It is difficult to argue that this year’s presidential election has been short on drama — or on provocative stances, embraced by sharp-tongued Republican and Democratic candidates, that have changed the very tenor of the public debate in the US.
Perhaps the most singularly provocative of these stances is how Bernie Sanders, the Democratic nominee, has departed from the mainstream of pro-Israel orthodoxy, traditionally the bulwark of America’s discourse on the Mideast conflict, thereby bringing the country closer to a tipping point where criticizing Israel, albeit in a genteel manner, is no longer taboo.
About time! About time, we say, that the US has caught up with Europe, where the mainstream media, world of academe and EU officialdom have long since ceased to see Israel as a holy cow whose violations of international law are to be winked at and even, as in the US, justified. If indeed we are arriving close to that tipping point, the man who is taking us there is Sanders, “the most successful Jewish presidential candidate in history,” as the New York Times identified him last week.
What is even more surprising is the overwhelming support he has received from the crowds he has addressed on the issue. Evidence of that was abundant, for example, at the last Democratic presidential debate in New York between himself and Hillary Clinton, the front, where the senator from Vermont hollered, with steely confidence, “There comes a time when if we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all the time. All that I am saying is that we cannot continue to be one-sided. There are two sides to the issue.”
He was greeted with cheers, interspersed with some in the crowd shouting “Free Palestine.” About the 1994 Gaza War, Bernie said in his speech: “We had in the Gaza area — not a very large area — some 10,000 civilians wounded and 1,500 who were killed.” Again, applause and cheers for the courage of the man.
But that’s not to say of course that public opinion, en masse, is turning against Israel, for make no mistake about it: The US government, and a sizable majority of Americans, remain pro-Israel. What may be changing is what is meant by “pro-Israel,” namely that the term does not mean Israel is always right — whether it is right or wrong.
Traditional pro-Israel pressure groups, old fossils like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (JDL), whose activists have for decades dominated the Israel debate in the US, do not like what they are seeing, and consider the Vermont senator’s views to be over the top. Or perhaps — shades of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift — they fear being knocked off their long-held perch as the sole powerbrokers of US foreign policy in the Mideast.
And they do have reason to fear, for there is, you see, a new kid on the block, a progressive “pro-Israel, pro-peace” pressure group known simply as J Street, a group whose leaders are critical of Israeli policies, including colony expansion and supports a two-state solution, and which has gained, since its advent on the scene 8 years ago, influence both on the Hill and in the White House. Indeed, last Monday President Obama dispatched two of his biggest heavy-hitters — Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry — to address J Street’s annual conference in Washington, where they expressed the administration’s “frustration” with the Israeli government. And several days earlier, the chief executive invited some of its college student activists to meet with him in the Oval Office.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, said after the Sanders-Clinton primary debate in New York that Sanders’ views “were different from the stale talking points that have dominated those types of discussions” in the past, and contributed to a “meaningful redefinition of what it means to be pro-Israel.” One imagines that what Mr. Ben-Ami is suggesting here is that an American, especially in this case a Jewish American, can be pro-Israel all he or she wants, but being pro-Israel does not, or should not, take one to the lunatic extreme of supporting Israel’s repressive occupation, expansionist policies and brazen discrimination.
Well, call J Street a benign AIPAC — that is, Israel's interests come first — but a group nevertheless whose aim is to promote, in its own words, “a new direction for American policy in the Middle East, diplomatic solutions over military ones and dialogue over confrontation.” Hey, I’ll take it.
The shift is coming. In 2012, for example, at the Democratic National Convention, delegates repeatedly booed officials who introduced into the party platform recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Last year, 50 members of the Democratic caucus boycotted Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in which he criticized the Obama administration for its nuclear deal with Iran. And a Pew Research Center poll in 2014, conducted soon after Israel’s invasion of Gaza, found that Americans under 30 were more likely to blame Israel than to blame Hamas for the carnage.
In the end, you have to take your hat off to Sanders for formalizing all this in the public debate.
