For U.S.-Israel relations, Yitzhak Rabin was best

Jimmy Carter homed in on Gerald Ford after their second television debate. It was 1976 and the two were locked in a close, cruel race. The first president in the history of the United States who had not been elected either president or vice president was pitted against the enigmatic peanut-grower who came out of nowhere and captured the Democratic nomination.

The president was perceived as being hostile to Israel after announcing a "reassessment" of the relations between it and the United States, because of a political dispute originating in the period immediately after the Yom Kippur War.

The governor of Georgia, who was initially seen as suspect with regard to the Israeli question, became a hero when he promoted the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, but went back to being suspect when he did not hesitate to press the government of Israel. Then as now, Carter denounces Israel and is, in turn, denounced by most of the country's supporters.

Back during the campaign of 1976, though, Carter's mind was on politics, not policy. And the second debate gave him an opportunity to neutralize suspicions and allay apprehensions. When Ford explained how his administration had supported laws to forestall the Arab boycott against Israel, Carter exposed the lie, and rightfully so.

The administration, he stated, had done "everything possible to block anti-boycott legislation." The White House had not even agreed to do what the president had supposedly promised: to make public the names of companies that were boycotting Israel and also moving Jews out of positions liable to anger their commercial partners.

Carter's biography shows that his difficulty with Israel is inbuilt, and fundamental, though some believed for many years that the true deterioration in his approach started in the wake of his meetings with then-prime minister Menachem Begin. Begin's relations with the U.S. administration had their ups and downs, from the zenith of Camp David to the nadir of the struggle to prevent the sale of AWACS reconnaissance planes to Saudi Arabia; from the initially affable dialogue with President Ronald Reagan, to the brawling over the bombing of Beirut in the first Lebanon War.

According to the eighth survey of the Israel Factor, our panel of experts believe that Begin performed pretty well in his dealings with the administration in those circumstances - better than his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, and better than Benjamin Netanyahu, whose relations with the Clinton administration were so poor that then U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, exulted almost publicly at Ehud Barak's victory over Netanyahu in the 1999 elections.

For his overall performance in the U.S. arena - after giving proper weight to his dealings with the administration and Congress, and public opinion - the panel gave Begin a grade of 3.125, identical to that of Barak and of the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert. Yitzhak Rabin received the highest overall grade for his "American" performance in general, and also for his dealings with the administration. Netanyahu, who was unable to get along with the administration, gets the highest grades for his activity vis-a-vis Congress and for shaping public opinion. Together with Ariel Sharon, he receives the second-highest grade, after Rabin, for general performance in the U.S. arena. The panel's lowest grade went to Shamir.

An employee of the current administration, who clearly cannot talk about the Israel Factor on the record, chose an analogy from the world of basketball to explain the disparities in the success of Israeli prime ministers when it comes to communicating with U.S. presidents.

It's all a matter of mismatch, he said. For example, the Golden State Warriors, eighth place in the West, ousted the league champions, the Dallas Mavericks, in the first round of the playoffs. It's the first time in history that this happened. But in the second round, the Warriors were having troubles against a team that is far less highly regarded and that no one thought of seriously as a candidate to win the championship: the Utah Jazz.

"A mismatch. That's the secret in basketball, and it's also the secret of the relations between Israeli prime ministers and American presidents," the official said. "Who is suited to play against whom."

The United States, the elder president Bush recalled in the course of pillorying the policy of the Shamir government, gives "nearly $1,000 to every Israeli man, woman and child." Shamir dug in and refused to cooperate with the programs of Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker. Nor was he able to find paths to their heart, or bypass routes to soften the disagreements, and he was inept at communicating with the American public. Accordingly, the panel agrees almost unanimously, Shamir failed in his relations with the United States. His overall grade is 1.875, far lower than any of the others.

That failure played a large part in Shamir's loss in the 1992 elections. Ariel Sharon, who watched from the sidelines, after himself having been burned in a clash with the administration during the 1982 Lebanon War, learned an important lesson: to avoid disagreements with Washington as much as possible.

He was also lucky: Like Rabin, with Bill Clinton, Sharon dealt with a sympathetic, understanding administration that identified with Israel. The panel gave him a reasonable grade, but not outstanding, with regard to American public opinion. His relations with Congress were not exceptional, either; Sharon did not invest enough in them. Still, his overall grade is high. The direct, open channel to the White House was sufficient for his needs.

But Rabin, as we saw, towers over them all. And not only in the final score, but also in the internal division between the panelists. Whereas Netanyahu gets a high grade from some of the experts and a lower one from others, as do Barak and Olmert, in regard to Rabin there is total agreement: He gets no less than a 4 for his relations with Clinton and no less than a 3 in the overall grade. The only similar comprehensive agreement is with regard to Shamir: no higher than a 3 in those categories. It's also worth noting that four of the panel members (Gold, Halperin, Pinkas, Rafiah) worked for some of these prime ministers.

The Israel Factor on Rosner's Domain:

Survey 8 of The Israel Factor is here.

The panel ranks Fred Thompson here.

Introduction to the project here.

This blog is part of my print-edition weekend column. Read it in full here.