There was a lot of talk that Donald Trump could get to 30 or 35 percent of the Jewish vote in the country because of his actions in favor of Israel. That talk looks like horse manure today. J Street released an exit poll today showing Jews voted for a Democrat yesterday at the historically high rate: 77 to 21.
This is well above the previous two elections (Hillary Clinton 71-24; Barack Obama, 69-30) and in line with the high water mark for Jews as Democrats, in the first Obama victory and the Bill Clinton and Al Gore races.
“In this historically pivotal election, Jewish voters have just totally repudiated Donald Trump and a Republican Party that has catered to the most far-right, xenophobic elements of the country,” J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami commented.
The significance of this data is that the two largest Jewish communities in the world — the U.S. and Israel — are at opposite poles of opinion. American Jews have always raised tons of money for Israel in little blue boxes– and the Israeli Jews who benefited from that fund-raising are Trumpists today: rightwing and xenophobic. Israeli Jews favored Trump over Biden by 77 to 23 in one recent survey. Israeli Jews have a “blind worship” of Donald Trump, Chemi Shalev of Haaretz said in summarizing a second, more recent survey.
According to the poll, 68 percent believe Trump would be “better for Israel,” and only 12 percent think Biden would.
(Notice how you have to go to an Israeli newspaper to learn how much Israeli Jews love Donald Trump. So far, not a word of this in the New York Times.)
This is a reflection of American Jewish sophistication; Jews here care about a lot more issues than just what Israeli Jews think will benefit Israel. And the number who do care about Israel is falling. Per J Street,
American Jews listed their top voting priorities as the coronavirus pandemic (54%), climate change (26%), healthcare (25%) and the economy (23%). Just 5% listed Israel as one of their top two voting issues, down from 9% in 2016. [emphasis ours].
So the number of American Jews who care about Israel first just dropped by nearly half!
This trend scares the Israel lobby. Pro-Israel organizations depend on Jews (and yes, evangelical Christians, too) who place Israel at the top of their list of issues. Among Jews, Israel is crashing as a consideration, which means that policy-making in the Democratic Party will grow fairer to Palestinians, at last.
American Jews are not just more sophisticated than Israeli Jews, but they have a lot to fear from Trump. He has enabled bigotry and white nationalism, forces that have been very harmful to Jews — witness the defacing of a Jewish cemetery in Michigan two days ago.
h/t Allison Deger.
Ami Ayalon published his book “Friendly Fire” in English first, because he thinks American Jews have the power to save Israeli Jews from themselves. Here’s an interview with him in the Times of Israel – https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/ami-ayalon-hasnt-given-up-on-the-two-state-solution/
In the book you write about wanting to reach American Jewish leaders, which is why in part you’ve published the book first in English rather than Hebrew. Many Israelis would say Diaspora Jews have no voice in what happens in Israel.
[Ayalon] The way we are going, the policies that we choose – I think they will bring Israel as a Jewish democracy to a dead end. It will not be the Jewish democracy that was envisioned by the founders at the end of the 19th century, or as written in our Declaration of Independence….That should not only be an Israeli issue. In a way I am trying to convince people abroad, mainly Jews….somewhere between 1988, when the Palestinians accepted the concept of a Jewish state and an Arab state [implied in the Palestinian Declaration of Independence] and 2002, with the Arab League Initiative [calling for normalization between the Arab world and Israel in exchange for a full withdrawal by Israel to the 1967 lines], we achieved victory. Once we achieved victory, our tragedy is that we are still fighting.
More evidence that “Israel’s” greatest weakness is its financial and geopoitical dependence on the U.S. It’s only a matter of time before the “Special Relationship” ends.
Unless something has changed, the vast majority of Jewish Americans are still Zionist and remain firmly committed to Jewish / “Jewish State” supremacism. This makes trading Trump for Biden seem less like a chasm between Jewish Americans and Jewish Israelis and more like a small pothole.
“Just 5% [of American Jews] listed Israel as one of their top two voting issues, down from 9% in 2016.” Sounds like the Israel Lobby’s main clout comes from a few rich guys. But money trumps morality in Congress. What’s a little bigoted, apartheid ethnic cleansing between benjamin friends? Senator Booker? Senator Harris?
Not historically unprecedented:
1960 Kennedy v Nixon 82:18
1964 Johnson v Goldwater 90:10
1968 Humphrey v Nixon 81:17
1992 Clinton v Bush 80:11
1996 Clinton v Dole 78:16
2000 Gore v Bush 79:19
This article just shows the anti-Trump bias of the authors. That’s all.