Bush and American Jews

Hillel Halkin in today’s New York Sun on “The Roots of Bush’s Friendliness:”

What is it with American Jews? Not that anyone expects them to become Republicans or to rejoice that George W. Bush is in the White House. But why do so many of them revile him so?

Halkin was in America last week and talked to many American Jews — “all political liberals, many of them academics, all Jewishly knowledgeable and committed people” — and argued unsuccessfully with them:

“He’s the first American president to adopt the Israeli position that meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians cannot be held as long as Palestinian terror persists.

“He’s the first president to agree with Israel that Palestinian democratization must be an integral part of the peace process and to prove he meant it by shunning Yasser Arafat.

“He’s the first president to side with Israel on the question of its future borders by stating clearly that all areas of the West Bank in which Jewish settlers are heavily concentrated should be incorporated into Israel.

"And needless to say," I went on, "Bush has also been the first president to order the military dismantling of an Arab dictatorship that was a strategic threat to Israel. . . .

The fact is that, in regard to Israel, Mr. Bush has been the kind of president that one would once have considered an impossibility. . .

Halkin says the animus of liberal American Jews cannot come simply from Bush’s religious beliefs:  “Jimmy Carter, after all, was a born-again Christian, too . . .”

It is instead he says, a largely an unconscious fear (the same fear, I think, that animated Philip Roth’s latest novel) — the double whammy of the “Christian right.”

The fact that the Christian right in America descends from the one branch of Christianity that has historically been not anti- but philo-Semitic, that of the dissenting English Protestant sects of the post-Reformation and of the American Puritanism that grew out of them, is lost on America’s Jews.

If it weren’t, they would understand that George W. Bush has been so pro-Israel not in spite of who he is but because of it.

(Hat tip:  Ed Lasky).