Gabriel Winant: More Americans Disagree About Israel, but Elite Consensus Holds Together
Today is Passover, and at seders everywhere (including the White House) last night, hungry Jews finished the ceremony and started eating with the traditional invocation, "Next year in Jerusalem."
But -- at least for the people at my seder -- just mentioning the word "Jerusalem" is enough right now to evoke groans and despair, given recent events. The intensification of settlement in East Jerusalem by the Israeli government and the accompanying chill in Israeli-American relations have made the ever-grim situation seem even worse. When the president seemed to snub Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House last week, he was speaking for American progressives who’ve had it with Israeli intransigence and are especially aggravated by the current ruling right-wing coalition in that country....
In this light it seems odd to have a political class -- and especially, a Democratic Party -- that is largely uninterested in bringing any real pressure on Israel to adjust its policies. When Netanyahu was in Washington, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seemed to make a point of posing for a photo op with him, announcing, "In Congress we speak with one voice on the subject of Israel."
Some of this obviously has to do with the historical relationship between Jews, Zionism, and the American political left and right. At the time of Israel’s founding, the Republican Party remained the comfortable home of old-school isolationist, anti-semitic cranks. Although this tendency still exists in some outer provinces of the right wing, conservatives generally shed their isolationism and anti-semitism in order to pursue the Cold War. Fighting world communism meant being willing to jump into bed with all kinds of allies around the world -- Israel among them.
This way of thinking about Israel has continued among conservatives even after the Cold War’s end. For all that sensationalists in the media love to talk about how evangelical conservatives love Israel because of biblical prophecies about the role of the Jews in the End Times, there’s a much simpler version of the story: conservatives of all stripes understand Israel as a comrade-in-arms in the civilization-wide struggle against Islam. For those on the right who foresee, essentially, a race war between the West and the Islamic world, Israel is an invaluable ally....
It does seem that there's a historical lag on these things. We now forget that, just like right-wingers were initially hostile to Israel, much of the left was friendly at the outset. Israel was founded as an explicitly socialist, secular project. For years, even after the occupations of neighboring territories during the 1967 Six Day War, Americans liberals failed to grasp just how extensive the human costs of a Jewish settler state could be. Young, dynamic Israel seemed unambiguously heroic.
Most of the leaders of the Democratic Party -- people like Pelosi -- are veterans of a time when it wasn’t obvious that the occupation crisis was going to continue endlessly. It didn't used to seem to liberals like Israel would always be such a problem. Maybe, for the partisan gap that’s emerged in the public to be matched by one among political elites, we just need to wait for generational turnover. Certainly, the difference between Obama and Pelosi suggests that the next generation won't be quite so interested in preserving the consensus in Washington. Because, despite the saying about politics stopping at the water's edge, it's rarely a good thing when both parties take the same line on an issue.