Soccer Dad

Equal opportunity blamers

Jeff Jacoby on a recent new about American support for Israel.

Take that Gallup survey, which found that 67 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Israel. The same survey also found that when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 63 percent of the public stands with Israel -- more than quadruple the 15 percent that support the Palestinians. There's not much doubt that the American mainstream is pro-Israel.

But look at the disparity that emerges when those results are sorted by party affiliation. While support for Israel vs. the Palestinians has climbed to a stratospheric 85 percent among Republicans, the comparable figure for Democrats is an anemic 48 percent. (It was 60 percent for independents.) And behind Israel's "Top 5'' favorability rating lies a gaping partisan rift: 80 percent of Republicans -- but just 53 percent of Democrats -- have positive feelings about the world's only Jewish country.

Similarly, it is true that 333 US House members, a hefty bipartisan majority, endorsed the robustly pro-Israel Hoyer-Cantor letter to Clinton. But there were only seven Republicans who declined to sign the letter, compared with 91 Democrats -- more than a third of the entire Democratic caucus. (Six Massachusetts Democrats were among the non-signers: John Olver, Richard Neal, John Tierney, Ed Markey, Michael Capuano, and Bill Delahunt.)

Shmuel Rosner summarizes some results of an AJC poll.

The number of people disapproving of Obama's handling of the relations have also increased, from 32% to 37%. But the number of those disapproving of the way the Netanyahu government was handling the relations have similarly increased - from 23% to 30%. Clearly, American Jews generally believe that both governments share the burden of letting the relations deteriorate. Thus, the most troubling news for Obama in this poll is the relatively low percentage of Jews saying he's handling his job approvingly. The question wasn't there last year, but from other surveys (not AJC's) we know that "Both in the election and now, Jewish and nonreligious Americans' support for Obama has registered way above average". That is still true, but Obama's support is declining among Jews. A 38% disapproval for him among Jews - one of the groups most supportive of the President - is quite high.

So apparently to some degree the President's policies towards Israel are hurting him among Jews in regards to Israel, but not as much as I would have hoped. But why isn't the drop of support more severe?

A friend pointed me to a front page article in the Baltimore Jewish Times by Dr. Robert O. Freedman. I plan to critique the article more fully later, but here's a short version. Freedman makes a number of accurate observations about American Israeli relation and the recent history of the Middle East, but when describing what led up to the current crisis he writes:

There were several aspects of the crisis. First, after a great deal of effort, the U.S. had gotten P.A. leader Mr. Abbas to agree to resume peace talks with Israel, albeit at the low level of indirect or proximity talks under which the U.S. Middle East Special Envoy George Mitchell would shuttle between the two sides. Mr. Biden's trip to Israel was aimed, in part, to add the U.S. imprimatur to the start of the talks that had been endorsed by the Arab league, thus giving Mr. Abbas a modicum of legitimization.

Now he doesn't explain why Abbas stopped talking to Israel. He doesn't mention that in late 2008 Abbas rejected a peace deal with then Israeli PM Ehud Olmert. So he hinges his analysis on Netanyahu ruining the administration's diplomatic initiative without acknowledging that that initiative was necessary because of a Palestinian refusal to make peace. Add to that his characterization as the Israeli government as having shifted to the right. Freedman, in one of the more prominent American Jewish publications, then provides the readership with a skewed view of what has happened in the Middle East. With few exceptions this is typical of coverage of Israel in non-Orthodox Jewish American publications. Add that to the generally antagonistic attitude of the mainstream media towards Israel, is it any wonder that American Jews are willing to be equal opportunity blamers regarding the current friction between Israel and the United States?