It was quite an election night, and quite an election.
The Jewish vote went 78 percent for Barack Obama. It is now safe to say that, after 80 years of consistently voting Democratic for President, the Jewish vote is no less predictable than the African-American vote or the vote of union households. Jews are, as the old phrase goes, “yellow dog Democrats.” It is almost odd that a community that is so fragmented on so many issues stands pretty much as one every four years.
Accordingly, the scare tactics that worked so well against Obama during the Democratic primaries flopped in the general election. The Republican Jewish Coalition, which wasted gazillions on race-mongering, might as well close shop. If a relatively moderate Republican nominee cannot break above 22 percent after six months of lying e-mails alleging that the Democrat is a Middle Eastern terrorist, it is safe to say that the Jewish Republican ship will never come in.
Jewish Americans are liberals. Period. Few vote based on Middle East issues but rather on the same issues other Americans do. There are some differences. Jews are more concerned about the separation of church and state, more anti-war (Iraq and Iran), more pro-choice, more supportive of gay rights, and far more willing to pay higher taxes to support government services.
I don’t write this to pat Jews on the back. It is simply to say that Jews have not forgotten that we are a tiny minority and that, not long ago, we depended on American progressive government to help us get on our feet. The Torah tells us: “Remember, you were slaves in Egypt.” And “do not separate yourself from the community.”
And that is why Jews living in mansions in Beverly Hills vote the same as Jews in apartments in Co-op City in the Bronx.
This is not going to change.
One of the effects of the Obama sweep of the Jewish community is that it frees him to aggressively pursue Israeli-Palestinian peace. Obama has the support of the Jewish community. It will support him with even more enthusiasm (if that is possible) if he returns America to the role of “honest broker” in the Middle East.
The precedent is Bill Clinton. Jewish-American voters supported him overwhelmingly in 1992. Less than a year later, they strongly backed him when he decided to embrace the Oslo approach and to invite Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat to sign their agreement on the White House lawn.
To be honest, George W. Bush did not have the same latitude Clinton had. If he had played the role of honest broker (and not allowed neocon staffers to subvert his policies) he would have been attacked by Democrats in Congress for “selling out” Israel.
Why? Because Bush is a Republican. And the most influential supporters of the Likud line on Capitol Hill are Democrats. With a fellow Democrat in the White House, they will think twice before jeopardizing their ability to “deliver” for themselves or their constituents by choosing grandstanding about Israel over supporting their president’s efforts at diplomacy.
The bottom line then is that Barack Obama is in a stronger position to do the right thing in the Middle East than any previous president. American Jews are in his corner and Arabs think that, by definition, he cannot hold hostile views toward them. And he doesn’t. A guy with a Muslim father is not capable of race-based bigotry against Muslims and Arabs.
One more thing. The Jewish community has changed. In 1993, when Yitzhak Rabin decided to pursue peace with the Palestinians, he asked his American friends to form a new organization to support him. He did not trust AIPAC to back the peace process with any enthusiasm, believing it was too vested in the Arab-Israeli conflict. With typical astuteness, he said that a new organization was needed to “provide cover” to President Clinton and help him counter the attacks from the Jewish right.
As a result, we founded Israel Policy Forum. We strongly supported Clinton’s (and Rabin’s) efforts. When George W. Bush finally pushed for diplomacy, we supported him too. (It is no coincidence that President Clinton’s blueprint for Middle East peace was delivered at our annual dinner just before he left the White House.)
We offer the same support to President Obama. The good news is that he won’t need it as much as President Clinton did. In 1993, it was considered the height of audacity to support Palestinian statehood. Those days are gone. On top of that, IPF is no longer alone in backing the exchange of the occupied territories for peace and security. There are a host of Jewish organizations engaged in these efforts now and we are regularly joined by Christian and Arab-American groups as well.
President Obama is going to pursue the peace process, just as President Clinton did. The only question is when. My recommendation is that he does so immediately, because the more time that passes the less leverage a president tends to have. (That is why the usual “pro-Israel” suspects in Washington will tell him to go slowly. They don’t want a successful result, so they prefer deferring Obama’s engagement until he has less of the “juice” he needs to put over an agreement).
Obama should recall what our most (domestically) successful modern president, Lyndon Baines Johnson said:
“You’ve got to give it all you can, that first year. It doesn’t matter what kind of a majority you come in with. You’ve got just one year when [Congress] treats you right, and before they start worrying about themselves.”
In January 1965, at the beginning of his four-year term and at the pinnacle of his popularity, he told top administration officials: “I was just elected President by the biggest popular margin in the history of the country . . . because Barry Goldwater had simply scared hell out of them. I’ve already lost about three of those sixteen. After a fight with Congress or something else, I’ll lose another couple of million. I could be down to 8 million in a couple of months.”
So what did he do? Within one year—by the summer of 1965—he achieved passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, the Elementary and Secondary Education Acts, and a host of other laws that utterly transformed America, and not coincidentally, made Barack Obama’s election possible.
It was a good thing that Johnson didn’t wait because, by 1966, his ill-fated Vietnam policies had eroded his popularity and his Congressional majorities. When he told Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, right after the 1967 Six Day War, that Israel would have to decide if it wanted peace or the West Bank, Eshkol ignored him. But those LBJ laws from the first year after his election will be with us—thank God—forever.
That’s the model. And, one more thing, compared to the rest of the problems Obama faces, achieving an Israeli-Palestinian agreement is picking the low-hanging fruit. The Taba Agreement of January 2001 takes us 99% of the way there.
As far as confronting the supposedly all-powerful lobby, Obama should not worry. Even if it does not like what he is proposing, it will not take on a popular Democratic president.
The lobby wants the president to believe that it can successfully challenge, and overturn, policies it does not like. It can’t. It’s just a bluff. That is why when President Reagan recognized the PLO and when President Clinton made Arafat his negotiating partner, the lobby simply went along.
Unless a policy threatens Israel’s physical security—and no president would propose that—the president will prevail. The American Jewish community is not going to the barricades over exclusive Israeli control of Jerusalem, over the West Bank, and certainly not over settlements beyond the Green Line. In the relationship between the President of the United States and a lobby, all the cards—all 52—are held by the president. Especially this one.
All it takes is will.
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