Democrats Can’t Hide Their Israel Problem

By Philip Klein

Thursday, September 23, 2021

 

For the past decade or so, top Democrats have been desperately trying to downplay the increasing size and influence of the anti-Israel wing of the party. But it keeps getting harder to hide what’s happening. This week provided yet another stark reminder when a group of progressives banded together to force House speaker Nancy Pelosi to rip $1 billion for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system out of a spending bill meant to avert a government shutdown. It’s hard to overstate what a radical turn this is for the party.

 

Iron Dome has been an enormously successful shield that has allowed Israel to protect its people by shooting down rockets that Palestinian terrorist groups indiscriminately fire at civilians. By limiting Israeli casualties, the system also protects Palestinian civilians. That is, were the rocket attacks more deadly, Israel would have no choice but to launch a more aggressive military campaign — and likely a ground invasion in Gaza — which would mean the loss of more lives on both sides.

 

But the life-saving system comes at a cost. Each time Israel intercepts a rocket, it is estimated to cost between $50,000 and $80,000. When Palestinians pursue a saturation-bombing strategy and fire thousands of rockets all over Israel, as they did in May, the price tag of defending civilians can quickly add up, so the system requires constant funding.

 

There is of course a principled stand one could take against foreign aid in general, or against sending more money overseas at a time when the U.S. is facing historic debt. But progressives are not making any sort of consistent argument against foreign aid and have zero concern for the national debt. If current plans being pushed by progressives pass, then Democrats will have authorized $6 trillion in new spending within the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency. That’s 6,000 times $1 billion.

 

Nor can the position be justified as an effort to “end the occupation,” as this was not about depriving Israel of funding for offensive weapons. Stripping funding for Iron Dome only makes sense if the goal is to help Hamas become more efficient at killing civilians. And progressives were so adamant about depriving Israel of this funding to protect its population that they were willing to shut down the government if the provision was not removed.

 

House majority leader Steny Hoyer, 82, is the classic Democratic elder pretending that nothing has changed when it comes to his party and Israel. In a desperate attempt to convince the media that there was nothing to see here, Hoyer scrambled to promise that Iron Dome would be taken care of because there would be a stand-alone vote on funding it. But that elides an important issue. The reason that it will easily pass as a stand-alone measure is that Republicans will be near unanimous (if not unanimous) in supporting Israel. But the fact that Democrats need Republicans to help fund Iron Dome shows how much the party has shifted. If the situations were reversed, and Republicans were in the majority, there would never be any need to rely on Democrats to get pro-Israel legislation across the finish line. Any such legislation would pass easily.

 

Polling bears out the dramatic shift in the partisan split on Israel in the past several decades. Take a basic question on whether people sympathize more with Israel or the Palestinians. In 1978, according to the Pew Research Center, Republicans were only marginally more supportive of Israel than were Democrats, 49 percent to 44 percent. But when the poll was taken in 2018, 79 percent of Republicans said they sympathized more with Israel, compared with 27 percent of Democrats — a staggering 52-point gap. Ideologically, the numbers are more dramatic, as liberal Democrats actually sympathize with the Palestinians over Israelis by a nearly two-to-one margin.

 

More recently, a Gallup poll taken this past March found that 53 percent of Democrats wanted the U.S. to put more pressure on Israelis, compared with just 17 percent of Republicans.

 

When Barack Obama came to the presidency, he pursued a “daylight” policy based on the mistaken notion that if the U.S. were seen as more distant from Israel, Americans would come to be viewed as a more honest broker by Arab countries, which would improve the prospects for peace. By the end of his administration, he abandoned Israel at the U.N., allowing the global body to pass a U.N. resolution condemning Jews for building homes in communities surrounding the Israeli capital city of Jerusalem. He also negotiated a nuclear deal that allowed hundreds of billions of dollars to flow to Iran. The agreement made Iran a greater conventional threat, allowed it to expand its ballistic-missile program, and kept alive its path to nuclear weapons.

 

But whenever Obama came under scrutiny for his hostile record toward Israel, his defenders would deploy U.S. funding of Iron Dome as a kind of political shield. Seeking to placate the AIPAC audience in 2012, Obama boasted, “As president, I have provided critical funding to deploy the Iron Dome system that has intercepted rockets that might have hit homes and hospitals and schools.”

 

Yet now, even Iron Dome has become controversial within the Democratic Party. That’s because younger and more liberal Democrats who are hostile to Israel have gained traction within the party, and their influence will only grow as elderly party leaders such as Hoyer fade from the scene. Democrats can deny what’s happening. But they can’t hide it.