Unshakable friendship

Editorial

Jewish Americans voted more than two-to-one for President Barack Obama. The gaping 69-30 lead for the incumbent Democrat seems baffling in the face of a concerted campaign to depict Obama as insouciant about Israel’s fate, if not an outright enemy of the Jewish state. The explanation lies in understanding both fleeting realities about this particular campaign and permanent truths about the relationship between Israel and America.

Among the most astonishing results was the reality that money cannot, after all, buy elections. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 declared that the Constitution’s First Amendment right to free expression prohibited the federal election administration from barring essentially unfettered spending by third-party institutions like corporations and trade unions. As critics of the decision feared, this election saw so-called “super PACs” spend $546.5 million in the election cycle – reportedly 78 percent of which was spent opposing candidates, rather than supporting candidates or policies. Overwhelmingly, the super PAC money supported Republicans (or, more precisely, went to smear Democrats) and had almost no tangible result. For example, Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino billionaire who spent an estimated $100 million supporting right-wing candidates who were, among other things, strongly hawkish on Israel-related issues, lost every bet but a Senate seat in Nevada.

While Republicans were plowing money into TV and radio ad bombardments that may ultimately have disgusted voters, Democrats were largely focusing funds on supporter identification and get-out-the-vote strategies that were far less visible but infinitely more effective than the GOP’s saturation approach. Republicans will learn this lesson and change their strategy, as well as their policy, recognizing new realities in a country where the core Republican demographic – older, white men – is falling precipitously as a proportion of the electorate.

Those who ostentatiously supported Mitt Romney and his team with millions of dollars are not the only ones who suffered a defeat. Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was accused, after the election, by former prime minister Ehud Olmert, of injecting himself into the American election campaign by attempting to undermine Obama on Mideast affairs. Netanyahu’s public critique of U.S. policy in recent months was just oblique enough to be ambiguous in terms of which candidate he would have preferred in the White House, but it is hard to imagine his statements as motivated by policy, rather than politics. Now, instead of having Romney, his friend and former business colleague, as president, Netanyahu is stuck once again with Obama, a man with whom the bilateral relationship has been personally frosty. (As the Obama administration and his Jewish supporters made clear during the campaign, despite whatever personal issues might exist, the two countries’ relations remain officially very solid.)

Despite the sometimes hysterical narrative around Obama’s policy toward Israel and, more urgently, Iran, Jewish voters in the United States overwhelmingly sided with Obama. Why?

Voting patterns do not change overnight. Jewish Americans have been among the stalwart members of the Democratic coalition since the 1930s at least. Jewish Americans, with notable exceptions, tend to be liberal on a range of crucial issues. Evangelical Christians in the past 30 years have become inextricably associated with the Republican party and, while this cohort tends to be massively Zionist based on theological interpretation, they are often viewed warily by Jewish Americans for a number of reasons, separation of church and state among them.

Perhaps the best explanation for why American Jews did not succumb to the warnings of Romney (who said Obama had “thrown Israel under the bus”) and other hyperbolic Republicans is because they know the reality of the relationship between the two countries is permanent and concrete. America and Israel are not allies because of cheap ideology or the fleeting whims of personal relationships between the heads of government. The two countries are allies because of a shared commitment to democratic ideals as well as a realpolitik calculation of mutual dependence in a vital geopolitical realm, transcending the shifts of political sands.

Yet, more than this, Israel is a permanent and unshakable friend because it is the world’s only Jewish state. This is not the case because, as some would have it, Jewish Americans nefariously control the levers of American power to skew Israel’s way. It is because, from the moment President Harry Truman recognized Israel on May 14, 1948, an American and broader human consensus arose that history had finally, belatedly, proven that the security of the Jewish people in an unspeakably harsh world depended on self-determination. Even in the most expensive American election in history, this invaluable reality could not be cheapened by those whose rhetoric would politicize this eternal truth.

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