Summary
President of the United States who took office in January 1989 and, with James Baker, in Perceptions of Palestine’s account formed a team of rare pragmatism and utter lack of sentimentality — “no illusions about the Arabs, no illusions about the Israelis” — less fettered by the U.S.-Israel relationship than any team except Carter and Vance, yet deterred by cautious, Israel-focused advisers and by an interest in process over substance, so that nothing was accomplished in its first eighteen months before the process collapsed and the Gulf crisis diverted attention until mid-1991, when it convened the Madrid conference (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2444-2459, 2490-2495).
Details
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Bush took an instant personal dislike to Prime Minister Shamir, who misled him about Israel’s settlement plans at their first meeting; he was, Christison writes, a diplomat but not a statesman, impatient with what he himself called “the vision thing” (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2460-2467).
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Quandt’s paradox as quoted: Bush’s initial agenda was “probably more consonant with Israeli views than that of any” previous president, yet his administration soon became known as the most hostile ever to Israel (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2574-2575).
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Bush and Baker were determined, Christison writes, to deal with Israel as “just another pragmatic foreign policy problem” (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2582-2583).
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Christison part 4: Bush made settlements his litmus test after Shamir misled him in April 1989 and over Soviet immigrants in East Jerusalem, suspended the U.S.-PLO dialogue in June 1990, then after the Gulf war used his popularity and the changed public frame to force the Madrid process and delay Israel’s loan-guarantee request in September 1991; Shamir was voted out in June 1992 (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2624-2630, 2640-2672, 2674).
Related pages
James Baker, Dennis Ross, Richard Haass, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Yitzhak Shamir, Martin Indyk