President Jimmy Carter’s success in mediating the Israeli-Egyptian peace settlement, and his bold call for a “Palestinian homeland” (making him the first US president to do so), had much to do with him being deaf to Jewish voices and organizations. Likewise, President George H.W. Bush could not have dragged the recalcitrant Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to the Madrid Peace Conference in October 1991 had he not been willing to take on what he described as “some powerful political forces” made up of “a thousand lobbyists on the Hill.”