Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

September 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered to create a Palestinian state in Gaza, almost all of the West Bank, and half of Jerusalem.

Flagrantly brutal and corrupt, Mubarak was nevertheless America’s loyal friend for more than thirty years. And after a single week of demonstrations that, though highly publicized, involved a fraction of Egypt’s 85 million inhabitants, the United States abandoned him.

Bush’s support for Israel had, in fact, emboldened Olmert to propose establishing a viable Palestinian state—an offer ignored by Mahmoud Abbas.

Said’s book became canonical in many Middle East Studies departments, pressuring students and professors to prove they were not Orientalists. Israel’s history was subjected to withering revisionism.

They resounded in the administration’s respect for the “international community,” a grouping that included North Korea, Pakistan, and Sudan, and which many Israelis considered an oxymoron.

That was true if being Jewish in America meant recoiling from military power, territorialism, nationalism, and a sense of tribe.

Yet refuting the Bush-Sharon letter also boxed in the Palestinians.

When, in 2006, the Palestinians went to the polls, a majority voted for Hamas, the terrorist group that the Bush administration insisted on including on the ballot.

Rather, he held that the talks begin immediately, without preconditions. “I’m ready to meet President Abbas, today and tomorrow and the next day, in any place,” he declared. “I’m prepared to go to Ramallah.”