Obama, don’t be like Jimmy Carter. Or Reagan either

Some notes for President Obama on “the Jewish agenda” historically in presidential politics.

First, from Leonard Fein’s book, Where Are We? The Inner Life of America’s Jews (1988), in which Fein insists that American Jews vote liberal, and wrestles with the fact that they jumped from Carter to Reagan in 1980 but began to abandon Reagan in 1984:

In 1984, Ronald Reagan, widely perceived by Jews as a truly splendid friend of Israel, won less of the Jewish vote than he had in 1980. A puzzlement, and an irritating disappointment to conservative Jewish intelletuals such as David Sidorsky, who in the aftermath of the election complained that American Jews, despite their devotion to Israel’s security and Soviet Jewry, had preferred a party “antagonistic to the security needs of Israel” and given to “the most accommodationist approaches to the Soviet Union.”

The historian Lucy Davidowicz summarized the neo-conservative view:

“The Jewish agenda requires a strong government in the United States to insure Israel’s security. Jews who care about Israel are obliged to use their vote to that end. They did so four years ago, when for the first time in over fifty years the Democratic candidate for the Presidency, Jimmy Carter, failed to win a majority of the Jewish vote. In 1984, by contrast, a great many Jews seemed willing to ignore the drift of the Democratic party into isolationism and defeatism, not to mention the party’s embrace of Jesse Jackson, a man overtly hostile to a strong America and a strong Israel.”

The year 1980 was not, then, the beginning of a trend; it was an ephemeral anomaly. Milton Himmelfarb concluded that “what misled the forecasters was the exceptionalness of 1980. It now seems clear that a big part of the 1980 Jewish vote for Reagan was the desire of many Jews to punish Carter.”

Fein’s comments on Jews punishing Jimmy Carter reminded me that Chemi Shalev in Haaretz recently wrote about Reagan actually taking Israel on. Is that why his vote dropped, from 80-84?

Imagine if Israel would launch a successful preemptive strike against a country that is building a nuclear bomb that threatens its very existence [1981], and the American president would describe it as “a tragedy”.

And then, not only would the U.S. administration fail to “stand by its ally”, as Republicans pledged this week, but it would actually lend its hand to a UN Security Council decision that condemns Israel, calls on it to place its nuclear facilities under international supervision and demands that it pay reparations (!) for the damage it had wrought.

And then, to add insult to injury, the U.S. president would impose an embargo on further sales of F-16 aircraft because Israel had “violated its commitment to use the planes only in self-defense”.

…And what if that very same president, only a few months later, would decide to sell truly game-changing sophisticated weaponry to Saudi Arabia, an Arab country that is a sworn enemy of Israel? And not only would this president dismiss Israeli objections that these weapons endanger its security, but he would actually warn, in a manner that sent shivers down the spines of American Jews, that “it is not the business of other nations to make American foreign policy”. And his Secretary of State would mince no words, just in case Walt or Mearsheimer hadn’t heard the first time, saying ominously that if the deal would be blocked by Israeli influence, there would be “serious implications on all American policies in the Middle East… I’ll just leave it there.” And then the two of them would extend the abovementioned arms embargo, just to twist Israel’s arm a little bit more.

I mean, what words would be left to describe such behavior, after the entire thesaurus’ arsenal of synonyms for “insult” “perfidy” and “knife in the back” have been exhausted to describe the official White House photo of President Obama talking to Prime Minister Netanyahu with his shoes on the table?

And what if this same president – you know who I’m talking about by now, but let’s keep up the charade – what if this same president, time after time after time, not only failed to exercise the U.S. veto in the UN Security Council to block anti-Israeli resolutions, but actually joined Muslim and Communist and other heathen countries in supporting Security Council decisions that condemned Israel for assassinating well-known terrorists; for annexing territories that Michele Bachman has clearly stated belong only to Israel; for killing violent jihadist students at Bir Zeit University; for waging war against the enemies of Western civilization in Lebanon; and even for “Israel’s policies and practices denying the human rights of Palestinians.”