Pompeo thinks Israel is great domestic politics for 2024

Last night on PBS News Hour, Nick Schifrin said Mike Pompeo was showing up in the occupied West Bank with last-minute gifts for Israel so that he would have “photo opportunities… if he were to choose to run for office– say president in 2024.”

It was a rare moment that the mainstream media addressed the domestic politics of Israel, though very cryptic on Schifrin’s part. So let’s explain this fully.

Pompeo is a very smart and strategic guy (first in his class at West Point, in MacArthur’s footsteps) and he knows two things about the politics of the Israel lobby:

1, The Sheldon Adelson primary of 2023– the battle for Adelson’s millions– precedes the Republican voters’ primaries of 2024.

2, The one headwind Pompeo has it in his power to possibly create against Biden/Harris in 2024 is to get Biden fighting with Netanyahu over settlements and get the Democratic Party fighting over Israel.

As to Adelson, you cannot point to a single private individual having greater influence over foreign policy than the casino mogul over the last 20 years. He has said straightforwardly that he wants the U.S. to recognize Jerusalem undivided as the “Jewish” capital, Palestinian rights to their own land destroyed, the Iran deal trashed, the peace process shattered, and the West Bank and other occupied territories considered as Israel. On all these wishes, two Republican presidents have delivered, George Bush and Donald Trump, because Adelson and his Israeli wife Miriam have been giving hundreds of millions to Republican causes.

All this is very simple and clear, and yet the mainstream media never cover it, merely touching on it now and then (though Connie Bruck did a good piece on Adelson in the New Yorker a long time ago). They prefer to investigate the Koch brothers because evidently it’s antisemitic to say that a wealthy Jew is wielding influence. (And yes, Christian evangelicals like the Israel issue too, on the Republican side.)

As to the second point, Barack Obama had the temerity in his first term to take on Netanyahu over settlements and the ’67 lines, and he then spent years walking it back and undoing the damage inside the Democratic Party, particularly in the 2012 reelection year, when Mitt Romney went to Jerusalem to out-Israel him. If there is one thing you need to know here, it is that when Obama decided to make pro-Palestine policy in his last months in office when he had some political freedom — abstaining on a resolution at the UN Security Council that called the settlements a “flagrant violation” of law– he made it a point to do so AFTER the 2016 election so that it would not hurt Hillary Clinton with donors.

Nathan Thrall reported this in the New York Times:

“There is a reason the U.N. vote did not come up before the election in November,” the former official said. “Was it because you were going to lose voters to Donald Trump? No. It was because you were going to have skittish donors. That, and the fact that we didn’t want Clinton to face pressure to condemn the resolution or be damaged by having to defend it.” What worries establishment Democrats, the former official added, is that the partisan divide over Israel will concretize — with Republicans defined as pro-Israel, Democrats defined as anti-Israel — and that the party coffers will empty.

Thrall’s piece was exceptional; still, there you have it, in the New York Times: Being pro-Israel is essential to fundraising in the Democratic Party. That’s why Nancy Pelosi goes to the Israeli American Council and says, “If this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to… Israel.” That’s why Barack Obama can only say that the land was overwhelmingly populated by Arabs and there was settler colonialism and a Nakba to make the Jewish state — when he’s out of office, in his (purposeless) memoir.

But if you state the obvious, that being pro-Israel is a source of funding in Washington, as the new Pentagon official, retired colonel Michael Macgregor, did in years gone by, then you get vilified. It’s what happened to Ilhan Omar when she said in 2019 that AIPAC wields clout because of the money. It’s what happened to Samantha Power in 2013 when she was going to be UN ambassador and it came out that she had said ten years before that actually doing something about Israel’s human rights violations “might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import”– Power had to eat her words and get the extremist Shmuley Boteach to be her sherpa to the lobby in order to get the U.N. job. It’s what happened to Chuck Hagel when he was about to be Defense Secretary and it came out that he’d said of the Senate, “The political reality is that … the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here.”

Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) just did it to Macgregor:

It’s not really a surprise to us that he also spreads millennia-old antisemitic tropes. January 20th can’t come soon enough.

A miserable antisemite– that’s how you marginalize people and end any discussion about how money influences foreign policy.

DMFI and Pompeo are already engaged. DMFI took shots at Pompeo yesterday. DMFI is determined not to let Israel become a political football, Pompeo is. His actions yesterday are aimed at making Joe Biden have to take on Netanyahu early in his administration, over the Democratic commitment to the so-called “two state solution.” To sow the seeds of another Obama-Netanyahu struggle.

That battle is brewing inside the Democratic Party. Buttigieg and Sanders thought it was good politics to label Netanyahu a racist during the primaries this year because they know the Democratic base believes in conditioning aid to Israel, and cares more about Palestinian human rights than about the two-state solution. Pompeo sees that movement on the left, which is why he officially declared Boycott Divestment Sanctions to be a “cancer” and antisemitic, etc, yesterday, and Netanyahu said, “Wonderful!” The liberal Zionists see that movement on the left, too, which is why they pushed the legislation that says BDS is antisemitic– so Dems won’t be wedged on Israel.

I think Pompeo will get his wish. Despite Biden’s best efforts, the Democratic leadership will be at war with its own base over Israel… but that’s another story.

Thanks to James North and Scott Roth and Adam Horowitz and Josh Ruebner.