There were times, when John Baird was foreign minister, that people weren't quite sure in what country's cabinet he served.

His enthusiasm for Israel on a visit there in 2012 led even an Israeli cabinet minister to confess Mr. Baird had made him feel less loyal. "I think Canada's an even better friend of Israel than we [Israelis] are," said then-finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, a leading member of the governing Likud party.

Certainly Palestinians have grown to dislike him.

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On Mr. Baird's first visit to Ramallah in 2012 to meet with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and then-prime minister Salam Fayyad, a senior Palestinian official said they had no problem with the Canadian's pro-Israel statements. "There's no mistaking where he stands," the official said, somewhat admiringly.

But the Palestinian leadership also said they hoped Mr. Baird would use his closeness to the Israelis to argue for policies that might help move the peace process forward, such as a halt to settlement construction.

It was not to be. And, on Mr. Baird's most recent trip in January, Palestinians let him know their feelings.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator in the peace process and a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization's executive committee, described Mr. Baird in a Globe and Mail comment piece as "going out of his way to legitimize the banality and brutality of a 50-year-old Israeli occupation [of the West Bank]," and called on Mr. Baird to apologize.

A crowd outside the Palestinian foreign minister's office heaved shoes and eggs at Mr. Baird in a display of contempt that could only have been carried out with official approval.

Throughout the Middle East, Canada has become known as Israel's most supportive ally, largely through the policy changes ushered in by Stephen Harper's government.

As a more-than-eager minister, Mr. Baird appeared to embrace the new direction of the Canadian government toward Israel – and, consequently, toward the Palestinians – no matter the effect.

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His damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead approach sat very well with the Netanyahu government, but earned him opprobrium at the United Nations, where Mr. Baird spoke passionately against granting the Palestinians status as a "non-member observer state," a vote he lost 138-9.

Mr. Baird wore the disappointing outcome as a badge of honour that showed how he stuck to the values he holds dear.

To that end, he liked to tell the story of being a 24-year-old staffer to then-foreign minister Perrin Beatty. Every day, he said, the minister and his staff would get a briefing from a foreign affairs official. One day, the briefing referred to Katyusha rockets being fired into northern Israel by the militant Shia group, Hezbollah, in Lebanon.

When Mr. Baird asked, "What should we do?" he was told: "Nothing."

"It's not that easy to tell the black hats from the white hats," the official said, "so we keep quiet."

"I could not stay quiet," an indignant Mr. Baird said. He proceeded to draw a black hat and white hat on a piece of paper, putting Israel under the white hat and Hezbollah the black.

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He listed the values "free country, democratic" and "our friend" under Israel, and he wrote "centre of global terrorism" and "our enemy" beneath Hezbollah.

He told the official: "We can certainly differentiate between the white hats and the black hats, and I certainly know who I support."

Israeli audiences applauded enthusiastically whenever he told the story.

But modern-day Israel is not the same thing as the Jewish diaspora facing the Holocaust; nor are the Palestinians (or Iran for that matter) the same as Nazi Germany. No state's policies are lily white, nor pitch black. Mr. Baird, for all his intelligence and charm, chose not to untangle the Arab-Israeli complexities and help build a bridge between the parties, but to take a side, that of Israel, to which he gave carte blanche.