Sometime in mid-2008 I was the author of an article that made the headlines of Maariv. It read: “Concern in Jerusalem: Obama is Getting Closer to the White House.” That article appeared after Barack Obama won several important victories in the Democratic Party primaries, placing him in a comfortable launching point to achieve the impossible, or at least the impossible until then. It looked like he could beat Hillary Clinton and then go on to defeat John McCain. The Jerusalem I was writing about was the Jerusalem of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. It was a Jerusalem of peace, negotiations and international stature. Israel’s legitimacy around the world was solid. Nevertheless, despite all that, Jerusalem was still worried about Obama, that unknown variable from Chicago, the man who came out of nowhere and managed to whip up every deep-rooted paranoia ever held by Jerusalem into a feverish pitch.

Four years have passed since then. Jerusalem itself has changed. Olmert and Livni are gone, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister Avigdor Liberman have taken their place. Barak is still there (but he has since swapped dog-tags). Obama has completed his first term in office and is now getting ready for his second term. As things turned out, despite all the “Concern in Jerusalem,” Obama has been the most favorable president ever to the Israeli right. True, he never meant for that to happen, but when all is said and done, settlements in the Occupied Territories flourished during his presidency, the peace process died, the US continued to veto every anti-Israel decision in the Security Council, intelligence cooperation between the US and Israel reached an all-time high, and so did the security and military aid that Israel received from the US.

Here’s something worth remembering. At a press conference in early October 2001, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon delivered his famous “Czechoslovakia Speech,” criticizing President George W. Bush’s efforts to piece together an international and pan-Arab coalition against terrorism. Sharon warned America and the world that they shouldn’t even consider turning Israel into a second Czechoslovakia. He gave that speech less than a month after Al-Qaeda launched its terrorist attack against the United States, while in Jerusalem — that same paranoid Jerusalem — people fretted that the US would throw Israel to the dogs in its efforts to spare itself, just like Neville Chamberlain tossed Czechoslovakia under the Nazi jackboots.

The end of the story is well-known. George Bush, Jr. later emerged as one of the most pro-Israeli presidents since the founding of AIPAC. He became a close friend of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and later of then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, he invaded Afghanistan and later Iraq, and in April 2004 he gave Sharon his famous letter recognizing demographic changes in the region. That document is still considered to provide the backing for everything pertaining to Israel’s position that it will keep the settlement blocs in the Occupied Territories.