By Mona Charen
Friday, September 07, 2012
Were you shocked when at least 50 percent of the
delegates to the Democratic National Convention appeared to vote “nay” on
recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and reinserting God into the
platform? Admittedly, it was high drama — a truly unscripted moment that laid
bare the raw hostility toward Israel that has gradually achieved mainstream
status within the Democratic party. But a surprise? Not really.
A Gallup poll released earlier this year showed that 78
percent of Republicans supported Israel over the Palestinians, whereas only 53
percent of Democrats agreed. For the past 12 years, Gallup reports, Democratic
support for Israel has been declining. The Left, which is increasingly
coterminous with the Democrats, has been hostile to Israel for much longer.
Seen an Occupy demonstration lately? Noticed “Israel Apartheid Week” at your
local campus?
The Democrats, as Shmuel Rosner chronicles in The Jewish
Journal, are zealously spinning this little debacle — at first claiming that
the platform wording change from 2008 was insignificant and charging, through
Senator Dick Durbin, that questions about it were a conservative plot. Former
congressman Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat who runs interference for Obama
with Jewish voters, asserted that the platform reflected Obama’s “unflinching”
commitment to Israel.
It took only about twelve hours for that line to shrivel.
When the vote was scheduled to revise the platform, the Obama campaign
circulated a new spin — namely that restoring God and Jerusalem was all Obama’s
idea and that he was befuddled as to how the platform had ever acquired the
offensive wording in the first place. David Axelrod blamed unnamed “others” on
Thursday morning for the screw-up, insisting that the president was too busy
with other things to notice. But Politico reported that Obama had seen and
signed off on the platform before the convention.
To suggest that this was a mere snafu insults the
intelligence of Americans. This president has profoundly altered the U.S.
position toward Israel. He insulted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; adopted
the Palestinian position on negotiations (that all settlement activity should
cease before talks could resume); condemned Israel from the U.N. podium; and
suggested that Israel return to the 1967 borders (“with land swaps”) before the
Palestinians had even agreed to negotiate, far less renounced terror or adopted
democratic norms. To the contrary, the PA and Hamas are drawing closer.
President Obama was famously outraged at Netanyahu for
building Jewish apartments in Israel’s capital — a capital that neither the
State Department nor the White House spokesman would identify as Jerusalem —
and yet has never publicly chastised PA leader Mahmoud Abbas for refusing to
recognize Israel as a “Jewish state.”
What remains in the Democratic platform is just as
disturbing as what was revised.
In 2008, the platform proclaimed:
The United States . . . should continue to isolate Hamas
until it renounces terrorism, recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and abides by
past agreements. . . . The creation of a Palestinian state through final status
negotiations, together with an international compensation mechanism, should
resolve the issue of Palestinian refugees by allowing them to settle there,
rather than in Israel.
Any proposed “settlement” of the Palestinian question
that permits Palestinians to exercise a claimed “right of return” to settle in
Israel represents an existential threat, as Israel could be swamped by Arab
immigrants, adding to the one-fifth of Israel’s population that is already
Arab.
But the 2012 platform, after the usual bromides about
U.S./Israeli friendship, reads: “A just and lasting Israeli-Palestinian accord,
producing two states for two peoples, would contribute to regional stability
and help sustain Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state.”
The reference to isolating Hamas is gone. The rejection
of a “right of return” to Israel for Palestinians is gone. Instead, we see code
words about Israel’s sustaining its character as a “Jewish and democratic
state.” This is the language of Israel’s critics, who warn darkly that Israel
cannot continue to rule over the West Bank and maintain its democratic bona
fides. But Israel has no desire to rule the West Bank, as it has amply
demonstrated (it evacuated Gaza and has granted near-total autonomy to the
Palestinians in the West Bank). Only the threat of violence and terror keeps a
single Israeli soldier on the West Bank.
The platform manages to patronize the Jewish state about
maintaining its soul, while minimizing the belligerence of its enemies and the
threats to its existence. The embarrassing floor spectacle merely underlined
the obvious coolness that a majority of Democrats — very much including the
incumbent president — feel toward Israel, their fulsome denials
notwithstanding.
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