By openly announcing a tilt toward Israel, Bush was staking out a position that broke with long-standing U.S. policy. What led him to take such an unusual position and present it in such a vigorous way? In part, it's because Bush surrounded himself with advisors known to hold stridently pro-Israeli views, most of them hardcore neocons. Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Richard Perle and Lewis "Scooter" Libby were all supporters of a strong Israel; Feith and Perle had opposed the U.S.-backed Oslo process. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held similar views: Cheney once said that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat should be killed, and Rumsfeld referred to the "so-called occupied territories."
But that is only a partial explanation. Bush had seen his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, stumble in the Middle East. He saw Clinton's failure at Camp David, and he remembered his father's difficult relationship with the Jewish community after he denied Israel loan guarantees because Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir would not freeze settlements. He concluded that no good had ever come to an American president from diving into the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Bush was as good as his word: He tilted toward Israel and gave Sharon a blank check to do what he wanted in the occupied territories. Bush did not pressure Israel on issues of settlements and illegal outposts, he did not pay much attention to the humanitarian crisis caused by Israeli roadblocks and closures, and he brushed off calls to reprimand Israel for using U.S.-made F-15s for targeted killings.
The relationship between Bush and Sharon was cemented by the 9/11 terror attacks. Bush divided the world into those who fight terror and those who support it. For Bush, Sharon's Israel was the good guys and Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority was the bad guys. "9/11," says former ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer, "added the emotional dimension to the Bush-Sharon relationship." Now they were both in it together, fighting terror.
There were, however, some rough spots in the early years of the Bush administration. After the 9/11 attacks, as Bush tried to build a coalition of moderate Arab states, Sharon became afraid that Bush was departing from his hands-off approach and caving in to Saudi pressure to present a peace plan and demand Israeli concessions. Sharon lost his cool, and in a speech delivered both in Hebrew and in English warned America not to try to "appease" the Arab world at Israel's expense. "I turn to the United States and say don't go back on the same mistakes as the democracies made in 1938. That is when Czechoslovakia was sacrificed for a convenient, temporary solution. Do not appease the Arabs on our account. Israel will not be Czechoslovakia. We will defend ourselves." The U.S. in turn denounced Sharon's angry remarks as "unacceptable." But it turned out to be an isolated event. Sharon worked quickly to fix the relationship and the incident was forgotten.
Sharon, for his part, made every effort not to harm his relationship with the White House. Powell's fears of "unleashing" Sharon turned out to be exaggerated. The new Sharon who came to power in Israel was quite different from the Sharon Powell had in mind. He was still a hard-liner, still tough on terror and still blind to human rights issues, but at the same time Sharon understood that his success in Israel depended on maintaining a good relationship with the U.S., and for that cause he was willing to do a lot.
In March of 2002 the Israeli army embarked on a major incursion into the West Bank, called "Operation Defensive Shield," in response to an upsurge in Palestinian terror attacks, including the Passover massacre in Netanya that killed 30 people who were celebrating the Jewish holiday. Sharon ordered the army to do what it had not done for a decade -- enter all Palestinian cities and camps with full force. Sharon did not seek Bush's early approval for the operation and the U.S. did not try to stop him.
The way Bush and Sharon handled Israel's incursion into Palestinian cities was typical: Bush let Sharon do as he pleased up to a certain limit, and Sharon knew when it was time to stop in order not to embarrass his American friend. A week into the operation, with Israeli troops in all West Bank cities and on their way into the refugee camps, Bush said "enough is enough." Asked when Israel should withdraw, he replied, "As soon as possible." Sharon did not budge. He knew that Bush was only paying lip service to the international community and that the U.S. president knew very well that Congress supported the Israeli operation. The Israeli forces kept moving in and the U.S. did not insist. Bush and Sharon talked by phone and Sharon said it was too early to pull back the troops. Bush, according to Israeli sources, gave a vague response, which Sharon understood to be an approval to continue.
Three days later Bush said publicly, "I meant what I said," and Sharon finally moved some forces. Sharon sensed that Bush needed him to begin to withdraw, so he did, but he also knew that the American president required only a token gesture. Sharon withdrew, slowly, from cities where the operation had already ended in any case; he left forces in the major terror hot spots of Jenin and Nablus. As always, Sharon's between-the-lines reading of Bush's desires was correct: The White House was satisfied with the partial withdrawal and didn't ask for more.
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