The president was elected amid high expectations that he would discontinue his predecessor’s habit of pressuring Israel to be more forthcoming in its negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs. He amassed a huge majority among Jewish voters by running against the incumbent simultaneously from the hawkish right and the dovish left.

The buzz in Washington concerned the shape of the president’s team and whether he would appoint a special envoy for the Israel-Palestine conflict. The president and his team inherited a peace process based on the Madrid conference that followed the first Gulf War.

As that team took shape, it was clear that American Jews were heavily represented at top levels of the White House, Cabinet, and State Department, and among those the president appointed as ambassador. Most critically, the president retained three quarters of the (entirely) Jewish team running American policy toward the Israel and the Palestinians. To fill in the fourth spot, vacated by Richard Haass (who now heads the Council on Foreign Relations), the president sought to inoculate himself from a fight with pro-Israel Democrats by appointing Martin Indyk, then still not an American citizen, to the National Security Council.

By a stroke of luck, the president and his men entered office on the heels of the victory by an Israeli moderate, Yitzhak Rabin. This allowed them to avoid a confrontation with an unyielding Israeli right, like the one with Prime Minister Shamir and his housing minister, Ariel Sharon, which had so damaged the presidency of President George H.W. First.

That lucky streak extended itself as Israeli doves, led by Yossi Beilin, concluded lengthy negotiations in Norway, conducted in secrecy from the press and without American participation. By the time such a confrontation presented itself, with the election of Prime Minister Netanyahu in the late spring of 1996, the Oslo process was too far along for its Jewish opponents to stop it.

Over time, critics in the Arab world and their allies would argue that the Clinton administration always leaned towards the Israel position, a falsehood that achieved the status of a self-fulfilling prophecy at Camp David in the summer of 2000. The idea that Jews dominate the Clinton administration was widespread in the Arab world. “One hundred days” after George W. Bush acceded in 2001,Nada Awar Jarrar wrote in Beirut’s Daily Star that “during Bill Clinton’s presidency “the pro-Israel lobby enjoyed unprecedented influence on American policy in the region.”

At around the same time, New York Times columnist Thos. Friedman joked that his Arab interlocutors were happily saying that “the yahoodis are gone.” Mr. Friedman’s point was that Arabs and others unhappy with the drift of Middle East policy under the Clinton administration should have followed the old adage: Be careful what you wish for.

Now the Jewish origins of senior officials spread throughout the Bush administration has surfaced in the presidential campaign. Though fewer numbers than their Democratic counterparts, Americans who happen to be Jewish are among those who have had a profound impact on policies in Iraq and towards the Israel-Palestine dispute.

The charge is heard everywhere, from the fringe right scared of Jews under their beds to the left charging that pro-Likud Jews have hijacked the Bush presidency. It is even being said that just as Israeli behavior towards the Palestinians is provoking anti-Semitism, the “cabal” of neoconservative Jews allegedly running Bush administration policies is stirring hatred toward Jews.

The latest version of this emerged in an September 27, 2004, article in Investor’s Business Daily, “Bush Still Falls Short With Jews, Once Behind War But No Longer.” The article asserts that, “Many American Jews now blame Bush for the rise of anti-Semitism in the world” in part due to “the prominence of Jews on Bush’s team – ex-Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, Defense Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith – in pushing for the war.”

Commenting on that thesis, my friend J.J. Goldberg, editor of the Forward, is quoted saying that, “There’s got to be a lot of anger at those particular Jewish Republicans who have made the Jewish community look bad. The perception is that this is a bunch of idiots who didn’t know what they were doing, and not only got Americans in trouble, but have created anti-Semitism.”

In fact, there is nothing new about blaming Jewish behavior for anti-Semitism. The question is whether it’s true? And it’s not. I don’t agree with everything Messrs. Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith have done, but right or wrong, what is the point, where is the evidence, of blaming (or crediting) them as Jews?

So apart from partisan rancor, then, what accounts for the new success of theories that blame a small number of Jews in high positions for the alleged ills that have befallen our country? My own guess is that liberals are pointing the finger at the Bush administration for not doing more with the mess inherited from the Clinton administration. Rather than turn their ire on the error of Oslo, which given the collapse of the peace process requires at least some serious revision, they blame Mr. Bush and his team.

As for Mr. Bush, he came into office several months into the intifada, with the territories in flames and with public support for Prime Minister Barak ,a moderate, evaporating. Within weeks, Mr. Sharon assumed the helm. Then came September 11. Iraq may – or may not – be judged a fiasco, but it is not a Jewish one. So we are left with only one conclusion about those who are bothered by the self-assertion of Jews.

Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.