[rad-green] Trump and Netanyahu are pushing American Jews to the left on Israel

*https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-11-14/donald-trump-benjamin-netanyahu-israel-jews-politics
<https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-11-14/donald-trump-benjamin-netanyahu-israel-jews-politics>*


*LOS ANGELES TIMES          NOV. 14, 2019*

Trump and Netanyahu are pushing American Jews to the left on Israel
[image: Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu]
*The alliance between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu has ruptured
seven decades of bipartisan agreement on American ties to Israel.(Susan
Walsh / Associated Press)*
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
When Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu met for the first time as heads of
state, the Israeli prime minister praised the American president for
restoring a policy of “no daylight
<https://forward.com/news/breaking-news/363475/trump-netanyahu-no-daylight/>”
between the nations.

Such a policy can mean providing Israel with the security to take risks in
peacemaking, as was the case with President Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud
Barak during the Oslo talks and with President George W. Bush and Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon with Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. But with Trump
and Netanyahu, this “no daylight” claim has been politically divisive in
both countries.

In the United States, the two leaders have sealed Israel’s bond with the
Republican Party and evangelical Christians, completing a process Netanyahu
started years earlier. In Israel, the right-wing government has enjoyed
Washington’s complicity in expanding settlements, annexing the Golan
Heights and pushing for similar control over the Jordan Valley and
ultimately most of the West Bank.

All these moves have ruptured seven decades of bipartisan agreement on
American ties to Israel. They have also left a large share of Democratic
voters, including Jews, feeling outraged that their support for Israel and
Zionism has been used to endorse a martial state ruling over several
million disenfranchised Palestinians and marching headlong toward apartheid.

What long seemed politically impossible — ending a blank-check foreign aid
policy that refused to question Israel’s actions — is gathering force
within the Democratic Party. Far from being a threat to Israel, as the
right will surely portray it, this trend offers a vital third way between
the extremes of occupation and annexation on the right and the boycott,
divestment, sanctions movement on the far left, with its implicit goal of
expunging Israel as a nation.

The public emergence of this middle ground on American-Israel relations
could be seen at the annual conference last month of J Street, the
progressive pro-Israel lobby that is a competitor to the center-right
behemoth, AIPAC.

At the three-day gathering, speaker after speaker called for American aid
to Israel to be paired with clear limits on its use and other conditions.
The aim was to revive some prospect of a two-state solution for the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Bernie Sanders, after proudly proclaiming his own Jewish identity, insisted
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgY7PH3VLx8> that some portion of the
U.S.’s annual $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel be spent alleviating
the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Two other presidential candidates, Pete
Buttigieg in person and Elizabeth Warren by video link, expressed similar
positions. All three would require imposing a ban on using U.S. aid for
annexation.

Such a position could lead to other conditions, like bans on the use of
U.S. aid in constructing settlements and imprisoning Palestinian children.

This is a sizable shift in Democratic positioning, given that the party’s
2016 convention delegates rejected platform language condemning occupation
and annexation, which had been drafted by Sanders backers.

Recent polling shows that Democrats as a whole and Jews specifically are
separating opposition to Netanyahu from their support for Israel. A survey
in May by J Street of likely Democratic primary voters found that 82%
believed
<https://jstreet.org/j-street-2019-poll-of-democratic-primary-and-caucus-voters/#.XcnEVOhKiUn>
one
can be pro-Israel while also criticizing specific Israeli policies. In the
same poll, Israel had favorable-vs-unfavorable percentages of 41 and 16.
Netanyahu, however, had a positive rating of just 12% and a negative of 39%.

The American Jewish Committee had similar results in its June 2019 poll
<https://www.jewishdatabank.org/content/upload/bjdb/AJC_2019_Survey_of_American_Jewish_Opinion_(question-by-question_responses).pdf>
of
American Jews. Some 59% disapproved of President Trump’s handling of
American-Israeli relations, which he has made the basis of his appeals to
Jewish voters. Of those surveyed, 57% said it would be appropriate for
American Jews try to influence Israeli policy on issues including
peacemaking and security and 64% endorsed a two-state solution.

Predictably, the right wing of both Israeli and American Jewry has cast any
criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Israel broadly. And we can expect
Trump to continue depicting criticism of Netanyahu’s regime, even from
Jews, as being anti-Semitic.

By the time of the Democratic National Convention next summer, though,
there will be no way to quash a full-throated debate and, quite possibly,
the passage of a very different platform plank from that of 2016. That kind
of daylight could be illuminating in more ways than one.

*Samuel G. Freedman is a journalism professor at Columbia University and
the author of eight books, including “Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the
Soul of American Jewry.”*

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