Democrats losing moral clarity on Israel

Boston Globe ^ | 7-21-14 | Jeff Jacoby

[SJackson]

The Pew Research Center last week released a new survey of American attitudes in the Middle East. The results weren’t surprising. In the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, 51 percent of Americans say they sympathize more with Israel. Only 14 percent feel greater affinity for the Palestinians.

Pew’s findings demonstrate the strength of pro-Israel feeling in the United States. The poll was conducted amid the current fighting with Hamas, but the bottom line hardly changed from Pew’s last survey in April, when it reported that in the 36 years it has been sampling public opinion, “sympathy toward Israel has never been higher.”

But below the surface, America’s Israel-friendly consensus is splitting along the same left-vs.-right fault line that has polarized so many other issues. While support for Israel is overwhelming among Republicans and conservatives, it has been shrinking among Democrats and liberals. “The partisan gap in Mideast sympathies has never been wider,” reports Pew, with 73 percent of Republicans sympathetic to Israel in the ongoing conflict, but just 44 percent of Democrats. Respondents identifying as liberal Democrats were five times as likely as conservative Republicans to sympathize more with the Palestinians.

Thus is the Democratic Party losing its way on one of the great moral issues of our time.

For roughly the first third of Israel’s existence, Democrats tended to support the Jewish state more strongly than Republicans did. In a compelling new book, “Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel,” foreign-affairs thinker Joshua Muravchik writes that during the run-up to the Six Day War in 1967, “Israel was above all a cause championed by liberals.” So heartfelt was this support that even ardent Democratic opponents of the Vietnam War, such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Eugene McCarthy, advocated US military action on Israel’s behalf.

Only over the last 25 years has support for Israel grown so much greater among Republicans than among Democrats. The reasons for the divergence are many. On the right, they include the high value Republicans have attached to Israel as a stable ally in a very unstable region, as well as the migration to the GOP of evangelical Christians, many of whom support the Jewish state as a matter of transcendent conviction.

[SJackson]

Some truth to that. Antisemitic attitudes are highest in the black community, have been for years.

[SJackson]

Once upon a time liberals claimed an absolute monopoly on pro-Israel support.

With very little to back up the claim. Truman, who embargoed arms in 1948. Kennedy wasn't much of an actor on the issue, though his brother was killed for his support of Israel. Still, Democrats never mention that, it would reflect poorly on the palestinians. LBJ, who reneged on Eisenhower's commitment to keep the Gulf of Aquaba open. How big could that have been, back down Egypt, perhaps no 1967 war. I acknowledge LBJ had his hands bull, and Israel in control of the Sinai shut the canal to Russian traffic to Vietnam. But it was a commitment, by a Republican, to defend Israel's access to the Red Sea, and a Democrat refused. Who's next, Jimmy Carter. A collection to make Clinton look good on the issue. Of course other than Nixon and to some extent Reagan, Republicans have their issues too. But Republicans seem, at least to me, to have an affection for Israel despite policy decisions. Many Democrats, certainly post Carter, seem to view it as a necessary burden.

[InterceptPoint]

An interesting theory. It could be you are right. In any case I'm old enough to have have noticed the Left’s transition from pro-Israel to anti-Israel. You just wake up one day and say to yourself: “I thought these guys were big supporters of Israel”.

[TrueKnightGalahad]

The comments on the article from the Globe's site are a hoot, as the loonies frantically dredge up supposed 'nuances' to justify their rabid lefty anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. The nutjobs are apparently blind to the fact that they are completely proving Jacoby's premise.

[Unam Sanctam]

And yet most American Jews viscerally support the extreme left wing Democrats and despise Evangelical Christians. Go figure...

[ek_hornbeck]

However--the hard Left inside the United States still tended to support Israel. The fact that it did so while elsewhere opposing it can only be because, for whatever reason, Moscow ordered them to. Moscow seemed to have a reason for keeping their American clients pro-Israel while ordering an anti-Israel line in the rest of the world.

There's a much simpler explanation for this. The intellectual leadership of the Left in America was heavily Jewish, something that wasn't true in the rest of the world because most other countries don't have a substantial Jewish population. The American Left tended to be pro-Israel because for most Jews, even those on the far Left, ethnic solidarity came ahead of ideological solidarity. As to why that isn't the case with today's US Jewish Left, I would say it's because today's generation of secular Jews is more assimilated and has less of a sense of ethnic solidarity than a couple of generations ago.