Here, UN rockets attack children in Tel Aviv 7/16, as planned.
Posted on 07/21/2014 12:00:12 PM PDT by SJackson
The Pew Research Center last week released a new survey of American attitudes in the Middle East. The results weren’t surprising. In the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, 51 percent of Americans say they sympathize more with Israel. Only 14 percent feel greater affinity for the Palestinians.
Pew’s findings demonstrate the strength of pro-Israel feeling in the United States. The poll was conducted amid the current fighting with Hamas, but the bottom line hardly changed from Pew’s last survey in April, when it reported that in the 36 years it has been sampling public opinion, “sympathy toward Israel has never been higher.”
But below the surface, America’s Israel-friendly consensus is splitting along the same left-vs.-right fault line that has polarized so many other issues. While support for Israel is overwhelming among Republicans and conservatives, it has been shrinking among Democrats and liberals. “The partisan gap in Mideast sympathies has never been wider,” reports Pew, with 73 percent of Republicans sympathetic to Israel in the ongoing conflict, but just 44 percent of Democrats. Respondents identifying as liberal Democrats were five times as likely as conservative Republicans to sympathize more with the Palestinians.
Thus is the Democratic Party losing its way on one of the great moral issues of our time.
For roughly the first third of Israel’s existence, Democrats tended to support the Jewish state more strongly than Republicans did. In a compelling new book, “Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel,” foreign-affairs thinker Joshua Muravchik writes that during the run-up to the Six Day War in 1967, “Israel was above all a cause championed by liberals.” So heartfelt was this support that even ardent Democratic opponents of the Vietnam War, such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Eugene McCarthy, advocated US military action on Israel’s behalf.
Only over the last 25 years has support for Israel grown so much greater among Republicans than among Democrats. The reasons for the divergence are many. On the right, they include the high value Republicans have attached to Israel as a stable ally in a very unstable region, as well as the migration to the GOP of evangelical Christians, many of whom support the Jewish state as a matter of transcendent conviction.
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Not sure moral clarity enters the equation. Voting blocks may, the administration's worldview certainly does.
The assumption that “moral clarity” is equal to “opposition to Israel” is absurd.
Exactly how do libtards lose something they never had?
Democrats hate winners.
Jews who support the DemocRats had better wake up.
I for one am glad to see the deviants turn against Israel. Israel should consider their opposition a badge of honor rather than trying to get them back and whining about how much nicer to homosexuals they are than the Arabs (because no liberal cares what Arabs do to homosexuals; that's their culture, you bigot).
It is not at all unusual for issues to drift across the spectrum over time. Temperance/prohibitionism went from being a left wing progressive position to one associated with "reactionary" Bible Belt Fundamentalists. Anti-Masonry went from the country's first red scare to a left wing anti-elite and "anti-clerical" movement.
As a Fundamentalist I always supported Israel, for totally different reasons from the liberals. I actually thought the Left supported the Arabs and the Right supported Israel (which it did, internationally).
Read it and you will see what I mean. Liberals always follow the lead of the radical leftists and Marxists.
***
But on the left, the Israeli-Arab dispute itself has been redefined. Liberals used to see the stakes with no illusions: A small Jewish democracy, an outpost of liberal Western values, was surrounded by brutal Arab dictatorships that denied its very right to exist. That moral clarity has eroded, partly because of facts on the ground over years of conflict — but ultimately through a skillful war of ideas, first launched on the radical left, to reframe the conflict by making Israel the villain and casting Palestinians, who had never been considered a nation, as an oppressed underdog seeking independence.
This intellectual assault began, as Muravchik details, when the Soviet Union, angered by Israel’s defeat of its Arab clients in 1967, engineered a propaganda campaign to delegitimize Zionism. Moscow embraced the PLO, assiduously promoting its significance to the global “anti-imperialist struggle.” The campaign was fought on many fronts, from academia to the United Nations to the media. Over time the anti-Israel narrative gained such traction that the Jewish state, though still a humane and liberal democracy, became one of the world’s most reviled nations.
See my post 8.
democrat=progressive=islamist(or facilitator)=nazi
The only way out is to admit it.
Here, UN rockets attack children in Tel Aviv 7/16, as planned.
Democrats credo. Once you have a group 100% in your camp, they become irrelevant except at election time.
Democrats lost moral clarity decades ago, probably in part from implicitly believing they had an unassailable monopoly on it.
Don’t over complicate things. Israelis look white enough for them to want them dead. That simple. Everybody always be over thinkin, democrats ain’t got no time for dat!
I'm afraid that observation by Muravchik is a little simplistic.
I agree that the Six Day War was the watershed event in this story, though the Communist world had become hostile to Israel already (as it was from 1917, only adopting a "pro-Zionist" position for a few years in the late 40s and early 50s).
However--the hard Left inside the United States still tended to support Israel. The fact that it did so while elsewhere opposing it can only be because, for whatever reason, Moscow ordered them to. Moscow seemed to have a reason for keeping their American clients pro-Israel while ordering an anti-Israel line in the rest of the world.
As recently as 1982, Jane Fonda and then-husband Tom Hayden entertained Israeli troops in Lebanon and justified doing so. This was at a time when Israel was taking it on the chin in the international media and when Israel's own Left was becoming traitorous just as ours had earlier. Yet at this time, under a right wing prime minister (Begin) the American Far Left was still reflexively pro-Israel. As I have said, for some reason of its own Moscow and its satellites wanted Israel to be identified with the Left within the United States while treating it as their bete noire elsewhere.
Of course now all those old "pro-Israel" leftists are anti-Israel. The party line was the only reason they supported it to begin with and when the line finally changed for the domestic USA Left, all the old "pro-Israel" leftists automatically adjusted their positions. As they always do.
I've been to Israel. Most Israeli Jews are olive-complexioned, just like so many other Mediterranean peoples.
So far as I know, the Saudis are snow white.
They look more pale on tv than Arabs. That’s enough for democrats to pick a side.
Evidently the libs have never seen the Saudi royal family on TV.
The Democrats never had any moral clarity to lose as far as Israel is concerned.
That's what people always say about me but I look in the mirror and never see any trace of olive. Maybe it's the light?
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