Why American Jews are backing Obama

It seemed a classic diplomatic faux pas — the sort that begins in mutual embarrassment and soon descends into ominous bristling and then open recrimination. On 9 March, Vice President Joseph Biden, in Jerusalem on a mission to revive peace talks between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinians, made the expected pledge of ongoing American commitment to Israel’s security, only to be upstaged hours later when Israel’s interior minister, Eli Yishai, announced the construction of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, an ancestrally contentious zone. Netanyahu, pleading innocence, insisted he had no idea the announcement was coming. But he did not countermand Yishai, who is also the leader of the right-wing Shas party, an integral player in Netanyahu’s shaky governing coalition.

These demarches left the White House unmoved. The rebukes came in quick succession, and with escalating intensity — first Biden’s condemnation (‘precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now’); next a testy phone call in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton scolded Netanyahu for the ‘deeply negative signal’ Israel had sent; then, on This Week, a familiar stop on the Washington carousel of the Sunday morning news programmes, Obama’s trusted adviser David Axelrod, normally a sleepy-eyed study in low-key deflection, unleashed his inner Chicago hardball player: ‘What happened there was an affront. It was an insult.’ Netanyahu didn’t budge. On Monday, he insisted that new Jewish settlements in and around Jerusalem would not be stopped; Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, spoke of a diplomatic crisis of ‘historic’ proportions. In less than a week, relations between the Obama administration and Israel, lukewarm in the best of times, had turned hyperborean.

Yet for all the tension in high places, there was little indication it would injure Obama’s standing with American Jews. This might seem surprising. According to recent census figures, America is the home of almost 6.5 million Jews — about half a million more than live in Israel. Together the two populations compose 80 per cent of world Jewry. But they also form a bipolar picture when it comes to Barack Obama. In Israel, his approval ratings are surreally low — under 10 per cent, some polls say. In America the story is altogether different. Jewish Americans continue to form his most loyal ethnic constituency, trailing only African Americans.

How can this be? Here’s one reason: for the great majority of American Jews, Zion is not Israel. It is the United States. Like other strivers in the larger ethnic jumble, Jews have been subjected at times to discrimination and prejudice, but nothing like the long dark history of persecution abroad. And in some respects they have the advantage over their fellow citizens, making their way as they do ‘without an Old Country link and a strangling church like the Italians, or the Irish, or the Poles, without generations of American forebears to bind you to American life, or blind you by your loyalty to its deformities’, as Philip Roth put it in his novel The Anatomy Lesson.

In such conditions Jews developed political views quite like those of others busy scaling the socio-economic ladder. They voted for a succession of Democratic presidents and gratefully supported the growing welfare state. They also, more often than some others, adopted the politics of protest, usually from the left and on behalf of other outsiders. Jews were among the most fervent participants in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Two of the three young civil rights activists murdered during the ‘Mississippi Summer’ of 1964 were Jews. Even today’s Jewish neoconservatives often began as starry-eyed liberals. Paul Wolfowitz, one of the Bush administration’s most committed hawks, an architect of the Iraq invasion, proudly remembers travelling to Washington in 1963 for the ‘Poor People’s Campaign’ in which the Revd Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

So American Jews remain loyal to Obama, himself the beneficiary of the civil rights movement, because he epitomises the dream of social progress to which they have long subscribed, which partly explains the important roles played in his career by so many Jews — whether the Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, the congressman and federal judge Abner Mikva, or later arrivals like Axelrod and the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Israel scarcely figures in this political narrative. But then for many years Israel stood outside the main concerns of American Jews. ‘In a study conducted in the late 1950s, Jews in a Midwestern suburb were asked what kinds of behaviours were essential to be considered a good Jew,’ the historian Peter Novick writes in The Holocaust in American Life (1999). ‘“Support Israel” was listed by 21 per cent, compared with 58 per cent who put “help the underprivileged”.’ Novick adds: ‘While there’s no way to measure just how important Israel was to American Jews through the mid-1960s, it was clearly less important than it later became.’

The Jewish-American attitude toward Israel in those years is captured by the most overtly Jewish-inflected Hollywood film in many years, the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, an Oscar nominee this year for best picture. It opens in an Eastern European shtetl, its I.B. Singer-like characters speaking immaculate Yiddish, and then hurtles forward to a meticulously rendered but also equally insular Midwestern landscape populated by archetypes who blend Old World habits with New World impulses — an aged rabbi who quotes Grace Slick, a freeloading luftmensch who covers the pages of his notebook with hieroglyphics that may unlock the universal law of probability. Though the action is set in 1967, the year of Israel’s ‘Six-Day War’ against several Arab states, the war isn’t even mentioned.

In subsequent years Israel has climbed higher on the Jewish-American agenda, but this change reflects a broader one within the American population at large, heightened by emerging fears about radical Islam, particularly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It was a fraught period for all Americans, but with specific implications for Jews, who were denounced by some as secret authors of the World Trade Center attacks even as Jewish members and allies of the Bush administration were accused of harbouring secret loyalties to Israel.

In those days it took only a few rhetorical steps to get from al-Qa’eda and Hamas to the return of global anti-Semitism and from there to the prospect of a ‘second Holocaust’, with Israel occupying in the past decade the sacrificial place occupied by European Jewry in the 1930s.

Throughout this time, however, the contours of Washington’s policy toward Israel remained firm, dating back to the 1940s, when Harry Truman supported the creation of a Jewish state. Since then, under both Democratic presidents as well as Republican ones, Israel has been both America’s bulwark in the Middle East and the recipient of lavish American spending.

Nonetheless, a fresh battle over Israel took shape in the United States. It is not a political battle; it is a cultural one, waged mainly by Jewish intellectuals against other Jewish intellectuals. And it grew ugly even by their disputatious standards, tilting at times into hoary accusations of ethnic self-loathing and even collaboration with the enemy. When the Jewish historian Tony Judt, writing in the leftish New York Review of Books in 2003, suggested that ‘the very idea of a “Jewish state” is an anachronism’, Gabr iel Schoenfeld, a Jewish journalist who was then on the staff of the rightish Commentary, retorted: ‘Seldom has the psychology of contemporary Jewish self-hatred been given more lucid expression.’

The recent diplomatic imbroglio promises a new round of stridency. Actually it has already begun. ‘An apology is not what the [Obama] administration needs or wants,’ blogged Jennifer Rubin, a senior editor at Commentary, on Monday. ‘It wants a fight, a scene, a sign to its beloved Palestinian friends that it can be tough, tougher than on any other nation on the planet, with Israel. What we have here is a heartfelt desire to cosy up to the Palestinians.’

But this seeming call to arms over Obama’s abandonment of Israel is best understood as the latest provocation in the ongoing rhetorical skirmish among the small fraction of Jews who differ over every aspect of America’s Israel policy. Like most other American Jews, Rubin presumably knows that Obama has kept in place a $30 billion military aid deal with Israel signed by Bush in 2007, with $3 billion to be released this year. Moreover, as Biden pointed out, ‘we revived defence consultations between the two countries, doubled our efforts to ensure Israel preserves its qualitative military edge in the region, expanded our joint exercises and co-operation on missile-defence systems’.

In sum, American Jews are fully aware that Israel remains America’s principal Middle East client, a state of affairs no one expects will change any time soon.

Sam Tanenhaus is editor of the New York Times Book Review.