JTA reports a generational shift among Jews: Younger Jews are for Obama, older ones for Hillary, who reportedly has been circulating Rev. Wright’s scary statements about Israel/Palestine to
superdelegates, many of whom are Jewish, to try and win their support.
The 2008 presidential race holds out the possibility that the Lobby will be
orphaned. Yesterday Cato scholar Leon Hadar said to me that John McCain is a "wild
card" when
it comes to the Israel Lobby because he is an "American nationalist"
who is going to do what he thinks is right for the U.S. and not be
swayed by our alliance with that perfect democracy, even when Joe Lieberman is whispering in his ear. Obama is of course
also highly questionable because he is post-parochial,
and making noises about an evenhanded policy. While Hillary is reliable; mainstream conservative Jews know that she
is super-responsive. But Hillary’s ship may have sailed.
Partly it’s demographics, as Hadar notes. Here is that all-important paper of last year showing that increasingly, young American Jews under 35 (most of whom, like Obama’s mother, are intermarrying) are distancing themselves from Israel.
Also, the mere announcement that dovish Jews are starting their own lobby was in itself an important blow to the old one. A couple weeks ago I heard Shlomo Ben-Ami in New York, speaking at the behest of those doves, say that he had met with Condoleezza Rice and urged her to press for Israeli concessions in the West Bank. Well, this week Rice got the Israelis to say they were reducing the number of checkpoints in the West Bank–though not their colonies. It struck me as a powerful sign of something that’s upon us: the Zionist left is suddenly at the policy table, the Israel lobby is changing before our eyes. When I saw David Wurmser a couple weeks ago, he was another raving old neocon, not a powerful aide in the White House.
Maybe we will look back on the heyday of the lobby as the period from ’91 to ’07. From the time that James Baker said Fuck the Jews, to the Iraq war and the return of the realists. In that interval, the hardline lobby was supreme. America loves change.
