ABSTRACT
In dealing with foreign affairs, wrote former House International Relations Committee chairman Lee Hamilton (D-Indiana), Congress tends “either to defer to the president or to engage in foreign policy haphazardly.” A national unity government was in power, headed by the Likud Party’s Yitzhak Shamir and including Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres of the Labor Party as ministers of defense and finance respectively. Efforts by DeLay and other Republican strategists to woo Jewish voters from their Democratic allegiance and forge an alliance between conservative Jews and fundamentalist Christians set up a dynamic whereby party leaders competed to demonstrate their support for the Israeli government, with a focus on near-term advantage. The Israeli government, reluctant to challenge the settlers in any case, was doubly so when the likely reward was another horrific bombing by Hamas or another group that the Palestinian Authority was unable or unwilling to control.
