The Israel lobby’s crushing win on Iron Dome

There’s been a lot of consternation among Palestine advocates over political roller-coaster ride in Congress last week.

First, in an unprecedented show of power, pro-Palestinian members of Congress managed to stop the Democratic House leadership from slipping $1 billion of military funding to Israel’s Iron Dome program into a bill to fund the government.

So the Democratic leadership asked for names. It called for an up-and-down vote on Iron Dome funding; and pro-Palestinian politicians were crushed, 420-9. In the end even New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez failed to vote against — voting present — and said that the bill was a “reckless” effort to “rip our communities apart.” Critics of Israel such as Betty McCollum and Mark Pocan and Jamaal Bowman fell away and voted for the $1 billion– on top of the $3.8 billion we already give Israel every year (“a 26% increase in security assistance to Israel“).

That $1 billion is more than twice what this country spends on either NATO or the Peace Corps. That $1 billion is going to a country that has a higher per capita GDP than France, Japan, and the UK. A country that has been described as an apartheid state by Human Rights Watch.

“In the course of two days, the mood within the pro-Israel community went from histrionic alarm to celebratory glee, whereas the other side traveled the same path in reverse,” writes an Israel lobbyist.

To understand the politics of this failure, you need to take Ocasio-Cortez’s explanation at its word. “It created a real sense of panic and horror among those in our community who otherwise engage thoughtfully in these discussions.”

Ocasio-Cortez was saying, The Jewish community is upset that we might stop this funding, but people of color are largely opposed to the funding. The New York Times conveyed the same message when it wrote that Iron Dome opposition came from “a new generation of progressive Democrats — many of them people of color”.

The organized Jewish community was all for this funding. There are 28 Jews in the House, 26 of them Democrat. All 28 voted for these funds. All the mainstream Jewish organizations were lobbying for it. Even J Street and Americans for Peace Now were surely for it though not vocal about it.

The unanimity of the Jewish congresspeople underlines a widespread political understanding: Jews are for Israel. 95 percent of American Jews support Israel, says Batya Ungar-Sargon. 85 percent of “openly-Jewish” college Jews are “strongly” supportive of Israel, says this recent survey of supposed campus antisemitism.

The leftwing groups Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow surely represent the new wave in Jewish life and they opposed the funding. Those groups apparently gave Rep. Ayanna Pressley in Boston a reason to vote against the funding. But politicians know how to count noses, and campaign contributions too, and non-/anti-Zionist Jews were not the base for even progressive politicians on a vote that was very important for Palestinians.

If you reach that conclusion that American Jews are For military aid to Israel, it’s very hard to oppose that aid as a Democrat. Because Jews are so important to the Democratic Party.

Jews vote Democrat at about 3 to 1, nearly as reliably as African-Americans. Their turnout rates are very high. And they are a key voting bloc in a few states, notably Florida, New Jersey, and New York, and they are important in a dozen or more congressional districts from California to Illinois to Michigan to Virginia.

It’s obviously not just voting. Jews are far and away the wealthiest group by religion in our society (44 percent of households made over $100,000 in 2016, well above the national average of 19 percent and well ahead of Hindus and Episcopalians). And Jews give to Democrats.

“Democrats get half their campaign funding from Jewish sources,” a leading Israel advocate said in 1996. The role of Jewish Democratic donors is “gigantic” and “shocking,” two experts told J Street in 2016 (J.J. Goldberg of the Forward and Stephanie Schriock then the head of Emily’s List respectively) . The New York Times called Jewish donors “the elephant in the room” in 2019: “Of the dozens of personal checks greater than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by Jewish donors.”

This arithmetic was true 50 years ago. Jews contributed as much as 75 percent of what Hubert Humphrey spent running for president in 1968 and in 1977, “constituted more than 60 percent of the large donors to the Democratic Party,” Jimmy Carter’s top political aide explained to him when trying to get the president’s “head out of the clouds” on Israel policy.

It was true in Obama’s era. When Obama ran for Senate in ’04, “his financial backers included Chicagoans Lester Crown… several members of the Pritzker family, owners of the Hyatt hotel chain, and another neighbor, Alan Solow, later head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. All were major financial backers of Israel,” Rashid Khalidi wrote in his book, “Brokers of Deceit.” When Obama tangled with Benjamin Netanyahu over settlements in 2011, his aide Ben Rhodes said that he “was given a list of leading Jewish donors to call to reassure them of Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides.” 

As Obama learned, even when Israel had a far-rightwing prime minister, Democratic American Jews would rally to the Israeli PM’s side (even when they agreed with the president on the issues). Stu Eizenstat, a political aide to both Jimmy Carter and Hillary Clinton, explained that loyalty in a 2018 book. Emphasis mine.

What Carter… did not fully understand was that support for any incumbent Israeli government was the ultimate litmus test of Jewish identity for mainstream Jewish leaders. It remains so, even when sorely tried by Israeli politicians. 

This influence is why a leading Israel lobbyist once bragged to reporter Jeffrey Goldberg (who himself once served in the Israeli army) that he could get the signatures of 76 Senators on a napkin by the next morning.

Congressional Democrats are well aware of these forces. Recall that when Raphael Warnock walked back criticisms of Israel in his close Senate race in Georgia last year, he won the backing of the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), and won the race. By contrast, last summer Democratic Majority for Israel and other pro-Israel PACs poured more than $2 million in negative TV ads into Nina Turner’s race against a Democratic establishment candidate in an Ohio congressional district after Turner refused to meet meet Israel lobbyists’ demands that she renounce the Squad. Those ads never mentioned Israel– the lobby doesn’t want that issue politicized. But Turner was clobbered in Jewish areas of the Cleveland suburbs; and Democratic Majority for Israel has been bragging about Turner’s defeat ever since.

Jamaal Bowman whose district includes a lot of southern Westchester was surely thinking of Nina Turner’s loss when he voted for the Iron Dome funding.

Joe Biden wants to do nothing to alienate the Jewish warchest/rightwing Israel lobby in his efforts to hold the Congress and the White House for Democrats. Nancy Pelosi feels the same way. “If this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel,” she said two years ago.

This commitment by Democratic leadership is so strong that Palestinians don’t get access to congressional offices without the endorsement of liberal Zionist groups.

While rightwing Zionists continue to dominate the Jewish discourse. David Harris of the American Jewish Committee said that legislators who tried to stop Iron Dome were “seeking Israel’s end.”

Harris was echoing Ted Deutch’s hateful rant against Rashida Tlaib on the House floor. Deutch called Tlaib, who is Palestinian, an antisemite because she “besmirched” our ally by using the word “apartheid” to describe Israel.

I cannot– cannot allow one of my colleagues to stand on the floor of the House of Representatives. … to label the Jewish Democratic state of Israel an apartheid state. I reject it…. I say to my colleague who just besmirched our ally… We can have an opportunity to debate a lot of issues on the House floor. But to falsely characterize Israel… is consistent with those who advocate for the dismantling of the one Jewish state in the world.. When there’s no place on the map for one Jewish state, that’s antisemitism.

Deutch’s “powerful” speech was applauded by the Democratic Majority for Israel.

But the world’s leading human rights groups have said just that about Israel: it’s an apartheid state. And as Beth Miller of JVP points out there was no support for Tlaib from her fellows under Deutch’s hideous attack.

Though Ted Deutch happily stood with the rightwing Trump administration on Israel:

That’s the role of the Israel lobby. To stand by Israeli governments no matter how rightwing. To call on American Jews to support the one and only Jewish state. And to vilify anyone who stands up for Palestinian human rights as an antisemite.

Part of the tragedy is that our media have accepted the view that it is antisemitic to discuss the role of the organized Jewish community because it’s a discussion of Jewish power. After the vote, the New York Times congressional correspondent observed that even outspoken progressives were “caught between their principles and the still powerful pro-Israel voices in their party, such as influential lobbyists and rabbis.” But after those same pro-Israel voices said this language was antisemitic, the paper removed the words.

The bad news is that lobby still has a “stranglehold” over policymaking because it has the overwhelming backing of the organized Jewish community, and a lot of money to spend on political races.

The good news is that nine Congresspeople decided to stand up against it. And the Israel lobby hears footsteps. As one lobbyist wrote in the New York Times, “[T]he debate over the Iron Dome system represents a tectonic shift in the discourse among Democrats, one that is likely to shape U.S.-Israel relations for decades.”

Apologies for rehashing some lines from an earlier post in 2019. h/t James North.