Broken Covenant.

• Author: Frankel, Glenn

A new book by the former Israeli foreign minister claims that Bush betrayed Israel. The real betrayal was right under his nose

The years between 1988 and 1992 marked a critical turning point in Israel's history. The country embarked on the hazardous transition from a small, ideologically oriented garrison-state to a more open, entrepreneurial, modem nation. It underwent the pain of suppressing and, ultimately, coming to terms with the Palestinian uprising; it braved the Gulf War; and it coped with the arrival of more than a half million Jews from the collapsing Soviet Union. Israel also endured what many then considered to be its greatest external threat: the Bush administration.

In his memoirs of this period, former Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Arens recalls his early recognition that relations between Jerusalem and Washington had cooled. He warns his aides, "They are going to play hardball with us, and if they feel that they have the political backing for it, they will try to cut our balls off without mercy."

It's not a bad summary of what follows. The Bush administration was Israel's worst foreign policy nightmare come true--an unsentimental Republican administration with neither political nor nostalgic ties to the Jewish state. Even Jimmy Carter was better: He may have been a dewy-eyed dove in Israeli eyes, but he was a Democrat and ultimately had to bow before the kind of pressures big-time Democratic supporters of Israel could apply. George Bush had no such constituency. With few prominent Jews in the Republican camp, Bush had a free hand in his dealings with Israel. Glenn Frankel, former Jerusalem bureau chief for The Washington Post, is the author of Beyond the Promised Land: Jews and Arabs on the Hard Road to a New Israel, published by Simon & Schuster.

Rather than give a broad overview of this dynamic period, Arens has chosen to focus on the collapsing relationship between the Shamir government and the Bush administration. This gives Arens an opportunity to make a provocative point: The Bush administration arrogantly sought to "interfere" with Israel's internal affairs and dictate its foreign policy, ultimately causing the fall of Shamir and the Israeli right, and creating a peace process that Arens views as highly dangerous to Israel's fate. "Never before in its history had a government of the United States dealt in this manner with a sister democracy," he contends.

In so claiming, Arens says both too much and too little. Too much in that he mistakenly ascribes to a misconceived American intervention virtually all of Israel's difficulties during this crucial period; too little in that in doing so, he ignores many other critical factors. In the end Arens misses the most important point of all--that it was the vast political, social, and economic changes inside Israel itself, aided and abetted by the end of the Cold War, that ultimately caused the Likud's downfall and inexorably led Israel to its fateful deal with the...