Bush Celebrates Israel

President Bush travels this week to Israel to join in the official celebration of the country’s 60th Anniversary and to throw his own party to commemorate Israel’s founding. Not since Harry Truman bucked the strong advice of his own State Department and rushed to be the first world leader to recognize the new State of Israel on May 15, 1948, has a president made the legitimacy and security of Israel such a high priority.When Mr. Bush first ran for president in 2000, few would have guessed that he would come to seen as such a friend of Israel. He had little foreign policy experience of his own, and his father’s legacy in the Jewish community was not positive, being remembered for his secretary of state’s coarse reference to the Jews and how “they don’t vote for us anyway” and for his own statement, in reference to the pro-Israel groups, that he was “one lonely little guy down here” who was “up against some powerful political” groups. So it was no surprise that in the 2000 election, Mr. Bush won only 19% of the Jewish vote.But while Mr. Bush’s record on Israel surely has not been the product of any political debt he may have owed the Jewish community, he nonetheless proceeded to remake America’s Arab-Israeli policy in the most profound way. The signal event was his Rose Garden speech on June 24, 2002. The president called for establishment of a Palestinian state, but set reform and democracy and abandonment of terror as conditions for establishment of the state: “It is untenable for Israeli citizens to live in terror. It is untenable for Palestinians to live in squalor and occupation. … My vision is two states, living side by side in peace and security.”Never before has a president articulated as forcefully that a Palestinian State was an objective of our foreign policy. As I listened to the president deliver the speech and heard him speak about it in the subsequent days, I realized that the president had turned United States policy on its head — in a way that was not only sympathetic to Israel, but also pro-Palestinian.Since the end of the Six Day War, our Middle East policy has rested on the basic assumption that Israel should trade land for peace — that if the Palestinians recognized Israel and made peace, then Israel would withdraw from the territory it captured in 1967 so the Palestinians could establish a state of their own. In his Rose Garden speech, the president made clear that the prerequisite to Palestinian statehood no longer would be Israeli territorial concessions, but rather would be Palestinian conduct: in short, through their own actions, the Palestinian would achieve the statehood they deserved.The president’s speech was, therefore, empowering both to the Palestinians and the Israelis. To the Palestinians, he made clear that “You deserve democracy and the rule of law.” To the Israelis’ he made equally clear that “Terror must be stopped. No nation can negotiate with terrorists.”In the seven years that I have worked for Mr. Bush, I have been asked countless times why his support for Israel is so strong. Many of those who pose this question suggest that the President’s support for Israel stems from his Evangelicalism. As Richard Land, a Southern Baptist leader with ties to the Bush Administration, has stated, evangelicals support Israel because they believe “God blesses those that bless the Jews and curses those who curse the Jews.” Mr. Land is not unique among Evangelicals who support Israel because of biblical prophecy, including passages in the New Testament that tie the survival of Israel to the Second Coming of Jesus.While I know the president to be a man of faith, and we have discussed our reading of the Bible on several occasions, I have never heard him use apocalyptic language or even discuss Israel in religious terms. Rather, I believe his devotion to Israel, which appears to have grown during his presidency, stems principally from two other values he holds dear — the sanctity of life, and democracy.Israel was established by the United Nations as a response to the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust and as a place of refuge for the survivors. I spent time with the president immediately upon his return from his visit to Auschwitz in 2003, and we discussed the impression it made on him. After September 11, when the United States got a taste of what it is to live in fear of suicide bombers, as Israelis do daily, his empathy for Israel only grew.The president’s faith in democracy has also drawn him closer to Israel. I am sure that Israel’s success as a free-market democracy in a region that has never known another such system of government has had an impact on him. But the president’s devotion to Israel as a democratic “Light unto the Nations” is neither religiously inspired nor parochial to the Jewish people. Mr. Bush has staked his presidency on his effort to bring democracy to Iraq. It is his quest for people to live in freedom and under the rule of law that motivates the president, whether the beneficiaries are Iraqi, Palestinian, or Israeli.Mr. Bush’s commitment to Israel stems, in my mind, mostly from what Israel has achieved in its 60 years of statehood. And it is those achievements that the president is celebrating this week in Jerusalem.Mr. Lefkowitz, who was a senior advisor to the president during his first term, is the President’s Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea.

Bush Celebrates Israel

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