IN THE wake of the diplomatic fight that the Obama administration
went out of its way to pick with Israel last month, two high-ranking
members of the US House of Representatives — Majority Leader Steny
Hoyer and Minority Whip Eric Cantor — invited their colleagues to
sign a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The letter reaffirmed the signers’ commitment to the “unbreakable
bond’’ and “extraordinary closeness’’ that exists between the
United States and Israel, and declared that “our valuable bilateral
relationship with Israel needs and deserves constant
reinforcement.’’ It expressed dismay at the “highly publicized
tensions’’ between the White House and the government of Benjamin
Netanyahu, and pointedly counseled the administration to resolve its
differences with Israel “quietly, in trust and confidence, as befits
longstanding strategic allies.’’
The letter was polite, but there was no mistaking the implicit
rebuke of the president for treating Israel so shabbily. Nor, one might
think, was there any mistaking its bipartisan appeal: It was signed by 333 members of the US House, more than
three-fourths of the entire membership.
The Hoyer-Cantor letter wasn’t the only apparent evidence in
recent weeks that American friendliness for Israel crosses party lines.
At the national conference of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, for
example, two of the featured speakers were US Senators Charles Schumer, a staunch Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, an equally staunch
Republican. In a Gallup poll released in February,
Israel was one of the five countries most positively viewed by a
majority of US citizens: 67 percent expressed a favorable opinion of
the Jewish state. And the president’s tilt against Israel has been
denounced as bluntly by GOP loyalist Liz Cheney (“President Obama
is playing a reckless game of . . . diminishing America’s ties to
Israel’’) as by lifelong Democrat Ed Koch (“It is
unimaginable that the president would treat any of our NATO allies,
large or small, in such a degrading fashion.’’)
Peer a little more closely, however, and the wall of pro-Israel
solidarity turns out not to be quite so — well, solid.
Take that Gallup survey, which found that 67 percent of Americans
have a favorable view of Israel. The same survey also found that when it comes to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 63 percent of the public stands with
Israel — more than quadruple the 15 percent that support the
Palestinians. There’s not much doubt that the American mainstream is
pro-Israel.
But look at the disparity that emerges when those results are
sorted by party affiliation. While support for Israel vs. the
Palestinians has climbed to a stratospheric 85 percent among
Republicans, the comparable figure for Democrats is an anemic 48
percent. (It was 60 percent for independents.) And behind Israel’s
“Top 5’’ favorability rating lies a gaping partisan rift: 80
percent of Republicans — but just 53 percent of Democrats — have
positive feelings about the world’s only Jewish country.
Similarly, it is true that 333 US House members, a hefty
bipartisan majority, endorsed the robustly pro-Israel Hoyer-Cantor
letter to Clinton. But there were only seven Republicans who declined
to sign the letter, compared with 91 Democrats — more than a third of
the entire Democratic caucus. (Six Massachusetts Democrats were among
the non-signers: John Olver, Richard Neal, John Tierney, Ed Markey,
Michael Capuano, and Bill Delahunt.)
From Zogby International, meanwhile, comes still more proof of the
widening gulf between the major parties on the subject of Israel. In a poll commissioned by the Arab American Institute
last month, respondents were asked whether Obama should “steer a
middle course’’ in the Middle East — code for not clearly
supporting Israel. “There is a strong divide on this question,’’
Zogby reported, “with 73 percent of Democrats agreeing that the
President should steer a middle course while only 24 percent of
Republicans hold the same opinion.’’
Taken as a whole, America’s identification with Israel is as
stout as ever — the “special relationship’’ between the two
nations still runs deep. But the old political consensus that brought
Republicans and Democrats together in support of the Middle East’s
only flourishing democracy is breaking down. Republican friendship for
Israel has never been more rock-solid. Democratic friendship —
especially in the age of Obama — is growing steadily less so.
