Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2021, pp. 16-17
Israel and Judaism
By Allan C. Brownfeld
ALTHOUGH PRESIDENT Donald Trump repeatedly proclaimed himself “Israel’s best friend” ever in American history, and pursued a series of policies in line with Israel’s right wing, such as moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, his efforts to attract Jewish voters failed dramatically.
According to exit polling, Trump received only 21 percent of the Jewish vote to Joe Biden’s 77 percent. Only 5 percent of Jewish voters listed Israel as one of their two most important issues, down from 9 percent in 2016. Top voting priorities for Jewish voters were the coronavirus pandemic (54 percent), climate change (26 percent), healthcare (25 percent), and the economy (23 percent). Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, declared that, “Jewish voters have just totally repudiated Donald Trump and a Republican Party that has catered to the most far-right xenophobic elements of the country.”
Israelis, on the other hand, favored Trump over Joe Biden by 77 to 23 in one recent survey. Chemi Shalev of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz writes that, “Israeli Jews have a blind worship of Donald Trump.” Discussing the growing divide between American Jews and Israel, Eric R. Mandel, director of the Middle East Political Information Network, writes in the Oct. 30-Nov. 5 edition of the International Jerusalem Post: “A recent poll of Israeli and American Jews regarding whom they favor in the American presidential election revealed results that were polar opposites. The overwhelming majority of Israelis favor the re-election of President Donald Trump...crediting him with moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, putting consequences on the Palestinian Authority’s incentifying of terrorist activity, and for the first time laid down a peace plan that prioritized Israeli security interests, while creating the diplomatic work for Israel’s first peace treaties with Arab nations in a generation.”
On the other hand, writes Mandel, “American Jews overwhelmingly favor the defeat of Trump, prioritizing domestic progressive or liberal concerns over Israeli security concerns. It is no surprise there is a profound difference between the two largest Jewish communities’ perspectives....American Jews have a much more universalistic perspective, identifying Judaism more as a religion they have or had, and are uncomfortable with the survival issues of the Jewish state. This has led too many to not only criticize Israel but join with boycotters and delegitimizers who share their progressive values.”
The division between American Jews and Israel has been growing steadily for many years. In his book Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict Over Israel, Prof. Dov Waxman of Northeastern University writes: “A historic change has been taking place in the American Jewish relationship with Israel. Israel is fast becoming a source of division rather than unity for American Jewry...A new era of American Jewish conflict over Israel is replacing the old era of solidarity...This echoes earlier debates about Zionism that occurred before 1948. Then, as now, there were fierce disagreements among American Jews and the American Jewish establishment...It was only after Israel’s founding that the communal consensus came to dominate American Jewish politics. Thus, from a historical perspective, the pro-Israel consensus that once reigned within the American Jewish community is the aberration, rather than the rule. Jewish division on Israel is historically the norm.”
Beyond this, in Waxman’s view, the overwhelming majority of American Jews, while wishing Israel well, were never really Zionists. He writes: “Classical Zionism has never had much relevance or appeal to American Jewry. Indeed, the vast majority of American Jews reject the basic elements of classical Zionism—that Diaspora Jews live in exile, that Jewish life in Israel is superior to life in the Diaspora, and that Diaspora Jewish life is doomed to eventually disappear. American Jews do not think that they live in exile and they do not regard Israel as their homeland...for many American Jews, America is more than just a home, it is itself a kind of Zion, an ‘almost promised land.’ Zionism has never succeeded in winning over the majority of American Jews.”
In recent years, sympathy for Zionism among American Jews has been in steady decline. A study by social scientists Ari Kelman and Steven M. Cohen found that among American Jews, each new generation is more alienated from Israel than the one before. Among American Jews born after 1980, only 54 percent feel “comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state.” The reason, Cohen asserted, is an aversion to “hard group boundaries” and the notion that “there is a distinction between Jews and anybody else.” Other polls show that among younger non-Orthodox Jews only 30 percent think that “caring about Israel is essential to being Jewish.” Slowly, it has become increasingly clear to American Jews that Israel does not share their values of religious freedom, separation of religion and state, and a citizenship that does not differentiate between people on the basis of race, religion and ethnic origin.
After the elections, commentator Philip Weiss argues that, “Israel will never be a bipartisan issue again because Jews are divided.” He points out that, “This [election] cycle has seen the rise of a young progressive Jewish camp on the left. J Street’s survey of Jewish voters shows that more than one in five Jewish voters under 40 support boycotting Israel...The two organizations that represent Israel-critical Jews, Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow both back up Israel’s biggest critics in the House...IfNotNow is rallying its following in defense of Raphael Warnock, one of two Democratic Senate candidates in Georgia, from smearing over the fact that he criticized Israel for human rights abuses from the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church. IfNotNow is also trying to discredit AIPAC over its acceptance of Trump—‘AIPAC belongs in the dustbin of history, along with Trump.’”
There is much speculation about how all of this will affect the Biden administration’s approach to Israel. Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum believes that, “Not every single thing that President Trump has done in Israel is going to automatically be something that is opposed by the Biden administration.” But Biden’s election revisits the relationship between the U.S. and Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu and Joe Biden have a long history, not all of it good. When the Obama administration entered into a nuclear agreement with Iran, Netanyahu went around the White House and encouraged opposition to the deal in Congress and among the American public. He was widely criticized for interfering in American politics.
Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, now a Middle East specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations says, “They [Netanyahu and Biden] have two very different approaches and Bibi is going to oppose him [over Iran]. That is going to come up early on, and clearly that is going to determine the relationship far more than the question of how to deal with Bibi when he calls every other day and demands that the United States do this or that, which is what he does—very needy.”
Biden has said he intends to rejoin the nuclear deal, conditioned on Iran’s compliance with its terms. The Washington Post reports that Biden is “likely to confront Netanyahu over Jewish settlements on land Palestinians claim for a future state, a sore spot from the beginning of the Obama administration. Biden is also expected to reverse Trump policies seen as punitive, such as a cutoff of humanitarian aid in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He is likely to try to reopen the Palestinian consulate in Washington...and to re-establish ties with the Palestinian government in the West Bank.”
Biden will have on his foreign policy team Obama veterans who feel burned by their failures to get a deal
The history of relations between Biden and Netanyahu is clearly mixed. On March 9, 2010, Michael Oren, then Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., was in Netanyahu’s motorcade pulling into an underground garage of Jerusalem’s David Citadel Hotel, en route to meet Biden. His American counterpart, Daniel Shapiro, rushed toward him with the news that Israeli officials had approved 1,600 new housing units in an ultra-Orthodox settlement in East Jerusalem against U.S. wishes. Biden considered leaving immediately and kept Netanyahu waiting for more than an hour while the Americans prepared a response.
In fact, shortly after Biden’s victory, Israel announced a rush of controversial settlement plans, including building 1,257 homes at the Givat Hamatos settlement outside Jerusalem.
Netanyahu also remains angry at the Obama administration’s decision to allow a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements to pass in December 2016. In the past, the U.S. vetoed such resolutions. How Joe Biden will proceed in the Middle East is not clear. But there is no indication that Netanyahu will have the free hand in Washington he has had with Trump. In a feature article about Biden’s new chief of staff, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency said of Ron Klain, who is Jewish, that, “Middle East policy is not Klain’s area of expertise, but when he weighs in he usually criticizes the conservative Israeli prime minister.”
Ron Kampeas, writing in the Washington Jewish Week provides this assessment: “Biden will reinstitute the emphasis on the two-state outcome as an endgame, but don’t expect a major push for peace from his White House. Biden will have on his foreign policy team plenty of Obama veterans and they feel burned by their two failures (2010-2011 and 2013-2014) to get a deal. The sense on Biden’s foreign policy team is that peace has to be organic, and must be initiated by the Israelis and Palestinians...During the primaries, some Democratic candidates spoke of conditioning defense aid to Israel on its behavior. Biden repeatedly rejected that proposal outright. He intervened to keep the word ‘occupation’ out of the Democratic platform...Biden has said that he will reestablish the diplomatic ties with the Palestinians that Trump ended...Biden has also said he would resume the assistance to the Palestinians that Trump cut off.”
Which direction U.S. Middle East policy will take in a Biden administration is, of course, not possible to know. What does seem clear, however, is that groups such as AIPAC are unlikely ever again to have veto power over such policy. The basis for their influence was largely the myth that it and like-minded groups spoke for American Jews. This was never true, but the growing division in American Jewish opinion revealed in the 2020 election makes this clear for all to see. Hopefully, the Biden administration will not fail to see the inherent problem with pursuing racial equality at home and embracing Israel’s policy of inequality with regard to both its Palestinian citizens and those in the occupied territories. Now, efforts to achieve a genuine Middle East peace and a Palestinian state have a growing Jewish constituency, as the election results show us. This constituency is likely to grow dramatically as demographic change alters the nature of the Jewish community, a new reality that is yet to be widely understood by many.
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.
