Mr Bush entered the White House with a considerable reserve of goodwill. As Ronald Reagan’s vice president for eight years, he had shown empathy for imperilled Jews in the Soviet Union and Syria, and worked behind the scenes to ease their plight.
As president, he played an important role in Israel’s 1991 rescue of Ethiopian Jews.
But Mr Bush and his chief of staff James Baker were among the “major critics” of Israel in the Reagan administration.
Immediately after his election, Mr Bush appointed Mr Baker, his long-time friend, as Secretary of State.
At the urging of a Margaret Thatcher tired of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s intransigence despite her strong pro-Israel credentials, the new president decided to adopt a tougher line with Jerusalem. After eight years of indulgence by Mr Reagan who, Mrs Thatcher privately complained, had not shown “the slightest interest” in the region, the Israeli right was in for a shock.
Mr Baker made the slightly bizarre choice of AIPAC’s annual pro-Israel jamboree to denounce Israel’s “unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel”. He urged it to stop settlement activity and begin negotiations with its Palestinian neighbours.
Indeed, whatever the Israeli government’s shortcomings, the Bush administration appeared to take a perverse pleasure in public rebukes. Mr Baker, for instance, famously read out the number of the White House switchboard at a congressional hearing and told Israel “when you’re serious about peace, call us”.
The following year, Mr Bush decided to delay $10 billion in loan guarantees — requested by Israeli to absorb Soviet immigrants — to pressure Shamir into halting settlements.
The president’s public denunciation of “powerful political forces” and the “thousand lobbyists” who were working to oppose him on Capitol Hill was similarly ill-judged, although it may have resulted more from Mr Bush’s frequently mangled syntax than a deliberate attempt to invoke notions of shadowy Jewish conspiracies.
Mr Bush eventually corralled Mr Shamir into participating in the 1991 Madrid peace conference. Although its achievements were limited, a path — which under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres would eventually lead to Oslo — had opened up.
As Mr Bush prepared to run for re-election in 1992, Mr Baker was alleged to have suggested: “F**k the Jews, they don’t vote for us.”
Whatever the truth about the remark (the Secretary of State vehemently denied uttering it), for many American Jews it appeared to encapsulate the administration’s lack of sensitivity.
They also had a rather more attractive alternative. Mr Clinton outflanked the president on the right, attacking him for having “repeatedly challenged Israel’s sovereignty over a united Jerusalem” and complaining that “Israel has been singled out for repeated attacks by this administration.”
But perhaps more importantly, given the largely dovish stance of US Jews, Mr Clinton moved the Democrats back towards the centre ground, distancing himself from the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Mr Jackson, who had run a strong campaign in the 1988 Democratic primaries and dominated coverage leading up to the party’s convention, was distrusted by many Jews for notorious remarks he made during an earlier nomination race when he called New York “Hymietown”.
Moreover, his “rainbow coalition” politics was simply a variant of the New Left radicalism that began to impinge on the party’s politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, repulsing many normally loyal Jewish Democrats.
Ironically, it is the current threat of radicalism from the right which has led some Jewish conservatives to now view Mr Bush in a kinder light.
Eliot Cohen, a Trump critic who served in the State Department under Mr Bush’s son, said the late president was “a reminder that what we’ve got is profoundly abnormal”, while the foreign policy specialist Max Boot lamented the fact that “it is impossible to imagine the Republican party again nominating a man who put loyalty to country above loyalty to right-wing dogma”.
