By Jonathan S. Tobin
Friday, May 18, 2018
Over the past half-century, Republicans and Democrats
have exchanged identities on Middle East issues. Republicans are now the
lockstep pro-Israel party, and the Democrats are deeply divided about their
attitudes toward the Jewish state. And as polling from both the Pew Research
Center and Gallup indicated earlier this year, the split between the two major
parties on Israel is growing.
The previous administration accelerated these trends.
President Barack Obama’s eight years were dedicated to creating what he called
more “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, and support for the Iran nuclear
deal became a litmus test of Democratic-party loyalty. President Donald Trump
has worked to overturn Obama’s Middle East policies, putting the remaining
pro-Israel Democrats in a difficult political situation. Trump’s recognition of
Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, as well as his abandonment of the Iran deal,
have been cheered by the Netanyahu government but panned by most Democrats,
including some who in the past have advocated both of those positions.
But reactions to the latest round of violence in the
Middle East shows that the Democrats’ drift may be speeding up still more, with
the party veering toward anti-Israel hostility.
It is one thing for most Democrats to treat the opening
of the new embassy in Jerusalem as if it were a Trump rally and therefore to be
avoided — the only Democrat in attendance was former senator Joseph Lieberman —
rather than a celebration of the alliance. But the deaths of dozens of
Palestinians in the course of a “march of return” in which thousands sought to
rush Israel’s border provided an opportunity to take the temperature of the
party on the relationship, and the results were far from good.
While the Trump administration backed Israel’s right to
defend its border with as much force as necessary, most Democrats didn’t agree.
Many responded as the Obama administration would have been expected to,
denouncing the supposedly “disproportionate” tactics of the Israel Defense
Forces but also noting the role of the Hamas terrorist group, which rules Gaza,
in fomenting the violence.
Representative Joseph Kennedy III, a rising star in the
party who gave the official Democratic response to Trump’s State of the Union
address earlier this year, provided a good example of this two-faced approach
when he managed to cram criticism of Israel’s “excessive use of force,” a
denunciation of Hamas, support for moving the embassy, and a claim that the
embassy’s “hasty relocation” by Trump was the ultimate cause for all the
violence into one two-paragraph statement.
But a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from 13
Senate Democrats suggests the party may be at a tipping point.
The letter was organized by once and perhaps future
presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and was joined by Senator
Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), another likely White House hopeful. Over the course
of two pages laying out concern for the Palestinians and a desire to resume
funding for a U.N. refugee agency fatally compromised by Hamas, the senators
showed little interest in the terror group’s responsibility for the violence or
the dismal situation in Gaza. Indeed, Sanders’s press release touting the
letter denounced the actions of “Israeli snipers” but made no mention at all of
Hamas.
Sanders has been outspoken in denouncing Israel for its
use of “disproportionate force” and seemed to take at face value Hamas’s claim
that the “march of return” was a civil-rights demonstration. He failed to note
that the march was motivated — as the use of the word “return” indicates — by
support for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state via the forced entry of
millions of descendants of 1948 refugees. He also ignored the fact that most of
the Palestinians who were killed while attempting to dismantle the fence were,
as the terror group has admitted, Hamas operatives — and that the crowds
rushing the fence were armed with Molotov cocktails and IEDs and attempted to
launch incendiaries across the border to ignite wildfires. Yet many on the
left, including the media, stubbornly depicted the march as the moral
equivalent of the 1965 March on Selma.
It is obvious how these views could force a schism in the
party. Israel was the one issue over which Sanders and Hillary Clinton had a
substantive disagreement during their Brooklyn debate; the former secretary of
state took Sanders to task for his willingness to spout Hamas talking points
about the 2014 Gaza war. Many Democrats, including Senate minority leader Chuck
Schumer and House minority whip Steny Hoyer, have remained faithful supporters
of Israel in spite of the Netanyahu government’s embrace of Trump. And
political observers have not forgotten the spectacle at the 2012 Democratic
National Convention in Charlotte, where the party’s leadership squelched the
clear opposition of the delegates on the floor to a resolution supporting
Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
The problem for pro-Israel Democrats is that their party,
increasingly dependent on minority voters, has become vulnerable to
intersectional arguments in which the Palestinian war on Israel is a Third
World parallel to the Black Lives Matter movement. That factor helps account
for the fact that sympathy for Israel as measured by the polls is so low among
Democrats when compared to Republicans. According to Pew, Republicans back
Israel against the Palestinians by a staggering 79 percent to 6 percent margin,
while Democrats are split 27–25 percent on the issue. Gallup shows that 87
percent of Republicans sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians,
while the same is true of only 49 percent of Democrats. While both polls show
that large majorities of Americans overall back Israel, the partisan
differences, which have been in place for two decades, are growing.
In a party whose center of gravity has shifted strongly
toward the “resistance” left since Clinton’s defeat, it remains to be seen
whether another relatively centrist candidate like her can defeat one who is
critical of Israel and supportive of Palestinian ambitions.
The truth about the Gaza violence — including the facts that
most of those killed were members of Hamas, and that the demonstrations ceased
the moment the terror group decided it was being asked to pay too high a price
for damaging Israel’s image — hasn’t seemed to influence the Left’s view of the
Middle East.
The willingness of the liberal mainstream media to jump
on the anti-Israel and anti-Trump bandwagon with respect to both Jerusalem and
Gaza has also made it harder for pro-Israel candidates to prevail, or even to
credibly speak for Democrats, on these issues. A New York Daily News front page that denounced Ivanka Trump as “Daddy’s
Little Ghoul” for smiling during the dedication of the new embassy while
Palestinians were killed in Gaza indicated that hatred for the president is
influencing the way many liberals think about Israel.
If Democratic politicians are showing they care more
about not offending intersectional ideology than about the sentiments of most
voters outside of the Left, the problem for the party’s pro-Israel wing is
apparent. With many Democrats (like the dwindling band of Never Trump
conservatives) now thinking that they must oppose anything Trump supports, it
remains to be seen whether party centrists can reverse this trend so long as
Israelis are cheering Trump’s decisions.
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