ARE WE STILL AN ALLY OF ISRAEL? VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
National Review Online:
Are We Still an Ally of Israel? Who Knows? V
Victor Davis Hanson
In a recent Gallup poll, 85 percent of Republicans and only 48 percent
of Democrats supported Israel rather that the Palestinians. What to make
of it?
The hard Left’s multiculturalist furor at Israel has made enormous
inroads into the Democratic party, as we see with the current “reset”
policy of the Obama administration, while the old blue-blood,
country-club Republicans who tsk-tsked Israel have almost vanished. Over
the last 20 years the Left has reconstructed Israel from a bastion of
the traditional liberal Jewish tradition into a Western, capitalist
hegemonic oppressor, all of which shows the power of campus
multculturalism when a tiny democratic country of 7 million can be
reconfigured into a colonial power.
In some sense Obama’s new policy, rather than the wishes of the
Democratic Congress, reflects the new Democratic majority, even as it is
at odds with the country at large (63 percent of the American people
express support for Israel). More to the point, no alliance can long
withstand such a marked divide, in which Republicans are overwhelmingly
pro-Israel and Democrats quite clearly are not – that divide leads to
something like the radical change of heart from Bush in 2008 to Obama in
2009.
Clearly Jewish-American voters are not factoring in Israel all that much
in their political decisions and have little problem identifying with a
party that has lots of problems with Israel – unless domestic politics
have not caught up with rapidly changing attitudes in Washington.
Stranger still, the Israeli liberal elite that dominates foreign policy
and cultural life in Israel will be finding the U.S. government much
more akin to the hostile feeling of Europe; its six-out-of-ten support
in America remains mostly rank and file.
All of this, of course, is the stuff of parlor thinking and mercurial
polls. The real problems won’t arise until there is another shooting war
in the Middle East, a flare-up with Iran, or another intifada, in which
everything from American resupply to verbal support for an Israel in
extremis will clarify things a great deal.
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