Israel as election issue

Editorial

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is expected to call an election within hours. Given this and the gripping campaign that is now entering its final phase in the United States, the issue arises of the role of Israel in North American elections and, specifically, the tendency of Jews to make Israel a litmus test for politicians.

Rarely more blatantly than in the notorious writings of American academics John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, commentators speculate on the power of Jews to influence politicians on policies affecting Israel. Campaign coverage of New York and Florida emphasize the Jewish, meaning Zionist, vote.

Jewish and Zionist organizations have been extremely effective at making the case for Israel, a fact that leads those predisposed to conspiracy theories to see something sinister. Groups like AIPAC ("America's pro-Israel lobby") have great resources and peerless success because they've been at it longer and have more at stake than most other such groups. Critics also overestimate the lobby's power by forgetting that the Israel lobby is selling a great product.

Critics see Zionist activism as a disproportionate response to threats facing Israel, believing that Israel and its overseas allies are all-powerful and, therefore, have nothing to fear, a recent variation on an ancient theme of Jewish power.

It is worth noting that this year marks the 70th anniversary of the Evian Conference, at which the world convened to determine the fate of European Jewry and concluded that genocide was preferable to mass Jewish migration. This shameful, nearly forgotten event, as much as the Holocaust itself, informs Zionism in the post-Shoah world as not so much an insurance against a future genocide perpetrated by bad people as a hedge against what Dr. Martin Luther King called the silence of the good people.

But is it hypersensitive to imagine the threats facing Israel as existential? The Arab leadership's almost monolithic and completely intransigent refusal to entertain the concept of Jewish sovereignty means that, as a matter of policy, Israel has to go. This is not only the view of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who promises to wipe Israel off the map, it is the official policy of all but two Arab states. In fact, with the exceptions (sometimes) of only Jordan and Egypt, Israel was never on the map – literally. Throughout the Arab world, in deference to their government's abject refusal to recognize the Zionist entity, maps are printed with Israel already eradicated.

The threats against Israel are serious and this in itself should be cause to defend Israel's security and strenuously champion Israel's right to exist. But there are less altruistic reasons why governments like Canada's should stand with Israel. Israel is the frontline in the fight for democracy, pluralism and individual freedoms, but Israel is almost certainly not the only land under threat. Israel's fate will be our fate eventually. Additional reasons include the simple math of bilateral trade, the intangible value of academic exchanges, access to world-leading technologies and medical partnerships, and so forth.

But when it comes to our politicians, acknowledging all of these complexities are gravy, of a sort, when all we are really asking for is a simple acknowledgement that Israel faces genuine threats and has a right to defend itself.

The Jewish community was pleasantly stunned when, tested just weeks into its term, the Conservative government of Harper proved during the 2006 Lebanon war that it unequivocally understood the gravity of the dangers Israel faces.

Their opposition, the Liberals, try to play middle broker between Zionism and its enemies, which sounds more reasonable than it is in practice. Brokering between pluralist democrats and corrupt, sometimes violent militants is destined to have an impact on one's own virtue.

The New Democratic Party, whose members don't waste a lot of time pondering where all their Jews have gone, has made a 180-degree turn in policy over no more than three decades, abandoning the side of everything their movement holds dear – which, more than any other place in the Mideast, is exemplified by Israel – and taken up unquestioningly the Arab narrative of Palestine. The NDP doesn't seem to understand how far off the rails of mainstream politics it has gone. The vitriolic enthusiasm and disproportionate attention the NDP and the broader left devotes to

Israel is a threat to its own legitimacy, less because of what it says about the left's view of Israel, or of Jews, than because of what it says about the left's lip-service to women's equality, gay rights, free collective bargaining, religious freedom, pluralism, separation of religion and state and other issues. All of these once-core values have been subordinated in the left to the cause of Palestinian nationalism.

We have made the case before that Israel may serve as a stand-in for tolerance more generally. If the fate of Israel's six million Jews are of little concern to a Canadian politician, it is probably a good predictor of how that politician would react if the security and well being of Canadian Jews were threatened. If a politician doesn't understand why Jews care about Israel, they don't understand much.

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