May 30, 2007
American Jews and the Middle East Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:35 AM EST Josh Zeitz wrote, on the fortieth anniversary of the Six-Day War, that it is “established lore that the Six-Day War encouraged American Jews to reconsider their liberalism on domestic and foreign policy”. He goes on to express skepticism that anything of the kind occurred, especially at the level of foreign policy, since “the standard narrative on American Jews and the Six-Day War is wrong. . . . On a grassroots level Jews continued to identify as liberal Democrats. Exit polls in 1968 indicated that 87 percent of New York City’s Jews voted for the Democrat Hubert Humphrey, down only slightly from 1964 totals, when 92 percent supported Lyndon Johnson. Four years later . . . Jews continued to vote Democratic but in somewhat diminished numbers. Exit polls suggested that McGovern won 66 percent of the Jewish vote nationally but a whopping 85 percent among New York City Jews.” Struck by the durability and breadth of the notion that American Jews control American foreign policy and push it to the right (Josh Zeitz teaches at Cambridge, where this view seems more common than one would have hoped, given the weight of evidence on the other side of the question), he concludes that “the Six-Day War . . . laid the foundation of an inaccurate but still resonant charge that blames American Jews for so many of the world’s woes, even as it fundamentally misreads American Jewish political culture.” I more or less agree with this account of the situation, for given the standard correlates of electoral behavior (wealth is one of them), American Jews continue to vote for the Democrats and support a liberal foreign policy in remarkable numbers. I am not sure that events in the Middle East will always be irrelevant to the electoral behavior of American Jews, but I do think the pattern Josh Zeitz describes will continue for quite a while, although the likely reason for this is not a very cheering one. Here’s why: For most of the period 1967–2007, both major U.S. political parties have followed similar policies on Israel and the Palestinians. While various lunatics contend that this agreement between the major American political parties has occurred because the omni-competent Jews control both of them, a more plausible explanation is that both Democrats and Republicans have seen the long-term future as a two-state solution, which means there will eventually be an Israeli state and a Palestinians state living alongside one another, with at most minor changes in the 1967 borders, and mutual recognition. Israeli politics has sometimes been dominated by a coalition that rejected a two state solution, and most large Israeli political parties have supported the construction of Jewish settlements in areas occupied in 1967, settlements that have often exasperated American Presidents. However, as long as the Palestinian political leadership (the PLO for most of the period since 1967) has conspicuously failed to consent to a two-state solution, instead insisting on what is described as a bi-national and secular state in Palestine, there has been no reason for the Americans to fall out with the Israelis, because no obvious opportunity for a stable peace was being lost on account of Israeli intransigence. From the White House’s perspective, the Israelis can occasionally be very annoying, but they are rarely truly infuriating for any significant length of time. There thus has been no reason for any large number of American Jews to decide that any American President was treating Israel badly. There was a very small exception to this pattern in 1992, but otherwise it has held strong for 40 years. In 1994, when the Palestinian leadership endorsed a two-state solution, the Israeli leadership followed suit, so there was still no obvious reason for the United States to fall out with the Israelis. Since 2000, two dramatic things have happened that have only reinforced this pattern. First, the PLO seems to have been unwilling to accept a two-state solution when one was on offer that year. Although this version of events remains contested, its accuracy is now, alas, irrelevant, because in January of 2006 Hamas won control of the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas explicitly rejects a two-state solution. Until Palestinians accept a two-state solution which the Israelis then reject, the chance of a protracted and truly serious rift between the United States and Israel seems slight, which means that American Jews, even if they care passionately about Israel—and there is some evidence that fewer do than was once the case—have no reason to prefer one U.S. party to the other on the grounds of U.S. policy toward Israel. The perennial demand for the United States to be “more even-handed between Israel and the Palestinians” wanes as soon as the Palestinian leadership visibly declines to accept the permanent existence of an Israeli state in part of Palestine. So for the foreseeable future, my guess is that support for Israel will not much distinguish Democrats and Republicans. Palestinians can probably change that. So far they haven’t.
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