ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER Ariel Sharon last week paid his fourth call on the Bush White House. The primary subject of Sharon’s visit was the fate and future of Palestinian Authority boss Yasser Arafat. Arafat has been under virtual house arrest in the West Bank since December, a calculated act of public humiliation that Israel undertook with the full acquiescence of the Bush administration. Arafat hasn’t been in the White House at all since Bill Clinton’s departure, a drastic change for the foreign leader who made more appearances at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during the previous administration than any other. The relationship between the United States and Israel has undergone a profound change in the past two months. Israel is no longer counseled by the State Department to show “restraint” in the wake of terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. Blame for the disastrous state of Israeli-Palestinian relations is placed firmly on Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. In the State of the Union address, the president added the Palestinian terror groups Hezbollah and Hamas to the list of terrorist organizations now considered enemies of the United States. The ostensible cause of the new American hard line was the effort by the Palestinian Authority to smuggle in 50 tons of weaponry from Iran–including missiles that could bombard Israeli towns–on board the ship Karine A. But in the months before Israel’s daring January seizure of the ship, Arafat had already poisoned relations with Colin Powell and his personal envoy, Anthony Zinni, by lying about having arranged the arrests of various Palestinian terrorists–who were subsequently killed by Israel while driving freely along West Bank or Gaza roads. The turn against Arafat has been so sharp, and the tone taken by the United States government has been so wounded, that there were surely other betrayals we don’t yet know about. Still, the pronounced tilt toward Israel cannot simply be the result of pique or shock at the Palestinian Authority’s effort to arm itself to the teeth. The change can be ascribed in part to Bush’s own sense of mission following September 11. The Palestinians had been waging a low-level terror war against Israel for almost a year when al Qaeda struck the United States. Bush’s growing conviction that terrorism of any sort poses a threat to civilized order around the world simply could not long coexist with a policy of rhetorical evenhandedness between a Western democracy and a terrorist organization masquerading as a legitimate political authority. But the roots of George W. Bush’s determination to side with Israel were planted on December 1, 1998, when the Texas governor was in Israel on his first visit. Ariel Sharon was then foreign minister in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, and on that day he took Bush and three other Republican governors on a helicopter trip. The usual highlight of a foreign dignitary’s visit to Israel is a long and depressing tour of Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust memorial. Israeli politicians have long believed in the magical power of the Yad Vashem visit and its ability to convince ignorant or unaware Americans of the magnitude of Jewish suffering in the last century–and therefore the need for a Jewish state. But the highlight of George W. Bush’s trip was his helicopter ride with Sharon. On the tour, Sharon did not seek to make Israel appealing by stressing Jewish victimization. Instead, by showing Bush and his fellow governors the simple geographical facts of Israel’s existence, he made an argument–an argument about the strategic and tactical threats to Israel’s Jews at that moment and in the future. From the air, a powerful lesson in the implacable geography of the Middle East takes only minutes. The Jewish state is so small that at its narrowest point, only nine miles separate the Mediterranean Sea from the West Bank. It’s often difficult for Americans to grasp how tiny Israel is, perhaps because a nation that dominates the international news the way Israel does can’t help but seem enormous. But Bush, the Texan, got it. As he joked in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 2000, “most driveways in Texas are longer than that.” Israel’s border with Lebanon to the north is constantly under threat from camps controlled by the terrorist group Hezbollah. To the northwest is the border with the ever-hostile Syria. Just beyond Jordan, narrow and weak, are Iran and Iraq, wide and adventurous. Iran pays for Hezbollah’s war of menace. The Scud missiles Iraq fired at Israel traversed all those borders in 12 minutes during the Gulf War. The proximity of Arab and Jewish population centers makes clear how unsustainable the fantasy of a pure separation between the two peoples is. Much of Israel’s water supply flows through the territory that, according to the logic of the Oslo accords, would be part of the state of Palestine. And the argument that Jerusalem could be easily divided between west and east starts to seem nonsensical when you see Jewish neighborhoods like Gilo and Maale Adumim from the air. They were built on what was Jordanian territory before 1967 and the Palestinians call them “settlements,” but comparing them to a redoubt of a few houses atop an empty Judean hill is ludicrous. They are so fully integrated into Jewish Jerusalem that it would be almost inconceivable that they could ever be ceded to the Palestinians. Bush would not speak to reporters on that trip, but his fellow travelers, future Republican National Committee chairman Marc Racicot and future ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci, did. They said they were both struck by how small Israel was–and, by extension, how large were the Arab world and population surrounding and abutting the Jewish state. The relationship forged between Bush and Sharon that day may be one of the most unexpected political friendships of our time, especially given the markedly unsympathetic attitude expressed by the first Bush administration toward the muscular Zionism represented by Sharon. But it’s not at all fanciful to believe that Bush’s response to the events of September 11 was influenced by what he saw that day on Sharon’s helicopter. America learned on September 11 that there is no safe haven in a dangerous world, not even for a nation bordered east and west by two vast oceans. That had been Sharon’s message about Israel’s parlous straits three years earlier. No surprise that it would resonate in a sadder and wiser America–and an administration sadder and wiser than its predecessors. John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and columnist for the New York Post.
