Israel as a wedge issue

Last month at the UN President Barack Obama did something he had never done before. He discussed Israel and the Palestinians without once attacking Israel. He didn’t blame Israel for the absence of peace.

True, Obama did not blame the Palestinians for refusing to negotiate with Israel. He did not attack Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for making a unity deal with Hamas. 

He did not condemn the Palestinians as racist anti-Semites in light of their demand that a Palestinian state be ethnically cleansed of Jews, or for their refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

But for the first time in his presidency, last month at the UN Obama spoke to a world audience and drew a moral equivalence between Israel that seeks peace and the Palestinians who seek Israel’s destruction. 

Given his record, this is a step forward. 

What caused the change?

Quite simply, the Republican victory in New York’s 9th Congressional District’s special election earlier this month caused the change. Obama did not attack Israel at the UN because he is concerned that he is losing American Jewish support. 

Cong. Bob Turner’s election, like that of other Republican politicians since 2009 in traditionally Democratic constituencies owes in large part to Obama’s poor economic record. But what made the NY-9 election unique was the major role Obama’s hostile policies towards Israel played in the race. With its high percentage of Jewish voters, the district served as a bellwether for Obama’s reelection prospects among Jews as well as a litmus test for the Democratic Party’s ability to continue to view Jews as automatic Democratic voters and generous Democratic campaign donors.

Obama’s UN speech, like the administration’s leaked report that it has sold Israel bunker buster bombs signal that the administration views the Jewish vote as in play for 2012. And they are trying to woo Jewish voters and donors back into the Democratic fold. 

The deterioration of Jewish support for the Democrats has been a long time in coming. 

Traditional Democratic support for Israel began eroding with the nomination of George McGovern as the party’s presidential candidate in 1972. Before Obama, Jimmy Carter was the most hostile president Israel ever experienced. 

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was widely regarded as pro-Israel. Yet during Clinton’s eight years in office, Yassir Arafat was the most frequent foreign guest at the White House. Clinton’s legacy was the Palestinian terror war which broke out in his last months in office. 

By the end of Clinton’s second term, Republicans had clearly surpassed Democrats in their partisan support for Israel. And in the face of this shift, Democratic leaders insisted that the Republicans mustn’t make Israel a "wedge issue." Since Israel enjoys support from both parties, the Democrats argued that it would harm Israel if Republicans made their outspoken and nearly unanimous support for Israel an electoral issue. 

American Jewish leaders were happy to oblige the Democrats. Since most of them and most of their members were Democrats, American Jewish groups from AIPAC to the New York Jewish Federation willingly pretended the Democratic Party’s growing support for the Palestinians against Israel meant nothing. And the few voices pointing out the increasingly obvious partisan divide were attacked for "politicizing" Israel.

In the two and a half years since he entered office, as Obama’s hostility towards Israel became increasingly obvious, demands by Democratic leaders that the Republicans keep mum on Israel and the Democrats became more and more shrill. They reached their climax during Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic visit to Washington in May. 

While Netanyahu was en route to the US capital, Obama blindsided him by endorsing the Palestinian demand that all future peace talks be based on an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines. Since those lines would render Israel indefensible, Netanyahu was compelled to confront Obama on the issue during a photo opportunity at the White House the following day. 

In the face of Obama’s unprecedentedly harsh treatment of Israel, Cong. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee used the opportunity of a joint meeting with Netanyahu for leaders of the National Democratic Jewish Council and the Republican Jewish Coalition to make the case for silence on her party’s weak support for Israel. 

Her statement reportedly made Netanyahu so uncomfortable that he asked, "Do you guys want me to leave the room and give you guys some privacy?"

While requests to block debate on Israel were respected in the past, the current divide between Democrats and Republicans on Israel is so wide that avoidance of the issue no longer makes sense for Republicans. And so, days after the meeting with Netanyahu, RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks wrote a letter to Wasserman Schultz officially rejecting her request. 

As he put it, "The Jewish community has a right to be informed about people’s records and people should be answerable for the positions they take. This is the essence of democracy."  

And indeed, both the RJC and the Emergency Committee for Israel, a conservative group formed ahead of the 2010 Congressional elections, made Obama’s hostility to Israel a major issue in the New York 9 race. 

Congressional Republicans have also stopped giving the Democrats a free ride for their tepid support for Israel. In the past Republicans avoided introducing major legislation on Israel without Democratic co-sponsors and willingly watered down their initiatives to attract Democratic support. This is no longer the case.

In August Cong. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee introduced a bill that will end US financial support for the Palestinian Authority and steeply curtail US funding for the UN if the UN upgrades the PLO’s diplomatic mission. All 57 of the bill’s co-sponsors are Republicans. 

Cong. Joe Walsh introduced a resolution in September calling for Israel to annex Judea and Samaria. His resolution’s 40-odd co-sponsors are also all Republicans.

 

Israel’s enemies in the US peddle the anti-Semitic fiction that Israel’s supporters are nothing more than a cabal of activists who band together to defend Israel at America’s expense. Extensive polling data shows that the pro-Israel "cabal" includes the vast majority of Americans. 

It is due to the public’s overwhelming support for Israel that pro-Israel activists have no reason to fear injecting support for Israel into the political debate. The more politicians are called to account for their positions on Israel, the most pro-Israel their positions will be.

And that is the thing of it. Due to the Jewish community’s willingness to pretend that there is no partisan divide on Israel, for the past generation, in the face of growing popular support for Israel, successive administrations have adopted policies of appeasement towards the Arabs that have required Israel to take actions that weakened it. That is, because American Jews have agreed not to make Israel an issue, politicians have felt free to pressure Israel to take steps that harm it – without the public’s knowledge and against its wishes. 

Turner’s victory and Obama’s UN speech expose the folly of this practice. They show that Israel’s position in the US is enhanced, not weakened when politicians are called to account for their positions.