Here are some friendly words of advice to my Republican friends eager to regurgitate Donald Trump’s talking point about the Democratic Party being “anti-Jewish.”
Before you hold up Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar as the poster child for anti-Semitic tropes, note that Trump himself already occupies that space. After all, he told those “good negotiator” Jewish Republicans “I don’t want your money” during a 2015 campaign event, essentially plagiarized The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by declaring “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty into order to enrich” her donors, and informed Jewish Americans at a 2018 White House Hanukah event that Israel is “your country.” And after the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, Trump assured the nation that some of the “blood and soil” crowd were “good people.”
But there is a much bigger challenge for Republicans hoping to flip enough people from the Democratic Party’s second-most loyal voting bloc to keep Florida and Ohio red. That quandary is far more severe than the GOP’s leading lights comparing Obamacare to the Holocaust, along with the IRS, the national debt, abortion, gun reform, limits on for-profit colleges, and even the FBI raid on Michael Cohen’s office. And the problem is worse than the Republicans’ posture toward Israel being largely set by evangelical Christians for whom Jews serve as Biblically mandated End Times cannon fodder for the Second Coming of Christ. No, the greatest obscenity is that the Republican pitch to Jewish Americans assumes—even demands—their dual loyalty. For the GOP, the only issue that should matter to American members of the Tribe is their fealty to Israel, and more precisely, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likudnik version of it.
Over the past several years, the Republican message to Jewish voters has devolved into this: to be Jewish is to unquestioningly support Bibi. Consider, for starters, the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney.
Romney didn’t merely cite his personal friendship with his former Boston Consulting Group colleague Netanyahu. Romney said that there shouldn’t be “an inch of daylight” between the White House and the current Israeli prime minister, whom Mitt said he would call first before making a pronouncement on U.S. policy involving Israel. Romney said that as president he would be able to order strikes against Iran without congressional authorization for the use of military force (AUMF). Not content to rest there, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee declared he would abandon a generation of bipartisan America support for a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians.
Total Republican rejection of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) for the Iranian nuclear program is a stark case in point. Despite overwhelming backing for the P5+1 agreement with Tehran from both the American and the Israeli national security communities, GOP leaders sought to blow up the deal in large part because Netanyahu wanted the United States to blow up Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Forty-seven Republican senators wrote to the Iranian Supreme Leader to warn Tehran that they would oppose the deal. In March 2015, House Speaker John Boehner took the unprecedented step of inviting a foreign leader to address a joint session of Congress to undermine the policy of the sitting president of the United States when he had Netanyahu speak during the presidency of Barack Obama. And Republicans did all of this even as polls showed Jewish Americans continued to support both the two-state solution and the Iranian nuclear deal.
By 2016, the Republican platform codified this pathetically simplified litmus test for Jewish voters:
Like the United States of America, the modern state of Israel is a country born from the aspiration for freedom and stands out among the nations as a beacon of democracy and humanity. Beyond our mutual strategic interests, Israel is likewise an exceptional country that shares our most essential values. It is the only country in the Middle East where freedom of speech and freedom of religion are found. Therefore, support for Israel is an expression of Americanism, and it is the responsibility of our government to advance policies that reflect Americans’ strong desire for a relationship with no daylight between America and Israel. We recognize Jerusalem as the eternal and indivisible capital of the Jewish state and call for the American embassy to be moved there in fulfillment of U.S. law. [Emphasis mine.]
Now, there’s not a nation on earth whose interests perfectly coincide with those of the United States. And to be sure, Republicans didn’t previously subscribe to the “no daylight” philosophy, as Eisenhower’s opposition to the 1956 Suez war, Ronald Reagan’s criticism of the Israeli destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, and James Baker’s famous “f*ck the Jews” remark about U.S. loan guarantees to Israel all attest. Nevertheless, after 60 Democrats boycotted Bibi’s speech in March 2015, Iowa Republican Congressman and noted white supremacist fellow traveler Steve King summed up the GOP’s posture toward Jewish Americans this way:
"Here is what I don't understand, I don't understand how Jews in America can be Democrats first and Jewish second and support Israel along the line of just following their President," King, a hardline conservative from Iowa, said Friday on Boston Herald Radio.
"It says this, they're knee-jerk supporters of the President's policy," King said.
As a Republican from Iowa, King has met with virtually every Republican considering a 2016 presidential run, hosting the first cattle call of 2016 Republican hopefuls in Iowa in January. [Emphasis mine.]
Let that sink in for a moment. Steve King, like Mitt Romney and so many other of his fellow Republicans, is defining Jewishness as equivalent to a full embrace of a right-wing Israeli government. The GOP, now little more than the Washington branch of the Likud Party, isn’t accusing Jewish Americans of having “dual loyalty”; it is demanding that they do.
Unfortunately for today’s GOP, like any other religious, racial, or ethnic group in the United States, Jewish Americans are Americans first and foremost. With their views and their votes, Jewish voters have been telling us this for decades.
It’s not just that American Jews don’t all agree with Bibism. As it turns out, Israel simply isn’t anywhere near their top priority. That was the obvious takeaway from an April 2012 poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, a not-for-profit, nonpartisan organization.
A majority of 51% pointed to the economy as the issue most important to their vote, followed by gaps between rich and poor (15%), health care (10%) and the federal deficit (7%). Only 4% of Jewish voters said Israel was the most important issue for them when deciding who should get their vote. Even when asked to name their second-most-important issue, Jewish voters gave the issue of Israel only marginal importance.
The data would suggest that the Republicans' focus on attacking both Obama's record on Israel and his troubled relations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was having little, if any, traction.
Last October, the Los Angeles Times reported on more recent polling that produced much the same result:
Israel was one of two top "voting issue priorities" for just 10% in a J Street poll conducted around the same time. More recently, "U.S.-Israel relations" was the most important issue for only 7.2% in the American Jewish Committee's 2015 study of Jewish American opinion, ranking fifth behind "economy" (41.7%), "national security" (12.3%), "healthcare" (12%), and "income inequality" (11.6%). It was the second and the third-most important issue for only 7.6% and 11.1%, respectively.
As Haaretz noted in reporting on the survey seven years ago, "Israel related issues seem to have little effect on Jewish voters' decision in choosing between Obama and Romney." Little effect, indeed. President Obama trounced Romney among Jewish voters 69 to 30 percent in 2012. In 2016, Hillary Clinton did even better, swamping Donald Trump by a 71 to 24 percent rout. That result has changed little over the past two generations. Since 1968, Democrats have pounded Republicans among Jewish Americans by a staggering 71 to 25 percent margin. And in the 2018 midterm wave, Jewish voters chose Democrats over Republicans by an enormous 62-point spread (79 to 17 percent).
There’s no mystery to these results. The Democratic Party is simply far more aligned with the views and values of Jewish Americans. Surveys of American Jews confirm what the exit polls tell us every four years: The Jewish electorate is perhaps the most liberal voting bloc in the United States. A poll conducted six years ago by the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at New York University revealed why the Jewish community continues to reliably vote for Democrats, "election cycle after election cycle":
The poll, which has a four percent margin of error, also found high support among Jews not just for social causes they have long championed including gay marriage (68 percent support) and access to legal abortion (63 percent favor), but on economic issues such as taxation. Sixty-five percent said they support raising income tax for those who earn above $200,000 a year and 62 percent said they thought the power of financial institutions pose a threat to the United States.
The survey also found that 73 percent of those polled favored the government requiring private health insurance to cover birth control.
(It is true that the Orthodox, the fastest-growing segment of the American Jewish community, are far more conservative, with 57 percent backing the Republican Party. But the Pew Research Center in 2013 found that caring about Israel was an "essential part of being Jewish" for 53% of American Jews 65 and older, while only 32% of Jews aged 18 to 29 expressed that same sentiment.)
An October 2018 survey by the Mellman Group poured more cold water on the notion that Israel, and especially the right-wing vision for it, is or should be what matters most to Jewish Americans. While over 90 percent of American Jews polled described themselves as “pro-Israel,” 59 percent declared that they were critical of some or many Israeli policies. And while the respondents narrowly approved (by 51 to 49 percent) of President Trump’s handling of U.S. relations with Israel, they strongly disapprove of everything else.
In every other arena there is massive disapproval. Indeed, as the graph indicates, 70% or more of Jewish voters disapprove of his handling of anti-Semitism, the Iran nuclear deal, foreign policy, immigration, Supreme Court nominations, gun safety, the environment and healthcare. Over sixty percent (62%) disapprove of Trump’s handling of US relations with the Palestinians.
Overall, Jewish Americans disapprove of Donald Trump by a jaw-dropping 75 to 25 percent margin. To put it another way, while Israeli Jews love Donald Trump, American Jews detest him.
But if members of the Tribe in America place a lower priority on Israel and hold Donald Trump and the GOP in very low regard, another, much larger group—evangelical Christians—represents their mirror image. As Chemi Shalev put it in Haaretz in December 2015:
One of the prime factors that has driven the Republican Party to unequivocally embrace Israel in recent decades, no strings attached, is Christian Evangelicals, whose inordinate influence on the GOP has been on public display throughout the primary season. But Jews dislike and distrust Evangelicals more than any other religious group in America, turning the GOP's Evangelical-inspired support for Israel into a double-edged sword that can repel American Jews no less than it attracts them.
Consider the 2008 election. Republicans had high hopes of peeling away Jewish voters from the Democratic Party. Pointing to Barack Obama's name and his former pastor, Jewish Republican groups called Obama a "naive and dangerous" man who as president could trigger a second Holocaust. But despite their early optimism, Obama's ultimate Jewish support on Election Day was little different than that of Democratic candidates past.
As it turned, out, a key factor in John McCain's failure to get American Jews to choose him was his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. In the run-up to the 2008 election, Newsweek reported that "Palin may hurt McCain among Jewish voters." The dynamics in Florida, later carried by Barack Obama, were particularly telling:
Many Florida Jews who had previously been open to McCain appear to share the couple's aversion to Palin, according to political scientists, polling data and anecdotal reporting. "She stands for all the wrong things in the eyes of the Jewish community," says Kenneth Wald, a professor at the University of Florida. Among the examples he cites: Palin seems to disdain intellectualism, she's a vociferous opponent of gun control and she attended a fundamentalist church that hosted Jews for Jesus, which seeks to convert Jews to Christianity. (Palin apparently sat through a speech by a leader of the group in which he said terrorist attacks on Israel were punishment for Israelis' failure to accept Jesus as the Messiah.)
The GOP’s Jewish problem only got worse in 2016. Consider, for example, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Rubio, along with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, took the unprecedented step of vowing never to publicly criticize Israel, just the latest codification of the GOP as the Washington-based arm of Bibi Netanyahu's Likud Party. But when it comes to marriage equality, an issue which enjoys the strong support of American Jews, Rubio said, "We are clearly called in the Bible to adhere to our civil authorities. But that conflicts with also our requirement to adhere to God's rules. So when those two come in conflict, God's rules always win."
And whose God might that be? Urging his supporters forward, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz proclaimed, "If we awaken and energize the body of Christ--if Christians and people of faith come out and vote our values--we will win and we will turn the country around." His wife Heidi recently boasted that as president, her husband Ted would show America "the face of God," and that "this Christian God that we serve is the foundation of our country." And among the hundreds of evangelical pastors who rallied to Cruz's side in Iowa, South Carolina, and around the country is Mike Bickle, founder and director of the Kansas City-based International House of Prayer. As the Times of Israel helpfully recalled:
Bickle runs the Israel Mandate project, an effort to convert Jews to Christianity, which runs daily livestreamed prayer services for "the nation of Israel to receive their Jewish Messiah, Yeshua (Jesus)," according to its website.
In recent years, Bickle has delivered numerous sermons that predict a new era of Holocaust-like conditions for Jews before the Second Coming, insisting that the Jews who do not recognize Jesus as their messiah will either die or be sent to prison or concentration camps. Perhaps most famously, he has suggested that a passage from Jeremiah 16:16 explains how Adolf Hitler's murder of more than six million Jews was permitted by God.
If that message sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Back in 2008, Republican nominee John McCain accepted the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, only to disavow him after Hagee’s lectures about Jeremiah and how "Hitler was a hunter" became public. But as the founder and leader of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), Hagee remains a very big deal in Republican circles. CUFI for years has featured American politicians, leaders of major American Jewish organizations, and Israeli ambassadors only too eager to mobilize evangelicals’ backing and cash for Eretz Yisrael. Its mission? According to the organization’s “Israel Pledge”:
We believe that the Jewish people have a right to live in their ancient land of Israel, and that the modern State of Israel is the fulfillment of this historic right.
CUFI contends that that historic right was God’s gift to the Jews, His Chosen People.
Unfortunately for the likes of Hagee, Gary Bauer, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer, and the rest of the crowd that comes together at CUFI gatherings in Washington each year, most Jewish Americans do not share that belief. After all, surveys show that while 44 percent of Americans—and only 40 percent of American Jews—believe Israel was given by God to the Jewish people, among Israeli Jews, the share identifying themselves as God's Chosen People reaches 70 percent. As it turns out, far and away the group most dedicated to the proposition that God gave the Land of Israel to the Jewish people is American white evangelical Protestants. And their End Times story doesn't end well for Jews anywhere.
In an October 2013 analysis, the Pew Research Center reported that at a whopping 82 percent, "A majority of white evangelicals believe God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people, compared with 40 percent of American Jews who believe the same." But just as jaw-dropping as the fact that white evangelicals are twice as likely as American Jews (40 percent), and five times more likely than "Jews of no religion" (16 percent), to believe this are the implications for U.S. policy:
White evangelical Protestants also are more likely than Jews to favor stronger U.S. support of Israel. Among Jews, 54% say American support of the Jewish state is "about right," while 31% say the U.S. is not supportive enough. By contrast, more white evangelical Protestants say the U.S. is not supportive enough of Israel (46%) than say support is about right (31%).
White evangelical Protestants are less optimistic than Jews about the prospects for a peaceful two-state solution to conflict in the region. When asked if there is a way for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully, six-in-ten American Jews (61%) say yes, while one-third say no. Among white evangelical Protestants, 42% say Israel and an independent Palestinian state can coexist peacefully, while 50% say this is not possible.
Not possible and, for many evangelicals, not desirable. After all, in their eschatology, the conversion of some Jews—and the slaughter of the rest—at Armageddon is part and parcel of the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and the Second Coming of Christ. That helps explain why white evangelical Protestants love the Jews, giving them an impressive 69 on Pew's 100-degree thermometer measuring American attitudes toward various religious groups. Alas, that love goes unrequited: "Despite evangelicals' warm feelings toward Jews, Jews tend to give evangelicals a much cooler rating (34 on average)."
For Christian Zionists such as former Rep. Michele Bachmann ("Support for Israel is handed down by God and if the United States pulls back its support, America will cease to exist"), Gov. Rick Perry ("As a Christian I have a clear directive to support Israel"), and Mike Huckabee ("no such thing as a Palestinian"), Israel serves merely as a means to an end. In that telling, it is a divinely required stepping stone to the End Times conversion (and much larger slaughter) of the Jews that will accompany the Second Coming of Christ. And that worldview has a real impact on foreign policy. As John Hagee explained in 2006, "The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West ... a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ."
With friends like that, Israel doesn't need enemies. And with Republicans like that, it's no wonder American Jews continue to overwhelmingly vote Democratic.
Nevertheless, Republicans and their media stenographers assure us that the clumsy comments of Congresswoman Omar will “split the Democrats” and are producing “an Israel problem for Democrats.” Meanwhile, Nebraska Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts learned his former campaign staffer Bennett Bressman posted hundreds of anti-Jewish, homophobic, and racist messages online, including a joke about the Holocaust and about turning Israel into "a crater." Maine GOP Gov. Paul LePage got in on the act and criticized Rep. Omar by proclaiming of Jewish Americans’ support for Democrats, “that’s where their money comes from for the most part. They should be absolutely insulted for what she’s been saying.” This from the party of Michele Bachmann, who has called for converting as many Jews as possible because Jesus is "coming soon,” even as she accused American Jews who “sold out Israel” by backing President Obama on the Iran nuclear deal. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee went a step further, charging Obama with preparing to “march Israelis to the door of the oven." All of these slanders enjoy the complete support of the lonely Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro, who called the Obama administration “obviously anti-Israel” and “borderline Jew-hating.”
All the while, the Republicans’ best and brightest tell American Jews that the litmus test for their very identity is unswerving loyalty to Benjamin Netanyahu. That would be the same Benjamin Netanyahu now facing both indictment on corruption charges and possible defeat at the polls in Israel. This is the same Bibi who backed a new “nation-state law” in 2018 that, he explained last weekend, means Israel is “the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.” And Israel’s Central Elections Committee barred an Arab party from the upcoming voting even as it blessed the participation of ultranationalist acolytes of the late Meir Kahane, whose previous party was deemed a terrorist organization by the United States. (Last fall, Israel’s chief rabbi refused to refer to Pittsburgh’s blood-soaked Tree of Life synagogue as a synagogue because it was not Orthodox.) One can only imagine the apoplectic reaction of Bibi and The Donald’s evangelical followers if the center coalition won the Israeli election and managed to achieve a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
Now, these might be the values of some or most Israelis. But they are certainly not the values of Americans in general, or of American Jews in particular. To say, as Republicans do, that they must be is at best a cartoonish stereotype of Jewish Americans. At worst, it is a variety of the very anti-Semitism the GOP now has chutzpah to decry.