AIPAC Opens While Tensions Roil Over U.S. Policy Toward Israel
AIPAC Opens While Tensions Roil Over U.S. Policy Toward Israel
(Bloomberg) -- The annual AIPAC summit is usually a bipartisan lovefest for Israel. But this year it’s drawing attention to President Donald Trump’s contentious shift in U.S.-Israeli policy ahead of an election there, and a clash among Democrats over support for the Jewish state.
The pro-Israel lobbying group’s three-day meeting in Washington kicks off Sunday and will feature speeches from Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, and the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate, as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials.
Conspicuously absent are the many congressional Democrats running -- or weighing a bid --for president.
Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, as well as Beto O’Rourke, Julián Castro and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, confirmed through their campaigns they won’t be attending the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference.
While other candidates didn’t give a reason, Sanders policy director Josh Orton said the senator is “concerned about the platform AIPAC is providing for leaders who have expressed bigotry and oppose a two-state solution.”
Widening Gulf
Those remarks reflect the widening gulf between Democrats and Trump over the U.S. approach to Israel and increasing hostility toward Netanyahu from the American left given his hard-line policies toward Palestinians. Netanyahu is also scheduled and dine with Trump while in Washington.
Trump has made support for Israel a linchpin of his foreign policy and has embraced Netanyahu closely, even as the Israeli leader faces various scandals. He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and on Thursday broke from decades of American policy by saying the U.S. should recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, land that the country seized from Syria in a 1967 war and later annexed.
Trump denied the action on the Golan Heights was designed to aid Netanyahu, who is facing re-election on April 9 under the cloud of a corruption investigation. But it may benefit the president’s re-election bid as he seeks to energize evangelical Christians, a core of his voter base that views support for Israel as a litmus test.
A day after the tweet, the Republican Jewish Coalition announced that Trump would speak at its annual leadership conference in Las Vegas on April 6 -- just three days before the Israeli vote.
J Street, a pro-Israel group that advocates for a two-state solution to end the long-standing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, accused Netanyahu and Trump of making political decisions that are eroding the longstanding bipartisan consensus on Israel.
“This is just another in a series of decisions being made on this issue that is clearly intended to curry favor with the harder-right elements of the pro-Israel community -- whether it’s evangelical Christians or the right wing of the Jewish community,” J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami said in an interview after Trump’s Golan Heights move.
“These are decisions not being made in the best interest of the United States. It puts Democrats in the position of opposing what the president is doing and it turns all these issues into political footballs,” Ben-Ami said.
Meanwhile, Democrats have been beset by a generational intra-party battle over whether to maintain steadfast U.S. support for Israel if Netanyahu’s hard-line policies continue.
Turmoil Among Democrats
The debate turned acrimonious with comments earlier this year by first-term Representative Ilhan Omar suggesting that support for Israel was influenced by financial support by the pro-Israel lobby and in some cases amounted to “allegiance to a foreign country.”
The Minnesota lawmaker was accused by Republicans and many Democrats of trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes, and the House under Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed a resolution condemning anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry.
Many liberals defended Omar’s right to criticize Israel’s policies, including presidential contenders like Sanders, Harris and Warren. But criticism of Israel has caused heartburn among many Democrats who don’t want the U.S. to waver in its backing of the Jewish state.
“I am not a person who is in disagreement with our policies towards Israel, or Israel’s policies for that matter. And I don’t want my party to become the party of anti-Semitism,” said Democratic presidential candidate John Delaney, a former congressman from Maryland. “People have every right to say what they feel about our policies toward Israel or Israel’s policies. But I don’t think they should be framed in anti-Semitic language.”
Speaking to reporters Friday, Trump said Democrats, whom Jewish voters have traditionally backed by a wide margin in presidential elections, have “proven to be anti-Israel.”
“And it’s a disgrace,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know what’s happened to them. But they are totally anti-Israel. Frankly, I think they’re anti-Jewish.”
J Street ’s Ben-Ami countered that the most potent form of anti-Semitism was in the “nationalism and ethno-nationalism that the president and his supporters are giving cover to.”
“There is a distinction between being anti-Semitic and being critical of the government of Israel,” he said. “Blurring that distinction for political purposes is a real disgrace.”
Jewish Americans have overwhelmingly preferred Democratic candidates in presidential elections since at least 2000, according to exit poll data compiled since then by the Pew Research Center.
In 2016, they voted for Hillary Clinton by 71 percent to 24 percent, a larger share than any other religious affiliation. Clinton spoke at AIPAC in 2016, like other Democratic presidential nominees before her.
“While there’ll be disagreements over policy, the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans, including me, will be voting for a Democrat for president,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “Cycle after cycle Republicans say that they’re going to be the party of Jewish voters, and cycle after cycle the strategy fails.”
Surveys illustrate a growing partisan split on Israel since Netanyahu came to power in 2009.
A Pew Research Center poll last year found Democratic sympathies for Israel falling, to now be evenly divided in their sympathies between Israel and the Palestinians. Republicans sympathize with Israel over Palestinians by a margin of 79 percent to 6 percent.
An Economist/YouGov poll in September 2018 provided further evidence of the shift. Just 37 percent of Americans described Israel as “an ally,” compared with 47 percent in 2015. The change was driven by a decline among Democrats and Americans aged 18-29, of whom just 25 percent of both categories described Israel as “an ally.”
“There’s a transformation happening in the Democratic Party over Israel and US foreign policy,” said Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, a left-wing group with ties to Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young star on the left.
“There’s a generational divide and a younger, more diverse and more progressive Democratic Party is linking the fight for inclusivity at home with taking on Netanyahu’s Trump-like rhetoric and policies abroad.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Sahil Kapur in Washington at skapur39@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Ros Krasny
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