rahm passes over their district.”)

But perhaps the most quintessential Emanuel story is told by Asher Lopatin, the modern Orthodox rabbi of Congregation Anshei Sholom B’nei Israel—where Emanuel and his wife are members—who recently delivered the first invocation at the Chicago City Council after Emanuel was elected mayor there. Lopatin recounts how one Yom Kippur, Emanuel, in attendance for the entire day of services, was accosted by an acquaintance during davening. His reaction? “Rahm in his inimitable fashion said, ‘shut [the] *something* up, I have a lot of repenting to do.’”

Bolten, 2006 (Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)

Joshua Bolten: Less popularly known for his Jewishness is Joshua Bolten, President George W. Bush’s second chief of staff and Emanuel’s immediate predecessor. And with a middle name like “Brewster,” this isn’t exactly surprising. But Bolten’s Jewish commitments are no less substantial and have been evidenced throughout his long political and post-political career.

As recounted in Laura Bush’s authorized biography, when Bolten first began serving as Bush’s policy director in 1999 in Texas, the future first lady noticed that he would consistently pass on certain dishes during meals at the Bush family ranch or governor’s mansion. As it turned out, Bolten would not eat shellfish or consume meat outside kosher homes or restaurants. From that point forward, Laura made sure to have a vegetarian alternative on hand; at campaign barbecues, there would be pork on the grill for staffers and vegetables for Bolten.

Bolten became one of the Bushes’ sources on Judaism. The subject particularly interested the first lady, who would quiz him about aspects of the Jewish holidays or the meanings of rituals. In her biography, Bolten recalls how “whenever I was over for a meal, they would say grace. They would ask me to say grace in Hebrew and ask for the translation.” Once, during a stay at Camp David, Laura asked Bolten to recite the Shehechiyanu blessing to mark the occasion.

At the White House, where Bolten, like Lew, first served as OMB director before becoming chief of staff, he placed a mezuzah on his office door, brought dreidels and gelt to staff meetings during Hanukkah, and, in 2006, participated in a White House Megillah reading for Purim.

Since the close of the Bush presidency, Bolten has served as the vice chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. In this capacity, he spoke this past May at the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony at the United States Holocaust Museum, where he presided over the joint lighting of six symbolic candles by congressmen and Holocaust survivors. All in all, not bad for a guy who started off funding the production of his teenage band’s LPs by playing covers at bar mitzvahs.

***

It’s hard not to wonder what the funniest Jewish anecdote from Lew’s tenure in the White House will be. If you’ve got a prediction, leave it in the comments. Winner gets a free copy of … you guessed it: Jews and Power.

December 1999: “George W. Bush, the front runner in the race for the Republican presidential candidacy, has declared that he will move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem the day he is inaugurated as U.S. president. Bush was speaking at a large gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington.”

Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky was born in Jerusalem on Oct. 17, 2002. Two months later, his mother, Naomi, an American citizen like her husband, went to the embassy in Tel Aviv to request a passport for her newborn. Where the form asks for place of birth—specifically, “City & Country as it is presently known”—Naomi wrote, “Jerusalem, Israel,” and requested that the official document designate the birth place by the country. Naomi’s request was not abnormal; it is standard operating procedure for Americans born in other foreign cities. Those born in Rome list Italy as their place of birth, just as those born in Tel Aviv list Israel.

But Naomi’s request was denied. “This is the only group that is being denied the right to say, ‘This is how I want to be described, this is where I was born,’ ” says Alyza Lewin, who, along with her father, Nathan Lewin, makes up the daughter-father legal duo representing the Zivotofskys.

The State Department’s concern is political. “The status of the city of Jerusalem is one of the most sensitive and longstanding disputes in the Arab-Israeli conflict,” the department’s lawyers wrote in their brief to the Court. “For the last 60 years, the United States’ consistent policy has been to recognize no state as having sovereignty over Jerusalem, leaving that issue to be decided in negotiations between the relevant parties with the peace process.” More than 52,000 current U.S. passports list Jerusalem—no country—as the place of birth.

Congress tried to change this passport policy only months before the application for baby Menachem’s passport was submitted. Tucked away in the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003, Congress included the following provision:

RECORD OF PLACE OF BIRTH AS ISRAEL FOR PASSPORT PURPOSES.—For purposes of the registration of birth, certification of nationality, or issuance of a passport of a United States citizen born in the city of Jerusalem, the Secretary shall, upon the request of the citizen or the citizen’s legal guardian, record the place of birth as Israel.

The language could not be clearer: If a passport applicant requests Israel on his passport, and he was born in Jerusalem, his wish must be granted.

And yet for the past nine years, the White House has argued that the decision isn’t Congress’ to make. President George W. Bush signed this piece of legislation—but after disavowing the passport provision with a signing statement arguing that it “impermissibly interferes with the President’s constitutional authority to conduct the Nation’s foreign affairs and to supervise the unitary executive branch … [to] speak for the Nation in international affairs, and determine the terms on which recognition is given to foreign states.”

President Barack Obama’s State Department seeks to continue Bush’s policy on the matter. The department is arguing that enforcing the 2002 law will alter U.S. foreign policy in a way that the executive branch does not intend, sending a message to the Palestinians that the United States has sided with Israel over who gets Jerusalem in a future final-status agreement. The petitioner, on the other hand, contends that the issue at stake is far more limited: The Lewins argue that the congressional act is “an extremely narrow and limited correction of a discriminatory State Department practice.”

It did not always apply only to Jerusalem. Alyza Lewin points to the precedent of Taiwan, toward which the United States has largely maintained a policy of “strategic ambiguity” about the island’s relationship with China. “In 1994,” she explained, “Congress passed a law that said that if individuals born in Taiwan want to put Taiwan down as their place of birth on their U.S. passport, then they should be allowed to put Taiwan.” At the time, the State Department argued that the law would negatively interfere with the executive branch’s foreign policy. Seventeen years later, the petitioners point out, there is “no apparent harm to relations with China” because of the law. The government contends that Zivotofsky is not a parallel case, since the Taiwan policy is “consistent with the United States’ recognition that the People’s Republic of China is the ‘sole legal government of China’ and ‘Taiwan is a part of China.’ ”

So far, the case attracted the most public attention in August, when the White House was caught changing photo captions on its website so that “Jerusalem, Israel” would simply appear as “Jerusalem,” an apparent attempt to conform with the State Department’s position before today’s case. The website scrubbing carried over to the State Department’s own site and other government archives.

The only organization to file an amicus brief in support of the State Department is Americans for Peace Now, a left-wing advocacy group. The Zivotofskys, however, have attracted widespread support, including from the Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, various religious groups of all denominations, members of Congress (at least 28 U.S. senators and 11 members of the House of Representatives), the Zionist Organization of America, and the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, among others.

But despite the popularity of the petitioner’s position, the government will likely win this case. The Court won’t rule that Jerusalem is not in Israel. Rather, it will avoid getting involved in an intra-government squabble between Congress and the White House. And if that happens, then the only person capable of changing the rules to allow Menachem to put Israel on his passport is the president.

Taking the stage frequently in a recent series of televised debates, the contenders clawed at each other and growled at President Barack Obama. An ambitious group, they also took the time to contest reality. Take, for example, Rick Perry. “The fact is,” the Texas governor said when asked about global warming, “to put America’s economic future in jeopardy, asking us to cut back in areas that would have monstrous economic impact on this country, is not good economics and I will suggest to you is not necessarily good science. Find out what the science truly is before you start putting the American economy in jeopardy.”

And what might the science truly be? Perry claims to have found out. In an August town hall meeting in New Hampshire, he sang his gospel. “There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects,” he said, “and I think we’re seeing weekly or even daily scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

Just where these intrepid scientists air their grievances daily, Perry didn’t say. It certainly isn’t in any credible academic publication: According to a study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, between 97 and 98 percent of the world’s 1,372 scientists “most actively publishing in the field” of climate research are quite certain of the idea of anthropogenic climate change, or climate change brought about by human actions.

But don’t expect the candidate who doesn’t lose sleep over the possibility of executing the innocent to lose heart when faced with the facts. And don’t expect his fan base to let science get in the way of a good story, either: As a survey released last week by the Yale Project on Climate Change shows, supporters of the Tea Party aren’t too troubled by global warming because a majority of them, 53 percent, believe it isn’t happening at all.

None of this, of course, is new. Radical ignorance has been in vogue with Republicans at least since a George W. Bush aide mocked his political foes for belonging to the benighted “reality-based community” while Bush and his followers answered to a higher power. “We are not this story’s author, who fills time and eternity with his purpose,” Bush said in his first inaugural address, referring to God. “This story goes on. And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.”

And herein, precisely, lies the problem. The Republican insistence on rejecting this reality for another, intangible one isn’t just bad science; it is, quite literally, bad faith.

Moses knew all about it. In this week’s parasha, he delivers yet another fiery speech to the Israelites, who are now standing on the doorstep of the Promised Land. But Moses isn’t interested in the immediate future; he’s more concerned with the recent past. “You have seen all that the Lord did before your very eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, to all his servants, and to all his land,” he says, “the great trials which your very eyes beheld and those great signs and wonders. Yet until this day, the Lord has not given you a heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear.”

It’s an odd epistemological argument: Even though you’ve seen God’s miracles with your own eyes, Moses tells the people, it is only now that you’re capable of true knowledge. And forget about the yiddisher kop; true knowledge comes not from the head but from the heart.

At first glance, Moses’ speech reads a bit like Stephen Colbert’s introduction of his famous term, truthiness. “I don’t trust books,” Colbert said in one of his show’s more memorable segments. “They’re all fact, no heart.” But Moses is smarter than that, and he knows that facts and heart work best when they work together. It’s not hard to guess how the Israelite leader came by his views. We can only imagine what went through his head when he descended from the mountain only to witness the golden calf; here, after all, were people who, just a few weeks before, had witnessed with their own eyes the glories of God, but, impatient with their absent leader, waited barely a month before fashioning a more tangible deity out of precious metals. In Sinai, the Israelites knew God with their minds, but not with their hearts. They realized that the Almighty was real and present, but they did not yet believe in him.

We mustn’t blame them. God is a mighty difficult idea to grasp. Proof of his existence doesn’t make it any easier. Faith is required. Because faith, Moses knows, is more than believing in things we’ll never know for certain exist; faith is also the wisdom to believe in things we know for certain do.

Which brings us back to the Republicans. The adherence of so many in the party to counterfactual narratives is often explained away by faith. Just what kind of faith Rick Perry repeatedly makes clear. In a speech in Virginia earlier this week, he said that his “faith journey is not the story of someone who turned to God because I wanted to. It was because I had nowhere else to turn. I was lost spiritually and emotionally.”

Perry, then, assumes that if he trusts in God, God will tell him what to do. He believes, if we take him at his word, that he is capable of interpreting the precise and unerring will of the Creator. This is the opposite of Moses’ brand of faith. For Perry, faith comes first, and proof is unnecessary; for Moses, proof comes first, and faith must follow. Perry was lost until he found God; Moses found God first and then made his people wander in the desert for 40 years, until they were ready—intellectually as well as emotionally—to embrace what faith meant.

And what faith really means is responsibility. Because we are incapable of knowing God’s mind—and by “we” I mean decent people of all political persuasions who are humbled by their belief in God—we’re left grappling with life’s greatest mysteries by ourselves. We try, like children playing a game with rules they don’t entirely understand, to make sense of what might seem, to the unbelieving, like a cruel and random existence. All we can do is our best, and our only guide is our heart and its call for compassion.

The Israelites at Sinai didn’t understand this idea at first. They yearned for a god they could grasp, a shiny golden god, a god they believed could redeem them. It took them four decades in the wilderness to learn that only they could redeem themselves, and that faith isn’t, in itself, salvation, but merely its engine. The Republicans are now learning the same lesson. Let us hope that they, too, are headed to the wilderness, where they can wander and wonder about the true nature of faith and the dictates of personal responsibility. If they don’t, if they allow the Tea Partiers in their midst to prevail, we are all looking at decades of false idols and bad faith.

The days of remembrance, particularly in Washington and New York, did prompt a flood of documentaries, interviews, talk shows, newspaper and magazine articles, and books. It was difficult to escape the Sept. 11 anniversary on television last week. The Week counted no fewer than 40 Sept. 11 television specials in the month leading up to the opening of the memorial at ground zero on Sunday—everything from Animal Planet’s Hero Dogs of 9/11, to the Oprah Winfrey Network’s Twins of the Twin Towers, about twins who lost a sister or brother on that fateful day.

Some critics warned that the excessive programming would be overkill, so to speak, that all these hours of TV would trivialize the occasion. They need not have worried. The interviews and new material disclosed helped illuminate an event that many Americans with no familial or geographical connection had stopped thinking about long ago.

But this theater of the unfathomable will not trigger the catharsis the Greeks might have imagined. Nor will it provide the national clarity that makes it possible to “move on.” For despite the week’s rhetoric about American unity, the country remains bitterly divided about the meaning of the Sept. 11 attacks and the decade they helped spawn.

***

Commemoration is not a particularly American art form. While commemorations abound in Europe, particularly in Russia and Germany, which have endured and inflicted great suffering, in the United States people tend to focus on joyous occasions. The Fourth of July and Thanksgiving reflect the optimism of a buoyant, relatively young country. And while Americans commemorate Memorial Day, they have no designated national ceremony for the Civil War, the bloodiest war in American history.

Sept. 11 changed that. Each year since the attack, the families of the 2,983 victims have gathered, many of them near the spot where the towers once stood, to read aloud the names of those who perished there. Bells have tolled, and mourners have held moments of silence.

The spare style and content of this year’s gathering in New York was consistent with those earlier gatherings. The ceremony was conscientiously solemn, simple, and apolitical, yet it emerged from painstaking negotiations between the families of the victims—often deeply divided themselves—and the mayor’s office. There were no religious figures on the program to articulate or interpret the families’ sense of loss and grief; the bereaved insisted on doing that for themselves. Nor were self-serving politicians permitted to give speeches hoping to score political points with constituents.

In the weeks before the anniversary, there was pressure to rewrite the commemoration drama. Politicians and officials who had heretofore been excluded clamored for speaking roles. Some conservative pundits demanded that religious leaders be included in the program. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg held firm. After an ugly battle last year over whether a mosque should be built in lower Manhattan, he wisely resisted politicizing the ceremony by raising the divisive issue over whether to include a Muslim cleric among the religious representatives.

In the end, a few more officials and politicians were included in the program. But all of them—including President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush—read letters, poems, or scripture. Obama read Psalm 46 for its message of perseverance, his spokesman said. Bush, who was cheered by the crowd, read an eloquent condolence letter that President Abraham Lincoln had sent to a mother who had lost five sons in the Civil War. The presidents and their wives stood solemnly side-by-side behind protective bullet-proof glass. (They left part-way through the reading of the victims’ names, under the cover of Yo-Yo Ma’s incomparable cello.)

The mayor, unprotected by a Plexiglas shield, was the event’s true master of ceremonies. “In all of the years,” he said, “we have shared both words and silences.” He lingered even after the reading of the names to greet families, many of whom he had come to know.

The families were the true stars of Sunday’s commemoration—the brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, and other relatives of those whose only crime was going to work that day, or rushing into the burning towers to save people they did not know. Relatives of the victims, from over 80 countries, included members of almost every nationality and religion, a microcosm of the city itself. They stood patiently beneath the podium in the sun, waiting for their loved one’s name to be called out—to be rescued, one by one, from the anonymity of having been killed in a mass attack.

Nancy Novaro, 52, of Mastic Beach, Long Island, said she came to the ceremony every year. “It still hurts,” she said, despite the passage of a decade. Her sister-in-law, Catherine LoGuidice, a 30-year-old broker, had worked on the 105th floor of the North Tower. Did it help to know that Osama Bin Laden was dead? “Who cares about him?” Ms. Novaro replied. “We’re here; he’s not. He can’t scare us. I’m a true New Yorker. They won’t take us down. We’ll always rebuild.”

Despite complaints about bureaucratic delays, cost overruns, and a general lack of urgency, the reconstruction of the site is now well under way. A giant American flag adorned the façade of 1 World Trade Center, formerly known as the Freedom Tower, now some 80 stories tall. And for the first time, the families got to see their loved one’s names inscribed in the bronze panels of the National September 11 Memorial, which also opened Sunday. Many used crayons and pencils to trace a name onto paper. Others just touched their relative’s name or left a memento on the panel—a photo, a ballet slipper, a fireman’s helmet. Still others stared silently into the twin reflecting pools, listening to the sound of the memorial’s giant, gushing waterfalls.

A grove of oak trees lines the memorial, along with one very special tree, a Callery pear tree that survived the devastation 10 years ago. Nearly dead when its badly burned root was pulled from the towers’ smoldering wreckage, the so-called survivor tree was struck by lightning two years ago and replanted at the site after being nursed back to life a second time.

***

Two days before the Sept. 11 commemoration, I attended another ceremony for the 23 New York Police Department officers who died at the towers. That toll turned out to be only the beginning of the department’s losses: In the weeks and months after, 50 more died from illnesses caused by exposure to the site. At the ceremony at Lincoln Center, Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly honored these victims beneath a screen featuring the NYPD’s motto, Faithful Unto Death.

The first responders, most lacking masks or respirators, had dug through rubble, many for days, trying to find survivors. Later, they worked to recover their fallen comrades and other victims. Inhaling toxic smoke, dust, and debris, and the scent of burnt flesh, they developed rare cancers and other fatal illnesses. Cardinal Edward Egan, the former archbishop of New York, told the 1,700 policemen, families, and guests assembled in Avery Fisher Hall that a police supervisor at a rescue center had given the cardinal his own mask, warning him that breathing in the towers’ dust and debris might be lethal. Egan had asked the officer where his own mask was. He needed to see everything and everyone in the area clearly, the supervisor had replied, and the mask obstructed his vision.

But getting compensation for the sickened police and dying first responders has been inexcusably difficult. Congress stonewalled, resisting granting any assistance for years. At the end of last year, the legislators were finally shamed by the public and the press into passing the Zadroga Act, which enables the sick or relatives of those who fell ill in a now expanded “dust zone” to apply for compensation. Inexplicably, however, those suffering from cancer have been excluded.

***

Despite the mayor’s efforts to keep politics out of the ceremony, politics have dominated discussions of how Sept. 11 should be remembered. While there was one ceremony at ground zero on Sunday, almost unbearable in its sadness, two competing narratives of the event and its aftermath have emerged.

One depicts the United States as the largely innocent victim of an evil, unspeakably barbaric foe hell-bent on destroying the nation. In this version of events, America is a country of courage and resilience, one that sought justice rather than vengeance. While bolstering security at home and abroad, the United States remained faithful to its core principles of the rule of law, freedom, equality, and tolerance, despite some stumbles. This version was articulated Sunday by Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who spoke at the commemoration at the Pentagon, where 125 civilians and military officers perished. The attacks enhanced American patriotism, he said, its people’s belief in one another, and their faith in their country. “They could kill our citizens,” he said, but “they could not kill our citizenship.”

The other, darker narrative, one favored by critics of American foreign policy, is that the United States somehow had it coming. Staunch U.S. support for Middle Eastern autocrats and Israel’s occupation of Palestinians had enraged young Muslims, who finally struck back at American symbols of power and wealth. The Bush Administration exploited the attack to unleash a decade of war and financial recklessness that has weakened the nation and helped its foes. The “sanitizing of 9/11 and the falsification of its genesis to jump-start a second war” in Iraq wound up “muddying and corrupting the memory of the event,” wrote Frank Rich, the former New York Times columnist, in an essay for New York magazine.

An even harsher assessment came from New York Times columnist and Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman. Krugman wrote Sunday on his blog that the anniversary had become a marker of “shame” for America. Assailing Bush and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani as “fake heroes,” he accused them of exploiting the attacks for their own personal and political gain. Many journalists, too, had lent “their support to the hijacking of the atrocity.” As a result, the memory of Sept. 11, he wrote, has been irrevocably “poisoned,” an “occasion for shame.”

In response to widespread outrage over his post, Krugman posted a second commentary on Monday. Reiterating his basic theme, he called the first two years following the attacks a “time of political exploitation and intimidation” for America that had culminated in the “deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq.”

He should also have written, Krugman added Monday, that Americans “behaved remarkably well in the weeks and months after 9/11.” There had been “very little panic, and much more tolerance than one might have feared,” he wrote. But he could neither “forget nor forgive” how the memory of the atrocity had been hijacked. Some readers could neither forget nor forgive Krugman for attempting to politicize a national commemoration in honor of innocent people who had died.

This is, obviously, absurd. Yet it would be equally absurd (well, nearly) to deny the young couple the right to marry each other. One solution a source has proposed would be a nice homage to family history: the couple should change the name back to what it was—Lifshitz. Ralph, recall, is a Jewish boy from the Bronx; the name was changed, moreover, not to hide its Jewishness but to hide the expletive within the name. And, really, is Lifshitz more obscene than Lauren Lauren?

All this talk of Ashkenazi heritage, of course, poses yet another question about the impending nuptials. The thought of a Jewish Bush—as in those Bushes—entices.

Laurens in Love [Page Six]

So, why are Washington policymakers working overtime to find a way to do business with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad?

We’re still trying to figure out what made Breivik set off a bomb that killed eight outside the prime minister’s office in Oslo then dress in a policeman’s uniform, take a ferry to a youth camp, and methodically gun down another 69 people, many of them children. Maybe his reading of anti-jihad polemicists deranged his mind with visions of multiculturalism run amok, or maybe his strange interpretation of Christian values turned him into a self-styled crusader. Perhaps he imagined himself an avatar of Aryan purity, or perhaps he’s just a psychopath, cloaking his madness in whatever tattered stuff he could find on the Internet.

The problem with Western societies isn’t that we occasionally produce monsters like Breivik, of whatever political persuasion. Rather, it’s that we negotiate with monsters like Assad, who live in palaces and use the instruments of government to murder their own people. The difference between Assad and Breivik is that instead of an automatic rifle and a sidearm, the Syrian president uses artillery, tanks, government snipers, and government torturers to kill people, week after week, while the world watches evidence of his sickening brutality on YouTube.

Yet the United States, and many other democracies, still have diplomatic relations with Assad’s regime. And while the media put Breivik on a shrink’s couch, no one’s trying to figure out why Assad instructed his security forces to open fire on unarmed protesters over the last five months and perpetrated further acts of mass murder this past weekend in several Syrian cities, leaving at least 145 dead. Unlike for Breivik, no one in the Western press is wondering what Assad reads on the Internet, or if the god he worships made him a murderer.

Breivik’s identifying himself as a Christian (and conservative) raised the hackles of a number of commentators in the United States. They argued that he can’t really be a Christian, because his actions are so obviously not informed by Christian beliefs. Of course, the same argument was used when discussing Osama Bin Laden and other Middle East murderers—they weren’t real Muslims, the thinking went. Instead, Bin Laden hijacked Islam.

The argument was absurd regarding Bin Laden and it’s no less absurd with Breivik—or with pedophilic priests or adulterous evangelical Christians, for that matter. True, Islam and Christianity are not the same. Ideas, doctrines, sins, and virtues vary, because the ideas put forth in sacred texts matter, as do the interpretations of those texts in different times and places. But determining exactly where ideas, religious or otherwise, hit the rough ground of human life is the work not of bloggers, pundits, and psychologists but of philosophers, novelists, and theologians. To turn Breivik’s bloodshed into a referendum on the comparative virtues of Christianity and Islam is obscene. To argue with him and Bin Laden over the veracity of their respective faiths is to pursue a covenant for monsters.

In the end, this murderous sickness is not about religion as such. After all, the regime in Damascus is ostensibly secular and it’s slaughtering Sunni Muslims in cities throughout Syria. What does it say about our own values—religious, moral, and political—that the Senate is deliberating whether to confirm the recess appointment of Robert Ford as U.S. ambassador to Damascus?

President George W. Bush recalled the last U.S. ambassador to Syria, Margaret Scobey, after the Feb. 14, 2005, assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Syria’s Assad regime was alleged to be involved in that crime as well as a series of political murders and bombs in Lebanon. Moreover, Syria was complicit in aiding foreign fighters traveling to Iraq to kill U.S. troops and ordinary Iraqis and boasted of its support for Hamas and Hezbollah. At the time, there were no deep mysteries about the Assad regime; its detentions, tortures, and murders of Syrian dissidents were a matter of ample public record. And yet the Obama Administration was convinced from the outset that treating Syria’s leader like a normal head of state was a more or less risk-free enterprise. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama explained that talking to your enemies was not rewarding them. He came to the White House promising to engage the rogue states that his predecessor had isolated.

Ford was dispatched to Syria on a recess appointment in December 2010, meaning that his appointment will expire when the current Congress recesses the session in the late fall, unless he is confirmed by the Senate, some members of which are disgusted with the administration’s Syria policy. It’s hard not to have some sympathy and respect for Ford, who by all accounts is a tough-minded foreign service officer who has served his country honorably in hard places, like Iraq, and is now being used as a political football. He showed courage three weeks ago when he traveled to Hama to show his sympathy with the Syrian opposition and perhaps to serve as a human shield—the Syrians wouldn’t dare attack Hama with the U.S. ambassador present.

Instead, the regime waited for Ford to get back to Damascus, where they attacked the U.S. embassy instead. Three weeks later, Assad’s security forces laid siege to Hama, with tanks firing shells indiscriminately into civilian neighborhoods and snipers placed on rooftops to pick off terrified people in the streets. Doubtless Assad would have gone after the people of Hama regardless of Ford’s visit, which was intended to draw a line in the sand and challenge the Syrian despot to stop killing his people. But the ease with which Assad crossed that line sent an unmistakable message of contempt for America’s empty condemnations of his behavior. Hama paid the price for what in the end has been revealed as American vanity.

It’s unclear whether Ford’s appointment will be confirmed or rejected by the Senate or if the White House will shy away from a possible setback and recall the ambassador, turning its current political weakness into an essay in late-blooming courage. But regarding the Syrian uprising that has so far cost the lives of thousands of peaceful protesters, the last thing the Obama Administration should be thinking about is politics. American prestige is not simply the sum of our military and economic power; it is rather a function of our values, taken from our historical experience as a free people. To have treated Assad like a statesman, let alone to have made him a focus for America’s ever-shifting plans for a new Middle East, is to have mingled with evil.

What we must finally admit to ourselves is that madmen are the products not of religion, video games, blogs, or other familiar parts of our common global culture but of an inner darkness that overrides sympathy as well as reason. The fact that the evil of such men cannot be redeemed by fine rhetoric, clever political dealings, or the ceremonies of polite diplomacy is precisely why it is so frightening. Now that Robert Ford has left Damascus for consultations in Washington, it is important that we don’t send him back until Bashar al-Assad and his henchmen are gone.

A close look at these polls reveals how flawed they are, but pointing that out is unlikely to stop pundits from recycling the underlying narrative of an imminent Jewish realignment. It’s a story that won’t die, no matter how often it’s proven wrong. This latest iteration is part of a long history of nonsense, built on a constant, almost willful overestimation of the commonality of interest between American Jews and evangelical Christians. Both of these groups care a lot about Israel. Both see anti-Semitism as a profound evil and a worldwide threat. But American evangelicals and Jews have very different ideas about Israel’s future. Besides, lots of evidence suggests that when it comes to identity politics, American Jews are most concerned with the place of Jews in America. They don’t trust people who want to turn their country into a Christian nation, even if those people swear to protect the Jewish state.

The last time a Republican presidential candidate won a plurality of the Jewish vote was in 1920, when Warren Harding won a landslide victory over James Cox. Even then, Harding didn’t get a majority—38 percent of Jews supported Socialist Eugene Debs; 43 percent went for Harding. But in the election of 1980, Jewish support for the Democrats reached a contemporary nadir: According to the book Jews in American Politics, Jimmy Carter, an evangelical who who was widely seen as unfriendly to Israel, got only 45 percent of the Jewish vote. Reagan received 39, and John Anderson 15 percent.

Not surprisingly, many people saw this as the beginning of a long-term shift in Jewish voting patterns, one they expected to continue in 1984. In that re-election year, Mort Kondrake wrote in the New Republic that “Jews are pulling loose from their traditional Democratic moorings.” The Reagan Administration, he reported, was trying to convince the American Jewish community that Walter Mondale would be weak on Israel, caving in “to Jesse Jackson and confirmed Arabisants from the Carter State Department.” (At the time, Jackson’s derisive reference to New York as “Hymietown” was very much in the news.) For the first time in 60 years, wrote Kondrake, “it’s not clear which party will receive a majority of the Jewish vote.”

That November, despite one of the worst showings in modern presidential campaign history, Mondale carried 67 percent of the Jewish electorate. Reagan got less of the Jewish vote in 1984 than Nixon did in 1972, despite the latter’s long reputation for anti-Semitism.

What happened? An important part of the answer lay in the growing association between the Republican Party and Christian fundamentalism. Reagan’s empowerment of the religious right was a significant issue in 1984. Endorsing Mondale, the New York Times concluded: “Mr. Reagan’s opponent talks about church and state with a care that verges on eloquence. [T]hat, alone, would be reason on Tuesday to vote for Walter Mondale.” Concerns about religion in politics did not sway the electorate at large, but Jews took them seriously. As a Commentary article said, “It seems that Reagan’s increasingly vocal embrace of the New—specifically, the Christian—Right scared Jews more than anything said by either Jackson or [Louis] Farrakhan.” Indeed, exit polls showed that Jews had a significantly more unfavorable opinion of Jerry Falwell—a man who’d been awarded the Jabotinsky Prize by Menachem Begin—than of Jesse Jackson.

Fast forward to the first George W. Bush campaign. Once again, Republicans had a candidate whose fierce Zionism derived from his evangelical convictions. And once again, Republican strategists thought they had a shot with American Jews. “Two issues stand in the way of Republicans gaining a significant percentage of the Jewish vote: abortion and the ‘religious right,’ ” GOP pollster Frank Luntz said at a Republican Jewish Coalition forum. “But here we have an answer. The magic word is ‘Israel.’ ” A Jewish Telegraphic Agency story asked, “Can George W. Bush Win the Jewish Vote?”

The answer, of course, was no—Al Gore won 79 percent of the Jewish electorate. Yet four years later, predictions of a Jewish swing to the right started up again. After all, Gore was a special case—he’d chosen a Jewish running mate. Besides, Sept. 11 had made the Middle East paramount in American politics. The Republican Jewish Coalition conducted a survey that, it said, showed a growing Jewish tilt to the GOP. “We are seeing a major shift in American political-party alliances,” the RJC’s Matt Brooks told the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. “We expect these realignment trends to continue.” There was no trend. Kerry won 76 percent of Jewish votes.

Nevertheless, in 2008, journalists and pundits once again speculated about a potential rightward lurch among Jews. After all, the Democratic candidate was named Barack Hussein Obama. He counted among his friends the Palestinian intellectual Rashid Khalidi. “Some Jews are incapable of deluding themselves that Obama would be the most resolute candidate in defending Israel,” the conservative Jennifer Rubin wrote in a Jerusalem Post piece titled “Why more Jews won’t be voting Democrat this year.” There were even Jews, she promised, with “a lifetime of Democratic voting” who would realize that “some things rank higher than even the top items on the liberal political agenda.” Perhaps there were, but not very many. Obama ended up getting 78 percent of the Jewish vote.

Now we’re once again hearing about a Jewish realignment. “Has Obama lost the support of some Jews—and their funding?” asked a Jerusalem Post story in June. Morris purported to show widespread Jewish disaffection with Obama, claiming that if the election were held today, the president would get just 56 percent of the Jewish vote. Then came the Secure America Now poll that seemed to show that only 43 percent of Jews planned to vote to re-elect Obama. Once again, the conservative media exulted.

Both polls, though, were sketchy. The website of the American Association of Public Opinion Research offers a guide to deciding whether a poll can be trusted; one of the most important things to consider, it says, is whether a pollster discloses his or her methodology. Morris does not. Meanwhile, what we know of Secure America Now’s methodology reveals the poll to be, as Adam Serwer wrote in the Washington Post, “laughably bogus.” It began with a conservative sample—only 64 percent of its respondents voted for Obama in 2008—and then posed a series of questions designed to turn them against the president. “Considering what President Obama has proposed for Israel just over a year before his 2012 re-election campaign—a return to the 1967 borders, dividing Jerusalem, and allowing the right of return for Palestinian Arabs to Israel—how concerned would you be about President Obama’s policies towards Israel if he were re-elected and did not have to worry about another election?” asked one. Finally, it asked whether the respondent would “consider” voting for someone else. Forty-three percent pronounced themselves unwilling to even entertain the idea. From that, the pollsters concluded that Obama’s support had dwindled to just that number.

That fact is, many American Jews might consider voting for “someone else,” but only a fraction would consider voting for the type of person that the GOP is likely to nominate. American Jews have shown, again and again, that they care more about social justice and a defense of American pluralism than a zealous defense of Israeli maximalism. They might get anxious about liberal criticism of Israel, but this anxiety tends to pale beside their abhorrence of the Christian right.

There actually was a moment in the summer of 2008 when Obama’s Jewish support looked relatively weak. “We did polling in the summer of 2008,” says Ira Forman, the former CEO of the National Jewish Coalition. “Obama was getting anywhere from 59 to 61 percent of the Jewish vote and McCain was at about 30. According to Gallup the numbers started shifting in August and they really jumped in September and October.” There is a simple, two-word explanation for this: Sarah Palin.

Jewish aversion to Palin has been clear to observers across the political spectrum. Rubin, author of the Jerusalem Post piece predicting a Jewish defection from the Democrats, acknowledged it in a Commentary article titled “Why Jews Hate Palin.” The piece would have read as vaguely anti-Semitic if a gentile had written it—among other things, she suggested that Jewish women were turned off by Palin’s decision to give birth to a baby with Down Syndrome because they “couldn’t imagine making a similar choice.” But Rubin had a point when she wrote, “If one were to invent a political leader designed to drive liberal, largely secular, urban, highly educated Jews to distraction, one would be hard pressed to come up with a more effective figure than Palin.”

At least, she had a point at the time, because since then, just such a leader has emerged—Michele Bachmann. Bachmann is even more rooted in the evangelical right than Palin is. Indeed, while at Oral Roberts University, she was the research assistant on a book by John Eidsmoe titled Christianity and the Constitution, which argued that the United States was founded as a Christian theocracy and that it should become one again. “The church and the state have separate spheres of authority, but both derive authority from God,” Eidsmoe wrote. “In that sense America, like [Old Testament] Israel, is a theocracy.”

Bachmann, like many evangelicals, believes in the scriptural imperative to restore the entire biblical land of Israel to Jewish control. She first went to Israel after high school, on a trip sponsored by the evangelical group Young Life, and she talks about Israel in the language of premillenial dispensationalism, the influential theology that holds that the second coming of Christ depends on the return of the Jews to their homeland. “If we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play,” she told the Republican Jewish Coalition last year. “And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis, we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel.”

This sort of thing has endeared her to some Jewish conservatives, but if history is any guide, it will not sway the community at large. (Her mispronunciation of “chutzpah” won’t help.) American Jews are savvy enough to realize that evangelical support for Israel does not necessarily imply concern with Jewish safety. After all, the dispensationalist scenario culminates in a third world war in the Middle East and the consignment of unconverted Jews to hell before the messiah returns. For those who truly see Israeli politics in terms of evangelical prophesy, an apocalyptic battle on Israeli soil is not something to be avoided at all costs. Instead, it’s the portal to paradise.

Yet this chiliastic theology is only a small part of the reason that Jews will likely remain wary of the Christian right. In the end, American Jews care most about America. They are unwilling to assume a role in their own country that’s in any way analogous to that of Arab citizens of Israel—a people with legal equality who are nonetheless excluded from their nation’s raison d’être. Jews know they can never be full citizens of a Christian nation.

And Republican politics have never been so fully Christianized. The Tea Party was initially mischaracterized as a libertarian movement, but it is deeply imbued with religious fundamentalism, and polls show that a majority of its members believe that the United States is a Christian nation. It’s no accident that, upon taking over statehouses nationwide, Republicans elected with Tea Party support enacted a record number of abortion restrictions—80 in the first six months of 2011, compared to 23 for all of 2010.

Of the serious Republican presidential candidates, the only one who is not entirely aligned with the Christian right is Mitt Romney. Indeed, his campaign has gone out of its way to point out how, as a fellow member of a religious minority, he understands Jewish concerns. Yet he is running for the nomination of a party dominated by religious literalists; the majority of Republicans, for example, don’t believe in evolution, and more than half of them believe that humans were created in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. In his desire to appeal to the GOP base, he has already forsworn his earlier pro-choice position and now opposes not just legal abortion but also stem-cell research. Should he win the nomination, he will almost certainly do what McCain did and choose a running mate meant to energize the Republican base. Some consultants are already speculating about a Romney-Bachmann ticket.

Whoever is ultimately the nominee, we can be sure that he or she will reiterate Romney’s accusation that Obama has “thrown Israel under a bus.” We can be sure that he or she will support the religious right’s agenda in domestic politics. And we can be relatively certain of what will matter most to Jewish voters.

CORRECTION, July 26: It was Adam Serwer, writing on Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog, and not Sargent himself, who called the Secure America Now’s poll methodology “laughably bogus.” The error has been corrected.

A Gallup poll released last week found that President Barack Obama’s approval rating stood at 60 percent among Jewish Americans—an 18 point drop from the 78 percent of Jews who voted for him in 2008.

“The question,” suggested the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Ron Kampeas “is whether Obama’s Jewish popularity dip since ’08 stems from the same cause of his fall generally—America’s persistent economic problems—or whether it has to do with the president’s policies on Israel.” He continued: “Apparently the interpretation depends on who is answering. Democrats and Gallup say it’s the economy; Republicans say it’s Israel.”

Yet Kampeas’ either-or reasoning may have missed a more fundamental and intriguing point: Jews almost always turn against a sitting president.

If Barack Obama flew to Israel to offer Benjamin Netanyahu a back rub, he would lose Jewish voters. If he raised, lowered, or kept taxes the same, he would lose Jewish voters. If he learned Yiddish or put a menorah on the flag, he would lose Jewish voters.

For more than 30 years, every incumbent president running for re-election, with a single exception, has lost Jewish supporters in his second campaign.

Running against the unelected incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter won 50 percent of the popular vote and 71 percent of the Jewish vote. Four years later, when he was defeated in his re-election campaign by Ronald Reagan, Carter won 41 percent of the popular vote, a decrease of 9 percentage points, and only 45 percent of the Jewish vote, a remarkable drop of 26 percent points.

In 1984, a wildly popular Reagan won re-election with 59 percent of the popular vote, an 8-point increase over his 1980 share. But Reagan’s percentage of the Jewish vote decreased by 8 percentage points from his first election to the second—which meant he underperformed among Jews relative to the general voting population by 16 points in his re-election effort, just as Carter had in his unsuccessful try four years earlier.

George H.W. Bush fared 24 percentage points worse among Jewish voters in his unsuccessful 1992 re-election effort, while Bill Clinton’s take of the Jewish vote dropped by only 2 percentage points from 1992 to 1996. But because Bush’s performance among the general population also decreased from his first election to his second while Clinton’s improved, both men underperformed by 8 percentage points among Jewish voters relative to the general electorate.

All that said, the majority of Jewish voters are loyal. Even in a very bad year, a Democratic presidential candidate can be assured of at least 45 percent of the Jewish vote. Another 14 percent of Jews—like those who voted for third-party candidates like John Anderson in 1980, who got 14 percent of the Jewish vote, or Ross Perot in 1992, who polled 9 percent of Jews—might not vote for a Democrat but still won’t vote for a Republican. There’s 10 percent of American Jews who will reliably vote for a Republican presidential candidate, plus 9 percent who may vote independent but won’t vote for a Democrat, based on this historical data.

That leaves about 22 percent of Jewish voters up for grabs, most of whom at least lean Democratic. In 2008, Obama won 82 percent of these toss-up Jews. This gave him 78 percent of the Jewish electorate compared to the 53 percent of the general electorate.

The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from all this—that Obama will inevitably lose Jewish voters in 2012—will make a fine talking point for Jewish Republicans. But Democrats of a more optimistic bent might look to recent history for hope. In 2004, George W. Bush bucked the trend and increased his initially scant Jewish vote by 5 percentage points, compared to a popular-vote increase of 3 percentage points. (Republicans would likely argue that Bush’s increase in Jewish support was hardly an accident, but rather the clear product of his stance as Israel’s leading supporter and an unshakable friend of its former prime minister, Ariel Sharon.) Perhaps that will become the new trend; after all, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first re-election through Richard Nixon’s resignation, Jewish support for incumbents increased as predictably as it decreased from Watergate to September 11.

The Arab Spring surely has something to do with Obama’s new approach, but it is hardly the sole or even the main cause of a shift that has turned U.S. Middle East policy on its head. So, what is?

Even before pro-U.S. regimes in Tunis and Cairo were toppled, Obama had said that he opposed the existing U.S.-backed order in the Middle East, which has rested on close military and diplomatic alliances with Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, and a substantial American military presence in the Persian Gulf. Most observers assumed that the president was indulging in rhetorical flights of fancy when he said that the status quo was unsustainable. But now we see he meant every word of it.

The existing political order in the Middle East has cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives over the past 60 years. In some cases, such as Israel, our alliances have been built on cultural affinity, military necessity, and domestic political considerations. In other cases, such as Saudi Arabia, our considerations have been more commercial. The larger point of U.S. engagement in the region has been to ensure the freedom of crucial shipping lanes and the flow of oil—without which the global economy that sustains billions of people around the world would grind to a halt.

Given the strong Wilsonian streak in U.S. politics, one might imagine that Obama is a staunch idealist—a man who, like Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, or George W. Bush, is disgusted by dictators. But Obama’s shameful record as a protector of human rights in the Middle East hardly bears out this theory: Iran’s Green Revolutionaries begged Obama for support for weeks, only to be greeted first with silence while being shot, tortured, and maimed by the mullahs and their goons, and then by lukewarm support, and now again with silence. Syria’s authoritarian rulers shoot their own people in the streets and bombard civilian neighborhoods with tanks and helicopter gunships, but the White House is virtually mum.

So, Obama is clearly not being driven by an obsession with human rights. Perhaps he is a wily master of realpolitik? A leader of this kind—like, say, Richard Nixon—would support the United States’ powerful friends, like Saudi Arabia and Israel, while seeking to constrain the power of its enemies, like Syria and Iran. Yet Obama has so significantly alienated the Saudis that they have embarked on their own cash-heavy royalist-oriented foreign policy, seeking to woo American allies like Jordan and Bahrain and even Pakistan into a new alliance devoted in large part to blocking Obama’s destabilizing policies in the region. Obama picks fights with Israel and then suddenly demands the Jewish state return to its 1967 borders as a condition for negotiating a peace agreement with the Palestinians—and is publicly rebuked by the Israeli prime minister, with the support of the U.S. Congress. Losing the trust and support of both Saudi Arabia and Israel in the space of a few months is hardly the move of a leader driven by realpolitik.

Perhaps, as some right-wing critics claim, Obama’s policy is the product of something worse, or more sinister, like a blueprint to weaken America on behalf of its enemies? Except this doesn’t fly either. Obama’s no Manchurian candidate, brainwashed by U.S. enemies during his schooldays in Indonesia to ruin the country. Instead, what all these theories miss is that Obama is simply a representative man of the post-World War II American Ivy League intelligentsia, which came to see the United States in a context shaped by the collapse of the European colonial empires under the weight of greed and barbarity.

***

It was the furies of Europe—its anti-Semitism and racism, its need to dominate and destroy—that drove its people to war twice in the last century while inflicting a series of revolting indignities on the so-called “lesser races” whose lands they colonized and plundered. Americans believed they were different, both at home and abroad, because they were anti-colonial from birth, and with the 20th-century advent of the decolonization movement they instinctively if sometimes cautiously sided with the new nations of the world against their former European overlords. The American sympathy for decolonization began with Woodrow Wilson and was passionately held by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and most of his top aides and by their successors in the U.S. foreign policy establishment of the 1950s, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, head of the CIA, none of whom can be dismissed as left-wing academics.

Anti-colonialism was the motor driving the Middle East policy of the American warrior who won Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose administration wished to make friends in the region by distinguishing itself from the great European powers and showing that Washington had no colonial ambitions. Ike put that premise into practice when he demanded England, France, and Israel stand down after invading Egypt in the Suez Crisis of 1956. Obama seems to understand the world similarly—the established order is wrong for us and wrong for the people of the region, morally and politically.

Obama may also reasonably believe that a United States in the grips of a financial crisis simply doesn’t have the money to meddle in the Middle East anymore. This country gets less than 25 percent of its energy resources from the Persian Gulf, so why should it be up to us to make sure that affordable oil transits the region? Let China, India, and Europe share the burden. Combine a bad U.S. economy, American exhaustion with our post-Sept. 11 commitments in the Middle East, and the nostalgic logic of decolonization and you can, finally, understand the origins of Obama’s regional policy.

But then you must tackle its consequences. The problem with this philosophy is that anti-colonialism is not a response to the realities of the Middle East but rather an exercise in self-congratulatory and often delusional nostalgia—and the results in practice have been awful. Eisenhower called his stance on Suez the worst foreign policy mistake of his tenure, and the results of Obama’s updated version of Ike’s policies have also been poor. After all the early enthusiasm for Mubarak’s ouster, Egypt is in deep trouble and spinning out of the U.S. orbit. If the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t rushing in to fill the vacuum, perhaps it’s just because they’re too savvy to want to claim ownership of a country that may be on the verge of bankruptcy and famine, as some analysts argue.

Pushing out Mubarak has made both the Israelis and Saudis wary of Obama—a move that has proven bad not only for Washington but for Riyadh and Jerusalem as well. The notion that several thousand libertine and/or fundamentalist Saudi princes are capable of formulating a coherent regional strategy is more fantastical than a J.K. Rowling novel. The Saudis on their own are a danger to themselves, the Middle East at large, and the world’s largest known reserves of oil. Leaving them to their own devices is easily the worst option among an array of bad choices.

With Israel, the administration may be on the verge of accomplishing the previously unthinkable—forcing the Jewish state to find other allies who will maintain the continuing supply of high-tech weapons to ensure its qualitative military advantage over its rivals. Perhaps Russia, India, and even China are interested in Israeli technology—military and civilian—and its newly discovered energy resources. By driving Israel away, the United States risks losing the leverage it has historically enjoyed with the Arabs by being able to broker deals with the Israelis, who will care a lot less about what Washington thinks once they can produce their own high-tech fighter planes, satellites, and missile systems.

Without U.S. leadership, the Middle East is less stable and less secure than it has been at any point since the 1973 war, for both U.S. allies and adversaries alike. The Iranian-led resistance bloc has also been hurt by the Arab Spring, even as the Obama Administration has failed to capitalize on Tehran’s setbacks. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is fighting for the survival of his regime, a fight that no one, not even Washington, expects him to win. Hezbollah has also been wounded and may suffer further with four of its members indicted for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

The result of the political insecurity that Obama has fostered has been a plunge in the standard of living for ordinary people throughout the region and increasing instability there. In the absence of strong U.S. leadership, Turkey now fancies itself as the second coming of the Ottoman empire and creates international incidents by dispatching flotillas to Gaza and making nice with Iran and Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah, further rattling the political and security architecture that the United States built, and now wishes to abandon.

Obama has locked in Washington’s losses in the Middle East while ignoring opportunities to hurt U.S. adversaries like Syria and Iran. But sooner or later he will have to act there, too. It cost Obama nothing to ditch Mubarak, alienate the Israelis and the Saudis, or even wage a thoughtless war against Qadaffi. But if he crosses the line with the Iranians, as they rush to build a nuclear bomb, they have the power to retaliate by causing regional havoc and raising the price of oil to $150 a barrel—making the current global economic mess seem like a profitable holiday season and ensuring a Republican victory in 2012. The fact is that letting the Iranians get the bomb is a much worse outcome. Even if it has little effect on the president’s re-election chances, Iranian hegemony in the Persian Gulf would spell long-term disaster and shape Obama’s historical legacy. The lesson that the president needs to learn from his mistakes is that the status quo is worth preserving because change is dangerous in the Middle East, where things can always get worse. So far, that’s exactly what has been happening.

Now the evidence is growing that at least some part of the ISI and the Pakistani army was, in fact, actively complicit in hiding Bin Laden for the past five years. The evidence laid out Friday in the New York Times and based on cell phones found in the hideout is not a smoking gun, but it is very suggestive. Bin Laden was in regular contact with the Harakat ul Mujahedin terror group, which the ISI created in the 1980s to fight India. The Harakat ul Mujahedin has loyally worked with the ISI for decades, and its members hijacked an Indian airliner in 1999 with al-Qaida and the ISI. Fazlur Rehman Khalil, head of Harakat ul Mujahedin, lives openly in an Islamabad suburb.

If Harakat helped Bin Laden, it is not hard to imagine that someone in the ISI knew that the world’s most wanted terrorist was been hidden somewhere inside Pakistan.

There is other circumstantial evidence of official Pakistani complicity in hiding Bin Laden. The commandant of the Kakul academy in 2006 was General Nadeem Taj, the right-hand man of former President Pervez Musharraf. After his service in Abbottabad, Taj became director general of the ISI in late 2007. On his watch, the ISI blew up the Indian embassy in Kabul and Benazir Bhutto was murdered by al-Qaida. The U.N. investigation of Benazir’s murder held the ISI as possibly culpable.

In September 2008, the George W. Bush Administration demanded that Taj be fired. Instead, he was promoted to corps commander. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai came a month later, and we know the ISI helped plan that. Taj had the means and access in 2006 to help Bin Laden, and he is clearly a problematic partner. Not a smoking gun by any means, but suggestive.

Pakistan is home to more terrorists than any other country, many of them harbored by the Pakistani army and the ISI. Osama Bin Laden’s deputy and now heir, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is probably somewhere nearby. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the tactical maestro of the Sept. 11 attacks, was living in Pakistan’s military capital, Rawalpindi, when he was captured (albeit with the ISI’s help). Mullah Omar, Emir of Believers to al-Qaida and head of the Afghan Taliban, was trained by the ISI and commutes between Quetta and Karachi. Hafez Saed, head of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant Islamist group, and mastermind of the Mumbai massacre, lives and preaches openly in Lahore. Dawood Ibrahim, who killed hundreds with bombs on Mumbai’s metro in 1993, lives in Karachi. There are no secrets here—the south Asian press reports their hideouts on a regular basis.

Pakistan’s civilian government is not implicated in any of this. Nor is Pakistan al-Qaida’s patronage akin to Iran’s role with Hezbollah. Pakistan is as much a victim of terror as its sponsor. It is a maze of contradictions. Analogies to the Cold War partnerships that matched patron state to terrorist group don’t work in Pakistan. The army sponsors some groups like Harakat and Lashkar-e-Taiba, but it is at war with others like the Pakistan Taliban. In the case of other terror groups like al-Qaida, the government is infiltrated by sympathizers. These varying relationships pose unique challenges that need tailored responses.

So, what should the United States do with Pakistan? First, we should tell the Pakistani army leadership that if we learn one of their officers is involved in harboring terrorists, planning terror operations, or tipping terrorist bomb factories off to drone raids, we will make it personal. Don’t sanction the country or the ISI; sanction individuals. Hold them accountable. That officer will go on our terrorist most-wanted list, and we will seize his property if we can, arrest him if he travels, expel his kids from school here or in England, and—if he is truly dangerous enough—take direct action. We should not do this alone. We should get allies, especially the British, to help, since Pakistanis love to visit London and send their kids to school in the United Kingdom.

Second, we will need a base to stage unilateral operations into Pakistan for the foreseeable future. We can hope al-Qaida will implode soon, but we cannot count on that. The Arabian Sea is too far away. So, we need a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan so we can continue to send drones and commandos over the Pakistani border. We don’t need 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, but we do need Afghan permission to operate in that country for the long term. That is the other hard lesson of Abbottabad.

Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow in the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, is a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and the author of Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad.

Well, by the kind of people who might feel comfortable custom-building a compound 100 meters from Pakistan’s leading military college to house the world’s most wanted terrorist.

It is no surprise that the recent arrests by the Pakistani government of several of its citizens for allegedly helping the CIA hunt Bin Laden is being reported as yet another sign of a growing divide between Washington and Islamabad. The New York Times reported the story straight, quoting the head of the House Intelligence Committee, Michigan Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who accused elements of the ISI and the military of protecting Bin Laden, a fact that you probably don’t need classified access to figure out.

Yet the congressman’s understanding reflects—as does the Times story—America’s broader problem in understanding and engaging with our enemies and allies alike. The significance of the arrests is not that they show that the Pakistani military protected Bin Laden: It shows that elements of Pakistan’s military or its intelligence service, the ISI, were also responsible for Bin Laden’s death.

Until yesterday’s revelation of the arrests there was no indication that Washington had any Pakistani assistance at all in finding and killing the al-Qaida chief. The story was that U.S. intelligence had located public enemy No. 1 by tracking one of Bin Laden’s loose-lipped couriers to the Abbottabad compound. The Americans, the story goes, never said a thing to the Pakistanis for fear that it would wreck the operation. And so the United States relied on satellite surveillance until the day the president gave the go-ahead to the SEAL team that finished the job.

Presumably, the Pakistanis recognized immediately that the story the Americans were peddling was nonsense. Someone in Pakistan—in either the military-security apparatus or from the political echelons—had to have sold Bin Laden to the Americans. I think it’s safe to assume that, for the last month and a half, Pakistani officials have been working to find out who bartered their prize away—and what they got in return.

It is possible that some Pakistani police and counterintelligence officials investigating the operation are motivated by sentimental or ideological reasons: They liked and sympathized with Bin Laden. Others realized that for all the noise about the refuge and killing of Bin Laden in Pakistan being an embarrassment to the army and ISI, this was a choice opportunity to stick it to the Americans, again, and make some money in the bargain. The five CIA informants that the Pakistanis have so far arrested—including an army major and the contractor who built Bin Laden’s house—are little fish that the Pakistanis are dangling to see what the Americans will do, or pay, to protect the key Pakistani assets who gave them their orders.

Even more interesting is the American version of the story, which is helpful mainly insofar as it illuminates the current U.S. position after 10 years of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The American public wants to believe in a simple, heroic story of Bin Laden’s killing, if only to celebrate the hard work of our intelligence community and special operators like the SEALs. But let’s remember that for all the excellent work the CIA does—and we are right to keep in mind that the agency’s successes are secret while its failures are public—America’s intelligence record is mixed.

In the winter of 2009, the CIA was tragically caught off guard when an asset of Jordanian intelligence turned out to be a double agent: He walked into a U.S. compound in Afghanistan and killed seven agency officers in a suicide operation. The problem was not that there were seven officers all in one place, but that U.S. counterintelligence had no idea that their prize was working for al-Qaida. Faulty counterintelligence is part of the agency’s Cold War legacy, according to which some of the walk-ins, or people who voluntarily came forward to provide us with information, were apparently Soviet assets. It seems they were simply providing false information—which, when combined with good information, made it difficult to detect that they were still controlled by our adversary. The United States was incapable of knowing what was true and what was false. Some speculate that this Cold War conundrum drove James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s legendary head of counterintelligence, to paranoia. By the end of the Cold War, one of the CIA’s leading counterintelligence officers, Aldrich Ames, was revealed to be a double agent who betrayed nearly every one of the CIA’s assets in the Soviet Union (damage that appears to have initially been blamed on Jonathan Pollard).

Of course, it’s not easy to do good counterintelligence work. Some compare it to an elaborate game of three-dimensional chess. While the analogy seems suitable enough for a middle-class American sensibility that perceives of chess as something daunting, serious, and foreign, it is truly not foreign enough by half. Good counterintelligence requires a type of mind most likely found in this country running a California drug gang. The U.S. intelligence community does not actively recruit such sociopaths into its ranks, so in the end it is often ineffective at doing counterintelligence work in countries that are run by sociopaths.

For example, Leon Panetta, a very skilled political operator with many years of experience in Washington bureaucracies, has no idea what it takes to become chief of staff of the Pakistani army, like Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and to hold onto that position among so many murderous rivals—like the junior officers who want to oust him for his cozy relationship with Washington. Our inability to actually think like the people we are trying to influence or defeat is ultimately a much more fundamental problem than the challenges of securing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Both our adversaries and our allies in the Middle East—the political and military leadership of countries like Syria and Iran and Iraq and Egypt alike—are the products of a kind of finishing school that makes Rikers Island look like Miss Porter’s prep school. What they had to do to secure power and then maintain it is beyond the imagination of any U.S. official who thinks Rahm Emanuel is a tough guy or that the West Wing of the White House is a snake pit or is stung by a slighting mention by Bob Woodward.

So, who are these people? Bashar al-Assad, for instance, has astonished the international community with his slaughter of unarmed civilians because the leaders of the Western democracies are incapable of imagining a “Westernized” ophthalmologist being capable of such violence. His Arab peers know better, which is why they are saying nothing; they’re scared of him, because he is a sociopath who tortures, maims, and kills children without blinking. NATO thought Muammar Qaddafi was a lunatic in funny robes who would fold at the first—or fifth—aerial bombardment of Tripoli. What they missed was the fact that Qaddafi is the kind of funny lunatic who held onto power for four decades while gleefully slaughtering his political opponents, manipulating Libya’s tribes, and stashing billions of dollars away for exactly the moment when the West would try to drive him from power, and who pays African mercenaries a thousand dollars a day to rape his own people.

And so we wonder why things go wrong when we try to engage the Syrians and Iranians, or to get the Pakistanis to choose a side (our side). The fact is that we don’t see the world the way they do.

But thank God for that. We want the American story about Bin Laden’s courier and the heroic SEAL team—a story that is obviously incomplete—to be true because we prize transparency, a workable chronology, understandable motives, and clear loyalties. But the American story will never be true in Pakistan or in the Middle East. Washington likes to pretend it is fighting a regular war against an enemy we can capture or kill, like Bin Laden. But it’s not. It is fighting a war where the United States cannot come down too heavily on Pakistan, even when it harbors mass murderers of Americans, because it needs Pakistan in order to fight in Afghanistan, against insurgents backed by elements of Pakistan’s military-security establishment, who might in turn gain access to Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal. Does that make sense? Not to us. Indeed, as far as the Pakistanis are concerned, the Americans are simply tourists in Afghanistan, albeit well-paying ones. But this is precisely the kind of conflict the Pakistanis are accustomed to.

Keep in mind what Afghanistan is to the Pakistanis: part of their war with India. Because Pakistan fears an invasion by its archrival, it needs strategic depth in Afghanistan where it can regroup in the event it is overwhelmed by the superior Indian forces in the early days of a prospective war. It is to that end that the Pakistanis have cultivated alliances with Afghani insurgent groups allied with al-Qaida. When the Pakistanis refuse to help us in Afghanistan, it is not because they are fighting us, but because they are preparing for war with India.

There is also a second conflict under way in Pakistan: the de facto war for control of the Pakistani state between various cliques of the country’s political and military leadership. Remember that when American officials describe support for al-Qaida and the Taliban coming from elements of the Pakistani security and military establishment, that means there are other elements, too—those with whom the pro-insurgent figures are at war.

America has little to do with either the Pakistan-India conflict or the Pakistani-Pakistani clash. To some Pakistani officials we are a nuisance, and to others we offer them a means by which to fight their internal rivals. That’s why Bin Laden was sold to the Americans by one side. Now it’s time for the other side to get their piece of the pie.

The real question Washington ought to be asking is: After five years of being hidden by elements of the Pakistani state, why was Bin Laden given up now?

And that is exactly what the president did in his Arab Spring speech. Repeatedly invoking the mantle of universal values, staging a dogged defense of “inalienable rights,” and enlisting the righteous historical forces of the American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement, Obama set forth an idealistic path in such a resolute manner that conservatives, unable to control their nostalgic impulses, could not help but observe that the president was sounding more and more like his predecessor George W. Bush. With one big difference, that is: Whereas the former president—by his own admission—was a “gut player” who had primarily relied upon his instincts to formulate ideals, Obama, the former law professor, has always counted much more on the power of ideas.

A closer look at his new ideas, however, reveals a distressing philosophical flaw. Framed by two seminal rhetorical exhibitions—the Cairo speech of June 2009 and the State Department speech last month—the evolution of Obama’s approach to the Arab world continues to oscillate between diametrically opposed philosophical polarities that cannot be adequately resolved. The first one, as laid out in Cairo, espouses a multicultural engagement with the world that embraces an array of separate but equal values. The second, so eloquently displayed two weeks ago, subtly discards this same multicultural bent only to replace it with a categorical reaffirmation of “universal rights.” The unbridgeable logical gap that divides these two speeches—and their binary perspectives about what constitutes truth—also reflects the fundamental philosophical contradiction underpinning the president’s unfolding Middle East strategy: How do you convincingly stand up for a set of universal values while at the same time denying the legitimacy of their universalism?

***

Obama’s memorable speech at Al-Azhar University in Cairo two years ago this week was one of the most humble, respectful, and ultimately unavoidable foreign policy speeches ever given by an American president. In Obama’s undisguised attempt to herald “a new beginning” with Islam and disassociate his presidency from the stained legacy of his predecessor—the controversial war in Iraq that Bush initiated—Obama departed from Bush’s unwavering belief in the supreme virtue of American values. Instead of extolling freedom and democracy, Obama offered elaborate accolades for Islam that were essentially meant to afford it a similar moral and historical legitimacy to our own ideals—suggesting that while Western and Islamic values may differ, they were still equally valid.

In discussing the need for governments that “reflect the will of the people,” Obama conceded in Cairo that “each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people,” and added that “there is no straight line to realize this process,” before clarifying that “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone” and insisting that “no system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on any other.” The philosophical implications of the speech were quite evident: By acknowledging that each nation produces its own set of principles according to its own particular circumstances, Obama was also admitting that there was ultimately no single criterion with which to evaluate multiple systems of value and meaning. In other words, he was implying that we could agree to disagree on the normative solutions to existential questions, since none of us actually possess the right answers.

It is not surprising that such a flexible philosophical approach spurred conservative critics to accuse the president of multiculturalism and to accordingly label him an “illiberal multicultural relativist.” For all the lingering ambiguity and confusion that such terms continue to generate, they do share an unequivocal repudiation of the universal legitimacy—and supremacy—of Western Enlightenment thought and its inherent beliefs in individual freedom, political equality, secularism, and democratic government. And although Obama has always acted in a nuanced manner that defies easy ideological labeling, his carefully crafted Cairo speech and the correspondingly deferential rhetoric he has chosen to use when engaging the Arab world suggest that he has shared to some extent in this repudiation—at least until recently.

What makes the Arab Spring speech remarkable is the fact that the president’s previous sympathies for the “common principles” that America shares with Islamic and Arab cultures seemed to dissipate beneath a resounding rhetorical defense of the universal legitimacy of Western ideals. Although still emphasizing that the Unites States “must proceed with a sense of humility” and conceding that “not every country will follow our particular form of representative democracy,” Obama steadfastly avowed that “we can and we will speak out for a set of core principles,” explicitly declaring that “the United States supports a set of universal rights”—a historically fraught term that had been conspicuously absent from the Cairo speech. The president’s repeated references to “universal rights,” “inalienable rights,” and “the self-determination of individuals,” as well as the sanctity of women’s rights and religious freedom, were all aimed at reaffirming the universal validity—and moral superiority—of core Western values.

Obama also chose to conjure the experiences of 1776 and the Civil Rights era last week and to quote that timeless Jeffersonian line that historically unites them—“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” By declaring that the core American values indeed constitute “self-evident truths,” Obama was essentially also implying that anything contradictory must necessarily be false.

Rather than display a philosophical coherence or even a theoretical consistency, what these carefully divergent speeches suggest is a fundamental contradiction that lies at the heart of the president’s emerging Middle East strategy. The multicultural tones of the Cairo speech and the undeniable universalism proudly exhibited last month are not complementary or symbiotic but rather competing. If you indeed believe that equal rights for women are indisputable, you cannot then concede that patriarchal cultural traditions that deny these rights are still legitimate. Alternatively, if you espouse that there is nothing more sacred than individual self-determination then there is no logical approach that allows you to endorse the validity of legal institutions that outlaw the sexual expression of that individuality by severely penalizing acts of homosexuality, as is the norm throughout the Arab world. Finally, if you contend that religious freedom is paramount, you cannot respect or even acknowledge the legitimacy of religious traditions that attempt to brutally subordinate—and eliminate—alternative beliefs, as is currently happening in Egypt, where Coptic Christians are increasingly being assailed by radical Muslims. The broader problem, put simply, is that if you advocate the universal values of Western Enlightenment—which the president clearly did in the Arab Spring speech—you have to then be willing to stand firmly behind everything that these values entail while at the same time explicitly repudiating anyone who attempts to undermine them.

Although the postmodern awakening of the late 1960s that bred multiculturalism may have opened our eyes to injustices latent within Western societies and altered the way in which we have come to engage questions of race, gender, and ethnicity, its continuing hold on the American political imagination may severely hinder the Obama Administration’s success in ushering in the ambitious transformation he described last month, from the Middle East “as it is” to the Middle East “as it should be.”

As the Arab Spring continues to consolidate and expand, the pressures placed upon the United States to take a stand and pick a side will inevitably only mount. At some point, the president will have to halt his juggling act and decide whether certain values are not just preferable but superior to others. It is one thing to respect the religious and cultural traditions from which Sharia law, Arab tribal identity, and patriarchal authority have sprouted. But once these traditions begin to threaten the vitality and sustenance of the very freedoms and rights that this Arab Spring is attempting to secure—and they will—Obama won’t be able to continue to maintain his unstable balancing act between universalism and multiculturalism. If there is any chance of transcending the sordid status quo and creating a new Middle East, the president must also be ready to unapologetically admit that there are still many things that the Arab world can—and must—be willing to learn from us.

One might think that the vote of one octogenarian and often cranky former New York City mayor may not be a big deal, but Koch has a long and eventful history of involvement with presidential campaigns. He almost perfectly captures the views of a certain type of older—often but not always Jewish—Democrat who is nonetheless skeptical of his party on national security issues. While Koch usually backs his party’s candidate, he also seems to have an uncanny ability to back a Republican—tacitly or explicitly—when the Democrats are going to lose.

In 1980, during his first term as mayor, Koch tortured Jimmy Carter over Carter’s position on Israel. At one point, Carter’s people reached out to Koch and asked him not to say anything about a particular administration action until the president had had a chance to explain himself. Koch obliged and went down to the White House for a meeting with Carter. Unsatisfied with the explanation Carter gave, Koch then continued criticizing the administration, infuriating Carter. In Carter’s White House Diary, he recalled that “Ed Koch made a disgraceful statement in New York, referring to [Secretary of State Cyrus] Vance, [National Security Adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski, [U.N. Ambassador Donald] McHenry, and [Assistant Secretary of State Harold] Saunders as a Gang of Four out to destroy Israel. Cy called him and had some heated words. Koch is almost acting like a fanatic this last couple of days.”

As Carter stumbled toward his 1980 electoral drubbing, Koch demonstrated a particular skill at getting under the president’s skin. Koch later recalled that Carter pulled him aside at a fundraiser and said, “You have done me more damage than any man in America.” One of Carter’s aides told Koch that what was going on inside Koch’s head was more hotly discussed in Washington than the thinking of the Ayatollah Khomeni.

Koch never actually pulled the lever for Ronald Reagan. “I never voted for him, but I loved him,” Koch wrote. In his book Mayor, Koch recounts an appearance with President Reagan at which Koch said: “I am not here to defend Ronald Reagan. But I’ll tell you, I like him. He’s a man of character.” Koch’s approach to Reagan differed from that of Democratic Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, who had denounced Reagan on the same day that Koch praised him. Koch recalls that the difference was not lost on Reagan aide James Brady, who told Koch, quite pointedly, “Now, which one of them do you think we’ll try to help more?” Koch even ran for reelection on the Republican ticket in 1981, although he ran as a Democrat as well. He won overwhelmingly.

Koch was not nearly as sympathetic toward the next Republican president, George H.W. Bush, or to his Secretary of State, James Baker. It was Koch who revealed to the world in a newspaper column Baker’s now infamous remark regarding Jews: “F— ’em. They didn’t vote for us.” Bush himself took notice of the column, writing in a letter to Koch that “I never ever heard such ugliness out of Jim Baker.” (Perhaps he hadn’t, but Koch’s source, the late Jack Kemp, apparently had.) This incident harmed Bush among Jews, but more broadly as well. Bush won only 11 percent of the Jewish vote in 1992, a significant drop from the 39 percent Reagan had attained in 1980. Not coincidentally, with Koch on his case, Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992 to Bill Clinton, whom Koch both “supported and admired.”

The next time Koch bucked his party to back the Republican presidential candidate was also the next time that the Republican candidate won the popular vote. In 2004, Koch backed George W. Bush over John Kerry because of Bush’s stances on the War on Terror, on anti-Semitism, and on Israel. “I believe the issue of international terrorism trumps all other issues,” Koch said and added that he did not “believe the Democratic Party has the stomach and commitment to deliver on this issue.” The anti-Semitism issue was also important. Bush had selected Koch to head the U.S. delegation to an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe conference on combating anti-Semitism in Berlin in 2004. On the third key issue, Israel, Koch wrote that he was “convinced that President Bush will never trade Israel’s special relationship with the U.S. in exchange for political support, be it domestic or international.” At the same time, he “doubt[ed] that John Kerry and the ‘Deaniacs’ who now embrace him would have the same resolve.” Koch added that “most Jewish leaders will concede that of all U.S. presidents, Bush 43 has been the most supportive and protective of the security of the State of Israel.”

In contrast to his more tacit support for Reagan, Koch explicitly endorsed Bush, as he said repeatedly, “even though I don’t agree with him on a single domestic issue,” and spoke on Bush’s behalf in Jewish enclaves in Florida. Koch’s efforts helped Bush improve his showing in the Jewish vote from 19 percent in 2000 to 25 percent in 2004. This improvement in the Jewish vote contributed to Bush’s victories in both Florida and Ohio, two states without which Bush would not have been reelected.

While some Democrats dismissed Koch as a turncoat after 2004, he remained in his mind a loyal Democrat. Although he had supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, he endorsed Barack Obama in September of that year. In a prepared statement, Koch said he “concluded that the country is safer in the hands of Barack Obama. Protecting and defending the U.S. means more than defending us from foreign attacks. It includes defending the public with respect to their civil rights, civil liberties and other needs.” And while he had liked certain Republicans in the past, his good feelings did not extend to vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who “fails miserably with respect to her views on the domestic issues that are so important to the people of the U.S., and to me.” In addition, he noted: “Frankly, it would scare me if she were to succeed John McCain in the presidency.”

But as Jimmy Carter learned in the 1970s, getting Koch’s endorsement and maintaining his support are very different things. The first indications of trouble came in an August 2009 Koch column on Real Clear Politics titled “Falling Out of Love with Barack Obama.” In this item, Koch’s concern was not Israel or a security-related issue, but Obama’s approach to health care. Koch expressed concerns about losing “the continued right to purchase and have available insurance that will permit me, no matter my age and physical condition, to purchase with my own money all the medical care I can afford.” His concerns at the time were not enough to drive him away from Obama, though. He saw “falling out of love” as “hopefully, a reversible process.” Indeed, as recently as April 25, he wrote, “I now believe President Barack Obama will be reelected, and although anything can happen between now and Election Day, I expect to be casting my vote for him.”

Koch’s latest piece, however, makes it seem as if the process of falling out of love may now be close to irreversible, especially after the events of the last week. Obama’s tough speech on Israel was followed immediately by strong criticism of Obama even from Democrats and an overwhelmingly positive bipartisan reception for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. Obama not only lost some face in the back and forth, but he appears to have lost Koch’s backing as well. Given Koch’s long and accurate record of picking presidential winners, this could portend poorly for the president. We are still a long way from the 2012 election, and the Republican field is far from set, but Obama should beware. When Ed Koch goes against his party’s presidential candidate, it is often a very bad sign.

Tevi Troy, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, was a senior White House aide in the George W. Bush Administration.

Obama’s ability to maintain his balance without committing himself stood out in sharp relief over a dramatic four days in which both sides to the Arab-Israeli conflict tried to paint the president of the United States as a partisan whose judgment could not be trusted. Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath told the New York Times that the first of two presidential addresses on the topic—given last Thursday—“contained little hope for the Palestinians”; Obama’s second speech, delivered yesterday at the annual AIPAC policy conference in Washington, inspired a dismissive retort from Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri, who said it showed that the U.S. government will continue “to support the occupation at the expense of the freedom of the Palestinian people.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters in the American Jewish community portrayed Obama as a betrayer of Israel—one who had either ignorantly or maliciously plucked crucial negotiating cards out of Israel’s hands by mandating a retreat to the indefensible 1967 borders in the face of two decades of Palestinian rejectionism. Obama’s critics were not entirely off the mark: The president had publicly adopted a key Palestinian negotiating point as official U.S. policy. Yet there was also something unbalanced about the attacks, which seemed to willfully ignore political and historical reality. After all, America’s strategic partnership with Israel since the 1967 war has been founded on the paradoxical idea that a strong Israel will be able to make territorial concessions to the Arabs. America gains influence through Israeli strength, which it builds up and then waters down to make the Arabs happy, furthering the dependence of both sides on Washington.

One outcome of this dynamic is that Israel’s strongest supporters in the White House often take steps that dramatically undermine Israel. It was no accident that George W. Bush backed both Ariel Sharon and the creation of a Palestinian state. Ronald Reagan—a steadfast friend of Israel if there ever was one—also halted the invasion of Lebanon and let Arafat escape to Tunis, tried to force the Israelis to negotiate with the PLO, denied the Israelis the right to attack the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq, then cut off military aid when they did. Yet Reagan’s seemingly antagonistic policies toward Israel make sense when seen in the context of the Cold War, the Iran-Iraq war, and other major U.S. commitments of his era. The surprise of this week is that it appears the same may be true of Obama, who may be thinking about the Middle East in more subtle and original ways than either the Israelis or Palestinians have yet given him credit for.

***

The political theater began last Thursday, when Obama delivered a somber and contradictory speech about America’s attitude toward the changes that have swept the Middle East in recent months. It was a wizardly piece of stagecraft whose purpose was to lay out a concrete set of American attitudes and preferences against a backdrop of ambiguity, in order to preserve the widest possible scope for future action. America likes democracy and will reward liberalizing and democratizing regimes, at the same time as it won’t disown repressive allies, like Bahrain. America is not hostile to political Islam but supports liberal values, like freedom of religion and speech, and gender equality. The contradictions in these positions are obvious, but life is full of contradictions.

The one place in which Obama was uncharacteristically specific about an expected sequence of actions and responses was his outline for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The president’s invocation of the 1967 borders as the basis for a settlement reportedly left Netanyahu incandescent with rage. The Palestinian leadership, meanwhile, was apparently angered by Obama’s call for a “non-militarized” state. Pundits were quick to tease out tiny differences between the president’s statement and various U.S.-backed frameworks for a two-state solution that have been gathering dust for the past decade. Ignoring the reality of 20 years of negotiations, many Jewish and pro-Israeli commentators attempted to frame Obama’s speech as a devastating embrace of Palestinian demands that would force Israel back to its 1967 borders—only nine miles wide at their narrowest point, Netanyahu informed the president, who had no doubt heard it all before—and invite another large-scale war in the Middle East.

Speaking to AIPAC on Sunday morning, Obama appeared to win over most of the crowd without substantially backtracking from the positions that had provoked such outrage on Thursday. “What I did on Thursday was to say publicly what has long been acknowledged privately,” he argued.

Except that wasn’t quite true. Missing from both the post-game analysis and from the president’s own remarks was any mention of what appears to be a central paragraph in Obama’s Thursday statement: “Palestinians should know the territorial outlines of their state; Israelis should know that their basic security concerns will be met. I’m aware that these steps alone will not resolve the conflict, because two wrenching and emotional issues will remain: the future of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees. But moving forward now on the basis of territory and security provides a foundation to resolve those two issues in a way that is just and fair and that respects the rights and aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians.”

The idea that the future of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees are core issues of the conflict that should be left for last seems at first glance like a familiar restatement of the approach that has governed peace negotiations since Oslo, which is to negotiate the easy stuff first, and do the hard stuff later. What was new and potentially revolutionary in Obama’s speech is the setting up of two sets of equivalencies, which are to be negotiated in sequence: first, Territory and Security, and then, Refugees and Jerusalem. Obama proposes negotiations about territory and security leading to a withdrawal of Israeli troops from most of the West Bank, with agreed-upon land swaps, while recognizing that any such agreement will fail when it comes to Jerusalem. Essentially, what Obama is proposing is an arrangement in which Israelis and Palestinians negotiate a map from which Jerusalem is excluded, and dictating that that map will look more or less like the 1967 borders, with large settlement blocs included inside Israel in exchange for equivalent patches of sovereign Israeli territory being ceded to a future Palestinian state.

Which brings us to the right of return. Since Oslo, Western observers have operated on the assumption that the Palestinian “right of return” is mainly a rhetorical device that will be abandoned in any final settlement in exchange for compensation and the resettlement of refugees inside Palestine. The Israelis have stipulated that a negotiated settlement will mean the end of all Palestinian claims against Israel and would entail the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

The conventional reading of Obama’s proposed pairing of territorial and security negotiations before Jerusalem and refugees would therefore be that the two “wrenching and emotional” issues are mainly important as theater, since neither side means what it says. Just as the Israelis have repeatedly proven willing to negotiate the boundaries of Jerusalem, the Palestinians know that the right of return is a fantasy and that they will ultimately recognize Israel as a Jewish state in order to obtain a state of their own.

***

The question, then, is whether Obama believes that Jerusalem and the right of return are real issues—the core of the crisis—or not.

Having spoken with most of the leading figures in Fatah over the past decade, it is my sense that the real fantasy here is the arrogant assumption that the Palestinian leadership will abandon its most deeply held principles in exchange for what even moderates see as a shriveled slice of historic Palestine. Indeed, reviewing my notes of conversations with all of Arafat’s key political advisers and security chiefs, including Mahmoud Abbas, I can’t identify a single one who expressed any clear willingness to abandon the right of return, or recognize Israel as a Jewish state. At best, these were framed as issues for future negotiations that would need to be submitted to a vote of the entire Palestinian people—including an estimated 4 to 6 million refugees and their descendants. No Palestinian leader I’ve ever spoken with—secular moderates included—imagined Israel as a permanent feature of the political landscape in the Middle East. All saw it as a more or less unnatural creation that would be subsumed, peacefully or not, by the resurgence of Arab Palestine in 20, 50, or 100 years.

A gifted politician who has the added advantage of having grown up partly in Muslim Indonesia, Obama seems acutely aware of the importance of symbolic, emotional politics, even as he prides himself on his own reasoned detachment and as he keeps relatively little patience for narratives of victimhood at home or abroad. I also believe that he is entirely serious when he says that he understands that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with a party—namely Hamas—that denies its right to exist. What Obama has set up, therefore, is a juggler’s paradise, in which he can keep both sides in suspense while he walks the tightrope toward a practical resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

In the best of all possible worlds, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators might build confidence negotiating about security and borders within the 1967 parameters that Obama has now established as official U.S. policy, and then be willing to tackle the so-called core issues. But seeing as that approach has failed repeatedly over the past two decades, it seems unlikely that Obama simply intends to try the same thing again.

Obama’s strategy for an Israeli-Palestinian deal therefore seems predicated on two assumptions:

1. Jerusalem and the right of return are the issues on which the two sides are least likely to agree.

2. An agreement between the two sides on these or other issues has been further complicated by the pact between Fatah and Hamas.

Given these assumptions, the outlines of Obama’s proposed pathway to peace become clearer: a phased withdrawal of Israeli troops from most of the West Bank at the direction of the president in exchange for security guarantees and other inducements from the United States. The Israelis would be forced to remove settlements and bring their troops home from most of the West Bank as they did during the disengagement from Gaza. The Palestinians would be handed most of their state on a platter and could then simply wait until the president forced the Israelis to give way on Jerusalem and refugees, too.

So, why would Israel sign on to such a disaster-in-the-making? The answer is that they won’t, and won’t have to. While Obama’s negotiating strategy leaves room for Palestinians and Israelis to agree on refugees and Jerusalem, it pointedly does not assume that any such agreement will be reached—only that a “foundation” for possible future agreement will be laid. What Obama anticipates, then, is that an agreement probably won’t be reached, in which case the Israelis will withdraw from most of the West Bank, where the Palestinians will establish a sovereign and non-militarized state. As that happens, the Israelis will continue to hold onto Jerusalem, and the Palestinians will continue to refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and demand the right of return. In fact, both sides are likely to harden their respective positions—the Israelis in the face of national trauma, and the Palestinians in the face of short-term triumph.

What Obama has very cleverly done therefore is to appropriate the Israeli proposal to establish a Palestinian state with interim borders—albeit on terms that the Israelis don’t particularly like. Yet each side stands to gain something very real from an interim arrangement that they would be unlikely to gain from an actual peace deal: The Palestinians would receive almost all of the territory they claim for an interim state—except Jerusalem—while holding on to their national dream of one day reclaiming all of Palestine from the Zionists. The Israelis, meanwhile, get a U.S.-sponsored end to the tar-baby of occupation and boatloads of shiny new weapons while holding on to major settlement blocs and an undivided Jerusalem. Hamas doesn’t have to sign a peace deal with the Israelis, and the Israelis don’t have to sign a peace deal with Hamas. America will benefit by having followed through on its promise—made by George W. Bush and repeated by Obama—to establish a Palestinian state. The millstone of Israeli occupation will be removed from around the necks of America and Israel, both of which will presumably find it easier to make friends in the Middle East.

All that is missing from this vision, of course, is the Jimmy Carter-era peace-treaty-signing ceremony photo-op on the White House lawn, whose chances of happening anytime in the near-to-intermediate future are close to zero. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose appetite for grand gestures often resulted in stalemates, or worse—including the nightmare of the Second Intifada—Obama the pragmatist may in fact view the signing of a symbolic peace treaty as negative for both sides. Eschewing symbolic triumphs for the creation of a new set of facts on the ground is a strategy that may not move fast enough for Obama to reap credit during his term in office, but—if it works—history will place victory at his feet. The Israeli occupation would, for the most part, be over; Hamas might take over the West Bank six months later, but the Israelis will have a recognized border and plenty of rockets, which will help them keep the peace just as well or badly as they do on Israel’s other borders, with less international fuss. Once the last Palestinian refugee dies in 2049, maybe someone will have the bright idea of trading some part of East Jerusalem and the Muslim quarter of the Old City for an end to ancient refugee claims and formal recognition of Israel as a Jewish State. By then, the president of the United States will probably have other problems to juggle. And if he needs a refresher course, he might just look back to Obama’s performance this past week.

The fact that a wave of revolutions has shaken the foundations of Arab politics without the slightest apparent connection to popular outrage against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians should be surprising to most experts and politicians in the West. For over four decades, the driving idea behind the West’s approach to the Middle East has been the supposed centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to Arab popular anger at the West and its key to ensuring the stability of the West’s favored regimes. That the price tag for this American diplomatic instrument has been thousands of dead Jews and several lost generations of Arabs has, in the upside-down world of Mideast policymakers, made the achievement of an ever-elusive peace deal seem all the more important with every passing year.

This idea was a convenient point of agreement between Washington policymakers and Arab regimes. For Washington, the peace process was a good source of photo ops and a chance to show concern for human rights in the region without interfering with the propensity of America’s Arab allies to torture and murder their political opponents. As for the regimes, they were happy to escape criticism of their own failures—rampant corruption, lack of basic human rights and freedoms, and violence against the Arabs they rule—by blaming Israel.

Now the notion that the genie of revolution in the Arab world can be put back in the bottle by blaming Israel is laughable. Even Arab populations with no special love for the Jewish state know that the regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and now Syria were not loved or hated by their people because of their adherence or opposition to the Palestinian cause. In fact, one of the most baffling things about the current wave of Arab revolutions to professional Middle East watchers must be the complete absence of any mention of the Palestinians in popular demonstrations and regime counter-propaganda alike.

However there is a clear connection between the Palestinian cause and the wave of popular discontent that has upended the foundations of Arab politics. By pushing the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past four decades, the West has helped to underwrite Arab repression at home. The rationale behind the emergency laws in places like Syria and Egypt (even now after Cairo’s “revolution”) is that because of the war with Israel, the Arab security states must be ever-vigilant and therefore forbid their people from exercising basic rights like freedom of speech—or, in the words of Gamal Abdel Nasser, “no voice louder than the cry of battle”—diktats that they enforce through torture and murder.

If the recent wave of revolutions in Arab countries has proven anything it is that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process isn’t even a convenient fiction by which Washington can make nice to the Arabs. Rather, it has been a recipe for failure on a grand scale—social, political, and economic—that has now been laid bare. While the Arab regimes are being held responsible for their failures by their fed-up populations, Washington seems to feel no need to hold itself accountable for the collapse of a set of enabling fictions that has greatly diminished our position in a region that is of crucial strategic importance for the United States both militarily and economically.

***

So, who might have an interest in the sort of disruption and realignments the Jerusalem bus bombing has caused? Maybe it was the Syrians tapping a few of their Palestinian assets to heat things up in Israel. With so many people on the streets of Syrian cities burning pictures of President Bashar al-Assad and toppling statues of his father, Hafez, from whom he inherited this authoritarian Baathist regime, the leadership in Damascus could sure use a lifeline. And the U.S. administration, always on the prowl for another go at the peace process, is happy to throw it one.

Or perhaps it was the Islamic Republic of Iran, attacking Israel through proxies in order to signal to Washington that maybe they’re ready to come to the table at last. If this turns out to be the case, it will be worth remembering that President Barack Obama failed to support the protesters who took to the streets for Iran’s Green Revolution in June 2009—because he wanted to engage an Iranian regime he thought was ready to deal on a host of Israel-related matters, such as Hezbollah and Iran’s nuclear program.

Of course even then the blame couldn’t fall exclusively on Obama. It’s all a matter of perspective, for in reality everyone plays the same vicious hand, from U.S. presidents to Arab regimes, as well as Arab “liberals,” and even the government of Israel itself.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for example, reached out to Syria when he embarked on a quiet round of negotiations with Damascus under Turkey’s supervision in 2007. Up until then, President George W. Bush’s administration had put the Syrians in isolation after their suspected involvement in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. But Olmert was facing a domestic crisis, including charges of corruption, and he knows how the game works—as soon as the international community gets a whiff of the peace process, everything else is put aside: The Arab regimes get a free pass for killing Arabs if they say they’re willing to talk to the Jews.

Still, Olmert’s opening freed the Syrians from their separation and brought the rest of an international community back to Damascus on bended knee—with France in the forefront. So what if the Syrians tortured their own people, murdered Lebanese journalists and political figures, and helped kill U.S. soldiers and American allies in Iraq, as well as Palestinians and Israelis? Olmert needed some breathing space, and the rest of the world was happy to comply.

***

Whoever attacked Israel last week knows how the game works, too, and sure enough in short order the U.S. policy community jumped to attention. Instead of pushing to cut off the regime in Damascus as the Syrian people braved death to go the streets, American policymakers like Sen. John Kerry and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered their bona fides. “There is a different leader in Syria now,” Clinton said of the man believed responsible for ordering the murder of Hariri. “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.” Never mind that her own State department says rather that Syria is a state sponsor of terror; Washington will do nothing to help the Syrians who’ve come out against their own government, because the U.S. president is going to make good on his word to engage dictators, no matter how many Arabs have to die as he proves his point.

The pro-Israel community in the United States must also share in the blame, or at least that large segment of it that has invested its energy and money in backing the peace process. Some say peace talks have to bring in the hardliners, like Hamas and Hezbollah—even as that means empowering those who have most to gain through murder. Those who want to keep the terrorist outfits out of negotiations are less stupid than they are cynical, for they know that in truth any agreement without Hamas and Hezbollah isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Others say that the peace process is phony, but it’s a diplomatic tool that Washington uses to keep our Muslim allies off our back.

And finally there are the Arab “liberals,” those Western-educated intellectuals who fill the editorial pages of the U.S. press with pleas to push harder on the peace process lest we empower the radicals. But at this stage the peace process does nothing except empower radicals by providing them with a staging ground.

The peace process wasn’t so bad when it started. Sure, President Jimmy Carter nearly undermined the prospects for an Egyptian-Israeli treaty when he tried to bring in the Palestinians and Syrians, but Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was savvy enough to escape the American president’s grand plans. And surely Sadat’s idea of reorienting Egypt from the Soviet Union toward the United States was a good thing for the Egyptian people. There’s also a Jordanian-Israeli deal on the books. But we’re just now beginning to see how high the price is.

There are the thousands of Israelis who were killed and injured when Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Palestinian factions negotiated on behalf of Syria, Iran, and others through the use of terror. And there are the thousands of Arabs killed and injured when the Israelis responded. But this is no “meaningless” cycle of violence; rather, it is the product of a deliberate diplomatic process overseen by the world’s oldest democracy. It was the United States that kept going back to the well over and over, with U.S. policymakers telling themselves that anything was worth the chance of peace.

Suicide bombing and the attacks of Sept. 11 were the logical conclusions to a strategy that started with a fund of surplus Arab youth that the regimes could dispose of as they saw fit. It is that same disposable youth that have taken to the streets these last three months—Arab men under the age of 30 who have no prospects because their regimes turned their countries into economic basket-cases and physical torture chambers, with Washington’s blessing. What they got in return for their suffering were the other-worldly fictions of a peace process that have now been laid bare.

As many readers will undoubtedly (if imperfectly) recall, the former Defense secretary was heavily criticized for insisting on force levels in Iraq believed to be based on the Bush Administration’s overly optimistic assessment of how the Iraqi people would respond to the end of Saddam’s dictatorship. When it comes to predicting the outcome of recent popular upheaval in the Middle East, Rumsfeld is clearly more cautious. The popular revolutions that have reconfigured the political landscape in Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries, Rumsfeld says, “might be good, might make things more hopeful. But you can also think of it as someone who yells fire in a crowded theater. Who can tell you who will get out safely? Or who will manage that process? This is the perfect instance of an unpredictable situation. It creates an opportunity for vicious minorities.”

When the smoke clears in Egypt and other Arab countries, Rumsfeld believes, those who are most disciplined are most likely to succeed. I ask if that means a willingness to use force. “It can come to that, but first there’s discipline,” Rumsfeld replies. “There is a lack of discipline in the mass of humanity. You have hundreds of thousands, millions of people who don’t know what they want and a handful who do. Determination is worth something. I close my eyes and picture this turmoil and ferment, and this image that comes to my mind is of magnets and magnetic particles. A magnet will draw along these particles in the direction it’s leading. The question is, who are the magnets going to be? People will have their own views and then add to these views an impression of how things are going.”

Rumsfeld is 78 years old and quick to point out that his time on earth has spanned one-third the history of the United States—the country that he has served for more than three-quarters of his life. After graduating from Princeton in 1954, Rumsfeld was commissioned as a naval officer, serving as an aviator and flight instructor. He was an Illinois congressman from 1962 until 1969, when he joined the Nixon Administration as director of the United States Office of Economic Opportunity. He also served as President Gerald R. Ford’s chief of staff and later as his secretary of Defense before becoming President Ronald Reagan’s Middle East envoy—a role made notorious by the frequently replayed image of Rumsfeld’s 1983 handshake with Saddam Hussein, the man his military would later depose. But it is his last position in government, his second stint as secretary of Defense, from 2000 to 2006, by which history will largely judge Rumsfeld. And if the recent uprisings against Arab regimes are any indication, history may come to look more kindly on President George W. Bush’s administration than seemed likely when Rumsfeld left office.

Rumsfeld’s recently published memoir, Known and Unknown, currently No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list, was four years in the making. “I didn’t think I’d write a book,” says Rumsfeld. “Then I thought I’d write a faster one.” Rumsfeld and his staff of young aides, editors, and fact-checkers have also set up a website with all of his many papers, memos, and briefings, so that “anyone who wants to look up the context for one of the quotes in the book can go to the whole document and check it for themselves.”

Known and Unknown opens with an explanation of one of Rumsfeld’s best-known statements, delivered in a 2003 press conference: “[T]here are known knowns … we also know there are known unknowns, that is to say some things [we know] we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” If Rumsfeld was mocked at the time for his utterance’s apparent obscurity and seeming pedantry, the meaning is clear to any first-year philosophy student: What does past experience tell us about things, and what can it not forecast? In other words, what are the limits to what we know of the world?

Rumsfeld’s uncertainty about the outcome of the series of uprisings in the Middle East is an antidote to the blind optimism of those who see military coups as social media revolutions and hence refuse to see the risks involved, not only to U.S. interests and allies, especially Israel, but to the Arabs as well. “Few things are as exhilarating as hope,” Rumsfeld says. “And few are as frightening as the uncertainty that comes from a situation like this.”

Rumsfeld’s worldview is a combination of a conservatism that springs from the experience of witnessing first-hand the limits of political activism and an optimism that is inevitable for any American who believes, in spite of human nature and the course it has charted throughout history, that sometimes the better angels of our nature gain the upper hand. His style is warm and personable, and it’s not difficult to see how he had the press corps eating out of his hands after Sept. 11—up until, that is, the Iraq war.

Overall, he says, he is disappointed in how the Obama Administration has handled the developing situation in the Middle East. “They should have been quicker off the mark with Libya,” Rumsfeld says. “You would be happy to encourage revolts and uprisings in Iran, Syria, and Libya. We almost can’t lose. It’s hard to think those circumstances could get much worse than they are. Qaddafi’s behavior has been harmful to us.”

Egypt is a different matter. “How you behave with an ally tells other allies how you behave,” Rumsfeld says of the White House’s marching orders to Mubarak. Rumsfeld explains how he had just seen a video in which Niall Ferguson ripped into what the Scottish-born NYU professor believed was the administration’s lackluster response to the crises in Tunisia and Egypt. “I can’t help but agree with what Ferguson said, but it’s easier for him than someone who has been in those positions. I’m slow to judgment.”

Still, as Rumsfeld notes, “Mubarak was helpful in the region and created a period of stability that was helpful to everyone”—Arabs and the United States no less than Israel. “If you were an Israeli that benefited from the Egypt-Israel treaty, which provided a respite from decades of fighting, you just have to be deeply concerned,” he continued. “It’s not that they don’t want the Arabs to have opportunities. But if you were in that situation, you might opt for stability versus opportunity for your neighbors.”

I ask how he sees Israel’s strategic situation in the region and whether the Jewish state will continue to serve as an American asset or turn into a liability. “I don’t look at Israel as an asset for the U.S.,” he says. “Any country that is democratic is an asset to the world, a model. That’s despite all the criticism they get from the U.N., the pressure they get from Iran, and the not-so-latent anti-Semitism in our country and other countries.”

While Rumsfeld’s vision of a smaller, more mobile Army may have been partly responsible for the rocky early years of American occupation of Iraq, it may become even more significant now than when he was in office. Rumsfeld’s successor as Defense secretary, Robert Gates, recently said that any future Defense secretary suggesting land invasions in Africa or Asia should have his head examined—a quip apparently aimed at Rumsfeld. But of course that wasn’t what Rumsfeld advised George W. Bush at all. Instead, he argued for a lighter force to go get Saddam and then leave. It was on Gates’ watch that the U.S. military has placed a premium on its counterinsurgency capabilities. In other words, he has helped turn an instrument designed to fight and kill enemies into one with the purpose of winning the hearts and minds of foreign populations. But because the loves and hatreds of foreigners are by definition obscure to American officials, including all future secretaries of Defense, a military centered on counterinsurgency will soon find itself irrelevant.

It is Gates’ Pentagon that perceives of the U.S. armed forces as potential hostages in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they are at the mercy of Iran and its local allies. And it is Gates who has put the brakes on establishing a no-fly zone in Libyan airspace that might shape the growing civil war there to the advantage of American interests. It’s somewhat paradoxical that Gates’ Pentagon has become more influential in the policy-making process than other bureaucracies, even as it means that American influence is shrinking in the Middle East. And it’s not going to get any easier for Washington to project power there, as it did during the tenure of Rumsfeld’s career.

As some analysts have suggested, Arab regimes are now going to be less likely to cooperate with Washington, whether that’s because their publics demand it or because the region’s political elite no longer trusts us as an ally. For instance, Middle Eastern regimes like Egypt’s and Pakistan’s may not give us the sort of help with terrorist suspects that our intelligence community and military have grown accustomed to.

“There are all kinds of power,” says Rumsfeld. “There’s the visible power to dissuade and deter, the power to impose, the power that comes from a nice marriage of military and diplomatic influence. That influence is greater if you know where to focus it.”

• After visiting the Holocaust Museum yesterday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon linked the swift UN sanctions against Libya with a rededication to fight genocide. [UN]

• Iranians will take to the streets today to protest the incarceration of opposition leaders. [Bloomberg]

• Meanwhile, the U.S. has begun moving warships closer to Libya for a possible military campaign against Col. Gaddafi’s forces, while NATO is engaging in soul searching over imposing a no-fly zone over the North African country. [NYT]

• Made easier thanks to a Bush era deal that removed Libya’s huge cache of nuclear materials. [NYT]

• A day after police demolished three buildings in an illegal settlement at Havat Gilad, settlers attacked a Palestinian village in retaliation. [Haaretz]

• 120 Israeli schoolchildren featured in the Oscar winning documentary “Strangers No More” will most likely be deported in coming weeks. [NYT]

Things have been trending badly for Israel for some time now, but Hosni Mubarak losing control of Egypt makes the Jewish state untenable. That’s right: Israel is no longer feasible. I don’t mean that in the manner the international left usually does—that nationalism is passé and we must move on to higher forms of communal existence. I mean it in the old-fashioned way of nations and peoples who are vanquished when the balance of power tips against them. And I mean it strategically—a tiny country with a Jewish majority of 6 million can’t survive surrounded by enemies and forsaken by its superpower ally.

For several decades American policymakers from both sides of the aisle traveled to the Middle East to explain how much peace there meant to Washington. During the October 1973 war, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s airlifts showed the Arabs that it was futile to make war on Israel while they were backed by an awesome superpower. The Arabs could not hope to beat Israel in war so they would have to petition the Israelis’ U.S. patron if they wanted any concessions. Besides, there were great rewards, such as American military aid, to be had for anyone who would sign a deal—which essentially amounted to a bribe.

Coming to power in Egypt after Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated for signing a treaty with Israel, Mubarak kept the peace and thereby underwrote the integrity of the peace process. Egypt was the trophy that Washington kept on display to show all the other Arab states what they, too, might have should they come to their senses and just sign a deal. But as it turns out, the peace treaty must not have been that important because the man who preserved it for some 30 years in the face of domestic as well as regional opposition—enduring several attempts on his life—was tossed aside by the Obama Administration. In doing so, the United States showed that everything it had ever said about the peace process was total nonsense.

America’s Arab allies were astonished that the White House would treat a close ally like Mubarak as it did; but they were also dumbstruck that the Americans could undermine their own position in the region without a second thought. If binding the region together in a peace process is no longer the cornerstone of U.S. Middle East strategy, what do the Americans have up their sleeve? Washington only has one move, which is to throw Israel under the bus.

Sure, things were bad for Israel even before Yussuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based radical cleric who is the spiritual voice of the Muslim Brotherhood reappeared last week in Cairo to call for the liberation of Jerusalem. But consider the most optimistic scenario for Egypt, in which it follows the Turkish model, once a strategic ally that in the space of just a few years has become moderately hostile. Ankara’s involvement with the Mavi Marmara incident made Turkey part of an international delegitimization campaign against Israel, waged largely in Europe but making inroads now in the United States.

For instance, consider the administration’s bizarre mishandling last week of the Palestinians’ proposed Security Council measure denouncing Israeli settlements. Not only did Washington delay in vetoing a proposed resolution that in the past it would’ve batted down immediately, but the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, felt compelled to make a statement covering the administration’s flank. The veto, she explained, should “not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity.”

Washington, it seems, is tired of having to stick up for Jerusalem. It’s bad enough that having Israel’s back always sets the United States against the rest of the international community, but in the wake of the Arab uprisings, defending Israel also means that Obama has to cross the Muslim and Arab masses he’s courted ever since his 2009 Cairo speech. But nothing Washington is able to wring out of Israel never seems to satisfy anyone. Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 bought it tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets, while its 2006 war there bought it international opprobrium. The 2005 withdrawal from Gaza that was supposed to burnish Israel’s bona fides with the international community only won it more rockets. And after the war with Hamas in the winter of 2008, Israel got the Goldstone Report.

Now, with the end of Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, Washington will have no choice but to move further away from Israel. It’s an understandable move from a superpower whose prestige is waning in the Middle East.

So what of the near future? There will still be a peace process, but it will be rather like a living will, in which the party with power of attorney, Washington, decides when to pull the plug on Israel—and how to dispose of the corpse. Indeed, the Obama Administration still wants talks between Israel and Syria—even though Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has said that a peace deal would cost his regime its life. It is Assad’s resistance to Israel, through his support of Hezbollah and Hamas and Syria’s alliance with Iran, that has endeared him to the Syrian masses. Syria is stable, said Assad, because “you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence … you will have this vacuum that creates disturbances.”

In other words, the peace treaty with Israel that Egypt signed has now been exposed as a suicide pact. In Assad’s view, the former Egyptian president’s great misstep was diverging from the beliefs of his people, who are anti-Israel. Or, as Syria’s foreign minister put it, “the leaders of regional countries should befriend their peoples. That’s the best choice.”

The notion that the Arab masses hate Israel is difficult for Washington policymakers to swallow. Their working assumption for the last several decades is that Arab rulers were responsible for anti-Israel sentiment by redirecting popular anger at their own regimes onto the tiny Jewish state. But as we’re seeing, the Arab public is more than able to voice its discontent with their rulers while also hating Israel. Whether Washington grasps the fact that Arabs hate Israel is immaterial, for Arab rulers cannot afford to forget it without losing their grip. And the United States will have no choice but to make those rulers happy if it is to pursue its interests in the region. Unfortunately, this means that Israel is no longer viable. By which I don’t mean that 6 million Jews are going to be killed, only that if they want to survive they can’t stay in Israel.

That the United States will not come to the aid of its liberal allies, or strengthen the moderate Muslims against the extremists, is one reason why the Freedom Agenda is not going to work, at least not right now. The underlying reason then is Arab political culture, where real democrats and genuine liberals do not stand a chance against the men with guns.

Burning Bush

The Bush White House believed that the problem with the Arabic-speaking Middle East was in the nature of repressive Arab regimes: In this view, Sept. 11 was the product of a political culture that had been strangled by its rulers, allowing their people no form of political expression except extremism. Deposing these regimes would unleash the native political energies of Arab peoples, went the argument, who would turn their attention away from anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments to the thoughtful participatory governance of their own societies. Accordingly, promoting democracy in the region was not only good for the Arabs, but also in America’s national interest. The first test for this Freedom Agenda was Iraq, followed by Lebanon and then the Palestinian Authority. Egypt is the fourth test—and the most consequential yet, for Cairo is the linchpin of Washington’s Middle East strategy.

Egypt was once commonly referred to as leader of the Arab world—an honorific denoting Egypt’s leadership in the arts, intellectual life, and media, as well as its enormous population of 80 million. And unlike other Arab states—Syria, say, or Saudi Arabia—Egypt has a real history and identity dating back thousands of years. Primarily, however, “leader of the Arab world” referred to Cairo’s political status, specifically its role in the wars against Israel.

When Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s second president, was in office, all his political capital rested on the fact that Egypt, unlike U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Jordan, clamored for war with the Zionist entity. When Anwar Sadat, his successor, brought Egypt from the Soviet to the American side after the 1973 war, it represented a Cold War victory for Washington that paid huge strategic dividends. However, it is one of the paradoxes of U.S. Middle East policy that by signing a peace treaty with Jerusalem, Sadat took Cairo out of the front-line camp and thereby weakened the regional prestige of a key American ally. Of course that treaty also put Sadat in the crosshairs of the Islamists, who killed him at Cairo stadium in 1981, with Mubarak beside him on the reviewing stand.

That peace has not only been good for the United States, securing our hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean, but also of course for Israel. It is that treaty with Cairo that allows Israel the relative luxury to worry primarily about a Persian adversary far from its borders and two terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah. The prospect of Egypt, with a large U.S.-trained and equipped army, air force, and navy, once again becoming “leader of the Arab world” is a nightmare for Israel’s leaders.

The U.S.-backed order in the Middle East is founded entirely on Cairo’s position as an ally—and on keeping the peace, as Mubarak has. If Egypt moves out of the American fold, it might well align itself with Iran. Mubarak has known well enough to fear the Islamic Republic—a street in Tehran is named after Sadat’s assassin. Or perhaps it would challenge the Iranians, in the way regional competition has worked since 1948—by seeing who can pose the greatest threat to Israel. Therefore, this fourth test of the freedom agenda could not be more important.

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Unfortunately, after the first three runs, it’s hard to be optimistic this time. What we’ve seen so far is that the political energies unleashed by the Freedom Agenda are not democratic but tribal, sectarian, and violent. In Gaza, the Palestinian electorate voted for Hamas. In Lebanon, while the majority voted for the pro-democracy March 14 movement, Hezbollah still won power in government even as it embarked on a bloody campaign culminating last week in the party’s takeover of the state. After U.S. forces brought down Saddam Hussein, Iraqis turned on each other, fueled by more than a thousand years of a sectarian rage that was further aggravated by Saddam as Sunnis and Shiites shed blood at a clip typically associated with the grislier sectors of central Africa.

It is true that Egypt is not Iraq. And yet as many seem to have forgotten, only a month ago Islamist militants attacked a church in Alexandria, killing 23 Coptic Christians. To be sure, many Muslims rallied to defend their Christian neighbors, and today there are Christians in the street alongside the Muslim majority, but anyone who thinks sectarian tensions are simply the fault of “extremists,” or the Mubarak regime’s inability to protect Christians, is missing the point: The execution of minorities strongly suggests that a society might not be ready for democracy.

The relevant minority here are the liberals and democrats, for they do indeed exist and Egypt is the historical capital of Arab liberalism, from the novelist Taha Hussein to the journalist Farag Foda. Today there are a number of bloggers, intellectuals, and journalists, like the playwright Ali Salem and Hala Mustafa, editor of the political journal Dimoqratiya (Democracy), who keep the liberal flame alive. The former wrote a book about his trip to Israel and the latter met with the Israeli ambassador, and both were punished for it and ostracized by their colleagues. This is an indication not only of their lack of popularity but also the temperament of Egyptian intellectual culture: illiberal and populist—in other words, undemocratic.

There is some truth to the idea that Mubarak has choked off his liberal opposition, leaving only the Muslim Brotherhood to challenge him, but arguably the Egyptian liberal movement came to an end with the 1926 publication of Taha Hussein’s work on pre-Islamic poetry, which dealt with the historical and literary foundations of Islam. Under pressure from the religious authorities and death threats from Islamists, Hussein removed the passages deemed offensive, and the precedent was set: Men with guns make the rules, which liberals must abide by or be killed. Nonetheless, more than half a century later, Foda challenged the Islamists, and they reminded him how precarious liberalism is in Egypt by gunning him down in a Cairo street in 1992.

The Islamists, represented now by the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood, are one of only two political institutions that would survive Mubarak’s downfall; the other is the military. Indeed, Egypt has been run by military rulers more often than not—from the Muslim conqueror of Egypt Amr ibn al-‘As to the Albanian soldier Mohamed Ali, whose dynasty fell to Nasser’s Free Officers in a 1952 coup. Mubarak’s son Gamal’s presidency would have represented something like a coup d’etat against the military, which is why they got him out and chief of military intelligence Omar Suleiman was named vice president, making him Mubarak’s official successor. The awful irony is that Gamal and his gang of young financiers and businessmen probably represented Egypt’s best chance to move away from military rule. At least this is what much of the Washington policy establishment believed, with the hope of getting Gamal to pick up the pace of political reform to match the country’s notable economic reform. If Mubarak goes down, the security forces, the military and the Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, will fight each other, or cut a deal, or both.

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Consider the other options. The United States wants national dialogue, which seems to include Mohamed ElBaradei. By virtue of his name recognition alone, the former IAEA head has been hailed by the Western press as one of the leaders of the democratic opposition. However, at the IAEA this so-called reformer distorted his inspectors’ reports on Iran and effectively paved the way for the Islamic Republic’s march toward a nuclear bomb. Now the Muslim Brotherhood has named him as their interlocutor. In other words, ElBaradei is nothing other than a shill for Islamists.

There’s also Ayman Nour, leader of the liberal Ghad (Tomorrow) party, who finished third in the last presidential elections before he was jailed on trumped-up charges. Then there’s Saad Eddine Ibrahim, the Arab world’s most famous democratic-rights activist, who was also imprisoned by Mubarak and is now living abroad in the United States. During Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel, Ibrahim came down on the side of the Lebanese militia. Ibrahim’s posture was hardly surprising given that his onetime jailer despised Hezbollah. But it is odd that a democratic advocate should applaud war with Israel, a country with whom Cairo has had a peace treaty for more than 30 years.

Maybe this should be one of the tests for Egypt’s democrats in the streets: Where do you stand on Israel? If they are really democrats, or just pragmatists, the young among them protesting for higher pay would answer that warmer relations with an advanced, European-style economy—like, say, Israel’s—would provide jobs for the millions of Egypt’s unemployed. Of course that is not the answer you’re going to get from the young men now filling the streets of Cairo. Or forget about Israel and ask them instead about Hezbollah. Do they support the Islamic resistance? Of course they do, because Egypt’s most famous democrat Saad Eddine Ibrahim supports Hezbollah, the outfit that has turned the remnants of Lebanese democracy on its head while killing its opponents.

No doubt there are real liberals and democrats in Egypt, and some may even be in the streets today, but they are not going to come out on top. In part that is because the United States is not going to help them. Indeed, Washington showed how seriously it takes Arab liberals and democrats two weeks ago when it watched silently from the sidelines as Hezbollah toppled Saad Hariri’s government. Plenty of Arabs hoping for a democratic Lebanon died over the last five years since the assassination of Rafik Hariri, and it is important to note that the million-plus Lebanese who went to the streets on March 14, 2005 demonstrated peacefully, unlike the Egyptians, and all the destruction and violence was caused by Hezbollah and its pro-Syrian allies.

That the United States will not come to the aid of its liberal allies, or strengthen the moderate Muslims against the extremists, is one reason why the Freedom Agenda is not going to work, at least not right now. The underlying reason then is Arab political culture, where real democrats and genuine liberals do not stand a chance against the men with guns.

Scheuer was the CIA’s first point man on Bin Laden in the 1990s, and his new biography is based on years of following the Saudi terror mastermind in and outside of the agency. His Bin Laden is a man motivated not by hatred of American values or obsessed with our freedoms, sexual or political, but by deep anger at American policies. It is not about whether we vote or what we wear but about what Bin Laden believes we have done to the Islamic world, the ummah, over the last century. The Crusaders, as Bin Laden calls us, have pillaged the ummah for decades. Above all the other “crimes” Bin Laden rails against is American support for the creation of Israel and for supporting it ever since.

Bergen, who is one of the few Westerners to have met Bin Laden face to face, and who interviewed dozens of his close followers for this book, comes to the same conclusion. Bin Laden grew up in a household where his father, a multibillionaire construction magnate, was in charge of remodeling the three holiest mosques of Islam—in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. The family would fly to each to pray at all three in one day sometimes. Defense of Islam was a family duty. For the young Bin Laden, the Palestinian cause was a centerpiece of life from youth. He named one of his daughters Safia, after a girl “who killed a Jewish spy.”

For al-Qaida Israel is the root of all evil, Bergen’s book reports. The Jewish state is the Crusader’s key ally in suppressing the ummah and is used to keep the Muslim world divided and weak. It literally separates the ummah into African and Asian parts. It prevents the Muslim world from developing nuclear weapons by bombing its reactors in Iraq, Syria, and maybe Iran to protect its own monopoly of nuclear weapons in the region. The United States provides it with $3 billion in aid each year, the latest high-performance weapons, and diplomatic protection. The answer to the Crusader-Zionist alliance must be jihad until America is driven out of the ummah for good, just as the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan. Then the traitorous regimes in Cairo, Riyadh, and elsewhere will be overthrown, and Israel will be driven into the sea and destroyed forever.

Thus Bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri started his career in terror with a plot to assassinate Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel, Bergen notes. When the two declared war on America in 1998, they set as their top goal to “liberate” Jerusalem from “the petty Jewish state.” The Sept. 11 Commission concluded the mastermind of the attacks, Khaled Shaykh Muhammad, was motivated by “his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.” In 2008, Bin Laden made it crystal clear “the Palestine issue is my central issue. It is why the incidents of September 11th took place.” After the failed 2009 Christmas attack on a Detroit-bound plane, Bin Laden said more attacks would come until America stops supporting Israel.

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Scheuer and Bergen agree that the intellectual mastermind who shaped Bin Laden and al-Qaida’s worldview more than any other was the Palestinian preacher Abdullah Azzam. He was born near the West Bank town of Jenin, and his family fled to the Jordanian town of Zarqa after the 1967 war. Recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood and briefly a fighter with Fatah, Azzam studied in Damascus, Amman, and then at the prestigious Al Azhar University in Cairo. His religious credentials were impeccable. At the start of the war in Afghanistan in 1980 he was teaching in Jidda, in Saudi Arabia, but, outraged by the Soviet invasion, he moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, and began assisting the mujahedin.

Azzam became increasingly involved in the cause of the Afghan mujahedin, spending time in their camps along the Pakistani border and writing pamphlets urging Muslims from all over the Islamic world, especially his fellow Arabs, to join the jihad. In 1984, he wrote a book crucial to the expansion of jihad, The Defense of Muslim Territories, in which he argued that every Muslim had an obligation to join the Afghan struggle. Afghanistan was the place to defeat the unbeliever and enemies of Islam, Azzam emphasized, not only because the invaders posed the greatest threat to the ummah but also because the pay-off in defeating a superpower would be vastly increased stature for Muslims throughout the world.

Azzam even visited the United States in the 1980s to raise money for the cause. His book became as important to the Afghan jihad as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was to the American Revolution. Azzam followed it with dozens of articles and other books urging support for the jihad. Soon he broke with the Muslim Brotherhood, declaring it too timid, and began spending all his time in Peshawar with the mujahedin or traveling around the ummah urging Muslims to join the jihad in South Asia.

To assist jihadis arriving from all points of the ummah, Azzam created the Maktab al Khadamat, or Service Bureau, in Peshawar, to provide them with housing and food. The cofounder of the Service Bureau was Osama Bin Laden, a fabulously rich young Saudi whom Azzam had met in Jidda. Bin Laden had come to Pakistan to join the jihad and brought with him financial support for an army of jihadi volunteers. Initially Azzam and Bin Laden set up hostels for jihadists in Peshawar, then they graduated to training camps where Arabs and others could “learn jihad” and go off to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Azzam has rightly been called the father of the modern global jihad by a former chief of the Mossad. He was assassinated in 1989 in Peshawar just as the Soviets were leaving Afghanistan in defeat. By then Bin Laden was launched on his own career in jihad.

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Both authors credit the George W. Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq with saving al-Qaida. Scheuer calls it “a godsend” for Bin Laden not just because it diverted American attention and resources away from finishing the job in south Asia but also because it validated Bin Laden’s claim to be “an acute analyst of American intentions.” Osama had been saying for years that America intended to invade the Arab Middle East to topple its governments, impose puppets, and force them to accept Israeli dominance. On February 11, 2003, Bin Laden sent a letter to the Iraqi people, broadcast via Al Jazeera, warning them to prepare for the “Crusaders war to occupy one of Islam’s former capitals, loot Muslim riches, and install a stooge regime to follow its masters in Washington and Tel Aviv to pave the way for the establishment of Greater Israel.” He advised the Iraqi nation to prepare for a long struggle against the Crusaders and in particular to engage in “urban and street warfare” and to “emphasize the importance of martyrdom operations which have inflicted unprecedented harm on America and Israel.” In Iraq all his predictions seemed to come true.

Al-Qaida also found a new hero in Iraq: another Jordanian citizen, also from Zarqa, named Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayilah, better known as Abu Musaib Zarqawi. Zarqa is a tough, mean, and small working-class city close to Amman. It is a city of small industries and manufacturing with little charm. There is a large Palestinian population in the city and a very large Palestinian refugee camp nearby created after the 1967 war when tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians fled the Israeli occupation of their homes into Jordan. The camp is dirty, without adequate sewage or electricity. It is a place where extremism and fanaticism grow.

Zarqawi got in trouble with the law early in life. As with many other inmates in jail, Zarqawi became a more clever and dangerous criminal. He also found Islam and became a convert to extremist jihadism. He spent several years in prison before being released in a general amnesty in 1988. Upon his release, he went to Afghanistan to join the mujahedin in 1989. He arrived too late to fight the Soviets and instead witnessed the struggle between the various mujahedin factions for control of Kabul.

Zarqawi was a junior partner in an al-Qaida plot in December 2000 to blow up the Radisson Hotel in Amman, and he built his own jihadist training camp in Herat in Afghanistan, where he operated independently of al-Qaida but as a close complement to it. In 2002, he created an infrastructure in Iraq to prepare for the Americans. His network carried out its first operation by killing a USAID officer, Laurence Foley, in Amman on October 28, 2002.

As Bergen relates, Zarqawi then took Iraq to the brink of civil war. He sent dozens of suicide bombers to kill Americans and Iraqis alike and a couple to blow up the Radisson during a wedding celebration in Amman as well. Even the al-Qaida core hiding in Pakistan found him too violent, and his excesses ultimately did in the Iraqi al-Qaida as Iraqis rejected its wanton cruelty. But it kept America bogged down in Iraq long enough for the old core of al-Qaida to regenerate in Pakistan.

These are accounts of a war in progress, and so there is much we still don’t know about both Bin Laden and his organization. We know far too little, for example, about the dynamics of the relationship between Bin Laden and the self-proclaimed Commander of the Faithful, Mullah Omar, to whom Bin Laden swears allegiance. Neither Scheuer nor Bergen speculate on what connections Bin Laden had at that time with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, which ran the mujahedin war. It is impossible to believe the ISI was not closely monitoring the rich Saudi’s activities in their back yard. This is an area that still cries out for more research and analysis by al-Qaida watchers. Nonetheless, these two books complement each other well and help us better understand our enemy, which is the first key to victory.

Bruce Riedel is a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has advised four presidents on the National Security Council staff in the White House. His latest book is Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of Global Jihad.

To the legion of Jews that Weiss has enraged, this will sound perverse. It’s certainly self-aggrandizing. But it also gets at the way that Weiss has abandoned a deeply assimilated life for a profound—if idiosyncratic and tortured—engagement with Jewish questions. As the founder of Mondoweiss, a blog that has become a nucleus of anti-Zionist writing, and a co-editor of a new book about Richard Goldstone’s report on Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza, Weiss says that he now thinks about Jewishness all the time. In his fierce critique of tribal identity, he’s found his tribe—one he believes is growing.

“I think I was alienated from a lot of Jewish communal life in my 20s, 30s, 40s,” Weiss says. “One symptom of that is the fact that I’d never been to Israel until 2006. I was 50 before I got to Israel.” Now that he is 55, Israel has become the center of his life. He goes to rabbinical conventions and corresponds with left-wing Israelis. “I love what I’ve undergone in the last few years,” he says. “And I love my engagement with Jewish communal life now.”

Of course, much of that engagement comes in the form of relentless criticism. Weiss’ blog is fulsomely, intensely anti-Israel—it’s a universe in which even Noam Chomsky, hero of anti-imperialists worldwide, is criticized for his residual attachment to the Jewish state. His obsessive focus on Israel has come at the expense of a successful career as a magazine journalist. Harvard-educated, he got his start writing for the New Republic and later contributed features to New York, and the New York Times Magazine and wrote a column for the New York Observer. Initially he launched Mondoweiss as a general-interest blog on the New York Observer website. When he started to focus on Israel, his editor warned him that he was becoming a crank.

He didn’t listen, and in 2007 he left the Observer, taking the blog with him. Today it operates under the umbrella of the nonprofit Nation Institute, which allows Weiss to solicit tax-deductable contributions. But its budget comes entirely from donations, and Weiss has to rely on his wife, the writer and editor Cynthia Kling, to help support him.

It’s a little hard to figure out why Weiss threw so much away for a cause that was so new to him. Naturally, he sees a linear moral logic to his journey. He looks at contemporary Israel and is appalled. Because he came to Middle Eastern issues late in life, he has no fond memories of labor Zionism, or maddening recollections of the times Palestinians spurned opportunities for peace, to complicate his anger. As one long alienated from Jewish life, he hasn’t developed the habit, common to many American Jews, of reflexively giving Israel the benefit of the doubt. For him—as it is for many younger Jews—Israel is defined by Avigdor Lieberman and Operation Cast Lead, by Shas and settlements.

Weiss first became interested in Israel in the run-up to the Iraq war. “I felt there was some element of Jewish organizational life that was behind this war because it was good for Israel,” he says. The notion that the neoconservatives spoke for American Jews horrified him, and it imbued him with a sense of responsibility to speak out as a Jew. As he dove into books about Jewish and Middle Eastern history, he came up against what he saw as the essential conflict between Zionism and American liberalism—which, after all, defines itself precisely by its refusal to privilege any race or religion. Liberal Zionists are used to holding these ideas in uneasy tension. Weiss could see nothing but stark dissonance. “I don’t believe in the necessity of a Jewish state,” he says. “Most Jews disagree with me, and that is sort of the heart of my crisis.”

The idea that American Jews might someday find themselves persecuted and in need of refuge strikes him as paranoia. “Temperamentally, I lack a paranoid gene,” he says. He grew up, he adds, hearing that Jews would always and everywhere be in danger. “And my whole experience has been the opposite.”

That still doesn’t quite explain why he jettisoned so much to devote himself to anti-Zionism. But there’s something in Weiss that reacts intensely to disillusionment. Once he rejects conventional wisdom, he’s willing to swing wildly, even heedlessly, in the other direction. In the 1990s, he was a staunch Bill Clinton defender. But when Clinton disappointed him, he began a long flirtation with all sorts of anti-Clinton conspiracy theories. His New York Observer columns painted an image of a menacing cabal of thugs sitting in the White House and snuffing out their enemies. As he wrote in 1998, “Everywhere Bill Clinton goes, he makes Chinatowns.” He was particularly fixated on Vince Foster’s suicide, which he was convinced was part of something larger and more sinister. He has more of a paranoid gene than he realizes.

He regrets some of this now. “I have problems with loyalty in life, and I felt little loyalty to the Democrats when I sensed the small-town corruption that hung around Clinton,” he wrote in 2009. “I wanted to expose it. It was the wrong impulse because as John Homans, my friend/editor, used to berate me, You’re arming people who disagree with you on policy matters. Did I help elevate W? … And would Gore have kept us out of Iraq? Maybe. That’s why I feel bad about what I did.”

Friends have suggested that the same impulse that sent him after Clinton may drive some of his writing about Israel. Though his voice can be reflective, he seems to enjoy pulling wild ideas from the fever swamps and giving them a respectful airing. He’s particularly interested in Jewish power, manifestations of which he diligently catalogs.

“Over and over, American presidents have said they oppose the colonization program; over and over these instincts have been nullified politically because of the Jewish presence in the power structure,” he wrote in 2009. “The Senate is dominated by Democrats, and 1/5 of them are Jews, even though Jews are just 2 percent of the population. The Washington Post has said that over half the money given to the Democratic Party comes from Jews. Obama’s top two political advisers are Jewish, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod. The news lately has been dominated by Obama aides Kenneth Feinberg and Larry Summers. And what does it mean that the Treasury Sec’y gets off the phone with Obama to confer immediately with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman and Jamie Dimon of Morgan (Dimon’s Jewish; Blankfein would seem to be)?” He didn’t say what exactly this did mean, particularly regarding Israel—it was just an invitation to conspiratorial speculation. From there, Weiss went on to list Jewish journalists including Ezra Klein, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Terry Gross, and Nina Totenberg.

Now, it’s fair for Weiss to argue that Jews, owing to their success, are far more secure in the United States than they realize, and that their politics should reflect that, just as it’s more than fair to criticize the pro-Israel establishment for its destructive impact on American foreign policy. What’s outrageous is the imputation of a unified Jewish agenda to all these disparate figures, most of whom have nothing to do with Barack Obama’s Middle Eastern policy, and some of whom are far to the left of virtually all non-Jewish Republicans on Israel issues. Netanyahu has reportedly slurred Emanuel and Axelrod as self-hating Jews; there’s certainly no evidence that they’ve urged softness on settlements.

Not surprisingly, some Jew-haters see Weiss as a native informer, telling the plain truth about the Zionist octopus. “Philip Weiss is a unique American Jewish voice—a Jew without all the usual rationalizations and blind spots–at least most of them,” Kevin MacDonald, a leading anti-Semitic theorist, wrote last May. MacDonald has bandied the idea of taxes on Jews and quotas against them in order to “achieve parity between Jews and other ethnic groups.”

Weiss isn’t responsible for his fans, of course. But when he wrote about McDonald’s embrace, there was something notably equivocal in his rejection of a figure who most American journalists and thinkers would find beneath contempt. “I find a lot of what MacDonald has said elsewhere bracing and bold,” he wrote. “He is alive to important sociological trends that few people are talking about out loud.” Only then did he call him out for his open racism and disdain for Jewish suffering.

Yet Weiss can’t simply be written off as a victim of self-loathing. His ambivalence toward the Jewish world is too complicated, suffused with attraction as well as lacerating anger. When he first went to Israel, he says, he was surprised by his satisfaction at seeing Jews with guns. He was moved by the silence in West Jerusalem on the Sabbath, and by the struggles of young Israeli leftists like those who’ve clustered around the +972 blog. “I am ethnocentric,” he says. “And as much as I’m involved in Palestinian solidarity, I emotionally look to other Jews.”

“I find his writing about Israel to be infused with a real Jewish concern,” says J.J. Goldberg, former editor of The Forward and a friendly acquaintance of Weiss’. “Some people who are associated with him write about Israeli wrongdoing with what seems like glee. He seems to have regret.”

Lately, Weiss is particularly gratified to see a growing number of Jews moving in his direction. “I think there’s going to be a big anti-Zionist moment in American Jewish life,” says Weiss. “I just think it’s inevitable.”

He may be right. Take Lizzy Ratner, for example. One of Weiss’ co-editors on the Goldstone book, Ratner is a former New York Observer writer who was born into New York’s elite Jewish establishment—her father is millionaire real-estate developer Bruce Ratner. Lizzy was 4 years old the first time she went to Israel; during college she spent a semester there and was at the rally when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Her horror led her to get involved in pro-Palestinian work.

“The moment I crossed a checkpoint, 15 minutes from Jerusalem, the world changed,” she told me. “My worldview shattered. You grow up being told ‘they’ want to push us into the sea and we have to do everything we can to stop this evil enemy that wants to kill us and is going to kill us, and then you meet the terrible evil enemy, and not only are they nice, and decent, but they’re actually oppressed.”

Returning from Israel in the 1990s, Ratner looked for a community of people who shared her concerns with the Middle East, and she couldn’t find it. She’d go to Palestinian solidarity meetings, and only three others would show up. Gradually, she drifted away from the issue altogether, until outrage over Gaza inspired her to get involved again. She found a movement to plug into. “Now I look at Phil and Adam’s website”—Adam Horowitz has been Weiss’ partner at Mondoweiss since 2008—“and I look at Jewish Voice for Peace—something undeniable is welling up,” she says.

Meanwhile, as Weiss has become more enmeshed in the world of left-wing anti-Zionist Jews, he’s become at least a little more sensitive to Jewish concerns. “I know I’ve made a lot of mistakes on my site over the years,” he says. “I think in my alienation from the Jewish community, I said stuff that I regret on a number of occasions.” He even has second thoughts about some of more strident attacks on neoconservatives. “The neoconservative thing is a very confusing thing to me,” he says. “I think it’s appropriate to talk about Jewish neoconservatives, but there’s an element of red-baiting. I haven’t come down fully on that issue. I know I’ve hurt people.”

And so his alienation from the Jewish community has been transformed into a new sense of mission within it. “There’s a crisis! There is truly a crisis in the two-state solution,” he says. “That de-marginalizes me.” He’s right, whether that fills you with hope or with dread.

If it weren’t for the historic events in Tunisia—where for the first time in Arab history a people rose up to send their ruler packing—people in Rabat, Morocco, where I’m traveling for the next week, and throughout the region would still be talking about Clinton’s speech. What made it surprisingly welcome is that, up until last Thursday, the Obama Administration had been putting as much distance as possible between itself and President George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” It wasn’t clear whether President Barack Obama believes that democracy promotion is likely to destabilize the repressive and volatile political systems of the Arab world—and that the survival of those regimes would be in America’s best interest—or if he was just following an anything-but-Bush handbook.

But Clinton picked up the gauntlet and laid it at the feet of Arab regimes, timed perfectly to herald an age of Arab accountability: Right after the Tunisians deposed their president-for-life, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, sealed indictments were handed down in the United Nations investigation of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, and while the names are yet to be revealed, the indictments are expected to identify Hezbollah members as well as government officials of its Syrian and Iranian sponsors.

Tunisia’s so-called Jasmine Revolution is the culmination of demonstrations that started with the self-immolation of a produce vendor in Sidi Bouzid after his goods were confiscated. Other suicides followed, accompanied by widespread protests against the lack of jobs, housing, freedom of speech, and food price inflation and corruption. Police and security forces shot and killed demonstrators, but when the army refused to turn on their countrymen, Ben Ali fled the country for Saudi Arabia last Friday, leaving Tunisia without a government and Tunisians elated with the rarest of achievements: vanquishing an Arab strongman.

In the days following Ben Ali’s exit, the Tunisian army skirmished with security forces still loyal to the ousted president. One hopes the military can now serve as the guarantor of a more or less peaceful transition as Tunisia takes its first steps toward a more democratic political culture. The more pessimistic interpretation is that the stark image of city streets vacant of any human beings except those who are armed to the teeth is a living tableau of Middle Eastern political culture. Here the masses are merely props to be chewed up and tossed away, and the real action is nothing but security chiefs and generals in a fight to the death.

That is to say, as thrilling as it is to see a people take its own destiny in its hands, there is reason to be concerned—for Tunisians and for the rest of the region, where protests seem to be gathering momentum. Algeria, Egypt, and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania have already reported cases of self-immolation—an ostensibly selfless and heroic gesture that is unfortunately reminiscent of one of the Middle East’s more popular forms of political expression: the suicide bombing. Something is happening in the region—in fact, has been happening for some time—that is simply not going to be solved with the downfall of one dictator.

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Which is why it’s not surprising that the Moroccans I’ve met here, on a trip sponsored by the Moroccan American Center for Policy, do not share the excitement with which the Jasmine Revolution has been received in many corners of the U.S. policy establishment. Some of the Moroccan diplomats, human rights activists, and parliamentarians I’ve spoken to even believe that Obama’s carefully modulated statement on Tunisia was too enthusiastic, given that no one has any idea yet whether democrats or Islamists or the army will wind up in power, and what the consequences will be.

Because many of these Moroccan officials are close in one way or another to the ruling regime, it is reasonable to interpret their vivid worries about “security”—all couched in terms articulating brotherly concerns and hopes for the citizens of another Maghreb state—as the fears of a ruling order imagining a bad end for itself. However, while it is important to understand the worries of any elite class in terms of its own self-interest, it is also foolish to discount the misgivings of those who actually have experience in Arab politics and governing Arab people.

From here in the region, it is perhaps easier to see the fundamental problems with Clinton’s welcome brand of Western-style honesty. For instance, what she calls “corruption” is just one family or tribe advancing the interests of its own clique while shutting out the others. Corruption as such is standard operating procedure in the Middle East. Only a lunatic, or an American public official, would give money to an armed gang with uncertain loyalties.

In Doha, Clinton argued that “[i]t is important to demonstrate that there is rule of law, good governance, and respect for contracts to create an investment climate that attracts businesses and keeps them there.” The problem here is that this isn’t necessarily true—a fact borne out by Ben Ali’s Tunisia. The regime was corrupt to the core—Ben Ali’s wife’s family had a hand in virtually every business venture in the country—but the country’s pro-business climate and liberalized economy won praises from all corners, including the IMF. Good governance then had nothing to do with building Tunisia’s economy or creating the country’s middle class, for it was all crafted by the heavy hand of a dictator.

“If leaders don’t offer a positive vision and give young people meaningful ways to contribute, others will fill the vacuum”—namely, “extremist elements, terrorist groups and others who would prey off desperation and poverty,” Clinton warned her audience in Doha. Alas, this isn’t true either. Visitors to the police state that Ben Ali ruled admired the country’s relatively open atmosphere—open, except for political dissent—but its secularism, educational system, and the relative freedom of women, had very little to do with a positive vision. Rather, it was all engendered by the single-minded obsession of a tyrant who perceived, perhaps rightly, that the country’s Islamist movement constituted his most serious and best-organized opposition. It is the fact that Ben Ali thoroughly repressed the Islamists and eradicated any evidence of their potent symbols and discourse that gave Tunisia’s its left-bank flair.

What is more depressing is that while we believe poverty, hopelessness, and despair may pave the way for extremist elements and terrorist groups, we know that democracy has empowered them where repression sidelines them. Even avid Bush partisans cannot ignore the fact that the gospel of democratization propagated by Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, during the president’s second term helped bring Hamas to power in Gaza and strengthened Hezbollah’s hand in Lebanon.

There is a reason why a famous Arab dictum has it that 100 years of tyranny is preferable to one day of chaos. It is meant to remind us of the nature of man, the political animal, who cannot foresee the consequences of his actions. The Arabs’ ancients would have been right to fear how an uprising that began in a suicide might end. If this saying is frequently held up as an example of Arab timidity, the same might be said of any society, and the fact is that the Arabs have stood up before and will invariably do so again. Still, it is unlikely that the uprising in Tunisia will serve as a model for the rest of the region. The Tunisian middle class succeeded where, for example, the Iranians failed in June 2009 only because the divisions in Ben Ali’s security apparatus were decisive. Presumably, rulers around their region right now are worried less about crowds in the street than about whether their intelligence officials are happy with their latest paycheck.

Moreover, it is unseemly for Americans to gloat about the fate of Arab regimes when the real issue is Arab people, like those getting shot in the streets of Tunisian cities or setting themselves on fire in Cairo. Their problems are not going to be solved with the exit of one Arab dictator—or even the whole pack of them, from Riyadh to Algiers. What’s wrong with Arab reform is that in most cases the institutions that need to be fixed do not yet exist—a fact that makes the content, though perhaps not the rhetoric, of Clinton’s speech no less irrelevant to Arab reality than the high-flown language of democracy favored by Condoleezza Rice. If there is a formula to fix what’s wrong with the region, no one has it.

I recently wrote an essay for Mishpacha magazine in which I talked about my own experiences as a Jewish senior official in the Bush Administration. I also discussed the prevalence of Jewish elected officials in the U.S. Congress, including the new House majority leader, Eric Cantor. In response, one reader offered a cautionary letter in which he warned against getting excited over having Jewish officials prominently featured in public life. The correspondent cited the Meshech Chochma, written by Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk, Latvia, who wrote in the early 20th century that Jews should be wary of getting too comfortable in a country, lest the native population be reminded of the Jewish people’s otherness and expel them, or worse.

Simcha’s words are even more haunting in light of Jewish history. In his lifetime, Germany, not the United States, was seen as the safest place for Jews to live. Germany was a cultured and advanced society in which Jews had existed, mostly peacefully, for a thousand years. During his lifetime, few would have believed Germany would be the driving force behind an atrocity like the Holocaust. Thus, one cannot blithely dismiss Simcha’s views as the equivalent of the mousy sentiment, “shah shtil fur de goyim”—don’t make a fuss about your Judaism in front of the non-Jewish population.

Even today, in a welcoming nation such as the United States, this fearful attitude often governs Jewish attitudes toward public life and public service. The notion is that latent anti-Semitism is only a surface scratch away and that Jews should keep their heads down and make as little noise as possible so as not to attract negative attention from non-Jewish fellow citizens. This attitude is often seen with respect to embarrassing behavior by Jews—the Bernie Madoff scandal is a prime example of such negative behavior. But the principle goes beyond scandal and applies to any publicly noticeable activity, even positive actions, such as the public service in which Giffords was engaged.

The adherence to a “shah shtil” approach is somewhat understandable not only in the shadow of the Giffords affair but also when one considers the prevalence of anti-Semitism both in the United States and around the world. According to the Anti-Defamation League’s 2009 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, there were “1,211 incidents of vandalism, harassment, and physical assaults against Jewish individuals, property, and community institutions across the U.S.” Outside the United States, the problem is even worse, as similar studies have found more than 1,700 anti-Semitic incidents in 2009 in England and France alone, two countries that publicly condemn anti-Semitism and have large and relatively comfortable Jewish communities. While 2010 figures are not yet available, the ADL’s website details 75 different anti-Semitic incidents in more than two dozen countries around the world in 2010.

Beyond all of these statistics are real stories of people traumatized by direct contact with anti-Semitism. In my own time in public life, I was never directly confronted with anti-Semitism in a physical sense, but I was certainly aware it was out there. When I worked as policy director for Sen. John Ashcroft in the 1990s, the senator’s chief of staff received a letter from an anti-Semitic group questioning my fitness for the job. The reason? I had publicly—and jokingly—hoped that a highly anticipated, high-end kosher restaurant in Washington—long since closed, alas—would be “good enough for the goyim,” that is, of sufficiently high quality that one would not be embarrassed to invite non-Jewish colleagues to eat there as well. The complainant felt that I had used a slur to refer to gentiles, whom he described, somewhat oddly, as my “opponents.” I explained the nonsensical nature of the complaint, and the chief of staff dismissed it, but I didn’t forget the incident.

Later, when I served in the White House, I was what the Jewish journalist Ron Kampeas called “one of the highly identified Jews” in the administration. As such, I was regularly listed on anti-Semitic sites—along with many of my Jewish colleagues—as one of the administration’s Jews, punctuated by questions such as: “Ask yourself: Is their first loyalty to America or Israel?” Later, when nominated as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, I was the subject of a longer write-up on an anti-Semitic site, which breathlessly reported that my last name Troy had been shortened from “Troyansky.”

In recounting these experiences, I do not intend to portray myself as a victim of anti-Semitism. To the contrary. I believe that it is a credit to the United States that I saw so little evidence of anti-Semitism that only aggressive Googling would uncover it. I also recognize that the White House bubble provides some lever of protection for senior officials—not only is the whole campus closely guarded, but direct phone numbers were unpublished, and discerning the email addresses of White House staffers is not intuitive. At the same time, I was also aware that anti-Semitic ugliness was a reality.

It is this reality that gives Jewish officials cause to be concerned and thoughtful about their public profiles, whether in the United States or elsewhere in the world. Yet while Jews should remain cognizant of the dangers of anti-Semitism, the proper response to the Giffords incident should not be a turn inward. In contrast, it is only by resolving to become active citizens and compassionate neighbors that we can identify and confront what is hateful before it gains political force.

Rather than being discouraged by the tragedy, aspiring Jewish officials should be encouraged by the embrace of Giffords as a national hero. They should also recognize that Jews serving in public life may disturb some, but that their service presents opportunities to show devotion to this country, which is a powerful tool against anti-Semitism. In addition, having more Jews in public life gives Jews a platform for fulfilling their historic role of a “light unto the nations.” The best way to fight against the darkness of all forms of bigotry is with the light of Judaism’s key message, as distilled by the great Rabbi Hillel when asked to summarize the whole Torah while standing on one leg: “What is hateful to you, do not do unto others.”

Giffords was willing to take the risk of serving in Congress while living quite publicly as a Jew. Today all Americans, Jew and non-Jew alike, are united in praying for her full and speedy recovery. But the attack on her reminds us that those willing to take a public stand against bigotry are heroes who deserve the accolades and admiration of our citizens. At a time such as this, Giffords’ example shows the Jewish people that we must eschew the “shah shtil” principle of cowering in the background. We cannot afford to be silent in the face of anti-Semitism or any other ideology of hate.

Tevi Troy, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, was a deputy secretary of Health and Human Services and senior White House aide in the George W. Bush Administration.

In the 15 years that separated that fire from the one that devoured more than 12,000 acres of Israel’s Carmel region last week, the firefighting crisis in Israel was repeatedly discussed in the Knesset. The Israeli parliament’s proceedings from May 13, 2003, for example, reads, “[T]he picture painted by Shimon Romach, the chief fire commissioner, shows a vital service on the brink of collapse.” On July 11, 2006, Romach testified once again before the Knesset, and he said then that in case of a major disaster, the firefighting infrastructure—lacking a central chain of command and sorely needed supplies—would collapse on the spot. Yoav Gadassi, the head of the firefighters’ union, testified as well. Israel’s firefighting service, he said, was “an organization that survives by depending on miracles.”

The operatic-scale negligence of this quintessentially vital service carried on. In 2007, a state comptroller’s report described the firefighting infrastructure in similarly harsh terms. And in July of this year, the government discussed the firefighting condition once again and tasked the Minister of the Interior, Eli Yishai of the Shas party, to draft a bill for firefighting reform within one month. The draft was prepared, and it has been languishing in the lower rungs of the government’s agenda ever since. A report by the state comptroller—the publication of which was rushed due to the Carmel fire—took the same urgent tone. The firefighting infrastructure in Israel, wrote the Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss in a report released Wednesday, is “on the verge of collapse in case of emergency, which might lead to loss of life and property and undermine the safety of the civilian population.” Local authorities, too, have partaken in this particular binge of criminal carelessness: Four months ago, Haifa’s city comptroller submitted a highly critical report, warning about everything from insufficient water reservoirs to fight fires to inadequate safety regulations in schools and kindergartens and recommending a series of urgent steps. None were taken.

I mention these intricate details because details are what governing is all about. More than empty political maneuvers, or bombastic statements, or ideological grandstanding, public servants are elected to see to it that a thousand small, unglamorous but infinitely important details are properly addressed.

Still smarting from the humiliation of having to call Cyprus, Greece, and Bulgaria to the rescue—carrying firefighting supplies and hardware Israel lacked—Israelis are mad as hell and in search of someone to blame for this spectacular collapse. But no one person deserves the blame; the fault is systemic. In the wake of the fire, Israeli media were quick to point out at least half a dozen more disasters in waiting. Last month, for example, three men were killed as a result of a leak in one of Haifa’s oil refineries. The refineries—located at the heart of Israel’s third-largest city—have been the subject of scrutiny for years. A government report issued three years ago found that an explosion might kill or maim as many as 100,000 people. Another report listed at least 400 sites of unprotected hazardous materials strewn throughout Israel.

Other threats abound. In 2007, for example, an investigatory committee headed by a former commander of the air force found severe safety problems plaguing Ben Gurion Airport, an airport currently using a single runway for all take-offs and landings. The committee submitted a list of 75 recommendations; in his report this year, the state’s comptroller found that 15 of these recommendations were ignored, and an additional 31 were either partially implemented or not yet implemented at all. The U.S. FAA has downgraded Israel’s safety ranking to Category 2, usually reserved for developing nations.

Seven years ago, when two babies died and 23 others were hospitalized after consuming contaminated baby food, work began on establishing a national food and drug administration. As of yet, such a body does not yet exist. Everywhere one looks, one sees inaction, ineptitude, and inability to accept responsibility.

Of course, there are bound to be those who read the aforementioned list, shrug their shoulders, and claim that Israel simply doesn’t have the resources to address all of its challenges, particularly with the high costs associated with defending its borders. That is patently false. Israel’s median household income is $37,000, which puts it a shade behind the United Kingdom and ahead of Scotland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The country is ranked first in the world in its supply of skilled manpower and ranks second among foreign countries in the number of its companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges. As Jeffrey Goldberg wisely observed last week, there is no reason why Israel can’t provide the same basic services as other advanced Western nations.

This grows even more maddening when one considers how promptly funds are found for the benefit of narrow interest groups or vanity projects. Even leaving aside the most obvious item—the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which, as a recent study reports, have cost Israel upward of $17 billion—the Jewish state’s budget is rich with pork barrels. The annual subsidies awarded to students of ultra-Orthodox yeshivot, for example—students who often do not work, pay taxes, or serve in the army—stands at $275 million.

On a much smaller scale, the $150,000 that Israel spent last year to pay a team of bloggers entrusted with tweeting positive things about the Jewish state could’ve paid for much of the desperately needed firefighting equipment the Jewish National Fund tried to schnorr for last week. Budget, like everything else, is a matter of priorities; for the past two decades, Israel’s leaders, so many of whom have been irredeemably corrupt, have proved that anything irrelevant to the Grand Guignol of war and peace—everything, that is, that a normal government is entrusted with overseeing—is not worthy of serious attention.

Bouts of poor governance, of course, are hardly rare. Even the most advanced and efficient nations sometimes fall victim to negligence, stupidity, and greed. But an overwhelming amount of evidence suggests that Israel is deeply afflicted by a political class that has lost the ability to govern.

This hasn’t always been the case. Much of the recent scholarship about David Ben Gurion, for example, suggests that the greatness of Israel’s founding father lay in his organizational skills and that the ragtag army he pitted against far larger Arab forces had won the war of independence, in large part, because it had at its disposal an infrastructure that provided food, transportation, sanitation, and other necessities that lack the halo of heroism but are indispensable for any large organization wishing to thrive. This spirit of thoroughness and attentiveness—the spirit that propelled a small group of warriors to land in a hostile African capital and rescue hostages, the spirit that drives so many excellent and innovative Israeli companies—is nowhere in evidence among Israel’s political class.

Any serious examination of this recent debacle, then, shouldn’t just focus on forest fires. It should focus on responsibility, decency, and commitment; Israel must insist that its captains possess all three before being allowed back at the helm.

With all due apologies to Oliver Stone (and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey), what the Wikileaks documents reveal is not a conspiracy of any kind but a scary and growing gap between the private assessments of American diplomats and allies in the Middle East and public statements made by U.S. government officials. The publication of these leaked cables is eerily reminiscent of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed a decade-long attempt by U.S. officials to distort and conceal unpalatable truths about the Vietnam War, and manipulate public opinion. The difference is that while the Pentagon Papers substantially vindicated the American left, the Wikileaks cable dump vindicates the right.

Here are eight of the most obvious examples from the initial trove of documents that has appeared online:

1. While the Israelis are deeply concerned about Iran’s march toward a nuclear program, it is in fact the Arabs who are begging the United States to “take out” Iranian installations through military force, with one United Arab Emirates official even proposing a ground invasion. Calling Iran “evil,” King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly urged the United States to “cut off the head of the snake” by attacking Iranian nuclear installations.

2. It is not just Israeli leaders who believe Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is reminiscent of Hitler; U.S. officials think so too, as do Arab leaders, who use the Hitler analogy to warn against the dangers of appeasing Iran.

3. North Korea, an isolated country that enjoys substantial diplomatic and economic backing from China, is supplying Iran with advanced ballistic missile systems that would allow an Iranian nuclear warhead to hit Tel Aviv—or Moscow—with a substantial degree of accuracy. Taken in concert with the North Korean-built nuclear reactor in Syria, it would appear that North Korea—acting with the knowledge and perhaps direct encouragement of China—is playing a significant and deliberate role in the proliferation of nuclear equipment and ballistic delivery systems in the Middle East.

4. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not a model Middle Eastern leader who has found the right admixture of religious enthusiasm and democracy, as U.S. government officials often like to suggest in public, but “an exceptionally dangerous” Islamist. U.S. diplomats have concluded that Erdogan’s anti-Israel rhetoric is not premised on domestic Turkish electioneering or larger geo-strategic concerns but rather on a personal, visceral hatred of Israel.

5. Tehran has used the cover of the ostensibly independent Iranian Red Crescent—a member of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, whose pledge of neutrality allows it access to war zones—to smuggle weapons and members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force into Lebanon during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, and into Iraq, to fight against U.S. soldiers.

6. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman are more worried about Hamas than about Israel and are staunchly opposed to the expansion of Iranian influence in the region.

7. The Amir of Qatar is a dubious ally, who plays Washington and Tehran off each other. “The Amir closed the meeting by offering that based on 30 years of experience with the Iranians, they will give you 100 words. Trust only one of the 100.”

8. America’s Arab allies do not believe that the Barack Obama Administration can separate Syria from Iran through any foreseeable combination of carrots and sticks. According to one cable, the UAE’s Sheik Mohamed Bin Zayed “showed no confidence that Syria could be separated from the Iranian camp” and quoted him directly as saying “If you want my opinion … I think not.” He advised that Syria would continue hedging on key regional issues (Iran, support for Hezbollah, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process) for the foreseeable future.

If these cables make many on the right look prescient, or at least in touch with reality, it is hardly a surprise that their domestic U.S. rivals are trying to spin the Wikileaks cables to their own advantage. For instance, leftwing academic specialists on the Middle East who have argued that the peace process is the key issue in the region and that the Gulf Arab states do not want the United States or Israel to bomb Iran are nonetheless celebrating the Wikileaks documents, even as their argument is now vitiated. Some university professors claim that their analysis is better than those of Washington’s Arab allies anyway. The New York Times is trying to make the case that in the wake of George W. Bush’s mismanagement the Obama Administration has managed to build a strong sanctions regime against Iran that includes Russia and China. Unfortunately, the cables prove only that Russian envoys are working to frustrate the U.S. effort by selling the Iranian position to the Arabs.

What comes through most strongly from the Wikileaks documents, however, is that U.S. Middle East policy is premised on a web of self-justifying fictions that are flatly contradicted by the assessments of American diplomats and allies in the region. Starting with Bush’s second term and continuing through the Obama Administration, Washington has ignored the strong and repeated pleas of its regional allies—from Jerusalem to Riyadh—to stop the Iranian nuclear program. Perhaps the most disturbing revelation in the documents is the extent to which both the Bush and Obama Administrations have concealed Iran’s war against the United States and its allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states, even as those same allies have been candid in their diplomatic exchanges with us. U.S. servicemen and -women are being dispatched to combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan where they are fighting Iranian soldiers and assets in a regional war with the Islamic Republic that our officials dare not discuss, lest they have to do something about it.

Members of the Washington policy establishment should be considerably less worried about how the foreign ministries of allied countries respond to the leaks than how the American electorate does. Even in a democracy, we accept that a key part of our diplomacy depends on concealing the truth, or even lying, in order to advance the interests of one’s own country. But it is hard to see how the public, mendacious, face of U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, serves American interests. By systematically misleading the American people, our policymakers have undermined the basis of our democracy, which is premised on the existence of a public that is capable of making informed decisions about a world that is only becoming more dangerous.

And yet new petitions on his behalf have recently begun to circulate, and gain momentum, both in the U.S. Congress and the Israeli Knesset. This is, in large measure, because Pollard’s situation rests on a contradiction: He was guilty of a reprehensible crime, and yet he has been treated abominably. One of the most infamous Jewish criminals in modern times, he is also the victim of the worst act of official American anti-Semitism in our lifetimes. With his round face and shoulder-length hair, Pollard today still looks more like a perpetual grad student than an arch criminal, but he has suffered severely. He has served hard time, mostly in maximum-security prisons, spending years in lockdown 23 hours a day. Websites pleading his case detail his medical ailments, noting that he has “developed diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, pre-glaucoma, and arthritis while in prison.”

From the moment he was sentenced, there were people in the Jewish community—and beyond—who believed Pollard had been unjustly punished and who fought for his release. But they were few and far between, and they often made the wrong case for him. This newest round of argument on Pollard’s behalf is different. For starters, many of his champions have been careful not to lionize him. Rather, they focus on correcting what Judge Stephen Williams, who filed a dissent in one of Pollard’s failed appeals, deemed “a fundamental miscarriage of justice.” Most surprisingly, on September 27, 2010, a former assistant secretary of Defense confirmed many people’s decades-long fears that, at some point, the case had turned personal—and poisonous. Without explaining what prompted him to break his silence, Lawrence Korb, who served in the Pentagon in Reagan’s first term, wrote President Barack Obama: “Based on my first-hand knowledge, I can say with confidence that the severity of Pollard’s sentence is a result of an almost visceral dislike of Israel and the special place it occupies in our foreign policy on the part of my boss at the time, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.”

Decades into this tragic and pathetic tale, American Jewry’s continuing allergy to defending Pollard says more about our communal fears and the price we are willing to pay for social and political acceptance than it does about Pollard and his crimes.

***

On November 21, 1985, FBI agents arrested Pollard, 31 at the time, just outside Israel’s embassy in Washington. Since June 1984, Pollard had been routinely removing sensitive documents from the Naval Intelligence Support Center on Friday afternoons, passing them to his Israeli handlers for Xeroxing, and blithely returning them on Monday mornings. When first interrogated by the FBI, Pollard called his wife. After he worked the word “cactus” into the conversation, their designated SOS code word, Anne Henderson-Pollard scurried about their house—with a neighbor’s help—sanitizing it. The neighbor subsequently gave the FBI a 70-pound suitcase filled with secret documents, reflecting the volume of Pollard’s activities and sloppiness.

Despite transferring thousands of documents to his Israeli handlers, Pollard failed to gain asylum at the embassy on that day in 1985. Backpedaling furiously, Israel first labeled Pollard a rogue agent, as his handlers worked out of a shadowy organization called Lekem, the Defense Ministry’s Bureau for Scientific Relations. The department, headed by the legendary Mossad man Rafi Eitan, was disbanded shortly after Pollard’s arrest. Israel granted Pollard citizenship in 1995—long after such a move could have done him any good. And it wasn’t until 1998 that Israel finally acknowledged what everyone knew: Pollard had been an authorized agent spying for Israel.

An American Jew’s arrest as an Israeli spy was upsetting enough for American Jews. But Pollard’s defense made the affair excruciating. Minimizing the thousands of dollars he earned, the diamond-and-sapphire ring the Israelis gave him, and his efforts to shop American secrets to South Africa and possibly Pakistan, too, Pollard portrayed himself as a Zionist idealist. Anti-Semites bullied him as a child, he recalled. He claimed that the documents he smuggled out, so crucial to Israeli security, should have been shared freely. And, using a most obnoxious and threatening term, he said a “racial obligation” compelled him, as a Jew, to defend the Jewish state.

Suddenly, amid Ronald Reagan’s resurgence of hard-bodied patriotic machismo, in the age of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo and Clint Eastwood’s tough-guy “make my day” taunt, a balding, mustachioed, jowly-faced American Jewish nerd in glasses was betraying the red, white, and blue for the blue and white. Pollard’s crimes epitomized Zionism-run-amok, with the ideological implications of Jewish tribal solidarity pushed to its extreme.

“I feel my husband and I did what we were expected to do, and what our moral obligation was as Jews, what our moral obligation was as human beings, and I have no regrets about that,” Anne Pollard said defiantly on 60 Minutes shortly before being sentenced, one of many arrogant, self-destructive moves the couple made back then. While stirring up the terrifying “dual loyalty” charge—far more terrifying to Jews than to Irish-Americans and other hyphenated Americans—the Pollards defined every Jew’s ultimate loyalty as being to the Jewish state. Desperately repudiating the charge, the prominent academic Jacob Neusner would declare America to be the true “promised land.”

This American Jewish skittishness regarding Pollard was particularly surprising because by the 1980s American Jews were thriving in America’s suburban meritocracy. Some American Jewish superstars were accented immigrants like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, Elie Wiesel. But most American Jewish success stories were 100 percent American. Speaking unaccented English, they were supposed to be unscarred psychologically, unapologetically American.

***

American Jews had been here before. Three decades before Pollard made headlines, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s arrest, trial, and conviction as Soviet spies for stealing atomic secrets rendered the American Jews’ nightmare scenario in pinkish hues. But in the 1950s, American Jews were greener, more marginal. Julius Rosenberg represented the intellectual, foreign-born, New York Jew as Communist, at a time when Communism was disproportionately popular among Jews.

With the Rosenbergs—as with the Pollards—the rightness of finding them guilty was often confused with the wrongness of their punishment. The zeal with which they were prosecuted, the way Judge Irving Kaufman presided over their trial, and Ethel Rosenberg’s unjust execution along with her husband, all suggested something deeper in both the American Jewish psyche and the larger American political culture. The American legal establishment particularly enjoyed prosecuting these treasonous Jews, while many American Jews leapt to prove their own loyalty—at the Rosenbergs’ expense.

Just as in the Rosenberg case, the judge presiding over Pollard’s sentencing was swayed to render too harsh a punishment—a decision that kicked up new waves of suspicion and anxiety.

In an effort to keep his wife out of prison, Pollard pleaded guilty to one count of espionage. His wife, Anne, then 26, pleaded guilty to the milder charge of illegally possessing classified documents. In return, the prosecutor asked the judge to punish Pollard with a “substantial number of years in prison.” During the sentencing phase, one voice proved damningly influential. In a secret 46-page-pre-sentencing “damage-assessment memorandum” sent to the judge—and an additional four-page memo that was recently declassified—Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger made a fierce argument. “It is difficult … to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel,” wrote Weinberger, before adding—malevolently and unnecessarily—that Pollard’s “loyalty to Israel transcends his loyalty to the United States.”

Judge Aubrey Robinson Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, sentenced Jonathan Pollard to life in prison and his wife to five years. (After Anne Henderson-Pollard served three-and-a-half years, she was paroled. Jonathan Pollard divorced her so she could rebuild her life without him.) The sentence was surprisingly harsh. By comparison, in 1987 Sgt. Clayton Lonetree, who’d been seduced by a Soviet agent, became the first Marine ever convicted of espionage. His crimes compromised agents and the American embassy in Moscow. Yet a military court—under Weinberger’s direct authority—sentenced Lonetree to 30 years in prison, and he eventually served nine years. Richard Miller, an FBI agent who spied for the Soviets in the 1980s, served 13 years. Spies for other allies, like Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Egypt, and the Philippines, served anywhere from two to four years, with maximum sentences of 10 years. Pollard’s extreme sentence—along with the continuing refusal to free him–has raised questions about official American anti-Semitism and whether Pollard is enduring harsher punishment for the crime of being an American Jew spying for Israel.

Given that neither Weinberger nor Robinson ever explained their actions, the Pollard case remained shrouded in this noxious mystery. Years later, Weinberger would skip over the case in his memoirs and, when asked about the omission, would dismiss the Pollard case as a “very minor matter.” But it’s clear that his accusation that Pollard committed “treason”—and harmed the nation—had a devastating impact.

In his recent letter, Lawrence Korb suggested that Weinberger, his former boss, had exaggerated the damage Pollard caused and that an anti-Semitic bias distorted the case. From the start, some speculated that Weinberger, who had Jewish grandparents but was a devout Episcopalian, sacrificed Pollard to exorcise his own ancestral demons. There was something about this pudgy, sloppy, unapologetic Jewish spy for Israel that repulsed Weinberger. Weinberger was also one of the Reagan Administration’s leading Israel skeptics. Caught in a power struggle with the pro-Israel Secretary of State George Shultz, Weinberger usually viewed the Jewish state as more albatross than asset.

More benign observers guessed that the secrets Pollard spilled did more damage to U.S. interests than Pollard or the Israelis suggested. Perhaps, some argued, Russian spies secured key codes thanks to Israeli-based KGB agents. Others assumed Pollard received instructions from a higher-level mole who remains unexposed. After Aldrich Ames’ arrest for spying in 1994, some speculated that Weinberger and others may have blamed Pollard for the damage Ames had actually caused, including the deaths of as many as 10 CIA assets. The author John Loftus and others theorized that Ames, who was a top CIA counter-intelligence official, probably pinned his own crimes on Pollard. In 1995, Moment magazine editor Hershel Shanks would quote Loftus quoting naval intelligence “sources” who admitted that “90 percent of the things we accused [Pollard] of stealing, he didn’t even have access to.”

***

After Pollard’s sentencing, New York Times columnist William Safire warned that Pollard encouraged “anti-Semites who charge that Jews everywhere are at best afflicted with dual loyalty and at worst are agents of a vast fifth column.” Issuing a personal declaration of independence from Israel, Safire proclaimed: “American supporters of Israel cannot support wrongdoing here or there. In matters of religion and culture, many of those supporters are American Jews, but in matters affecting national interest and ultimate loyalty, the stonewalling leaders of Israel will learn to think of us as Jewish Americans.”

But one keen observer of American Jewry, the political scientist Daniel Elazar, noticed that it was American Jews—and not their non-Jewish neighbors—who were actually raising the dual-loyalty specter, “apparently in the hope of preventing the issue from surfacing by raising the charge in order to deny it. Even more frequently, it was raised by Jews in the media, most of whom were highly assimilated but still apparently needed to demonstrate their ‘bona fides’ as Americans.” Elazar concluded: “The level of American Jewish insecurity is astounding.”

American Jews still viewed themselves and their community as on probation in the United States, with their ultimate acceptance conditional on good behavior. This pathology would be stated clearly, if unconsciously, years later, by one of the highest-ranking Jews in American history, who served his country nobly as director of naval intelligence from 1978 to 1982 and yanked Pollard’s security clearance—temporarily—years before the spying began. Rear Admiral Sumner Shapiro sounded like a scared yid when discussing Pollard. Annoyed at fringe American Jewish groups that defended Pollard, Shapiro told the Washington Post in 1998: “We work so hard to establish ourselves and to get where we are, and to have somebody screw it up … and then to have Jewish organizations line up behind this guy and try to make him out a hero of the Jewish people, it bothers the hell out of me.”

All minorities want to celebrate their tribal successes as reflecting the best of their people without being tarred when one of their own acts poorly. And given the torturous history of anti-Semitism, American Jews feel this intensely. We circulate lists of Jewish Nobel prize winners, delighting in each American Jewish success, using Jewish achievements to validate our rich but complex Jewish baggage. And while we reserve the right to cringe when a Bernard Madoff becomes the modern face of the greedy Jew or a Jonathan Pollard becomes the modern face of the traitorous Jew, we also reserve the right to object when our neighbors make similar leaps from the one bad apple to the whole bunch.

Nearly two years after Pollard’s arrest, with the sentencing returning the case to the headlines, the Israeli academic Shlomo Avineri zeroed in on this American Jewish insecurity—and inconsistency. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, first condemning Pollard as a traitor and his own government as clumsy, Avineri mocked the “nervousness, insecurity, and even cringing” of American Jews. Playing the role of the abrasive Israeli—or biblical prophet—Avineri wrote: “Today, American Jewish leaders by their protestations of over-zealous loyalty to the United States at a moment when no one is really questioning it, are saying that America in the long run is no different from France and Germany. When you have to over-identify, there is no other proof needed that you think that your non-Jewish neighbors are looking askance at your Americanism. You are condemned by your own protestations of loyalty and flag-waving.” At a time when Israel’s actions made it unpopular with many American Jews, Avineri’s aggressively Zionist analysis only exacerbated tensions.

***

The controversy–and speculation–peaked during the Wye River negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in October 1998. Benjamin Netanyahu, in his first round as Israel’s prime minister, lobbied hard for Pollard’s release. President Bill Clinton seemed set to free him as a sweetener to Israel until the CIA director, George Tenet, threatened to resign. Such power politicking against a spy who had been imprisoned for over a decade reinforced both camps’ speculation. Those who fear anti-Semitism say this irrational move reflects a deep aversion in the WASP-iest bastions of the American government. Those who believe Pollard did more damage than we know insist that the usually mild-mannered Tenet had a good reason to be so rigid.

To Israeli settlers, Pollard’s case symbolizes the anti-Semitism of even benign non-Jewish polities such as the United States and the weak-kneed appeasement policies of successive Israeli governments, which have failed to free Pollard. The most popular pro-Pollard bumper sticker in Israel simply appeals for Pollard to come home “haBaytah,” but a few years ago one poster challenged: “BUSH: FREE YOUR CAPTIVE.” This poster not only targeted a good friend of Israel’s, George W. Bush, but it pictured Pollard with the young Israeli Hamas is holding, Gilad Shalit. The implicit comparisons, between the innocent Shalit and the guilty Pollard, as well as between the democratic United States and the terrorist-state Hamas, were offensive. While the right’s support has sustained Pollard emotionally, it may have made his get-out-of-jail card even harder to get. The Israeli right is unpopular with both the American Jewish community and the American political establishment, making Pollard even more unappealing.

***

However unappealing he may be, the time has come to free Jonathan Pollard—not as some sop to Israelis but as a matter of justice. Holding an individual hostage to the vagaries of the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process is cruel and unusual punishment. The Pollard case has become a question of justice, American-style, unrelated to American-Israeli relations. And justice when applied too zealously becomes unjust. For decades, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil-rights organizations have taught that we take up certain criminals’ cases not because we like the criminals or excuse their crimes but because, at a certain point, it becomes the right thing to do.

Imagine another case in which an accused man served a disproportionately long sentence after being tried in a court where direct pressure was applied by the secretary of Defense for reasons that may well have been mistaken or personally motivated. If there was another such case, one imagines that it would attract lots of attention from the ACLU and other groups concerned with the civil liberties of Americans. So why are they silent? More to the point, why are we silent?

If the Pollard case represents the worst of American anti-Semitism, then, by historic standards, anti-Semitism American style is mild indeed. Still, that American Jews, despite their long record of defending the underdog, still hestitate to champion Pollard’s release now, suggests that we—like Jonathan Pollard—remain victims of the “astounding” insecurity Elazar witnessed two decades ago.

Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University in Montreal and a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, is the author of six books on American history and Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today.

1. “Charlie decided we needed more alcohol to enjoy the experience fully. To our amazement, he was able to convince a stagehand that Willie Nelson needed some beer. The guy dutifully went out and bought the beer with Charlie’s money. Charlie left one case for Willie and snuck one back to us. We hunched over in our seats and drank like thirst-ravaged wanderers.”

2. “I underwent medical tests to prove that I was drug free. … Then Nixon resigned.”

3. “You don’t realize what a weird place you’re growing up in.”

4. “We lived in a tiny apartment and shared a bathroom with—depending on whom you ask—either one or two prostitutes.”

5. “If you are going to f— me, you better give me a kiss first.”

6. “This little bearded Jewish gnome who would sit naked out in the garden and sort of spew down at people who drove by. He was going through his naturist stage, which was a bit terrifying for Long Island.”

7. “I went on racking my memory for a single dry day over the past few weeks; then the past month; then longer. I could not remember one. Drinking had become a habit. I have a habitual personality.”

8. “I can’t remember any sense of fear or apprehension about quitting. It was just, this is what has to be done, and it has to be done now.”

9. “I knew what she was thinking. I had talked about quitting before, and nothing had come of it. What she didn’t know was that this time I had changed on the inside—and that would enable me to change my behavior forever.”

10. “‘Are my testicles black?’”

ANSWERS
1. Decision Points.

2. Life.

3. Life.

4. Decision Points.

5. Decision Points.

6. Life.

7. Decision Points.

8. Life.

9. Decision Points.

10. Decision Points. (The author is quoting his father,George H. W. Bush.)

“Revolutionaries-for-a-weekend should never get hangovers,” wrote Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night. No doubt a few over-eager attendees at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Saturday rally on the National Mall in Washington conceived of themselves as latter-day Pentagon-levitators—the anti-Vietnam War activists of Mailer’s armies—much as one over-eager columnist conceived of herself and her generation (which is to say, my generation) as going down to our very own Yasgur’s Farm. But I am here to tell you that the operative word in the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” was “and/or.” The event could have been whatever you wanted it to be, which meant that it was nothing at all. It’s not exactly what a Mall rally the weekend before the midterms called for.

At least Mailer’s point about the hangover remained applicable. After a too-long trip for coffee—nobody, not the coffee shops or the Metro Authority (which hauled a record-for-a-Saturday 825,437 passengers) or the organizers themselves guessed the event would draw remotely so many people—a few of us took the bus south down 11th Street toward the Mall. One imagines L’Enfant designed the city for just these sorts of days: a bright, warm fall afternoon, when the denizens of the jagged, swampy hills of the north would pour into the sunken, flat expanse of the Mall, with its undeniable symmetry and open access, and engage in some imagined future ritual of democracy.

But the rush of people met a dam just north of the Mall, where an hourglass effect and an ill-placed row of Porta-Potties made things unpleasantly impenetrable. The next 45 minutes were a slow slog eastward toward the Capitol through a three-dimensional, fluid wall of people, emerging behind the stage, where people with press passes and people who knew people with press passes mingled in an almost pastoral setting with passersby and Human Rights Campaign volunteers.

It was here that the actor Sam Waterston, driving past, took a sneak picture of me.

I knew that Waterston had already spoken not because I could hear him—the audio was truly terrible, which no doubt helped cause the mass exodus that began well before the event was through—but because I could make out his show’s trademark chung-chung sound, which bracketed what I now know was Waterston’s stentorian, deadpan reading of a Colbert-penned ode to fear. (“Did you hear that? No? You’re probably going deaf./ It’s your kids back home cooking up some crystal meth.”) But I admit I was surprised when Waterston, sitting alone in the back of a black Town Car that inched away from behind the stage, snapped the picture of me—me in my corduroy sport coat, earnestly striving to look professional on the theory that maybe there would actually be something to cover—backed by the rest of the crowd. He had a giddy, grandfatherly smile on his face, which confirmed my sense that I was at the rally less to stand for a certain set of principles (there was no set of principles) or to be entertained (as I said, you couldn’t hear a thing), but to be an extra in the cast of exactly the sort of non-event alchemized by warm, young bodies and media hype into Great American Spectacle—exactly the sort of non-event, in other words, that Jon Stewart, in his more pious moods, gets a kick out of shaking his head at with a fake non-grin on his face.

Having a grandfatherly television actor appropriate my youthful mojo for his iPhone collection was merely the most focused part of the spectacle, which tried to package itself as irony but was actually something much more depressing and wrong. The rallygoers’ signs—like that from the above-mentioned Earthling—seemed more dedicated to showing off the makers’ wit than anything else. And the hosts’ fundamental message, too—despite Stewart’s celebrated appeal to media decency toward the event’s end—was one of irony made impotent by context: that the best way to beat back the extremists storming the gates of the mainstream is to laugh at them. Stewart had up to 250,000 people watching him, depending on the estimate. But, as Stalin said of the pope, how many divisions has he got?

This is the back of my sign.

While the rally’s opportunity cost was arguably great—a liberal could plausibly see it as a gigantic missed chance—it was basically a poorly run party that confirmed Stewart’s downward trajectory from exciting comedian to, at times, important political spokesperson to, now, the second and no doubt lesser coming of Al Franken. Stewart’s somber, deeply boring speech, which lectured the press that it ought to “hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen,” was so trite and bland that it cannot be taken seriously even by not-serious people. It was as though Stewart were determined to be for the mushy middle what Colbert is for the Fox News right: a parody. And even this character was undercut every step of the way by Stewart’s need to be the comedian, the better to excuse himself for not taking a stronger stand. “The press is our immune system,” he declared. “If we overreact to everything we actually get sicker, and perhaps eczema.” Chuckles.

When I first heard that Jon Stewart was going to hold a rally in favor of moderation, I smelled a rat. Moderation is neither good nor bad: Certain people are right about things, and certain other people are wrong about those things, and how moderate they are has zero bearing on how right or wrong they are. Moreover, Stewart’s moderation happens to be particularly false and damaging, because, say what you will about the demerits of the fringe left and the fringe right, the fringe left is, well, on the fringe, while the fringe right is about to unseat the majority leader of the Senate, win several other Senate and House races, collect hundreds of millions of dollars in donations and book royalties and speaking fees, and have a big impact on the selection of the Republican Party’s standard-bearer for 2012 and what he or she will stand for.

Jon Stewart speaks at least in part as a man with a job dependent on ratings. He is paid to get high ratings by a corporation. Stewart’s a smart guy, and so his corporate interests would naturally make him afraid of actual liberalism—the perfect explanation for his adoption of anti-liberal moderation. Those ratings, meanwhile, are about to face their greatest threat yet, as the one talk-show host with similarly strong cred with the young’uns, Conan O’Brien, has a new show that just happens to start at the same time as Stewart’s and just happens to debut next Monday. And, hey, didn’t Stewart’s crew just publish a new book?

I was upset that so much of my generational cohort failed to see this, that so many would even be able to have a good time. I felt betrayed. I became obsessed; one late night, I found myself adapting Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America” and emailing a few friends:

Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Jon Stewart?
I’m obsessed by Jon Stewart.
I watch him every day.
His show stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I watch it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility.
Everybody’s serious but me.

As it turns out, I was much more serious than the event demanded. Stewart will never have the influence of Ginsberg’s totem of irresistible and rotten Americana: midcentury Time magazine.

Everything will probably be OK.

Incidentally, if you’ve read David Brooks, you’ll know that my generation’s Woodstock will be not this but some networking get-together. Whatever this was, though, I arrived on Friday night via Greenbelt, Md., near where Interstate 95 dead-ends into the Capitol Beltway. The buses from New York to downtown D.C. had sold out over a week before, no doubt because of the rally; mine stopped first in Baltimore and then deposited me and about a dozen others, many of whom, I gathered, were headed for a homecoming weekend of tailgating in College Park (Maryland would crush Wake Forest, 62-14), at a half-empty parking lot abutted by an office park and the terminus of the Washington Metro’s Green Line.

“I’m wonderful! I’m great!” chirps Rep. Shelley Berkley as she scoops ground coffee into a four-cup Black & Decker in her suburban Vegas home on the first morning of Rosh Hashanah. We’re headed out to stop at four different synagogues. “I’ve got to be the luckiest person in the world!” she says.

In this autumn of mass discontent with incumbents in general and Democrats in particular, the six-term congresswoman with nominal 2010 opposition is counting her blessings. At 59, she’s arrived at the place she’s always wanted to be, recognized as one of the most strident, hawkish pro-Israel voices in Washington while not sacrificing a bit of her brassy, Vegas-style pizzazz or otherwise strident left-leaning views. Even the evangelical Christian activist Gary Bauer says of Berkley: “Oh, I like her a lot. I think she’s gutsy, she’s articulate, she has a lot of flair.”

Indeed, her only real political quandary right now is whether to continue to, as she likes to say, bloom where she’s planted in the House of Representatives, or seek grander glory. She is Nevada’s only safe federal Democrat this year—a notable contrast, in particular, to her mentor, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—and her state’s other Senate seat is likely to be contested in 2012 thanks to a sex scandal hounding its Republican occupant, John Ensign. She openly wonders whether she might do even more for her two primary causes, Nevada and Israel, from Congress’ upper chamber.

“I wouldn’t have a primary,” she tells a Chabad rabbi during our day together. “I would capture the Democratic primary without a problem. I have to decide if I’m willing to forgo a sure thing to go for the gold. If I lose, then I’m out. I’d be risking a lot.”

Few politicians do this sort of deliberating and strategizing so publicly, but Berkley is also the sort to call out her own party’s president when she sees him making what she views as grave missteps on Israel. Fewer still would, as Berkley did on Rosh Hashanah, empathize with an irate Jewish constituent and say that President Barack Obama has “blown it” with the Jews.

Then again, Berkley is also willing to stand at the end of her driveway in triple-digit heat waving down a tardy, lost reporter arriving for an interview and then sit him on a breakfast-bar stool to make him coffee. She serves that brew in a blue plastic mug that reads “My favorite congresswoman Shelley Berkley,” and then when I wonder what my journalist colleagues would think of me drinking from it, jokes with a dismissive wave and a cackle, “Oh, puleeze, they all have their own!”

Then, clad in a bold fuchsia suit jacket, a monochrome-swirled skirt, and black-and-white polka-dot shoes she brags she bought at DSW, she drives us away in the Ford Fusion hybrid she recently purchased to replace her gas-guzzling Cadillac. (She drives a SmartCar in D.C.)

We’re en route to Temple Beth Shalom for her aliyah, for which she’ll take out the tiny piece of gum she’s always chewing and leave it in a scrap of tissue on her seat. That seat is at the front row of the sanctuary’s second section, where worshippers must walk by her and she can schmooze.

This is her shul, the one she has belonged to since she was a 12-year-old Rochelle Levine and her parents moved her and her sister here from the Catskills to outrun her father’s gambling debts. The Levines had planned to relocate to California, but her parents were entranced by the glitter of the Strip after a detour to see the Hoover Dam, so they stayed. Las Vegas had about 130,000 residents then, and it had one synagogue.

“The first thing my father did when we got here was go down to the union hall and get a job, and the first thing my mother did was join the temple,” she recalls. It was the summer of 1963, and her dad became a waiter at the Sands Hotel-Casino.

Politics entered Berkley’s bloodstream quite early, motivated as much as anything by the tales her grandmothers relayed of the shtetls her family came from and the Nazi genocide that occurred there. “I wanted to be in a position that, God forbid anything were to happen to my people like what happened in the Holocaust, I would be in a position to help stop it,” she tells me. “When I decided to do this, I decided I was going to be a Jew who happened to be an elected official. I wear my Jewishness on my sleeve. I don’t apologize for it to anybody.”

She first became president of Las Vegas B’nai B’rith Girls, and later she was UNLV student body president. She worked on successful state assembly campaigns in 1968 for two political novices who would become U.S. senators, Reid and Richard Bryan. Berkley paid for her law degree by serving cocktails in Strip casinos, then she served a term in the state assembly and two on the board of regents before her 1998 election to Congress.

That was a heady transition. She attended the 1999 state dinner for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and a breakfast for Jewish members of Congress the following morning at which Barak predicted that a peace deal would come within 18 months.

“I walked out of that breakfast thinking, ‘I’ve only been here five months. I’ve already brought peace to the Middle East,’ ” Berkley says as we sit in the Beth Shalom lobby after her aliyah. “I thought, ‘What is so difficult?’ The reality is not so easy. I remember being interviewed and telling people what happened in the breakfast, but then the peace track with Syria fell apart because Assad demanded Israel give back the Golan Heights before they would sit down. That wasn’t going to happen. Arafat continued and continued and continued until he had wrung out every concession he could make. At Camp David, Israel offered 97 percent of the West Bank, control of Gaza, control of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, and Arafat walked away, started the second Intifada.”

Those early years set the tone for Berkley’s tenure in Washington. To her, it proved that the Palestinians don’t want peace, they want the destruction of Israel, and so it is incumbent upon the United States to stand firmly beside Israeli leaders almost no matter what.

That explains her rocky relationship with the president. Berkley was a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter who endorsed Obama only after Clinton conceded the nomination and only after Obama called and pledged his support for Israel as well as his opposition to storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, one of the top local issues for Nevada.

Then she was apoplectic when the administration “drew a line that didn’t need to be drawn” by condemning West Bank settlements in May 2009. Berkley believes Obama is trying to—and can—recover, and that his performance during the flotilla crisis was “excellent,” but that there is a genuine mistrust in the activist Jewish community toward the Democratic president.

“Nothing is irretrievable,” she says, shortly after making the remark to the constituent that Obama had “blown it” with the Jews. “But right now he’s in a very bad place with the organized Jewish community.”

She’s pleased to see Rahm Emanuel depart as Obama’s chief of staff. Berkley, who chairs a semi-annual gathering of Jewish legislators from the European Union and the United States, recalls often being asked why Emanuel wasn’t doing more for the Israeli agenda. Berkley and Emanuel, former colleagues in Congress, “weren’t the closest of friends then and nothing much has changed,” she says. Meanwhile, while she faults President George W. Bush for many things during his presidency, she believes the Republican president was more personally committed to Israel than Obama.

It’s this sort of blunt talk that impresses folks like Bauer, the former president of the Family Research Council now on the executive board of Christians United for Israel. The two part ways on virtually every other issue, but on this they’ve formed an unlikely friendship.

“I think she’s a leader in this regard,” says Bauer, who recalls Berkley receiving the most rousing applause of any speaker at his group’s annual convention in July from a crowd he described as “overwhelming conservative, Christian, and pro-life.” “There are other people on Capitol Hill that will privately say to their constituents, ‘Of course I’m with Israel and I’m talking to the White House behind the scenes’ to get the policy better. But she’s been willing to say it publicly. This is the way you can tell when a political figure really feels something in their heart.”

Because of her prominence on Israel, Berkley’s own constituents occasionally seem to forget how liberal she is. She supports abortion rights, same-sex marriage, the Obama stimulus efforts, and the health reform bill. On Rosh Hashanah, as she dropped in on one Jewish group after the next, several people cornered her to explain her refusal to condemn the planned Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero in New York. The Chabad rabbi was particularly upset.

“You know what also made me crazy,” Berkley retorts in a thick New York accent, still intact despite a near half-century in Nevada. “Two things. First of all, I didn’t like the fact that opponents keep calling that area ‘hallowed grounds.’ This is downtown New York. There’s a porno place, a bar, and tattoo parlor. Not exactly hallowed ground. And, number two, I’m very cognizant of the fact that we are such a small minority and I thought if a Jewish congresswoman starts condemning other religions and building where they have the right quite frankly to build, that’s going to turn around on us.”

Berkley happens to be on fairly good terms with the Muslim community in Las Vegas. A Muslim friend, Dr. Ikram Khan, played shadkhen in arranging her first date with her second husband, Dr. Larry Lehrner, and Berkley says Lehrner’s practice is half Muslim. The day after our Rosh Hashanah tour, she visited a mosque to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Aslam Abdullah, the executive director of the Islamic Society of Nevada, says he finds Berkley to be accessible, friendly, and respectful.

Accessible, indeed. This is a congresswoman who admitted to me on my “The Strip” podcast in 2006 that she missed a vote on Gulf Coast relief after Hurricane Katrina because she was recovering from plastic surgery. (Republicans reacted with a press release, which still makes her giggle.) She happily indulged the hounding cameras of TMZ.com in July 2009 on why she supported a posthumous Congressional honor for Michael Jackson because of his ties to Las Vegas. And as she walks me around her home pointing out her favorite tchochkes, we wind up in her bathroom taking stock of the framed pictures from exotic worldwide destinations she and her husband have visited.

“I love being the congresswoman from Las Vegas and a lot of the bright clothes and the bling and all,” she says. “I have an image I want to portray. I reflect the glitz and the glitter of the community I represent. And every now and then I take a step back and I just can’t believe that I am fortunate enough to be doing what I’m doing. I’m the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants who couldn’t speak English, and I’m a member of the House of Representatives. I mean, how amazing is that?”

Steve Friess is a Las Vegas-based writer who blogs at VegasHappensHere.com and contributes regularly to the Daily Beast and AOL News.

“David is, I think, the most important man in America right now,” Beck said in July, introducing one of Barton’s many appearances on his show. In addition to being a frequent TV guest of Beck’s, Barton is also one of three professors at Beck’s online school, Beck University. He was a member of the expert panel that created Texas’ controversial new history standards, which played down Thomas Jefferson and played up John Calvin. In September, he spoke at a rally for Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, where he was billed as a “constitutional scholar.” Later this month, he and Newt Gingrich will headline a meeting for Nevada pastors at a Las Vegas resort, meant to mobilize them ahead of the upcoming elections.

“Barton’s role in the Tea Party movement is much like it’s been in the Republican Party for the last decade,” says Dan Quinn, communications director of the Texas Freedom Network, a civil liberties group that has watched Barton for years. “He is acting as an intellectual resource for them. He gives them the words in their increasingly extremist vocabulary. On the right he has become this great icon of American historical scholarship, when he’s anything but.”

In fact, Barton doesn’t have any historical training all. His sole academic degree is a bachelor’s in religious education from Oral Roberts University—though given the right’s rampant populism, his fans are unlikely to care about his lack of credentials. Barton’s past association with white supremacists and Holocaust deniers might be more damaging, if anyone paid attention. Still, he’s gotten much more sophisticated about race over the last two decades. These days, he’s more likely to be hurling accusations of racism than fending them off.

Barton built his career by arguing, via a selective reading of documents from the Founding Fathers, that the Constitution is rooted in biblical values and that the founders never intended to separate church and state. He claims, falsely, that 52 of the 55 founding fathers were “orthodox, evangelical Christians,” and that they always intended for Christianity to shape American government. Public secularism, in his view, constitutes an unconstitutional tyranny that is systematically robbing the country of its religious heritage.

This is in many ways an old story. People who write about the religious right—myself included—have often marveled at the intricacy and resilience of the movement’s carefully wrought alternative history. The Anti-Defamation League was criticizing Barton as far back as 1994, writing in one report: “This ostensible scholarship functions in fact as an assault on scholarship: in the manner of other recent phony revisionisms, the history it supports is little more than a compendium of anecdotes divorced from their original context, linked harum-scarum and laced with factual errors and distorted innuendo.”

Yet Barton just keeps getting more powerful and more mainstream. His public career began in the late 1980s when, he has written, God ordered him to the library to investigate the ostensible correlation between the end of state-mandated school prayer and declines in SAT scores. “I didn’t know why,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1988 America: To Pray Or Not To Pray?, “but I somehow knew that these two pieces of information would be very important.”

The next year he published The Myth of Separation, a farrago of quotes torn from context and outright misinformation. It claimed, wrongly, that Thomas Jefferson described the wall of separation between church and state as “one directional,” keeping the state out of the church while maintaining “Christian principles in government.” It also falsely attributed a quote to James Madison, that the government’s future was “staked upon the Ten Commandments.” He later issued an extended correction for these and other mistakes, though that hasn’t stopped them from being repeated endlessly online.

Barton found an eager audience for his Christian nationalist history on the right-wing fringe. In 1991, as the ADL has reported, he spoke at a summer gathering of Scriptures for America, a group founded by Pete Peters, a pastor in the Christian Identity movement. Christian Identity holds that Anglo-Saxons are the true children of Israel, while Jews are the Satanic offspring of Eve’s liaison with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Black people, according to Christian Identity theology, are a separate species of “mud people.” Other speakers at the meeting were Holocaust denier Malcolm Ross and white supremacist Richard Kelly Hoskins. Barton was advertised as “a new and special speaker” who would ask, “Was it the plan of our forefathers that America be the melting pot home of various religions and philosophies?” (One can assume that the answer was no.) On November 24 of that year, Barton spoke at another Christianity Identity gathering, this one in Oregon. According to the ADL, his self-published books were advertised in “The Watchman,” a Christian Identity publication.

Soon, though, Barton’s star started rising on the mainstream right, and he denounced Christian Identity, claiming that he hadn’t known he was addressing racist groups when he appeared at the movement’s meetings. That sounds implausible—it’s hard to imagine how one might speak at two white supremacist summits in five months by accident. Still, the association didn’t seem to hurt him. By the middle of the 1990s, every major religious right organization marketed Barton’s self-published books. In 1994, Newt Gingrich, then the House minority whip, praised Barton’s “wonderful” and “most useful” work, and, in 1997, Barton was elected vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party. The Bush campaign hired him to do clergy outreach in 2004.

In recent years, Barton has pioneered a new kind of historical revisionism, one that absolves conservative Republicans of any complicity in American racism, which he lays entirely at the feet of Democrats. He points out, correctly, that before 1964, many of the country’s most virulently racist politicians were Democrats. He neglects to mention that they fled to the GOP en masse after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Indeed, in one astonishing document, he attributes Strom Thurmond’s break with the Democrats to his “dramatic change of heart on civil rights issues,” as if the former Dixiecrat had turned Republican out of outrage at segregation. In an equally audacious reinterpretation of history, he paints the founding era as a golden age of racial comity, denying that racism was ever an essential part of America’s DNA.

Such rhetorical maneuvers have been particularly useful to Beck, obsessed as he is with secret histories and a prelapsarian version of the American past. Over the summer, Beck hosted a series of shows he called “Founders’ Fridays,” revisionist forays into American history guided by Barton. Under the guise of teaching black history, Founders’ Fridays argued against the idea that black people had been oppressed by the Revolutionary generation. On July 5, for example, Barton presented a newspaper from the late 18th century that featured the obituary of a black man who had fought in the Revolution. The obituaries, Barton pointed out, were “not broken out black and white. … It’s telling you who’s died, didn’t matter whether were you black or white or anything, you’re a citizen.”

Denying the racial sins of the Founding Fathers makes it easier to deify them—and, in turn, to promote faith in America’s Christian destiny. “In learning about the founders and seeing the heroes that were involved, it only strengthens my view that this was a divine document, the Declaration of Independence,” said Beck at the end of one show. “For the most part, these guys were amazing. And they struggled in their time to do the right thing. You say that they’re not Christians. They were Christians. And they fought for people who weren’t. The same thing with [saying] they were all white. Well, they fought for people who weren’t.”

Barton has given American history an immaculate conception, one that turns slaveholders into civil-rights heroes. He’s helped recreate a myth of a golden age of unimpeachable American righteousness. “[T]he national motto is e pluribus unum, out of many we became one,” said Barton during one of his appearances on Beck. “And we have tried for 20 years to make it e unum pluribus, out of one we’re going to be all these groups.” In some ways Barton hasn’t changed much at all. He’s still making the case against diversity, and coating it in divinity.

Michelle Goldberg is the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World.

Last week’s incident on the border between Lebanon and Israel suggests that even if war between the two countries is not imminent, Hezbollah is making good on its strategic aims regarding not only Israel, but its host nation, Lebanon. Where the Lebanese government and its assorted allies, regional and international, had once hoped that Hezbollah could somehow be persuaded to abandon its arms, become a regular political party, and integrate its units into the army under the control of the Lebanese government, precisely the reverse has happened, and a monster is being born—just as Hezbollah predicted. The Lebanese state, its army, and even its people are being swallowed by the resistance.

It is ironic that Israel has also seen Lebanon as overrun by Hezbollah for some time, so that if (or when) war comes, Hezbollah won’t be the only group to suffer the consequences. Official Israel calls this strategic posture the Dahiya doctrine, after the Hezbollah stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut that was laid to waste in the 2006 war. What the doctrine means is that in the next round of fighting, all of Lebanon will be devastated.

How did this come to pass?

Just 14 months ago, Lebanon’s pro-democracy, U.S.-allied March 14 movement won the parliamentary majority. It seemed Hezbollah was on the defensive. And yet even then the March 14 alliance was showing cracks, as when one of its pillars, Walid Jumblatt, started to distance himself from his local and international allies, including the United States, and inch closer to one-time adversaries Syria and Hezbollah. When I spoke to him last fall, Jumblatt rationalized his tactics by pointing to how the international community, and especially the United States, seemed unwilling to defend its Lebanese allies when Hezbollah overran Beirut in May 2008. The decline of the March 14 alliance then accelerated with the new U.S. administration’s stated intentions to engage Syria. The prospect of President Barack Obama reaching out to Damascus was enough to frighten the Saudis into making amends with Syria before, they feared, Washington could cut a deal and leave Riyadh out in the cold. When the Saudis folded, their clients in Lebanon followed suit, and Prime Minister Saad Hariri went on his knees to the Syrian capital to seek comity with Bashar al-Assad, the man who had his father killed.

Two weeks ago Assad made the return trip: He visited Beirut alongside Saudi King Abdullah, a summit widely misconstrued as a harbinger of stability in Lebanon. This misunderstanding was cleared up last week in the firefight that cost an IDF officer, two Lebanese Armed Forces soldiers, and a Lebanese journalist their lives, an event perhaps best understood as what journalist Hussain Abdul-Hussain calls a “security message.” That is, Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah were intent on reminding everyone that neither the Lebanese government nor its sponsor in Riyadh calls the shots in Lebanon.

What is most moving about the collapse of the March 14 movement, the return of Syrian hegemony to Lebanon, and Hezbollah’s de facto takeover of the state is that the Lebanese have by and large refrained from blaming the United States for their fate. During the time I lived in Beirut from 2004 to 2006, the heyday of the Cedar Revolution, I was regularly asked by anxious Lebanese friends and associates if the United States was genuinely supportive of their popular movement or if Washington intended to sell Lebanon out to the Syrians, as it had when it permitted Damascus free rein throughout the 1990s. How could I answer with any authority, except insofar as I understood the American character? Sometimes I responded, no, we are serious this time; or, who knows, I said, hedging my bets, perhaps; and sometimes I said, probably, yes, invariably.

But now that we have abandoned the Lebanese to the jackals, they have accepted their tragic destiny without accusing us of failing them, as we have.

Most people outside of the Beltway did not really understand the stakes involved in the George W. Bush Administration’s democracy promotion. While the world outside Washington saw the invasion of Iraq as either a revolution in U.S. policy or a conspiracy of greedy corporations and evil special-interest groups, another way to see Bush’s agenda is as an accounting adjustment: Some of the funds that had been typically designated to support Arab militaries were to be diverted into building democratic institutions.

In the case of Lebanon, Bush’s policy curtailed our relationship with Syrian security services and put more money into Lebanese political institutions. U.S. support of the Lebanese Armed Forces was meant to enable the state to extend its sovereignty from border to border. It is hardly surprising that Hezbollah, which embodies the challenge to that state’s sovereignty, understood this better than the Lebanese government. For the last five years, various figures from the March 14 movement have come through Washington to petition for more firepower—planes, tanks, artillery—anything that would serve as evidence that, counter to Hezbollah’s argument, the LAF was capable of defending Lebanon from Israel. That the IDF colonel was killed on the border by a sniper rifle likely provided by the United States—before the U.S. aid package, the LAF had no sniper rifles—may bring that support to an end.

It is an article of faith of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment that the active component of American policy is building and strengthening institutions in faraway places—for instance, a new Iraqi constitution, the Pakistani parliament, the Afghan criminal justice system. The premise of institution-building is that it is not the particular ideas and values of foreign cultures that determine how people in those places live; it is rather the absence of U.S.-style political institutions that have kept these foreigners mired in poverty, or in a constant state of war with their neighbors, or enabled widespread corruption among their political elites.

But this obsession with building political institutions betrays a parochial innocence, a uniquely American discomfort with tragedy. It wasn’t always like this. By and large, our founding fathers were landlocked; Franklin, Jefferson, and the entire Adams family all rolled into one did not see a fraction of the globe that a typical 35-year-old development expert sees today. And yet, unlike foreign aid workers, the founders were familiar with the tragic view of life, which is why they sought to keep this experiment in democracy isolated from the rest of the world and its tragedies.

The United States wanted to help the Lebanese build political institutions but were unwilling to do anything that might alter the balance of power in Lebanon, like make war on Syria—and even that might not have changed anything. When the Lebanese first took to the streets to demand Syria withdraw its troops, I feared they did not understand that they were essentially on their own, that Washington was not going to protect them. But now I see I was wrong. The Lebanese long ago had taken the measure of our character and understood all along that the United States was not going to send troops on their behalf, so when they asked if they were destined to be sold out to the Syrians, what they were really saying was, Are you Americans watching us? We surprised you, didn’t we? We’re sort of heroes, don’t you think?

Since the 2005 murder of Saad’s father, Rafik Hariri, and 22 others in a massive car-bombing, Lebanese officials and journalists have been killed and maimed by the Syrians and their allies, but there are still those in the press attacking Damascus and Hezbollah—even after the Saudis warned the Lebanese prime minister that they don’t want to see any more anti-Syrian polemic in the Hariri-owned media. And this week after Hassan Nasrallah’s televised presentation ostensibly providing irrefutable proof that Israel assassinated Rafik Hariri, Lebanese journalists are mocking the Hezbollah leader. While Nasrallah has claimed that he has intercepted Israeli drone feeds showing that Israel tracked Hariri’s movements, his opponents are questioning whether he hasn’t merely lifted images from Google Earth.

So, who is standing with these Lebanese then? No one, even if they’ve done nothing wrong. In fact, they’ve conducted themselves heroically. But none of that will change the fact that when war comes with Israel, they too will be in harm’s way, and not just Hezbollah, the villains. This is tragic.

It is typical in Lebanon, as throughout the Middle East, to blame one’s fate on Israel. Over the last week I received emails and text messages from Lebanese friends about Israel’s “provocations” on the border. More than once I bit my lip, noting only that somewhere in Israel a family was mourning a father, a son, a brother, a husband because of Hezbollah, who was also their enemy. Too often, innocent Lebanese forget that they are no more innocent than innocent Israelis; the difference is that Israel can and will protect its citizens from Hezbollah while the Lebanese government cannot. It is not fair, it’s tragic. More often than not, the name that this maddening powerlessness and inability to change your own circumstances gives to the inchoate pattern of tragedy in the Middle East is Israel.

Of course, the Middle East is no less tragic for the Israelis than it is for the Lebanese, but that is not to say life is impossible, or, as the saying would have it, that the status quo is unsustainable. Life goes on—sons are born and fathers are murdered. Life as such is sustainable and has been sustained over the course of several thousand years—or long before we Americans entered the scene with our post-tragic ethos. That we can’t imagine that some things do not work out well does not mean they are unsustainable, only that we are incapable of fathoming the depths of tragedy.

“After six Israeli prime ministers and three U.S. presidents failed at the peace process,” Gold says, “you’d think people would stop and say, ‘Let’s think about this, maybe a reassessment is needed.’ ” Instead, he continues, the default reaction is to pick up the shattered relics of Oslo, an approach that tends to ignore the Second Intifada and what he has noted was a 500-percent increase in rocket attacks from Gaza after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal. “In think-tank circles it’s said that we all know what the final settlement looks like,” he says. “But this is binding Israel to a legacy of failed negotiations. If you do that, no one would ever negotiate. What if Medvedev met with Obama and said, ‘Let’s pick up where Reagan left off at Reykjavik?’ ”

The sticking point is that Washington sees a negotiated Palestinian-Israeli agreement as a vital U.S. interest to ensure an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, the White House has been willing to beat up on Netanyahu over settlements in Jerusalem even as Obama seems to be hemorrhaging Jewish political support—and fund-raising—with a midterm election only four months away.

While Gold no longer works for the Israeli government, in his post as president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs he is widely held in Israeli and U.S. circles alike to be close to Netanyahu and his senior staff. “Since I left government service,” says the 56-year-old former academic, “I have been obsessed with the need for Israel to articulate in the public discourse its security requirements in the West Bank.” Netanyahu asked Gold in 1997 to accompany him to the Map Room in the basement of the White House for an intimate meeting with President Bill Clinton and one other official in which the IDF’s concept of defensible borders was laid out to the United States.

While the Palestinians’ political demands are clear (a contiguous state, a capital in Jerusalem), the Israeli side, as Gold wrote in Tablet Magazine last week, “has been far more vague,” dwelling in abstractions like peace and security without clearly articulating what that entails. The project that Gold is now pushing in Washington is meant to fill that vacuum. “Israelis have taken lots of risks for peace,” says Gold. “They should not be in a diplomatic testing ground again.”

The book Israel’s Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace is a collection published this year under the auspices of the JCPA with essays about security and diplomacy by leading figures in Israel’s security establishment, like Maj.-Gen. Aharon Ze’evi Farkash, former head of IDF intelligence, and Maj.-Gen. Uzi Dayan, former IDF deputy chief of staff and a former national security adviser to Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. The volume’s findings represent a broad consensus across the Israeli political spectrum, and the fact that Lt.-Gen. Moshe Yaalon—former IDF chief of staff and currently the vice prime minister—wrote the introduction is evidence that the ideas have won approval at the highest political levels.

The book pushes three common ideas, some likely to add to the friction between Washington and Jerusalem: First, Israel, must not withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines; second, Israel needs defensible borders; third, Israel must rely on itself to defend itself and not on foreign forces as proposed by U.S. national security adviser Gen. James Jones, who has talked openly about replacing the IDF with international forces in the West Bank.

The insistence that Israel must retain the ability to defend its own borders—a basic attribute of national sovereignty—is the least controversial element of Gold’s blueprint. The issue is not merely the inglorious record of U.N. peacekeeping forces—from Sinai to Bosnia and Lebanon—but also the fact that the international community rarely sends its blue helmets into the middle of a real shooting war, which is what the West Bank would become if an IDF withdrawal left Hamas and Fatah at each other’s throats and eager to gain credit for launching terror attacks on Israel.

The concept of defensible borders is closely tied to the drawing of 1949 armistice lines, commonly and incorrectly known as the 1967 borders. As Gold explains in his contribution to the volume, successive U.S. administrations since Lyndon Johnson’s have all recognized the danger in Israel withdrawing to those borders. George Shultz, one of President Ronald Reagan’s secretaries of State, explained that “Israel will never negotiate from or return to the 1967 borders,” and the Clinton Administration reaffirmed the Reagan White House’s concept of defensible borders. However, it was during Clinton’s Camp David negotiations that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak abandoned the idea of defensible borders in the hope of a radical breakthrough with Yasser Arafat. With the outbreak of the Second Intifada and peace nowhere in the offing, the George W. Bush Administration pledged not to hold the Israelis to the Clinton parameters and returned to the traditional U.S. position. “It is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,” reads an April 14, 2004 letter from Bush to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Gold, who was not officially in the Sharon government, was nonetheless employed in a number of missions and prepared Sharon’s presentation to Bush on the significance of defensible borders during their first meeting, in 2001. Gold sat in the Roosevelt Room as Sharon entered the Oval Office with the index cards Gold had written. “Years later, when Sharon completed negotiations over the Bush letter in 2004,” says Gold, “he instructed his team in Washington to call me in Jerusalem to say we got defensible borders into the letter.”

Even as the Bush letter applied regardless of who sat in the White House (it won wide bipartisan approval in the House and Senate, with both Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel voting in favor), the Obama Administration has not yet clearly signaled if it intends to accept the commitments of its predecessor. Insofar as Israel sees the letter as “the foundation for the United States to accept new construction in the Jewish settlements that encircle Jerusalem,” it is yet another source of contention between Netanyahu and Obama.

Perhaps even more daunting is the prospect of any Israeli government having to explain to the Obama White House that many of the land swaps from Camp David are not plausible in the context of defensible borders. In other words, everyone in Washington who believes that they know what Israel’s vision of a final settlement looks like is in for a surprise. Israel will have to retain security control over the Jordan rift valley, which means not just the river bank but the eastern slopes of the West Bank hill ridge. It is important to remember that the West Bank overlooks Israel’s coastal plain and 70 percent of the country’s population. If the Hamas rockets fired from Gaza were launched from the West Bank on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, it could bring Israel to its knees, disrupting the country’s economic and social life on a massive scale and shutting down Ben Gurion Airport. Moreover, Islamist militants from all around the region would attempt to transit through Jordan into the West Bank to launch attacks against the Zionist entity, destabilizing the Hashemite Kingdom.

“The concepts in this book are very close to last Knesset speech of Rabin, given thirty days before he was assassinated,” says Gold. The rhetorical point is clear enough: For all the nostalgia in the United States for a visionary statesman like Rabin, a warrior and also a man of peace, he also articulated most clearly Israel’s need for defensible borders and said nothing about land swaps. If those ideas have been lost in the last 20 years, the Israelis are also to blame. “A lot of Israel’s biggest mistakes is that Israeli diplomats put forward plans and pushed it back to the military,” says Gold. “For instance, Oslo began with two academics, and later representatives of the Foreign Ministry came in. When it became official, that’s when the army came in, at the end. I strongly believe we have to reverse the sequence—to lay out Israel’s security needs and then come out with diplomatic process to protect them.”

There is no going back to Oslo, no matter what the Obama Administration believes or hopes. Perhaps the only thing saving Netanyahu from having to fight with a U.S. president and thereby unnerve the Israeli electorate is the incompetence of the White House. Had Obama not pushed Netanyahu so hard on settlements, twice, he wouldn’t have pushed Mahmoud Abbas into a corner where it was impossible for the Palestinian president to be less intransigent than the United States, thus freezing the diplomatic process.

The paradox of the U.S. president’s sympathy for the Palestinian cause and lack of sympathy for Israeli territorial and security claims is that he has managed to fulfill the dreams of hard-liners on both sides and turn back the clock 20 years to before the ill-fated Oslo process even began. For the first time in two decades, the Palestinians and Israelis are not in direct negotiations. A final Palestinian-Israeli agreement couldn’t be further away, which means that Netanyahu can smile for the cameras and shake the president’s hand and breathe easily, now that he doesn’t have to explain that a peace deal, if it happens, won’t look like what everyone in Washington thinks it will.

Wexler, who arrived late, stood by himself through the hourlong presentation, leaning against a wall near the back of the room with his soft black leather Dell briefcase between his feet. At 49, he was at least a decade younger than most of the other men in attendance, though he sports similarly silvered hair, and he kept his hand pensively over his chin for much of the talk. Dayan expressed his opposition to the current U.S. effort to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations using 1967 borders as the basis for a future Palestinian state. During the question-and-answer session, Wexler raised his hand and asked, pointedly, “General Dayan, how could it be in any respect a smart strategy to treat in this fashion your most important ally?” Dayan looked surprised. “Rabbi Wexler,” he began, before someone at the front corrected him. “I’m not challenging the White House or the so-important friendship with the United States,” Dayan said. “I’m challenging how important borders are.”

Wexler may have been unfamiliar to the general, but others in the room knew exactly who he was. In his six months as president of Abraham’s Center for Middle East Peace, Wexler has adopted an unofficial role as ambassador to the organized American Jewish community. As a congressman, he managed to retain support from both J Street, the dovish two-year-old Israel lobby, and the more conservative AIPAC, which commended him earlier this year as “one of the stalwart leaders of the American-Israel alliance in Congress.” After last week’s luncheon, hosted by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Wexler stayed behind for a quiet tête-à-tête with the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dore Gold, who served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first premiership a decade ago, and who addressed the lunch gathering along with Dayan.

In March 2007, Wexler endorsed Barack Obama, breaking not just with other Jewish Democrats in South Florida but with his own long history as an early and fervent supporter of the Clintons, starting in 1992. Today, he is frequently mentioned as a potential ambassador to Israel—a position currently filled by James Cunningham, a career diplomat who went to Tel Aviv in the waning days of the George W. Bush Administration. “It’s a position he could have at the snap of his fingers,” said Stuart Eizenstat, who served under President Bill Clinton as a special envoy for Holocaust-era claims and is a special State Department adviser to Hillary Clinton on Holocaust issues. “He could do a world of good for the administration, because at the end of the day [the Israelis] have to have trust in the American administration, and there is no one better placed than Bob to make that argument.”

The visit to New York followed a high-profile dinner Wexler and Abraham hosted at Washington’s Newseum for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during his visit to Washington in early June. The guest list included the billionaire publisher Mort Zuckerman and Lee Rosenberg, an Obama supporter who is currently the president of AIPAC, along with political heavyweights like Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, and Stephen Hadley, who held the job under George W. Bush, and his former deputy, Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Middle Eastern affairs under Bush. The center Wexler runs is “a meeting spot where people from all segments of the community can come together and hear reasonable points of view,” said J Street President Jeremy Ben Ami, who was also at the event.

Publicly, Wexler is probably best known for his 2006 appearance on Comedy Central’s satire show The Colbert Report, on which Stephen Colbert coaxed him into repeating the sentence: “I enjoy cocaine because it’s fun to do.” Wexler spent a dozen years representing Boca Raton, one of the most Jewish and most reliably Democratic districts in the House of Representatives. As a member of the influential Foreign Affairs committee, he was particularly active in establishing a congressional caucus on U.S.-Turkish relations and went out of his way to travel to places like Saudi Arabia and Syria, where, according to an account in Wexler’s autobiography, Fire-Breathing Liberal, President Bashar al-Assad gave him messages to carry to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

“Serving in government is an extraordinary honor, whether it’s in Congress or in any other capacity, but there are other ways to participate in a meaningful way as well,” Wexler said in an interview in late June. We were in his Washington office, on the fifth floor of a building overlooking the colonnaded Navy Memorial plaza along Pennsylvania Ave., where he keeps the bronze plaque from the entrance to his old House office leaning against the windowsill. Framed photographs of him posing with various leaders—Netanyahu, Sharon, Obama, King Abdullah—compete for space with framed newspaper clippings from his Florida political career.

Wexler, who was in shirtsleeves, favors blue ties that match his eyes and tends to rap his fingertips on tabletops when he is particularly emphatic about a point he’s making. He refused to say whether he had been offered the ambassadorship, formally or informally. (The White House declined to comment for this story.) But Wexler has publicly, and repeatedly, said his decision to leave Congress was motivated in part by financial concerns—he has three teenage children—and acquaintances speculate that his hesitance about returning to government service, even as an ambassador, stems from the same pressures. (Members of Congress are paid $174,000 annually; Wexler declined to disclose his current salary, which is not reflected in the Center’s most recent financial filings.) Over the years, Wexler explained, “Danny would joke with me and ask when I was going to leave Congress and get a real job.” The jibe turned into a real prospect after Obama’s election invigorated Abraham about the prospects for reaching a peace agreement—an irony, he added, since Abraham, a longtime supporter of the Clintons, had initially been sharply critical of his decision to back Obama. Now he shuttles around on extra-diplomatic excursions—Israel and the West Bank, Turkey, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan—aboard Abraham’s private jet.

Abraham, an 85-year-old World War II veteran, founded the Center for Middle East Peace in 1989, with Wayne Owens, a Democratic congressman from Utah who had served on the foreign affairs and intelligence committees, at its helm. Together, the pair met with Yasser Arafat in 1989, in Tunisia, then an extraordinary step, and went on to cultivate relationships with leaders across the Middle East. “They would come see us and the national security adviser and occasionally the president to brief us on meetings they’d had with various Israeli and Arab leaders and give us ideas,” said Robert Malley, who served on the staff of the National Security Council and as a special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs in the Clinton Administration. He recalled that Abraham had called the White House from Israel with both Ehud Barak and Arafat on the line after the failure of negotiations at Camp David. Of Abraham’s center, Malley said, “It’s not going to change history, but in his position you can’t hope to do more than that—he has access and he can bring people together.”

Owens died unexpectedly in December 2002 after having a heart attack on the beach in Tel Aviv during a trip with Abraham, who subsequently wound down the center’s $14 million operation. Owens was deeply beloved in official Washington, but as a Mormon, he never had Wexler’s entree into the official world of American Jewry. Wexler, a Queens native who grew up in South Florida, where his father owned a deli, made his first trip to Israel on his honeymoon, after his wife, Laurie, said she didn’t like the idea of marrying someone who hadn’t been to the Jewish state. He was elected to Congress in 1996 after six years in the Florida State Senate and was drafted onto the Foreign Affairs committee by Lee Hamilton, a veteran Democratic congressman from Indiana who subsequently served on the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group. “He was a natural,” says Hamilton, who is currently president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “He’s always been very close to the Jewish community and a very strong advocate for the Democratic Party, and I think he’s played a hugely important role in bridging the gaps that sometimes arise between the two.”

Now Wexler’s task is not just to maintain open channels among the Americans, Israelis, and Arabs—it’s to continue applying additional glue to the relationship between the Obama Administration and the American Jewish community. “My understanding with Danny was that I had only one red line, or only one rule, and that is that we would work in coordination and consistent with the Obama Administration,” Wexler said. “I believe the course that President Obama is pursuing is compelling in terms of what is in the best interests of the state of Israel.” He echoed recent administration talking points about the closeness of the U.S.-Israeli military and intelligence relationships and added another example to counter claims of anything like a rift between Washington and Jerusalem: phone calls made by George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, to voting countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development this spring encouraging them to accept Israel as a member.

None of that, though, speaks to the fundamental anxiety increasingly pervasive in some Jewish quarters about where the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is heading. Last week, Wexler met with Ehud Barak during the Israeli defense minister’s visit to Washington; he has extended an invitation to host a gathering for Netanyahu when the prime minister is scheduled to be in town next week. But, like everyone, Wexler is looking ahead to the expiration of the settlement-construction freeze in September, and like everyone, he can’t predict whether or not the current proximity talks will lead to a resumption of direct, Camp David-style negotiations. “The plan is to create the dynamic in which the Israelis and the Palestinians can engage in direct negotiations. That’s the plan. It’s tedious, it’s painful, and for every two steps forward there’s one step back, but that’s the plan,” Wexler told me. He deflected the question of whether he anticipated a grand proposal from the Obama Administration, in the event that the proximity talks fail to progress. “I don’t think it makes any sense to foreshadow what might happen four months from now, or five months from now, should there not be direct negotiations,” he said. “Because I am confident and hopeful there will be.”

That optimism is a hallmark of the style Abraham and Owens established two decades ago, during the hopeful era of the Oslo accords. “They had more fire and determination than anyone else on the block,” Malley said. “And Wexler shares this attitude of, ‘We have a vision, it makes sense.’ ” Obama’s election revived Abraham’s resolve to fight for the establishment of a two-state deal, Wexler said. “I think he felt that coming off the eight years of the Bush Administration, because of the Intifada and because of the two wars, the opportunity for negotiating a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians and an end to conflict was so remote, that the next two or three years were the best last opportunity for a two-state solution.”

Wexler said that Abbas, at the Newseum dinner, warned about the increasingly vocal campaign among Palestinians against continuing to pursue the two-state model. “People need to understand that while the two-state solution may seem difficult to attain—it’s riddled with uncertainty, it’s riddled with risks and painful compromises—but the alternative is not paradise. It’s not some golden status quo,” Wexler went on. “The alternative is the one-state solution, and the one-state solution will amount to a state that is no longer Jewish. And I for one am not for that.”

The volatile Turkish leader was supposed to have been a key U.S. partner in a new world order founded on diplomacy rather than force. Obama reached out to him repeatedly, first in a high-profile pilgrimage just after taking office and most recently to mediate a secret nuclear fuel deal with Iran. But Erdogan has a different agenda, which a group of Turkish diplomats recently characterized as “neo-Ottoman.” He sees an opportunity to become the Mideast’s regional hegemon, as well as Russia’s strategic partner in oil and gas transmission. And to succeed he wants to rally the region’s extremists to his neo-Ottoman cause.

“Even despots, gangsters and pirates have specific sensitiveness, [and] follow some specific morals,” Erdogan said of Turkey’s erstwhile ally Israel, accusing the Jewish state of “piracy” and “war crimes.” He also vowed that Kurdish rebels who seek autonomy from Turkey will “drown in their own blood.” Evidently, Erdogan interpreted U.S. expressions of dependence on Turkish good will as an invitation to say and do whatever he wants.

Turkey’s public embrace of Hamas—which the European Union and the United States consider a terrorist organization—has undercut traditional U.S. allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The biggest loser might be the Palestinian Authority and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas. After a year of riding point for the Obama Administration’s Mideast policy, and after five years spent nursing George W. Bush’s promise of U.S. support for a Palestinian state, Abbas was cut off at the knees when Obama buckled to Turkish demands over Gaza. The White House declared after the flotilla debacle that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was “unsustainable” and “must be changed” and announced a new $400 million Gaza aid package that will help resuscitate Hamas. Visiting the White House days later, Abbas reportedly begged Obama not to lift the Gaza blockade, which was sponsored by the Bush Administration after Hamas gunmen slaughtered Abbas’ security people during the June 2007 Gaza coup in order to squeeze Hamas into “reconciliation” with the Palestinian Authority.

The Obama blend of self-abnegation and chaos persuades U.S. allies around the world that they are on their own and U.S. enemies that they can get away with a great deal more than they dreamed only a year ago. When Obama proclaimed to the U.N. General Assembly in September 2009 that “no one nation can or should try to dominate another nation,” the message to world leaders in the audience recalls Robin Williams’s 1970s nightclub impression of Jimmy Carter addressing the world on the eve of World War III: “That’s all, good night, you’re on your own.”

***

With the United States seemingly committed to a general strategic withdrawal, the rest of the world has begun a wild scramble for position in a post-U.S.-dominated world. Every wannabe and used-to-be power from Pyongyang to Ankara has seen the opportunity to realize long-simmering ambitions that had been frustrated by decades of Cold War and another two decades of U.S. hegemony. As a matter of self-preservation, their neighbors have had no choice but to join the fray.

Iran hopes to command a “Shi’ite crescent” embracing disaffected Muslims from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hazara in Afghanistan. Turkey wants to assert its old overlordship over the region, while the starry-eyed Islamists of Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, dream of a new caliphate. Russia wants to weaken the United States.

“America has no influence now, because it’s not doing anything,” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told the Italian daily La Repubblica last month. The United States is not to be engaged, but simply replaced, the Syrian leader said. “It is merely a matter of becoming aware of a fact: that America and Europe have failed to solve the problems of the world,” he said. “This failure leads necessarily to other alternatives: a geo-strategic map that aligns Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Russia, in a community of politics, interests and infrastructure. It takes the form of a single space that unites five seas: the Mediterranean, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea.”

Assad’s account isn’t quite accurate: Turkey, Iran, and Russia only agree about the United States. They compete with each other in the Hobbesian post-United States war of each against all. Turkey’s Erdogan sponsored the Gaza blockade-runners in order to make Hamas into a Turkish rather than an Iranian attack dog. Turkey has aligned with Iran, in open defiance of Washington’s desultory efforts to “isolate” the Tehran regime but with a view toward contending with Iran for leadership of the Muslim world.

But Assad is entirely right to sneer at the confusion and weakness at the heart of U.S. foreign policy. As presidential candidate, Obama employed his ample talent for persuasion to convince prospective supporters with incompatible views that he was on their side. Despite extensive reporting of anti-Israel sentiment among his friends and political entourage during the summer of 2008, Obama managed to win the endorsement of the New Republic’s Martin Peretz, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, Elie Weisel, and other American Jewish celebrities who like to advertize their commitment to Israel’s security.

But the methods that served Obama so well as candidate have turned into a cascading series of catastrophes that has left the United States at a diplomatic low point not seen since the Carter Administration. Whatever the failings of the Bush Administration—and there were many—the world accorded U.S. priorities a grudging respect born of fear. In just two years Obama has become a figure of astonishment and contempt. In every field of foreign policy—Middle East peace, nuclear proliferation, dealings with the Russians, the Korean peninsula, relations with Japan, management of Latin America— the once-stable pillars of U.S. foreign policy are melting down.

Obama’s image, meanwhile, has tarnished rapidly overseas. His administration’s popularity among Arabs plunged during the past year. The British and continental media portray him as a bumbler; Der Spiegel, Germany’s arbiter of liberal opinion, dismisses Obama as the “Jimmy Carter of the 21st century.”

One problem is that the White House works like a campaign headquarters rather than a presidency. Everything is about spin, and all lines of communication go straight up to the persuader-in-chief. Overlapping and conflicting responsibilities abound. Whether Middle East policy emanates from Dennis Ross or George Mitchell or Hillary Clinton or Rahm Emanuel on a given day depends on press leaks and presidential whim. And above the chaos there is Obama’s preternatural confidence that he can persuade almost anyone to do almost anything.

Israel, which wants to remain a loyal U.S. ally, is in a particularly tough position. Despite his misgivings, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed on to the two basic requirements of the new U.S. paradigm for the Middle East: acceptance of a two-state solution and a settlement freeze. The Obama Administration repaid Netanyahu’s loyalty in March by staging a diplomatic crisis over a minor zoning decision in an East Jerusalem neighborhood where no Arab ever had lived and that every draft peace agreement assigns to Israel. The White House in effect demanded that Israel concede in advance key matters subject to negotiations. Most alarming to Israel, it repudiated the 2004 agreement that President George W. Bush had struck with then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in which Israel unilaterally evacuated Gaza in return for American flexibility on West Bank settlement growth. Sharon’s chief of staff Dov Weisglass put this agreement in writing in letters that have since been made public.

To add insult to injury, in March the White House sent Gen. David Petraeus to tell the Senate that Israel’s failure to make peace with the Palestinians compromised the United States’ position throughout the Middle East. And when Netanyahu came to Washington to meet Obama later that month, he was given the back-door treatment usually accorded disreputable dictators from banana republics, without a final statement or a photo opportunity.

The Obama Administration rewarded its most loyal and cooperative ally by sabotaging Israel’s negotiating position, blaming Israel for U.S. policy failures in the Middle East, and humiliating its leader. Any of these actions would have been sufficient to put Israel in diplomatic isolation; the combination of them has left Israel in the weakest international position in decades. Israel has become a passive observer in the demolition of its international standing, hoping that the remonstrations of its friends in the United States would reverse the administration’s public hostility.

***

Damaging as the diplomatic crisis was to Israel’s position, the most devastating blow to Israel’s standing came on May 28—the weekend prior to the Mavi Marmara incident—when the United States cast its vote against Israel at the May 28 U.N. review conference for the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Breaking decades of precedent, the United States voted for a statement demanding that Israel join the NPT, which would mean handing over its nuclear arsenal.

This action—taken over Netanyahu’s urgent protests—marked the first explicit repudiation of Israel’s right to defend itself by any U.S. government. Israel’s policy of “nuclear ambiguity”—neither confirming nor denying the possession of nuclear weapons—was an American idea, not an Israeli idea, to begin with. Then-Prime Minister Golda Meir adopted “nuclear ambiguity” in 1969 at the behest of President Richard Nixon, who did not want Israel to make a public demonstration of its recently acquired weapons. Every U.S. administration since Nixon’s has supported “nuclear ambiguity,” and Israel has cooperated. With no prior announcement, and no consultation, the Obama Administration overthrew a fundamental tenet of U.S.-Israeli relations in order to please Arab governments at the United Nations.

Netanyahu’s office called the NPT document “deeply flawed and hypocritical.” He added: “It singles out Israel, the Middle East’s only true democracy and the only country threatened with annihilation. Yet the terrorist regime in Iran, which is racing to develop nuclear weapons and which openly threatens to wipe Israel off the map, is not even mentioned in the resolution.”

Perhaps the most astonishing feature of the affair is that the administration not only voted against Israel on an existential issue but then publicly repudiated its own stance on the same day. Late on May 28, Obama and National Security Advisor James L. Jones released separate statements that “deplored” the U.N. resolution that it had endorsed that same morning. Jones said: “The United States will not permit a conference or actions that could jeopardize Israel’s national security. We will not accept any approach that singles out Israel or sets unrealistic expectations. The United States’ long-standing position on Middle East peace and security remains unchanged, including its unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.”

He continued: “In this respect, the United States deplores the decision to single out Israel in the Middle East section of the NPT document.” But if the White House deplored the resolution, why vote for it? The State Department attempted to explain, compounding the confusion. The Washington Times quoted a “senior State Department official” saying, “We did fight hard to get that language out of the final document.” But the State Department only need have voted “no.” To announce that the United States had fought and lost over anti-Israel language is a declaration that the United States will subject its alliance with Israel to a majority vote at the United Nations.

At the same time, the State Department told the Washington Times, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has received unequivocal guarantees from Obama for the State of Israel’s preservation of strategic and deterring abilities. These assurances include a significant upgrade in the history of United States-Israel relations in the line of strategic understandings.” No subsequent mention has been made of these “historic assurances,” which presumably reside in the same wastebasket as the Weisglass letters and the “nuclear ambiguity” posture.

Obama seems to believe that he can build support in the Muslim world by voting for anti-Israel U.N. resolutions while at the same time reassuring American Jews that he really is on Israel’s side. Rahm Emanuel was wheeled out twice in May, along with Middle East adviser Dennis Ross, to shmooze a group of rabbis assembled for this purpose. Privately, though, Emanuel has been distancing himself from his boss. A recently reported rumor, which the White House denied, has him quitting after the midterm elections.

***

Just as bewildering are Obama’s efforts to placate hostile parties in the Muslim world. In order to bolster Mahmoud Abbas, Obama provoked a storm of protest by liberal Jewish supporters. At the peak of his problems with the American Jewish community, Obama then threw Abbas under the bus in order to placate Turkish leader Erdogan, who embraced Hamas in order to energize his Islamist political base which has been nurtured for years on nutty anti-U.S. propaganda. Wall Street Journal editor Robert L. Pollock recently recounted a 2006 conversation with the Turkish leader, in which he asked Erdogan to refute rumors that U.S. soldiers were harvesting organs from Iraqi prisoners—and Erdogan refused. “These kind of things happen in the world. If it’s not happening in Iraq, then it’s happening in other countries,” Erdogan replied.

Erdogan is an unusual sort of poster-boy for human rights advocacy. During the past two decades Turkish security forces have killed an estimated 40,000 members of the country’s Kurdish minority. After Kurdish militants killed several Turkish soldiers last week, Erdogan vowed that the Kurdish resistance fighters would “drown in their own blood.” Some 1,500 Kurdish leaders, including the mayors of several hundred Kurdish-majority towns, presently are under detention.

At home, Erdogan wields power in a monster-ridden world of paranoid politics. Erdogan’s Islamist AKP has accused the secular establishment of hatching a vast conspiracy called “Ergenekon” aimed at imposing military rule. More than 4,300 military officers, journalists, public officials, and other pillars of Turkish civil society have been charged with lurid and often incredible crimes. Secular Turks allege that the mass arrests are designed to transform Turkey into an Islamic state. The United States has kept mum about the internal policies of its Islamist friends in Ankara.

Erdogan’s belief that he had a free pass from Obama is clearly not just a fantasy of the Turkish leader’s imagination but the product of a deepening relationship between the two men. Obama’s high-profile outreach to the Muslim world began in April 2009 with a town-hall meeting in Turkey, when the U.S. foreign-policy establishment argued that Erdogan’s “moderate” version of political Islam would provide a bridge between the United States and Muslims around the world. Obama’s dependence on the Turkish leader grew over the next year the U.S. president found himself entangled with Erdogan and Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a scheme to control Iran’s enriched uranium. So fixated was Obama on “engagement” with Iran and Syria that Turkey’s alliance with hostile regimes in Tehran and Damascus seemed like a golden opportunity. In fact, it should have been a red flag about the extremist character of the Erdogan government.

When Iran in May agreed to a Brazilian-Turkish plan to hand over 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium to Turkey, the United States rejected the plan as inadequate. Miffed, the Brazilian foreign ministry posted on its website a facsimile of an April 20 letter from Obama to Brazil’s President Lula da Silva, in which Obama makes clear that the 1,200-kilogram exchange was his idea in the first place.

In the April 20 letter, Obama thanks his Brazilian counterpart for meeting privately with himself and Erdogan at the Washington Nuclear Security Summit earlier that month. “There is a potentially important compromise that has already been offered,” Obama wrote. “In November, the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] conveyed to Iran our offer to allow Iran to ship its 1,200 kg of LEU [low enriched uranium] to a third country—specifically Turkey—at the outset of the process to be held ‘in escrow’ as a guarantee during the fuel production process that Iran would get back its uranium if we failed to deliver the fuel” that the United States promised to provide if Iran gave up its own enrichment program—which is exactly what Iran, Brazil and Turkey jointly proposed just a month later, and the White House then denounced.

Enmeshed in diplomatic shenanigans designed to woo U.S. enemies, it is clear that Obama regards the U.S. alliance with Israel as an annoyance. But Russia understands Israel’s strategic value to the United States quite well. While Russia has joined the diplomatic pile-up against Israel, it also is courting Israel as an arms customer as well as an arms supplier. Russian sources claim that Israel has already ordered several Su-32 “fullback” long range fighter-bombers, the top-of-the-line warplane that has just become available to Russia’s own air force. Sources say that Russia also has offered Israel the newest version of its surface-to-air missile system, which outperforms the Patriot air-defense system supplied by the United States. And Russia wants the full package of military avionics from Israel.

Israel has said nothing about rumored arms purchases from Russia, but it has good reason to diversify its sources of arms. The Obama Administration reportedly has privately threatened that it will cut off delivery of F-16 spare parts if Israrel launches a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. It is doubtful that Russia cares one way or the other whether Israel survives. Moscow’s objective is to weaken the United States. It could not have imagined that the president of the United States would be such a help in this project.

After throwing Israel under the bus in order to bolster the Palestinian Authority, Obama has thrown the Palestinian Authority under the bus in order to placate Erdogan, who is riding a tide of popularity in the Muslim world thanks to his sponsorship of Hamas and its jihadist allies and has threatened to use the Turkish military to force the Israeli blockade. No part of mainstream American opinion can support this kind of open embrace of extremists; even the most fervent advocates of dialogue with Hamas cannot defend turning Gaza into an Iranian port. The president has outraged Jewish voters and has nothing to show for it. Erdogan is the runaway broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice. He cannot be appeased, for he has staked his political future as well as his country’s position in the world on the extremist card. Obama now searches in vain for the magic formula that will put the Turkish broom back in the closet. And the water keeps rising.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor at First Things magazine and the Spengler columnist for Asia Times Online.

So it goes. The first time I visited the White House was as a tourist in 1977 when I had just moved to Washington. Years later, I attended a reception there during the Reagan Administration with my husband, who was a political appointee in the Justice Department. While I sadly have no recollection of the food, I do remember two things vividly. First, my sense that the size of the White House was a populist reaction to the end of the French monarchy. This people’s house—“President’s House,” as the executive mansion was first called—had none of the regal proportions of the palaces of the Louvre or Versailles. The other thing I recall is meeting President Ronald Reagan.

I had recently read an article in which Reagan’s brother had described a peculiar and endearing habit the president had as a child—a habit he shared with my then-4-year-old daughter, Daniela. Reagan rubbed earlobes, both his own and those of other people. This was something my little Daniela did whenever there were grown-ups visiting our home. I mentioned this shared habit to him just before it was our turn to shake the president’s hand for the requisite photo. His reaction of absolute surprise, and that of his wife, Nancy, was immortalized in a photo now in my study.

Awareness of dietary restrictions has been around for some time in this country. When Franklin Roosevelt was governor of New York, he had two regular guests, Jewish men, to lunch at the executive mansion in Albany. When it came to the attention of the governor and his wife, Eleanor, that these men abstained from everything offered them except for fruit, dessert, and coffee, Mrs. Roosevelt realized she should serve dairy and vegetables in a new set of dishes especially reserved for these occasions.

Some decades later, in the 1960s and ‘70s, as Jewish pride grew and people in general became less afraid to indicate their dietary preferences, the White House began ordering special kosher meals for kashrut-observing guests. Kosher state dinners got underway at the end of that period, during the Carter Administration. Henry Haller was the White House chef in 1978, when 1,300 guests were invited for the Camp David Peace Treaty dinner. Of those meals, 50 were kosher, ordered from a local caterer.

Two years later, in 1980, the White House held its first entirely kosher state dinner; it was in honor of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin with 180 guests. The menu included cold Columbia River salmon with sauce verte and golden twists, roast duckling with glazed peaches, wild rice, fresh asparagus, and mixed green salad. The wines came from California and were kosher—Kedem, Seyval Blanc, Chaumac, and sparkling white. In those days, White House pastry chefs usually served butter-rich petit fours; at Begin’s dinner, they prepared a non-dairy frozen orange sherbet cake with Grand Marnier sauce along with pareve pastries.

Ann Amernick, the assistant pastry chef under Haller and later the first female pastry chef at the White House, remembers how the White House kitchen was made kosher. “The mashgiachs came with blowtorches as big as they were,” says Amernick, who’s the author of The Art of the Dessert. “They spent all day burning and covering surfaces with aluminum foil. The kitchen was unbearably hot. I felt it was a historical moment and at the same time it was comical. Roland Mesnier, the pastry chef, was desperately trying to get the sorbets made and one of the mashgiachs was following him around with the blowtorch. Every time Roland turned around the mashgiach was there. While some of the cooks had a partial understanding of kashrut from past experience in hotels and lessons in cooking school, the reality in the White House was another story.”

Awareness of religious and ethnic diversity is part of life today in the White House. During the administration of George W. Bush, the first couple hosted a Hanukkah party with 400 kosher latkes. The Obamas, whose personal chef, Sam Kass, is Jewish, have now held two Passover seders; kitchen staff have prepared recipes culled from the mothers of Jewish White House employees.

In addition to thinking about ethnic cuisine, the White House is now concentrating more on fresh foods and foods from the garden, a practice initiated by the earliest presidents. Not only was there a White House garden during the time of the founding fathers, but Thomas Jefferson, while president, marketed with his French chef in Georgetown, selecting foods suited to his mostly French, English, Dutch, and Italian menus. When time permitted, he also helped prepare the dishes and select the wines.

My favorite visit to the White House was with a group of visiting chefs for a behind-the-scenes tour of the kitchen and the garden. It was organized in September by Bill Yosses, the current pastry chef and a dear friend. In the vegetable garden, eggplant bushes grew as tall as I am. Kale was everywhere. And the ripe tomatoes showed no signs of the blight that had hit the rest of the Middle Atlantic crop. Nearby we saw the honeybee combs, tended by a White House employee who is also a bee keeper. White House honey, in tiny jars, is given away to guests at state dinners.

Later, over coffee, I tasted Bill’s freshly made lemon pound cake. It used nine lemons fresh from the White House garden, and it was delicious.

LEMON POUND CAKE SUPREME
Adapted from The Perfect Finish by Bill Yosses and Melissa Clark

11 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, plus additional for the bottom and sides of the pan and the parchment paper
9 lemons
2 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1½ cups superfine sugar
1½ teaspoons baking powder
Dash of salt
3/4 cup crème fraiche or heavy cream
6 large eggs, at room temperature
1½ cups granulated sugar
½ cup confectioners’ sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, putting a rack in the center. Use butter to grease the bottom and sides of a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan, line the bottom with parchment paper or waxed paper, then grease the paper.

2. Set 2 of the lemons aside. Grate the zest of 4 lemons, and set those lemons and their zest aside also. Slice off the tops and bottoms of 3 unzested lemons. Stand each lemon on end on a cutting board and use a small knife to slice away the skin and white pith, leaving the flesh exposed. Working over a bowl, cut the segments away from the membranes and let the fruit and juice fall into the bowl (remove any seeds). Using a fork, break the segments into 1-inch pieces.

3. Sift the flour, superfine sugar, baking powder, and salt into the bowl of an electric mixer. Begin mixing on low speed, then add the crème fraiche or cream. Increase the speed to medium and beat in the eggs one at a time, the butter, and 3 tablespoons of the lemon zest. Gently fold the lemon segments and juices into the batter. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake on the center rack for 15 minutes. Use a sharp knife to cut an incision lengthwise down the middle of the cake. This will prevent the cake from splitting on the side. Bake for 30 minutes longer. Lower the oven to 325 degrees, and bake for 40 to 45 minutes longer, until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean.

4. Meanwhile, juice the 6 lemons you set aside in step 1 and strain the juice. Put the granulated sugar and the confectioners’ sugar in a pot over high heat and add 1½ cups water. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring, until the sugar is dissolved. Stir in the lemon juice and remaining zest and let cool.

5. When the cake is done, transfer it to a wire rack to cool in the pan for 30 minutes. Raise the oven temperature to 350 degrees. Slide a thin knife or offset spatula around the sides of the pan and turn it over to unmold the cake onto a sheet pan, and carefully peel the parchment or waxed paper from the bottom of the cake. Pour the lemon syrup over the cake and very gently squeeze the cake to help it absorb the syrup. Carefully turn the cake over and squeeze a bit more until all the syrup is absorbed. It makes for messy hands, but it is worth the effort. Transfer the cake to a clean cookie sheet and return it to the oven for 10 minutes to set the glaze. Cool on a rack.

Yield: 1 (9-inch) loaf to serve 8

EGGPLANT SALAD
Adapted from Dahan Catering

½ cup olive oil
2 eggplants, cut into ½-inch dice (about 2 pounds)
8 plum tomatoes, seeded and skinned, fresh or canned
4 shallots, finely diced
½ bunch of Italian flat leaf parsley (1 cup)
The grated zest of 1 lemon
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Heat the oil in a large nonstick frying pan over high. Sauté the diced eggplant until browned and soft, but not mushy, stirring occasionally. It should take about 5–7 minutes. Remove the eggplant from the pan with a slotted spoon so that any remaining oil will stay in the pan and drain the eggplant on a paper towel.
2. If using fresh tomatoes, score the bottoms. In a large pot bring to boil 5 cups of water. Once the water has come to a strong boil, put tomatoes in for 15 seconds. Remove the tomatoes and put immediately into an ice bath. Once the tomatoes are cool enough to handle, gently peel back the skin, trying not remove too much flesh. Then, slice tomatoes in half to remove the seeds and cut into ¼-inch dice.
3. Reheat the sauté pan on medium heat, and sauté the shallots until translucent. Then add the tomatoes and half the parsley and cook on medium heat until most of the excess liquid from the tomatoes has evaporated. Sprinkle on the lemon zest and season to taste with salt and pepper. Let cool and refrigerate for later use or serve immediately, sprinkled with the remaining parsley.

Yield: About 6 servings

It was a classic illustration of the liberal Zionist predicament. In recent weeks this predicament has received an increased amount of attention, due in large part to a bracing and much-discussed essay by Peter Beinart—a former editor of The New Republic, the very citadel of American pro-Israel orthodoxy—in which he sounded the alarm on the plummeting levels of support for Israel among younger American Jews. “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door,” Beinart wrote, “and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.” Similar concerns led to the formation in 2008 of J Street, a lobby group that aims to represent the views of liberal Jews and serve as a counterweight to traditionally right-leaning groups like AIPAC. If current trends continue, American Jewish attitudes toward Israel may ultimately be transformed in a way unseen since the bulk of the community first got on board with Zionism, in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War.

How can liberal Zionism be saved? For those aiming to revive the form of American liberal Zionism that marked the generation that came of age after the 1967 war, it is tempting to blame its decline on a betrayal by outside forces. On this logic the collapse of support has been caused by Israel’s own shift to the right in recent years—epitomized by the rise of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—a shift aided and abetted by a right-leaning institutional leadership of the American Jewish community that refuses to criticize Israel under any circumstances. Resuscitating liberal Zionism, this argument goes, will thereby involve siding with Israeli moderates while speaking out against settlers abroad and neoconservatives at home.

But can liberal Zionism, at least in the form that has dominated American Jewish life for decades, be saved at all? And should it be? These are harder questions but may ultimately be more important ones. It may be emotionally satisfying to posit a blameless liberal Zionism betrayed by outside forces, or to suppose that younger Jews are reacting only against the right and not liberal Zionism itself, but it is not clear that either claim is true. For one thing, Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman undoubtedly make good villains, but the aspects of Israeli politics that have alienated U.S. liberals go deeper than the current right-wing government. (To take only the most recent example, it was not the nefarious Netanyahu or the loathsome Lieberman who brought us the attack on Gaza, but rather the supposed “good guys”: Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, and Tzipi Livni.)

More generally, the apparently impending collapse of mainstream liberal Zionism in the United States is no accident. Some of the phenomenon may be attributed to the simple passage of time—to a generation growing up farther removed from the looming presence of the Holocaust and without memories of the 1967 and 1973 wars. But we cannot adequately understand this collapse without understanding the compromises and contradictions that liberal Zionism became involved in over a period of decades.

***

Let me drop the pretense of disinterestedness for a moment. I am a member of the “younger generation” whose attitudes have become the subject of so much discussion, and in many ways I am typical of it. When the last decade began I considered myself to be, broadly speaking, a fairly standard young liberal Zionist—at least insofar as I thought about these things, which was not often. In the years since, my views have shifted to the point that I would not consider myself a Zionist at all. I make no claim to “speak for my generation,” whatever that would mean, and one should never trust anyone who claims that they can. But I have reason to think that my experience was far from atypical, and it might therefore be worthwhile to examine it more closely.

It’s always tempting, when writing a conversion narrative, to exaggerate the magnitude of the shift for dramatic effect. But I can’t honestly claim that I was ever a neoconservative or a hardliner (aside from a brief Likudnik episode in my childhood). Rather, I held a set of views fairly typical of American liberal Zionism. I was largely uninformed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I was against the occupation and the settlements, and I considered myself sympathetic to Palestinian suffering. Still, I did not really question the basic Israeli narrative of the conflict (“we want peace, but they only want to annihilate us”); I believed that everything would be better if only the Palestinians could find their King or Gandhi; I was convinced that the shrill-sounding activists who constantly harped on Israel’s sins were hysterical at best and anti-Semitic at worst. I was a “serious” and “responsible” liberal, I told myself, and much of this identity hinged on differentiating myself from them.

Wawro is a Middle East tourist, as he is more than happy to admit. His previous work was on modern European military history, though his hosting gigs on the History Channel have undoubtedly contributed to an aura of broad historical competence. He speaks no regional languages and thus is limited to English-language sources. As his title indicates, Wawro thinks that the United States has become trapped in the “quicksand” of the Middle East. I found this a promising beginning and looked forward to an intelligent deconstruction of U.S. policy from an isolationist point of view. A good case can be made that U.S. interests would have been better served if the United States had been much less involved in the Middle East. The core of that case is simple: a) oil is a commodity, and whoever produces it would have to sell it to us and the world at market prices; and b) the problems between Arabs and Israelis have very limited global significance, and their negative consequences for U.S. interests would be relatively easy to limit. Wawro, in the end, thinks he has made just that isolationist critique. He concludes the book: “Let us move deliberately and powerfully to the edge of the morass and climb out.”

But this is a bit of false advertising. He undercuts his conclusion just a few pages earlier, when he calls for a “reckoning” with both Saudi Arabia and Israel. With the former he implies that we need to pressure Riyadh for major domestic political changes. With the latter he says we need to solve the Palestinian problem, including its refugee element. One can make the case for both recommendations, but this is hardly a limited agenda for U.S. foreign policy. It is also at variance with Wawro’s sensible conclusion elsewhere (particularly in the Iraq context) that the United States should avoid quixotic efforts to change the domestic political systems of the region. A real isolationist critique would say that we should not care a whit about Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia or Palestinian rage, no matter how justified, because our interests can be secured without involving ourselves in these matters. In the end, despite the isolationist trappings, Wawro does not advocate a U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East, just an activist policy with different goals and methods.

The muddle of Wawro’s policy recommendations is matched by his overly simplistic account of how the United States ended up where it is in today’s Middle East. Boiled down, his argument is that everything the United States has done in the region has been a huge mistake. He is critical of U.S. intervention in Iranian politics to help overthrow progressive nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. He is equally critical of U.S. efforts at various times to embrace another “progressive” politician of that era, Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser. President Dwight Eisenhower should have supported the British and French intervention in the Suez Crisis of 1956 but should not have intervened in Lebanon in 1958. Even when he grudgingly concedes the success of a policy, like the Gulf War of 1990-91, he is critical of the lack of planning for the postwar situation (even though that critique implies that the Unites States should have been more involved in Iraqi domestic politics after the war).

In essence, when it comes to U.S. Middle East policy, Wawro is a Groucho Marxist—whatever it is, he’s against it. A reader has a right to consistency in critique, or some effort to judge which approaches were more or less successful. Wawro does not provide that consistency. As a historian, he is also surprisingly lacking in empathy for his subjects. At one point, he traces the Sept. 11 attacks directly to the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957, which promised military and economic aid to countries threatened by another state. Even if we accept the questionable chain of causality Wawro implies in this charge, it would have taken superhuman foresight for a politician to have anticipated the consequences of his actions 45 years into the future.

There are two great villains in his telling of the story: Israel and Saudi Arabia. For Wawro, the Israelis have manipulated U.S. domestic politics since 1948 to involve the United States in an unbalanced policy of support for their expansionist aims. He makes very little differentiation across time periods. For him, the domestic-politics explanation is as powerful in the 1950s—when many American Jewish organizations were just beginning to exert themselves or did not yet exist, and Eisenhower reversed Israeli gains in the Suez War—as it was in the 2000s, when the George W. Bush Administration allied with Israel in the “global war on terror.” He acknowledges but downplays the importance of shifting Cold War considerations in U.S. policy toward Jerusalem, which provide a better explanation for the relative distance Eisenhower exhibited toward the Israelis versus the beginning of the “special relationship” under Kennedy and its full flowering under Johnson and Nixon. If Jewish political power were so central and so all-encompassing, it is difficult indeed to explain these changes. But if you realize that Eisenhower and his secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, still held out hope of bringing Egypt and Syria into the anti-Soviet alliance, you understand their arms-length approach to Israel. By the early 1960s, it was clear that Nasser and the Syrians had chosen the Soviet camp, and thus the growing strength of the U.S.-Israeli strategic relationship made sense in the Cold War framework even to Richard Nixon—not a politician known for his close relations with the American Jewish community.

Wawro is on firmer ground in emphasizing domestic politics as the main driver in the U.S.-Israeli relationship after the Cold War ended. But once again his mono-causal emphasis on the domestic factor does not help us explain important differences among the post-Cold War presidents, from Bill Clinton’s intense focus on the peace process to Bush’s hands-off stance to Barack Obama’s promise of a more critical, even-handed engagement. Wawro’s intense criticism of the pro-Israel lobby will undoubtedly lead to comparisons with the recent work on the subject by John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt. However, I see a substantial difference in their critiques. Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the policies supported by the pro-Israel lobby do not advance U.S. interests, but they repeatedly assert that it is normal for U.S. citizens to engage in lobbying.

Wawro at no point acknowledges the legitimacy of the domestic political process in the formation of U.S. foreign policy. Instead, he allows his distaste for the results of that lobbying to affect his tone about the process itself. The implication of his analysis is that there is something inherently illegitimate about the way supporters of Israel attempt to influence U.S. policy-making. The distinction between the Mearsheimer-Walt position and Wawro’s is subtle, as both are very opposed to the current level of U.S. support for Israel, but important. Mearsheimer and Walt are engaging the public in an effort to develop a base of support to counter what they see as the influence of the pro-Israel lobby. Wawro is simply hinting that the lobby’s activities, in a somewhat sinister way, harm U.S. interests.

The same prospect of public controversy is not present in Wawro’s other choice of villain. Nobody in the United States really likes Saudi Arabia, for all the obvious reasons: the cultural differences, the puritanical and narrow interpretation of Islam that is the state religion in the country, Saudi power in the world oil market, the involvement of so many Saudis in the Sept. 11 attacks. Wawro never mentions the Saudis without emphasizing their obscurantism, their hypocrisy, their greed, and their support for terrorists ranging from the Algerian opponents of French colonialism in the 1950s through al-Qaida today. What he never satisfactorily explains, though, is why every U.S. president since Franklin Roosevelt thought it was important to have a good working relationship with them, despite all the differences between the two countries and despite the occasional domestic political cost maintaining the relationship entailed.

Much as in the case of Israel, Wawro attributes the Saudi-U.S. relationship to domestic politics. In this case he sees a combination of the power of the oil lobby and the more general and seemingly insatiable public appetite for petroleum as producing an unfortunate reliance on a country that is really an enemy of the United States. Again, his mono-causal explanatory framework obscures much more than it enlightens. He has little to say about the common Cold War interests of Washington and Riyadh. He gives little explanatory weight to regional shifts that drove the two countries together, particularly the Iranian Revolution, which not only ended the most important U.S. alliance in the Persian Gulf but also presented the Saudis with their first real challenge to leadership on the Islamic platform in the region.

Wawro’s lack of concern for the nuance of Middle East politics also undercuts his most serious charge against Saudi Arabia: that it has consistently supported terrorism. He does not acknowledge that at least some of the “terrorists” the Saudis supported were also supported by the United States, as part of our common Cold War strategy against the Soviet Union. An author with a greater sense of the ironies of history would have noted that the Sept. 11 attacks can be directly traced back to the two greatest successes in that relationship: the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and the Gulf War of 1990-91. But Wawro is not interested in tragic ironies or historical nuance. He knows the bad guys, and that is that.

When Wawro gets to the payoff of the book—Sept. 11, the Iraq War and its aftermath—he tells a surprisingly conventional story. The Sept. 11 story was better told by Lawrence Wright, in The Looming Tower, and Steve Coll, in Ghost Wars. His account of the Iraq War, building on the extensive public record and literature now developed, does not attempt to judge which of the many motives attributed to the Bush Administration were most important in driving it to war. He simply throws them all in the pot—WMD, terrorism, democracy-promotion, neocon hubris, oil, and Israel.

I wanted to like this book. I share Wawro’s absolute rejection of the Iraq War and the neoconservative project in the Middle East and his disquiet about the power of the pro-Israel lobby in U.S. policy-making. Like him, I think that U.S. interests could be served by a less interventionist approach to the region. But in the end his account of the U.S. Middle East adventures is unsatisfactory. Too many details are wrong, too many nuances are unexplored, too much explanatory weight is put on his villains. What he gets right is not new, and what he presents as new is not particularly right. The isolationist critique of U.S. Middle Eastern policy, which Wawro set out to write, remains to be written.

F. Gregory Gause III is a professor of political science at the University of Vermont and the author of The International Relations of the Persian Gulf.

UPDATE: Guess what? They are brothers!

“If we distance ourselves from Israel,” Abrams told the audience, “the Jordanians, Egyptians and the rest of our allies in the Middle East will think, ‘if they can do it to the Israelis, why not us?’ ”

Abrams, while well under 6 feet tall, is a commanding physical presence, with broad shoulders and a prominent chin and nose, a profile worthy of a Roman coin. And like a provincial governor, he wielded power on behalf of a hegemon in a way that earned him more enemies at home than abroad. His rivals mock the policies he advocates, describe him as arrogant, and fear winding up on the wrong end of his sharp wit. While in the United States he is best known for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, in the Middle East, he is simply “Elliott”—the man tapped by Bush to administer the daily conduct of U.S. policy in large parts of the region, with particular attention to democracy promotion and the Bush Administration’s “Freedom Agenda” in Egypt and throughout North Africa, as well as in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and the Palestinian territories.

The point Abrams was making at the AIPAC conference was not intended as one of the several applause lines that would elicit loud and spontaneous approval from the crowd of Jewish-American political activists. It was a subtler, more nuanced critique, and one illustrating Abrams’s worldview. The former American viceroy for the Arabs and Israelis was drawing concentric circles—one around Israel, a larger one around the entire Middle East, and then another encompassing the whole world. Enveloping the peripheries, all of these rings emanate from the still, unmoving center, the crux where the world’s balance of power rests: Washington.

From Abrams’s perspective, the crisis in the U.S.-Israeli relationship is but one symptom of a larger failure in the conduct of American foreign policy. “The White House put distance between us and Israel,” Abrams told me in an interview. “But they’ve also done it with everyone else—like the U.K., Australia, India, and Japan, among others. This is a poor practice of diplomacy.” In effect, he charges, the Obama Administration has no one playing the role of Elliott Abrams—an unabashed advocate of the virtues of American power with the experience of two two-term administrations under his belt and four decades of contacts with the world’s governing elites.

“I don’t think it’s true that the administration came in only with a domestic focus,” says Abrams, in response to my suggestion that the Obama Administration has been preoccupied with the sizable domestic problems that it inherited from George Bush and has had little time for foreign policy. “This president had a coherent view of the world and America’s role, and the terrible things that according to him happened under Bush that he would change and correct. It is central to his presidency. We saw that in the Cairo speech.”

What Abrams finds most curious about Obama’s desire to atone for America’s past transgressions, especially those of his predecessor, is that it has done little to ingratiate the president with the international community. “He remains very popular overseas—with the people,” Abrams says. “But if you ask the governing elites in Australia, the U.K., France, Japan, and all of the Middle East leaders, his popularity has sunk. Allies are used to being treated like allies, and it is manifest he has no interest in them. They feel it, and this has affected elite opinion.”

A president who came to office on a surge of popular acclaim across the world cannot connect with his global peers, Abrams says. The reason Obama appears to be even less popular among foreign elites than George Bush, he explains, is the new president’s conviction that the United States has no special obligations or duties to its allies, Israeli or otherwise. “This is a radical departure,” Abrams says, “not just from George W. Bush, but also from the Clinton Administration.”

We’re sitting in a conference room at the Washington office of the Council on Foreign Relations, where Abrams landed after his eight years on Bush’s National Security Council staff. Abrams’s comfortable setup here is a telling example of how the U.S. foreign-policy establishment works. The Bush Administration’s neoconservatives are painted by outside-the-Beltway types like Frank Rich, and by partisan bloggers, as a gang of delirious ideologues who tumbled out of the clouds when George Bush came to power and promptly disappeared from sight with the inauguration of Barack Obama. And yet while Abrams’s neoconservative credentials are hardly in doubt—he is married to Norman Podhoretz’s stepdaughter and served as chief of staff to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan—the Council does not admit madmen and mavericks. It is the home of Washington’s permanent foreign-policy establishment. Even out of office, Abrams spends the better part of his day on the phone with foreign officials—Europeans, Asians, and Palestinians, as well as Israelis—when he is not traveling abroad.

During Abrams’s eight years with the Bush Administration, I heard Arab officials, journalists, and activists across the region boast about their relationship with the point-man for U.S. Middle East policy. Who had met with him most recently? What did he say in private? What did his public statements mean for their cause? Arab esteem for a Bush appointee may come as a surprise to many Americans, especially those whose opinion of Abrams is colored by his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, when he entered a plea agreement on two misdemeanor counts of misleading Congress. (He was pardoned by George H.W. Bush in 1992.) But it was Abrams who introduced one of the Reagan’s Administration’s most effective tools.

“Elliott mainstreamed the concern for human rights in the U.S. government,” says a former State Department colleague who worked with Abrams in the Reagan and Bush administrations. “He made human rights a respectable thing for Republicans; before that it was always a liberal thing.” Abrams’s position on human rights earned him the scorn of leftists, who denounced him as a hypocrite for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, and earned him some powerful opponents in GOP circles, like Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Jesse Helms, who at first didn’t see the point of pressuring allies like the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet the same way we pressured opponents like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. “Elliott said, ‘If we’re going to win in Latin America, we have to be credible and hold allies to the same standards as we hold others,’ ” says Abrams’s former colleague at State. “He had allies in this, like Secretary of State George Shultz and President Reagan. But the fact is that Elliott has had a huge effect on the thinking of subsequent generations.”

Abrams notes that some of those most disappointed with American global leadership are dissidents in places like Egypt and Iran. The Obama White House, says Abrams, “has no measurable interest in human rights.” To speak out against human rights abuses requires you to believe that the United States has a special place in the world.

“For Elliott, American democracy makes the United States an exceptional power, imbued with a unique moral authority,” says Michael Doran, senior director for the Middle East under Abrams on the NSC staff. “When the United States engages warmly with a foreign regime, it confers moral legitimacy, which is an asset that American strategists should use consciously and with great care.”

The Administration’s efforts to reach out to adversaries like Iran and Syria without exacting anything in return while shaming allies like Israel shows little understanding of how human rights can be used as an instrument of American statecraft. No one knows what Obama’s strategy is, says Abrams. “We’re all speculating—the Arabs, the Israelis, the Europeans.” The White House, he says, has fallen prey to a “shocking misreading of world politics, and especially of the Arab world.”

The Obama Administration, says Abrams, appears to believe that “advantages will accrue to us by putting distance between us and Israel. But look at the Bush Administration—not only was it extremely pro-Israel, but we actually invaded an Arab country. And still we had extremely close relations with the Arabs.” From his experience, Abrams says, what Arab governments want is a strong and reliable American ally. “They want to know, is this president tough enough to take on Iran? If answer is no, they’ll be very unhappy.”

Even while Abrams sees Obama’s strained relationship with the Netanyahu government as a reflection of the Administration’s larger misconceptions, he is greatly concerned with how the White House regards Israel. If, as Vice President Joe Biden suggested, construction in East Jerusalem and lack of progress on the peace process endangers American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. citizens at home, then concessions will come of out of Israel’s account.

“If you believe that the relationship with Israel is a burden and a liability and we have to diminish the cost, then you may believe stopping 1,600 housing units can relieve some of the problem,” Abrams says. “But, by the same logic, maybe if we divide Jerusalem that would make the terrorists feel even better, so is the answer to force Israel back to the 1967 borders? But there’s no limit to this argument; nothing can satisfy grievance except the elimination of Israel. Why do it in steps? Why not eliminate all the problem at once?”

Abrams says he knew there were problems a year ago when the Administration insisted that the Netanyahu government agree to a total construction freeze. “This was a demand anyone with a decent knowledge of Israeli politics knew was not possible,” he says. “Every administration makes mistakes, but with them it’s a failure to learn from mistakes after 15 months and they are making the same mistake again. There’s no learning curve.”

Of course, there are experienced diplomats throughout the Administration—men like Richard Holbrooke and like Dennis Ross, who served as Middle East czar for George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and was moved over to the White House from the State Department several months ago. There is George Mitchell, the president’s special envoy in charge of the upcoming proximity talks, who, while not one of Abrams’s favorites, helped negotiate the peace in Ireland and who tried to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians at the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Yet for all of his fondness for czars and envoys, Obama appears not to see the world outside of America’s borders as a series of places run by local and regional elites. Rather, ruling elites are the source of our problems—and he is most comfortable speaking over their heads to a global public that really does seem to like him.

In Obama’s view, Abrams suggests, there are no concentric circles of American power radiating throughout the world. There are no pieces to move around on the chessboard, because the metaphor of international relations as a great game played by members of a global gentlemen’s club is inherently elitist. There is no balance of power, as Obama argued in his U.N. speech, no rivalries among nations and no alliances either, only an indiscriminate mass of peoples who can be moved by rhetoric and managed by the president’s political advisers. The fact is that the Administration’s foreign policy is made after the image of a man who doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, or the exceptionalism of any other nation: All the world is his stage, and the people of the world are his audience. The global elites, our allies, hear Obama’s suggestion that they are no different than anyone else, even our adversaries—and they don’t like it.

Abrams is an agent of a less charismatic and more old-fashioned style of American leadership, in which interests are balanced and the world is made whole not by a single transformative leader or by the will of the globalized masses but by daily contacts between high-ranking policy professionals who give each other a regular heads-up about what might be coming down the pike. The true complaint of Israeli officials in the wake of the Ramat Shlomo blow-up is the same as the complaint of British, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian officials and other foreigners who have been angered and baffled by the conduct of U.S. foreign policy since Barack Obama took office: They have no idea whom to call. The fact that our allies are flying blind means that they can no longer rely on us.

The Arabs and Israelis, Abrams says, are not alone in “wanting to know if the U.S. will maintain its position and hold on to our dominance.” If not, the world will make its own arrangements, without consulting our elites and at the expense of our interests.

Before President George W. Bush tapped him to lead the Pentagon in late 2006, Gates had been CIA director under the first President Bush, and he is generally seen to share that earlier administration’s realist foreign-policy outlook. In the past, when not confined by the need to follow a particular administration’s line, Gates has advocated negotiating with Iran. In 2004, he co-chaired a task force that recommended that the U.S. “engage selectively,” and concluded that an Israeli bombing strike would be “extremely problematic” practically and “would adversely affect U.S. interests”. These more moderate sentiments, which were mostly out of fashion in the Bush administration (although Bush did oppose Israeli bombing), have largely been adopted by President Barack Obama. On the other hand, as Tablet Senior Editor Michael Weiss noted last week, the events of the past several weeks in Iran have made engagement a temporary non-starter. Moreover, though Gates’s preferred tactical strategy is more moderate than others’, he is nonetheless firm on the importance of resolving the Iranian situation: two weeks ago, he identified Iran’s nuclear ambitions as the biggest threat to global security.

So what happens today? The main goal appears less to be to conduct specific planning and more to achieve a general sense that the U.S. and Israel are on the same general page. According to Makovsky, Gates and Barak—the two countries’ civilian military heads—“hold each other in the highest professional regard.” Hopefully that will count for something even as the two countries disagree on the wisdom of engagement and as Israel continues to raise the specter of military action.

Gates Says U.S. Overture to Iran is ‘Not Open-Ended’ [NYT]

Bush spoke on May 15, 2008. He began by quoting Ben Gurion’s proclamation, declaring that Israel possessed a “natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate.” The president of the United States called it “the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David—a homeland for the chosen people: Eretz Yisrael.” He recalled how America recognized the Jewish state 11 minutes after the declaration. He characterized the “alliance between our governments” as “unbreakable” but he asserted that the “source of our friendship runs deeper than any treaty.” He spoke of the “bonds of the Book” and the “ties of the soul.”

The president recalled that when William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower, he quoted the words of Jeremiah: “Come let us declare in Zion the word of God.” He spoke of how the founders of America “saw a new promised land” and gave their towns names like Bethlehem and New Canaan. His words were those of a man who has read and thought about how the idea of Israel was intertwined with the idea of America going back to James Madison, say, or Samuel Adams and of why, as he put it to the Knesset, “many Americans became passionate advocates for a Jewish state.”

Bush also spoke of the “suffering and sacrifice [that] would pass before the dream was fulfilled.” He spoke of the “soulless men” who perpetrated the Holocaust, and he quoted Elie Wiesel. He described the joyous tears of a “fearless woman raised in Wisconsin,” Golda Meir, when the dream of a state was fulfilled. He spoke of touching the Western Wall, seeing the sun reflected in the Sea of Galilee, of praying at Yad Vashem and visiting Masada and he swore the oath that Israeli soldiers swear: “Masada shall never fall again.”

Then the president turned to the principles that guide American policy—“shared convictions,” he called them, “rooted in moral clarity and un-swayed by popularity polls or the shifting opinions of international elites.” That led to an articulation of democracy as “the only way to ensure human rights,” and he spoke of how the United Nations has singled out Israel as a target of its human rights resolutions and declared that Americans consider it “a source of shame.”

He expressed the belief that George Washington had spoken of more than two centuries previously—that, as Mr. Bush put it, “religious liberty is fundamental to a civilized society.” He declared that Americans “condemn anti-Semitism in all forms—whether by those who openly question Israel’s right to exist, or by others who quietly excuse them.” He disputed that terrorists acting in the name of religion are religious men. “No one who prays to the God of Abraham could strap a suicide vest to an innocent child, or blow up guiltless guests at a Passover Seder, or fly planes into office buildings filled with unsuspecting workers,” he said. “They accept no God before themselves.”

He spoke specifically of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Iranians and of calls for Israel to be wiped off the map. “There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words.” He called such reactions “natural” but “deadly wrong.” He remarked on how “[s]ome 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.” Then he quoted the American senator who, in 1939, declared, “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.”

This is where he warned of the “false comfort of appeasement.” He rejected the suggestions of some that “if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away.” He argued that permitting “the world’s leading sponsor of terror to possess the world’s deadliest weapons would be an unforgivable betrayal for future generations.” Then he marked the point that was so prescient in respect of what is happening on the streets of Tehran today.

“Leaders who are accountable to their people will not pursue endless confrontation and bloodshed,” he said. “Young people with a place in their society and a voice in their future are less likely to search for meaning in radicalism. Societies where citizens can express their conscience and worship their God will not export violence; they will be partners in peace. The fundamental insight, that freedom yields peace, is the great lesson of the 20th century. Now our task is to apply it to the 21st.”

So the president declared that America “must stand with the reformers working to break the old patterns of tyranny and despair” and “give voice to millions of ordinary people who dream for a better life in a free society.” He warned of “violent resistance.” But said with faith in our ideals he could imagine “Israel celebrating the 120th anniversary as one of the world’s great democracies, a secure and flourishing homeland for the Jewish people.” And he foresaw the rest of the Middle East as having been transformed, the terrorists defeated, and the region entering “a new period of tolerance and integration.”

Bush’s remarks were greeted by derision and controversy in the Arab press. One website that tracks foreign press reports ran a headline calling the speech an “act of lunacy” and quoted the chairman of Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper as complaining that the president’s remarks “appeared to have been lifted almost word-for-word from the Torah.” When reporters asked Senator Joseph Biden about Mr. Bush’s speech, the then-Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee reacted by swearing, according to the New York Times. The Democrats were apparently under the impression that Bush was talking about President-to-be Obama. But now blood is running in the streets of Tehran and a new American president is debating whether to speak in a way that might be construed as meddling. One way to judge whatever he says would be to compare it to the standard President Bush set a year ago in Jerusalem.