With the total failure of the effort by AIPAC and others to scuttle the Iran deal, we are now beginning to see the fallout. Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine surveys the wreckage and has this to say:
The deal’s opponents not only misjudged public opinion as a whole, but more astonishingly, they misjudged the state of American Jewish opinion in particular. Congress might have been moved to oppose the Iran deal if the American Jewish community had viewed it as an existential threat to Israel. But Jews did not, on the whole, take that view. A detailed survey of American Jewish opinion by The Jewish Journal found that American Jews support the deal, 53 percent to 35 percent. How could that be? Well, this chart shows how Jewish opinion breaks down:
Liberals like the deal, and conservatives don’t, by roughly equal margins. But most Jews are liberals. Rising polarization of American life has cleaved in two everything in its path. There is no more “Israel lobby”; there is a red Israel lobby and a blue one.
I’d go further than that. I’d say that AIPAC and the right wing Jewish establishment have gone so far to the right that they have lost any chance of winning over the younger generation of Jewish millennials whose ties to Israel – if any – were based mostly on their parents’ and grandparents’ reflexive connections. When I was growing up, Israel was the single issue on which Jewish religious education was based. Despite my left wing beliefs on pretty much everything, I was pro-Israel because I was brought up to believe that Israel represented the last best hope of Jewish people everywhere. No matter how bad things got anywhere else in the world, Jews could always go to Israel and in this way avoid another Holocaust.
Over time, I’ve seen that belief beaten down, bit by bit by bit, by the increasingly rightward drift of Israeli politics and foreign policy. Now, I no longer make any pretense of defending Israeli policy. I defend Israel from double standards and hypocrisy, but the Likudnik policies of Netanyahu are an abomination.
AIPAC, however, has always represented the views of my parents’ generation – that Israel is always right and can do no wrong. American Jews, however, don’t think this anymore, as Chait points out.
The implications of this cleavage made blocking the Iran deal hopeless from the outset. As a simple matter of political mechanics, acquiring a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress meant hawks needed liberal Democrats to take their side. But they did not have arguments that could appeal to liberals — even liberals with a deep emotional connection to Israel. Nonproliferation experts strongly supported the agreement as the best way out of a difficult circumstance. Even Israel’s security establishment disagreed with Benjamin Netanyahu and the pro-Israel right. The technical case for the strength of the inspections and the enforcement mechanism was strong; the case against leaned heavily on apocalypticism.
The bigger problem is that AIPAC is much more in tune with the Israeli right wing than with the American left.
And this underscores the most important tectonic forces moving beneath the Israel lobby’s feet. Over the last 15 years, the foreign-policy debate in Israel has moved steadily rightward. (In the last election, left-of-center Israeli parties relied on domestic issues, rather than appealing for territorial compromise.) The Israeli right favors either permanent occupation of the West Bank, or an occupation that lasts until such time as the Palestinians produce a pro-Zionist government, which is functionally the same thing.
That perspective has become increasingly coterminous with the American “pro-Israel” view. At last year’s AIPAC conference, some 65 percent of the attendees were Republican. That skewed perspective has pushed the American Jewish establishment to the right of American Jewry as a whole. Jewish Republicans have always believed that forcing Jews to pick sides between a conservative Israeli government and a liberal American one would leave them with the larger share.
That was a stupid and incorrect calculation. American Jews are Americans first, and their connection to Israel is one that has been taken for granted even as it increasingly fell away as Israel engaged in policies that horrified liberal American Jews over the past generation.
For how many years have we been hearing that Jews were increasingly becoming more Republican? It was never true, and still isn’t – except where Israel is concerned. The American “Israel is never wrong” lobby has been steadfast, even as the American Jewish community has increasingly diverged from that point of view. And the younger generation of Jews, products of intermarriage and increasingly secular upbringings, is even further removed from the AIPAC perspective. If the choice is AIPAC or nothing as regards Israel, my kids will choose nothing. There has to be a better way to reach out to the next generation of American Jews, or there won’t be an American Jewish connection to Israel at all.
But as Chait points out, right wing pro-Israel supporters see even the total defeat of the Iran deal opposition as a good thing.
But there is more at work than simple pigheadedness or habitual aggression. Many conservative supporters of Israel do not necessarily regard the crack-up of American Jewish opinion as a problem. In their view, diplomacy with Iran is the prelude to Israel’s annihilation, and support for Netanyahu’s permanent occupation is the sine qua non of genuine support for Israel. It follows that the Iran debate essentially succeeded, by smoking out the fake Israel supporters. An almost giddy Jennifer Rubin concludes that the deal’s victory destroys “the myth of bipartisan support for Israel.” The crack-up of the Israel lobby is, for its most conservative members, not a failure at all but the fulfillment of a longtime dream.
As I’ve stated above, this is total lunacy. Having an “Israel lobby” that only represents 25% – at most – of the Jewish community is a recipe for disaster. As younger American Jews reject the idea of any connection to Israel at all (many regard J Street as AIPAC light), the window of opportunity for forging a new and different kind of relationship between American Jews and Israel begins to close even faster. That is a more existential threat to Israel than anything Iran will be able to do for the foreseeable future.
Maryland Scramble 