Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.

Barack Obama is bad for Israel, especially after the Iran nuclear deal. That is a given for many American Jews. The only American president they despise more, arguably, is Jimmy Carter, who at age 90 announced last week that he has metastasized cancer. When the 39th president leaves us, he will receive the usual glowing eulogies afforded ex-American presidents, yet many Jewish-Americans will listen through gritted teeth, recalling their strong suspicion that Carter was an anti-Semite. After all, during his long post-presidency Carter stood up for Palestinian rights with unseemly zeal, especially in his heretical 2006 book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid.

For many American Jews, it’s hard to recall that it was also Carter who—through vision, hard work and indomitable will—forged a singular agreement that allowed Israel to keep peace with its Arab neighbors for nearly four decades and, more importantly, to use that halcyon time to advance economically and transcend the Arab nations in military and technological strength, creating a world where today Israel no longer has to fear a traditional military attack by any Arab enemy. That agreement, Carter’s 1979 Camp David accord with Egypt—one of the great triumphs of American diplomacy in the 20th century—saved Israel from the main existential threat that had shadowed the Jewish state since its founding in 1948. Does that sound like the legacy of anti-Semite?


Barack Obama, whom some American Jews also suspect is anti-Semitic, may have just saved Israel’s existence again—and as profoundly as Carter did. However flawed, compromised and uncertain in its application, the Iran deal is the only thing in the past decade that has come close to stopping Tehran’s relentless march from a few hundred centrifuges to 20,000 and counting. That path would have led ultimately to Israel’s ultimate nightmare, a Mideast nuclear arms race that brings in not only Iran but rich Arab (and Israel-hating) countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Despite a lot of bluffing over recent years about an Israeli attack against Iran, Israeli security experts know a military solution would be a meager stopgap at best, setting Iran back by only a few years, and driving its nuclear program deeper underground. The evidence that many Israelis quietly realize this—despite the incessant caterwauling of Benjamin Netanyahu—is that key members of Israel’s security establishment, the ones who would know, have tentatively backed the Iran deal or at least conceded that Israel can live with it.

Among those experts, Ami Ayalon, former head of the Shin Bet, or Israel’s top domestic security agency, who told The Washington Post that the Vienna agreement was a useful way of curbing the Iranian threat. “When negotiations began, Iran was two months away from acquiring enough material for a [nuclear] bomb. Now it will be 12 months,” Ayalon said. That view was echoed by Gen. Yitzhak Ben-Israel, former head of the military’s weapons development and technology industry administration and current head of the Israeli Space Agency, who called it “a reasonable compromise” that “distances the Iranian nuclear threat for a very long time.”

But this is, however informed, a distinctly minority view among Israelis, as well as many American Jews. Though some polls appear to show many American Jews support the deal, the perception that it is very bad for Israel and that Jews in general oppose the deal has put it in jeopardy in Congress: Democratic senate minority-leader-in-waiting Charles Schumer of New York has announced that he would vote against the agreement, and so has another Jewish Democratic member of Congress, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA). Both are precisely the sort of critical Democratic votes that Obama needs to avoid an override of his inevitable veto of congressional disapproval of the deal. Obama himself has raised the stakes, coming dangerously close to accusing AIPAC, the biggest and loudest Israel lobby, of funding the main opposition against the pact. But at American University last week the president was almost apologetic for upsetting the Israelis, saying it would “be an abrogation of my constitutional duty to act against my best judgment simply because it causes temporary friction with a dear friend and ally.”

The views of American Jewry are hardly monolithic; indeed despite the things being said about him by some conservative Jews Obama continues to have a higher approval rating among American Jews than he does among the public at large. Liberal Jewish groups like J Street have added to the debate, raising serious questions about Israel’s behavior. And yet many American Jews would concede there is a hard-line orthodoxy that prevails in Washington and demands total devotion to Israel. It is one that Netanyahu exploited in March when he spoke to thundering applause in Congress about Obama’s “very bad deal,” a deal that at that point didn’t even exist. It is this hard-line lobby that writer Peter Beinart found himself permanently at odds with after he dared to argue, in his essay “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” in The New York Review of Books in May 2010 and later in a book, that many young, liberal American Jews are disengaging from Zionism and the pro-Israel orthodoxy in this country because they cannot support much of what Israel does.

Obama is thus only sharing the fate of most modern U.S. presidents who have dared to cross official Israeli policy—and the American Jewish community. Somehow it seems that the ones who have worked hardest to preserve Israel have managed only to earn Israeli and Jewish mistrust and contempt.

After Carter there was George H.W. Bush, who with the 1991 Madrid conference set in motion what became the Oslo peace process—which during Bill Clinton’s subsequent presidency came within a hair’s breadth of achieving a necessary, internationally legal separation from the Palestinians. Most Israelis yearned passionately for this historic outcome. And yet for their troubles the elder Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, also earned the enmity of American Jewry, again for the heresy of defiance. Like Obama and Carter, Bush and Baker came down hard on Israel; like Obama (and Carter at Camp David), they sought to halt settlements in occupied lands and pushed and pushed for a Palestinian settlement, with Baker famously firing off a tough challenge to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir to call the White House at “1-202-456-1414 … when you’re serious about peace.” In the 1992 election, Bush received 15 percent of the Jewish vote, the worst showing by a Republican presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater in 1964.

By contrast, an American president who remains popular among American Jews, George W. Bush, casually ditched the Oslo process and at the same time, by invading Iraq without cause—at a time when his attention was required in Afghanistan and Pakistan—virtually ensured the rise of Iran as a great, dangerous and nearly nuclearized power in the Mideast and an existential threat to Israel. What W. did do very effectively—earning the lasting gratitude of many American Jews—was to walk in lockstep with Israel on almost every issue.

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Why do American presidents seem to get in such trouble for pressing Israel to solve its deepest problems? The tragedy of modern Israel is that economically and technologically the country is full of geniuses and visionaries, but strategically its political leaders sometimes can’t seem to see around the next bend. This is not for lack of brains, of course, but mainly because long-term strategic thought requires enormous political courage in a region of the world where wrenching political compromises must be made because Jews and Arabs live on top of each other. Tragically, two modern Israeli leaders who did seem to grasp a long-term strategic vision for their nation and at the same time possessed the courage and power to implement it—Yitzchak Rabin and Ariel Sharon, both of whom came around to the necessity of major compromises for a two-state solution with the Palestinians—were struck down before they could act, one by an assassin, the other by a stroke. Another, arguably, was Edud Barak, who made deeply painful compromises (at the second Camp David and at Taba, respectively) under tremendous pressure from Bill Clinton but was tripped up in the end by Yasser Arafat, who was fairly deficient in strategic vision himself.

And what of the current Israeli prime minister? Does he possess the strategic vision—and political courage—to match his very considerable acumen in Israeli politics, which has made him one of the longest-serving premiers in Israel’s history? Consider: At a time when the Arab world is overrun with anti-Western Islamist radicals or new militarist dictators (as in Egypt), Netanyahu has failed to seize this unique moment in history and illuminate Israel’s new role to the world as a pro-Western and democratic island in a sea of increasingly anti-Western and unstable enemies. At a time of intense anti-Arab phobia in the West, when a genuine Israeli gesture toward peace with the Palestinians would have won Israel endless admiration—and support—even among European nations that harbor more than their share of anti-Semites, Netanyahu ratcheted up settlements instead. After the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris in January, a vote of solidarity with France would have won Netanyahu admiration even in one of the most anti-Semitic countries in Europe. Netanyahu did the opposite, impudently calling on French Jews to retreat to Israel. And now, over Iran, Netanyahu has totally isolated his nation at a time when the known world powers have backed the historic Iran agreement.

Is it proper for an Israeli leader to come out against the Iran deal? No doubt it is; it may even be smart policy, as a way of communicating to Tehran that there are serious skeptics out there and it had better behave. But Netanyahu, by using immoderate, almost hysterical language and launching a self-defeating jihad against the most powerful man in the world—even though Obama has provided record levels of security assistance to Israel—has only ensured that neither the White House nor the Europeans will listen to a word he has to say. Israel, of course, needs them to listen; close U.S.-Israeli intelligence and security cooperation will be critical in the years ahead.

Israel, an astonishingly successful country that should have the admiration of much of the world today, is once again all alone, and largely by its own doing.

For American presidents who like to think they have some strategic vision, a vision that does not simply assume absurdly that U.S. and Israeli interests are always perfectly aligned (though they often times are), this tendency of the Jewish community toward black-and-white judgment over support for Israel—keep in line with Israel, or be labeled anti-Semitic—is endlessly frustrating.

At American University earlier this month, the new nothing-but-drama Obama (replacing no-drama Obama) betrayed his feelings publicly about these frustrations. Without naming names, the president frankly noted that the same people who so vociferously opposed the Iran deal today were often the ones who so blithely embraced the Iraq invasion more than a decade ago, misjudging the consequences of starting a war in the Mideast and setting up the Iran problem in the first place. Yet today, Obama suggested, we hear “the same mindset, in many cases offered by the same people who seem to have no compunction with being repeatedly wrong, [that] led to a war that did more to strengthen Iran, more to isolate the United States than anything we have done in the decades before or since.”

The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus promptly chided the president for acting “embittered.” But all this deserves closer examination. Obama said “the same people” are doing this. Who are these people?

Very often they are American Jews, the ones who fancy themselves our— yes, I’m Jewish too— intellectual leaders ( though let's clearly remember that the chief architects of the Iraq invasion, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, were all good Christians). Prominent among these Jewish voices is Leon Wieseltier, longtime literary editor for The New Republic (now at the Atlantic) and, to put it mildly, no nuclear expert. Possessed of Old Testament hair and an almost Mosaic sense of moral certainty but little sense of the facts, Wieseltier blithely played down the global challenge of al Qaeda post-9/11 to support the Iraq war, which had nothing to do with 9/11, thus embracing policies that helped empower the Islamist Republic of Iran. Today Wieseltier can’t be bothered with details about whether the intrusive and permanent regime of inspections inside Iran will work (the issue for most technical experts). Instead Wieseltier has denounced the deal on grandiose grounds: Iran is, must be, every moral human being’s enemy. “We should be adversaries. What democrat, what pluralist, what liberal, what conservative, what believer, what non-believer, would want this Iran for a friend?” he writes in typical pounding prose.

“ This Iran.” Wieseltier means the Islamist hard-liners that he thinks speak for Iran. But as anyone who has reported from Iran has found out, Iran is not monolithic (just as American Jewry and Israelis aren’t). Within the tight confines of the Islamic Republic, which restricts election candidates and social behavior, it has an astonishingly pluralistic political culture. When I visited, in 2007, I found more open, on-the-record dissent against the regime than one sometimes finds in Washington against the White House. Nor is Iran, as a nation, a natural adversary either for the U.S. or Israel. (During the Shah’s time, in fact, Mossad and SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, worked together.) Despite its hateful rhetoric, the Islamic Republic has persisted for nearly four decades—the same length of time as the cold peace between Israel and Egypt, ironically—without attacking Israel directly, which makes its national actions very different from those of Hitler during the Holocaust.

Of course we now have the familiar meme, found especially in the writings of Jeffrey Goldberg, also of the Atlantic, that if Iran should ever get the bomb it might act differently: Some crazed millenialist ayatollah could decide to use it to wipe out Israel—even though Iran would be wiped out in turn many times over. Anything’s possible, I suppose, but this fear does not square with the history of the Islamic Republic’s actions over the past 36 years, which have proved to be rational for the most part and even subtle, even when it comes to underwriting terrorism. Indeed, as I learned when I was there and interviewed a number of hardliners, religious conservatives in Iran do have long-term plans to occupy this earth.They tend to invoke the “China model,” whereby the mandarins in Beijing managed to quash political dissent after the Tiananmen Square democracy movement by redirecting the desire for more freedom into a booming economy, as recipe for success. The Iranian Islamists want to stay in power too, and they generally want to live.

Finally there is Wieseltier’s nonsensical statement that the deal turns “this Iran” into “a friend.” That would be nice, but no one is claiming that, least of all Obama, who went one step back from Reagan’s “trust but verify” line about the Soviet Union and declared he’s not trusting Tehran at all, only verifying.

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Will it ever be possible for American presidents to treat Israel as just another ally—an actual foreign nation rather than a kind of 51 st state, and a key battleground one at that—and simply try to resolve Mideast problems on their own terms? It doesn’t appear so. In 2007, two then-respected professors, Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, published a book called The Israel Lobby, to address what everyone in Washington knows to be true (but only a few have the guts to say): The powerful political and lobbying interests in support of Israel have outsized importance in U.S. foreign policy.

But when you shoot at a king, you must kill him, and Walt and Mearsheimer failed miserably. They produced a shoddy, exaggerated piece of work that blamed the “Israel lobby,” without much evidence, for most bad things in U.S. foreign policy (including the 2003 Iraq invasion). Thus they soiled the debate; they not only shot themselves down but also ensured that no one would take on the actual Israel lobby again for a long time.

And so the problem persists. Jimmy Carter was never forgiven for pressing Israelis and Jews in general to grapple with unpleasant realities—supplying them with strategic vision—not only while he was in the White House but long afterward. This no doubt came from his own frustrations over the partial failure of Camp David, at which Menachem Begin had pledged to deal with the Palestinian issue— promising Carter a five-year settlement moratorium while starting negotiations on Palestinian self-rule—but failed to keep his word. Carter was also savaged by American Jews for proposing in 2014 that Hamas be recognized as a political actor; yet it appears that Israel may now be going down that road itself. In June, the Palestinian Al-Quds newspaper reported that Hamas was discussing a proposal for a long-term ceasefire with Israel, and Israeli intelligence officials are even said to be considering whether they can work with Hamas to defeat the Islamic State, their common enemy.

In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in December of 2006, Carter tried himself to confront the issue of his reputation among Jews, with some asperity: “The many controversial issues concerning Palestine and the path to peace for Israel are intensely debated among Israelis and throughout other nations—but not in the United States. For the last 30 years, I have witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts,” he wrote. “This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices. It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine.”

Sadly, Carter’s own great legacy in Israel’s favor will not change that. Nor, likely, will Obama’s.