Israel and American Presidential Elections

Michael Anbar PhD

Jewish American leftist are trying to make the Arab-Israeli conflict an election issue in 2004, in spite of the fact that all poles indicate that Israel enjoys American public support from most traditional Democrats in addition to the overwhelming majority of Republicans.  Throwing the Middle Eastern conflict into the political arena of the 2004 election campaign can only hurt Israel. It may even hurt certain Americans who oppose Israel’s policies.  The only true beneficiaries of such a political confrontation would be the anti-Israeli and anti-American Arabs, who are delighted to disrupt the American political system by unwarranted controversies and thus impair American efforts to curb global Islamism.

I am referring to a recent article titled “Dump Bush, Help Israel” written by an American Jew who lives now in Jerusalem. That op-ed appeared in a respectable Israeli magazine (Jerusalem Report, February 9, 2004). In this article the author urges American Jews to vote against President Bush in 2004, irrespective who his Democrat rival will be.  His thesis is that irrespective of American domestic issues, the State of Israel and therefore the Jewish people would be better off if the US President was a Democrat; any Democrat for that matter. It is unexpected from an Israeli magazine to get involved in US internal partisan politics, but since this article has been published in Israel and read by many Jews in the US, it deserves a critical response as if it was published in a Jewish magazine in this country.

There is little doubt, as pointed out in “Israel’s Western Front,” that the welfare of Israel depends on American public opinion as well as on American global foreign policy.  Notwithstanding the debatable arguments presented in the Jerusalem Report article, which may echo notions of the small, ultra-liberal Tikkun community, one can assert that, with very few exceptions, American public support of Israel, as reflected by the US Congress, has been bipartisan.

The same cannot be said, however, about the influential American press and other mass media, which have often shown open hostility to the Jewish state in the last 30 years. It also cannot be said about all US presidents and certainly not about the US Department of State in different US Administrations. When we analyze US treatment of Israel by the different US Administration since the establishment of the State of Israel, we find a mixed bag of favorable and unfavorable relationships.

President Harry Truman, a Democrat, recognized the State of Israel in 1948 only after it was recognized by the Soviet Union.  Once Israel was attacked by its neighboring Arab states, Truman imposed an arms embargo on it.  Israel would not have survived that ominous Arab assault if not for the Arms supplied by the Eastern Bloc. As incredible as it may sound today, Israel has survived not because of Harry Truman but because of Joseph Stalin.  Regarding the Jewish people, President Truman seemly pursued a policy similar to that of his predecessor, President Franklin Roosevelt. In spite of Jewish and Polish pleas, Roosevelt refused to impair the Nazi Holocaust machine or to admit Jewish refugees into the US. The recently publicized Truman diary, containing unfavorable comments about Jews, is in line with his foreign policy.

Also President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, was not friendly to Israel when he intervened in favor of Egypt in the 1956 French-British-Israeli Suez Canal campaign, forcing Israel to give up the Gaza strip.

President Kennedy, a Democrat, who was deeply involved in the Cold War (the Cuba crisis), did not change US policy in the Middle East.

Only when the USSR dumped Israel in favor of Egypt, did President Lyndon Johnson, again a Democrat, change US policy toward Israel, the only country in the region not aligned with the Eastern bloc, unlike Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia. President Johnson helped Israel during the Six Days War. This was in line with his global policy, which also involved the unpopular Viet Nam War, trying to curb the expansion of the Communist bloc.

President Richard Nixon, a Republican, did not like Jews but seemed to love Israel, a tough MidEastern American ally that demonstrated the superiority of American hardware over Egyptian Soviet-built weapon systems. However, under the pressure of the Saudi oil boycott, Nixon did not allow Israel to totally humiliate Egypt and Syria and possibly extract a peace agreement that could have ended the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The same even-handed American policy was continued by President Gerald Ford, a Republican, and later by President Jimmy Carter, the Democrat. Carter extracted from Israel the return of the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt for a de facto recognition of Israel by that Arab country, but without insisting on an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Judging by Carter’s recent anti-Israeli editorials in the New York Times and his unqualified support of the “Geneva Plan”, which undermines the legitimate democratic Israeli government and exposes the Jewish state to an existential danger, this American ex-president who endorses Arafat’s legitimacy as an elected president of the PA, does not respect democracy, neither is he a friend of the Jewish people.

The first American president to show genuine friendship to the State of Israel, respecting it out of conviction, was Ronald Reagan, a Republican. Like Nixon before him, Reagan valued the role of Israel in the global arena, neutralizing the Communist supporters in the region and thus contributing to the fall of the “Evil Empire”.

Reagan’s ideology-driven, positive attitude toward Israel was not shared by his successor George H. W. Bush, another Republican, whose Secretary of State displayed open hostility to the Jewish state and its government.

Then came President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who made the notorious Egyptian-born terrorist, Yasser Arafat a welcome houseguest in the White House, while publicly snubbing off Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, on several occasions. To soften Israel’s political position, Clinton sent his PR team to Israel to help defeat Netanyahu and get Ehud Barak elected. In other words, Clinton managed to pull off a non-violent Allende in Jerusalem to meet his own political goals. Under Clinton’s persuasion Barak was ready to make far-reaching concessions to the Arabs, including the establishment of an Arab capital in divided Jerusalem, Israel’s historical 3000 year-old capital. Fortunately for the Jewish people, Arafat rejected those concessions, because the PLO, which follows Egyptian long-term political objectives, (see “The Roadmap to Peace: With whom are the Israelis supposed to make peace?” has vowed to eradicate the whole State of Israel.

Then Clinton, the shrewd pragmatist, was replaced by a Republican ideologue, to the chagrin of many Jewish liberals.  President George W. Bush who, like Ronald Reagan, has pro-Israeli religious convictions, openly displays friendship to Israel’s democratically elected PM, while blatantly showing his dislike of the duplicitous Arafat. Even the Jerusalem Report op-ed does not fault Bush for that, but it fails to mention that President Bush neutralized Iraq, which had maintained its state of war with Israel since 1948 and posed the most significant immediate threat to the Jewish state.  Surprisingly, Jewish liberals still criticize the removal of Saddam Hussein, who starved Iraqi children while paying blood monies to Palestinian terrorists for murdering Jewish children. According to those liberals America should not have invaded Iraq but continued to negotiate with Saddam ad infinitum.  That is also their opinion about the need to continue negotiating with Arafat.

Jewish liberals, including the author of the Jerusalem Report op-ed, lament that unlike Clinton, President Bush did not lean enough on Israel to make far-reaching concessions to the violent despotic Arab regime in the disputed territories, which was established by naïve Israeli politicians with the blessings of President Clinton. They fault Bush also for not pressuring the Arab supporters of Arafat to stop supporting him, making him a more amenable negotiator “for peace” with Israel. These critics do not realize that President Bush has more important issues to tackle in his relationship with the Arab tyrannies; foremost among these is their support of global Islamistic terrorism.

Liberal Jews, the “Tikkun Community” in particular, seem to be unhappy also with Bush’s insistence on dismantling all terrorist organizations in the territories controlled by the PA and establishment of an open democratic regime.  This is why those liberal Jews are urging Jewish American voters to “dump Bush.” A Democrat President might follow in the footsteps of Clinton, whom they still admire, and appease Arafat and his ilk, forcing Israel into an indefensible military and political position that might lead to its eventual elimination.

Jewish leftists in Israel and in the US come up with the illusionary “impending demographic catastrophe” of an Islamic takeover unless Israel yields to Arab demands and establishes a Palestinian state immediately. Independently verified, “worst-case scenario” statistics predict an increase of the Muslim population in Israel from 15 to 20% in 20 years from now, when the global confrontation with Islam is likely to be over.  As shown in “A Danger that is not Real,” even if Israel annexed Judea and Samaria, the percentage of Muslims in Israel would not result in an Islamic political take-over, and it does not justify Israel be stampeded into a precarious position.  Moreover, as discussed in “One Wall, One Man, One Vote – Not Necessarily,” there are ways to guarantee the Jewish national character of Israel.

Looking at the history of US-Israel relationship over the last 56 years, one can see that by and large it has been driven by American global or national political needs, irrespective of the party affiliation of the American president. In spite of his friendship to Israel, President Bush has now more important issues at hand than pressuring Egypt, Syria and Iran to lean on Arafat to agree to give Israel some reprieve and not continue to demand its immediate replacement by a Muslim state. One must realize that the Arab-Israeli conflict is just a minor flashpoint on the global scene, a confrontation that will be resolved once militant Islamism is defeated without compromise.

As pointed out in “Fort Israel on the Global Frontier,” Israel is currently in the forefront of the global confrontation between Islamism and Western civilization. As such, the commonality of interests and alliance between Israel and the US is now stronger than it was even during the climax of the Cold War with the USSR. President Bush understands this, unlike any of his naïve Democrat opponents who, like Carter and Clinton, would probably appease the Muslims and not hesitate to endanger the long-term existence of Israel in the process. Disagreements between the Israeli government and the Bush Administration, to the extent that they exist, are on tactical (e.g., the exact positioning of Israel’s defense fence) rather than on strategic issues.

            History teaches us that abrupt changes in foreign policy often result in disasters. New administrations, trying to prove to their constituents that they are different, often take actions with insufficient information and faulty projective analysis. This happened when President Carter withdrew US support from the Iranian Shah and helped to bring to power an anti-American despotic theocracy that has been trying to intimidate and threaten the US ever since. President Clinton’s withdrawal from Somalia was interpreted by Islamists as proof of American weakness and has emboldened them to proceed with their militant policy, eventually leading to the 9/11 atrocities. The dramatic change in Israeli foreign policy by the Rabin-Peres government resulted in the Oslo debacle. New policies are not always better, especially when implemented without sufficient projective long-term analysis.  American political structure is especially prone to such mistakes when candidates to the highest office in the land tend often to shoot from the hip, without carefully scrutinizing the consequences of their ideas.

Four more years of President Bush will assure the democratization of Afghanistan and Iraq, and probably result in changes of regimes in Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and possibly also in other Islamic countries. This will encourage an ideological reform in Islam. Such changes, combined with a significant diminution of international terrorism, are absolute prerequisites for a lasting peace between the Arabs and the Jewish nation. The uninterrupted continuation of the current uncompromising American foreign policy is, therefore, in the best interest of the Jewish people.

The survival of Israel and of the Jewish nation depends on containment and hopefully eradication of radical, violent Islam, not less than it depends on a strong US-Israel alliance.  Both of these are associated with the Bush administration. Israel’s survival is critical for all Jews, irrespective of their view on other political or social issues. Every American Jew should therefore take this into consideration when voting in November 2004.                                                                             February 12, 2004