NEW YORK (JTA) — The share of Democrats who sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians is falling fast, while Republican sympathy for Israel over the Palestinians is spiking.
So says a new poll by the Pew Research Center. But experts are divided on what it means, and whether pro-Israel activists — and Democrats — should be worried. Do the results indicate that Democrats are abandoning Israel en masse? Is it another sign of political polarization, which makes it harder for one party to support an issue associated with the other?
Or, as some analysts suggest, was it a badly worded question?
The Pew poll, released Tuesday, shows that partisan polarization around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is starker than ever in the United States. While 79 percent of Republicans sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians, that number is only 27% for Democrats. 25% of Democrats sympathized more with the Palestinians, while only 9% of Republicans did. Overall, 46% of Americans sympathize more with Israel, and 19% with the Palestinians.
Since 2001, the share of Republicans who sympathize with Israel has increased 29 percentage points, from 50% to 79%, says Pew. Over the same period, the share of Democrats sympathizing more with Israel has declined 11 points, from 38% to 27%.
As recently as two years ago, 43% of Democrats sympathized more with Israel. And the drop for Israel this year is especially steep among liberal Democrats: 35% said they sympathized more with the Palestinians — nearly double the 19% who sympathize more with Israel.
The worriers see this as another crack in the bipartisan support that Israel has long enjoyed in the United States.
US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walk away after a news conference at the Prime Minister’s residence in Jerusalem, March 20, 2013. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
“The numbers are worrying for anyone like me that cares about the US-Israel relationship,” Dennis Ross, a former American peace negotiator for presidents of both parties, wrote in an email to JTA. “Israel has been and must remain not a Democratic or Republican issue but an American issue. That is a challenge now, especially with the attitudes of the progressive side of the Democratic Party, the alienation of the majority of the Jewish community from the Trump administration, and the administration’s strong symbolic support for Israel.”
The trend, according to one theory, was exacerbated by eight years of feuding between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which, according to whom you ask, showed either that Democrats couldn’t be trusted on Israel or that Netanyahu stumbled in associating Israel so closely with the Republican side.
It continues with the current love fest between Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, who had a typically warm meeting Thursday in Davos, Switzerland. A solidly right-wing government in Jerusalem, another theory goes, makes it harder for liberal Democrats to warm up to a country they once solidly supported.
With an increasingly diverse coalition underpinning the Democrats’ base, Israel needs to make its case as a liberal and open society, said Jason Isaacson, the American Jewish Committee’s associate executive director for policy. That has become harder, he said, as the peace process has frozen and the government in Israel has shifted further to the right.
“It’s a reminder that it’s essential for Israel and friends of Israel to make the case for Israel’s openness and liberalism and devotion to justice and yearning for peace,” Isaacson said. “I recognize that the messages of a government [in Israel] can have an effect on how that message takes hold on particular constituencies in the United States.”
Republican Jewish activists, meanwhile, are saying the poll proves what they’ve long asserted: that Republicans are the only party that’s truly pro-Israel. Republicans have celebrated Trump’s opposition to the Iran nuclear agreement — brokered by Obama and reviled by Netanyahu — as well as his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence both enjoyed the warmest of welcomes on their trips to Israel.
In this Tuesday, May 23, 2017 file photo, US President Donald Trump, left, shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner, File)
“Support for Israel is strong and growing in the Republican Party, while it is declining among Democrats,” Republican Jewish Coalition President Matt Brooks said in a statement. “We saw the Democrats’ views on Israel implemented by the Obama administration, which put ‘daylight’ between the US and our chief ally, Israel, while pursuing a disastrous Middle East policy.”
Previous administrations also sought to be “honest brokers” in the Middle East, and Democrats like to argue that under Obama the level of US funding and cooperation provided to Israel was unprecedented. But Republicans assert that the Iran deal was a disaster for Israel and that Obama’s pressure on Netanyahu was relentless, culminating in his decision, in the last days of his presidency, to allow the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction.
But other experts say shifting sympathies in the conflict are a symptom of political polarization, not of Democratic opposition to Israel. Democrats “are increasingly conflating their feelings about Israel with their feelings about Trump, associating Israel with the American president,” wrote Michael Kaplow, the policy director of the Israel Policy Forum, in the Forward.
Trump has cast himself as vociferously pro-Israel, so for some Democrats, coldness toward Israel is one more way to protest a president whose policies they abhor, says Rabbi Jack Moline, former president of the National Jewish Democratic Council.
Pew’s polling has shown increasing polarization overall between Americans of the two parties. A December poll found 86% of Americans feel there is strong or very strong conflict between Republicans and Democrats, and the share of Democrats and Republicans who have very unfavorable opinions of the other party has doubled since the 1990s.
“I think this is not a sudden surge of sympathy for Palestinians,” Moline said. “I think that’s always been there. I don’t think it’s an abandonment of Israel by anybody. I think that what this is is one of the pieces of fallout from the very ugly divisiveness on all matters in this country.”
Recent polls show that a vast majority of Americans do support Israel. According to a February 2017 Gallup poll, 71% of Americans view Israel favorably, a number that has stayed relatively constant for the past 15 years. The differences in the Gallup poll among Republicans (81%), Independents (70%) and Democrats (61%) aren’t as dramatic as the Pew poll.
Resolutions and legislation favoring Israel routinely pass Congress and the Senate with little to no opposition. A vote recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital passed the Senate 90-0, months before Trump issued his own recognition. Among the 18 states that have passed laws against the boycott Israel movement, half are blue states, half are red.
“There remains broad, bipartisan support in Congress for the US-Israel relationship, because strengthening that relationship serves American interests,” Marshall Wittman, the spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, wrote JTA in an email. “That support is demonstrated regularly in consistent, bipartisan votes on pro-Israel initiatives.”
Children waving Israeli and American flags at the Celebrate Israel parade in New York City, June 4, 2017. (Perry Bindelglass)
Wittman’s predecessor, Josh Block, told JTA that support for Israel remains robust among Democrats, and that anti-Israel feeling represents a group that is still on the party’s extreme. He noted numbers from the same Pew poll showing that support for Israel is still high across ethnic groups and religious denominations.
“There’s been a legitimate effort of people on the far fringe of the Democratic party … to poison and undermine the legitimacy of Jewish pride and support for Israel,” Block, now the CEO of The Israel Project, told JTA. “The reality is the vast majority of Americans and the vast majority of Democrats identify Israel as one of our closest allies in the world. They see Israel as a free, open, democratic society.”
Polls showing broad support for Israel led some observers to criticize the way Pew framed the question. Most Americans, said Tamara Cofman Wittes, a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, don’t take a side in the conflict, and that option wasn’t given in the Pew poll. A poll conducted by the University of Maryland found that 59% of Americans don’t want the government to favor either Israelis or Palestinians. Broken down by party, 77% of Democrats said Trump should lean toward neither side in mediating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, compared to 38%t of Republicans. Only 9% of Democrats wanted Trump to lean toward the Palestinians.
Pew’s question “pushes the answers to be more polarized than they may in fact be,” Wittes said of the Pew survey. “I don’t think this poll tells you anything useful about American support for Israel. One should not take away from this public opinion data the conclusion that there are whole segments of Americans that are getting more hostile to Israel, and I should write them off.”
Still, there are unmistakable signs that there are more Democrats willing to criticize Israel, especially its current government, than Republicans. In both 2012 and 2016, Democrats faced pressure from pro-Palestinian delegates to alter their party platform’s planks on Israel. In 2012, boilerplate references to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital were dropped from the platform but later restored. And in 2016, the party altered its platform to reflect Palestinian aspirations but rejected language calling for Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and settlement activity.
James Zogby, who was the chair of the Democratic National Committee’s Resolutions Committee, was among those who wanted to add language about Israel’s occupation to the 2016 party platform.
Zogby, the founder of the Arab American Institute, told JTA that the Pew results show that Democrats are growing tired of Israeli actions in the West Bank and resent the mutual admiration between Trump and Netanyahu. Zogby also says Democrats are upset about Netanyahu’s past efforts to undermine Obama’s Iran nuclear deal — including a 2015 speech to Congress he delivered at the invitation of its Republican opponents.
James Zogby speaking at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., October 2012. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“This is largely the result of really bad Israeli policy, and an embrace by a president who also has a really negative agenda,” he said.
Wittes and others also noted that this poll isn’t good news for Republican supporters of Israel, either. Pro-Israel activists have long emphasized that defending Israel is a bipartisan priority. If that support does erode among Democrats, it could hurt Israel even if Republicans continue to support the Jewish state.
“Every member of Congress who supports Israel is a good thing,” said Jennifer Rubin, a columnist for the Washington Post who self-identifies as center-right and has been very critical of Trump. “My conclusion is that [support for Israel] has become way too imbalanced. The challenge is to remove this from the partisan dynamic that is so fierce right now.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/are-democrats-abandoning-israel-for-palestinians-depends-who-you-ask/
Related:
John Kerry To Abbas Confidante: “Stay strong and Dona’t give in to Donald Trump” — Treasonous? — Kerry considering running for president in 2020
**********************************************
US ex-envoy warns Israeli leaders not to ‘burn bridges’ with Democrats
Former ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro says Jewish state should take concerns of progressives in America seriously rather than throw in lot with Republican party alone
By Times of Israel
27 January 2018, 10:43 pm
.
Former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro cautioned Israeli leaders to be wary of “burning bridges” with the Democratic Party and aligning themselves solely with the Republicans, amid a sharp uptick in partisan divides over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as reflected in the findings of a new Pew Research Center poll released Tuesday.
“Israeli leaders may find it difficult to resist the temptation to ride this wave, embracing one side in partisan US political battles — as when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arranged his speech in Congress against the Iran deal solely with the Republican congressional leadership,” Shapiro said in a new op-ed co-written with Tamara Cofman Wittes and published by the Atlantic. “But that approach comes at the cost of alienating even longtime allies across the aisle, and when the next crisis inevitably hits, Israel’s leaders may regret having burned those bridges.”
Israel’s leaders, he cautioned, should not allow “the perception to take hold that they are writing off whole chunks of the Democratic camp.”
According to the poll, Democrats are almost as likely to sympathize with the Palestinians as they are with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian peace conflict, while support for the Jewish state among Republicans is nearly three times higher than Democrats.
Twenty-seven percent of Democrats told the Pew Research Center they sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians, compared to 25% who said their sympathies lie with the Palestinians.
In this Tuesday, May 23, 2017 file photo, US President Donald Trump, left, shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner, File)
Among Republicans, those numbers were 79% and 6%, respectively.
“Based on the findings, some Israeli pundits and politicians, and many on the American right, have been arguing that Israel and its supporters should give up on the Democratic Party and its elected representatives as supporters of Israel,” Shapiro wrote, pointing to a tweet by the Republican Jewish Coalition, which boasted that the “GOP is the pro-Israel Party.” Shapiro, however, warned that the poll was “a terrible foundation for such claims,” adding that the results did not necessarily imply that Democrats were anti-Israel.
“The poll question is faulty because sympathy for Palestinians should not imply hostility to Israel, nor should sympathy for Israel require disregard for the fate of Palestinians,” the ex-envoy wrote. “A solution to their conflict enshrining two states for two peoples is the outcome most preferred by Americans regardless of party, and administrations of both parties have sought to help both Israel and the Palestinians achieve their goals in a two-state solution.”
Shapiro acknowledged that “support for Israel is, in fact, becoming a politicized issue in the United States, and partisan divides on policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are indeed getting wider.” It would be a grave mistake, he warned, for Israeli leaders to throw in their lot with the Republican party alone.
“Looking at the underlying data from the survey responses, we see that 34 percent of this year’s sample identify as independents — more than identify as Republicans (26 percent) or Democrats (33 percent),” he continued. “The gap between independents and Republicans remains large and trending larger, but the independents’ trend tracks the Democratic trend — both moving toward less sympathy with Israel relative to the Palestinians in the conflict between them. That’s the pattern that should worry Israelis, because independents and Democrats together represent more than two-thirds of Americans.”
“Americans are far more divided on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than they are on Israel or the US-Israel relationship and so when Israel advocates and Israelis themselves use this poll question as a proxy for American support for Israel, they are not doing themselves any favors.”
Although the percentage gap in support for Israel remained fairly steady between the parties in the two decades after 1978, the parties’ views on Israel began to diverge in 2001, with support among Democrats having fallen from 38% to 27% today, while among Republicans it has risen from 50% to 79%.
“In recent years, some Americans have come to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of human rights — and this is especially true for younger Americans, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans,” Shapiro wrote. “This makes them sensitive to the hardships faced by Palestinian civilians, and to certain Israeli practices, like housing demolitions. These groups form a larger proportion of the voting public than they have in the past, and a growing proportion of the Democratic Party’s core constituency. And yes, there is some anti-Israel sentiment on the left end of the progressive political spectrum, just as there is some on the right end of the conservative camp.”
According to Shapiro, “the survey results point to how specific aspects of Israeli policy, such as the expansion of West Bank settlements that make a two-state solution more difficult, [and] affect the way Israel is viewed in the United States.”
In light of these trends, and due to the changing demography in America, Shapiro advised Israelis to consider what policies can contribute to the US-Israeli relationship, and which might erode its foundations.
“Israelis don’t have to take all the blame for the diplomatic stalemate. Palestinians bear plenty of their share, from failing to respond to negotiating proposals, to inciting and glorifying violence, to denying the historical Jewish connection to the land of Israel,” the former ambassador wrote. “But an Israeli government that does not seem committed at least to keeping the two-state solution alive and viable for the future will likely find there are some American supporters whose sympathy they will struggle to retain.”
“Israeli leaders would be wise not to allow the perception to take hold that they are writing off whole chunks of the Democratic camp, or disrespecting elected officials from the Democratic Party,” Shapiro continued. “And without weakening their own relationship with President Trump, Israeli leaders should find ways to demonstrate sensitivity to progressives’ concerns, especially when those concerns touch on issues core to the values Israel and the United States share.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-ex-envoy-warns-israeli-leaders-not-to-burn-bridges-with-democrats/
Image copyrightAFP
been saying it for years… maybe now, when 
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) say it, you’d care to listen?
