Say "Good-Bye" to the Democrats

Michael L.

Can one be considered supportive of the Jewish people if one is hostile to the Jewish state?

I certainly would not think so, but I would bet that more and more Democrats think that way.

Writing in the Times of Israel, David Horovitz tells us:

Three quarters of highly educated, high income, publicly active US Democrats — the so-called “opinion elites” — believe Israel has too much influence on US foreign policy, almost half of them consider Israel to be a racist country, and fewer than half of them believe that Israel wants peace with its neighbors. These are among the findings of a new survey carried out by US political consultant Frank Luntz.

Detailing the survey results to The Times of Israel on Sunday, Luntz called the findings “a disaster” for Israel. He summed them up by saying that the Democratic opinion elites are converting to the Palestinians, and “Israel can no longer claim to have the bipartisan support of America.”

Israel is the only country on the entire planet that cannot coax the United States into recognizing its capital, yet somehow Israel is said to have too much influence on US foreign policy.

I have been arguing for years that the Progressive-Left and the Democratic Party have betrayed their Jewish constituency through accepting the BDS movement as part of the larger coalition.  It would be something akin to telling black people that if they wish to remain Democrats than they will just simply have to get used to the fact that the Ku Klux Klan has a seat at the Democratic Party table.

The movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel has nothing to do with peace.  BDS has nothing to do with social justice or universal human rights and everything to do with the Palestinian-Arab determination to weaken, undermine, and eventually eliminate Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people.

76% of Democrats think that Israel (i.e., the Jews of Israel) have too much influence on American foreign policy.  76%!

47% of Democrats - almost half! - think that Israel is a racist country, whereas only about 13% of Republicans think so.

88% of Republicans understand that Israel wants to live in peace, but only 48% of Democrats understand this.

This polling data was put together by Republican pollster Frank Luntz who I remember very clearly as a regular FOX News guy during the Bush II years.  This will incline some people to dismiss the numbers, but they are certainly consistent with my own experience as an activist and writer.

Unlike Luntz, however, I do not think that these findings represent a "disaster."

The Democratic Party has enjoyed the blind loyalty of American Jews for far too long.

If American Jews want bi-partisan support for Israel then we need to do a better job supporting both political parties.  The Republicans support Israel and the Jews despite the fact that most American Jews detest the Republican Party.  But Jews are funny that way.  For example, we have no better friends on the planet then Evangelical Christians, yet we tend to despise Evangelicals.

It makes me wonder if diaspora Jews, as a whole, do not suffer from some form of collective Stockholm Syndrome?  We donate time and money and blood and sweat to those who do little more than perpetually kick us in the head, while those who actually do support us, we disdain.

There is something fundamentally wrong with this.  We should not be like Barack Obama.  That is, we should support our friends and oppose our enemies.  This is what I like to think of as a little something called "normal."  Others might term it "common sense," but whatever you call it, it is in short supply among diaspora Jews.

There are those who claim that Evangelical support for Israel is only out of some malicious post-Apocalyptic End-of-Days scenario in which Jesus will return and show Adolph Hitler and the Catholic Church - to paraphrase Pat Condell - just how Jews should really be dealt with.  I think that the people who believe this of Evangelicals are fundamentally bigots.  They are assigning evil, essentially, to millions of their fellow Americans for no other reason then that they disagree with their political views.

It may very well be that for some Evangelicals support for Israel is, indeed, out of some hysterical theocratic nightmare drama, but for many, many others it is because the Bible is their book along with the New Testament.  The place names of towns throughout the United States are directly out of the Hebrew Bible.  Their entire way of being - for better or for worse - is heavily derived, ultimately, from Jewish theological traditions.

And then, of course, there is Genesis 12:3 which, in the King James Bible, reads as follows:

And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

For millions upon millions of devout American Christians, this is why they support Israel.

They recognize and honor the fact that their own spiritual-religious heritage points to the Holy Land, the Land of the Jews.

If the Democrats wish to turn their backs on the Jews for moral reasons, no less, then let them do so.

As long as I am paraphrasing, let me mangle a little Gloria Steinem:

The Jews need the Democratic Party like a fish needs a bicycle.

I, for one, believe in supporting our friends, not our enemies.  Furthermore, it is only through such support that we can ever hope to influence, and in some measure reform, conservative political elements in the United States, or the West, more generally.

I am not a Republican.  Not yet, anyway.  However, given the general disdain of the Democratic Party for the Jewish State of Israel, it takes a special type of Jew to continue to worship at that altar.

Some might even say that it is a form of idolatry.