RUTH WISSE: OBAMA, ROMNEY AND THE JEWS
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No citizens would seem to need a strong America more than the Jews, who are once again targeted by aggressors seeking to destroy what they cannot attain. Iran develops the bomb and threatens to annihilate the Jewish state. Fundamentalist-controlled Egypt threatens to abrogate the treaty that cost Israel the Sinai Peninsula. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza vie over which is Israel’s more effective enemy, with the latter firing more than 400 rockets into southern Israel so far this year.
Israel rejects having any foreign soldier defend its soil, but no country the size of New Jersey can permanently withstand such disproportionate force without countervailing support from a greater power.
The positive basis for such support was spelled out by Mitt Romney this summer on his visit to Israel: common belief in democracy and the rule of law, common practice of free enterprise, and common freedom of expression that includes the freedom to criticize. The defensive rationale for supporting Israel is that, as Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has put it, “those who single out the Jewish people as a target of racial and religious bigotry will inevitably be a threat to all of us.”
These affinities explain why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was cheered when he told the U.S. Congress last year that “Israel has no greater friend than America and America has no greater friend than Israel.” Through military intelligence and experience, it is sometimes Israel that protects America.
Given the unique danger to the Jewish state and Israel’s exceptional role in the defense of democracy, one might expect American Jews to vote for whichever party and politician is likelier to secure both countries. But Unlike Christians, Muslims and many others, Jews are a self-defined minority with a strategy of political accommodation to surrounding majorities. Whether out of fear or hopes for peace, many Jews have ingested the accusations against them, hoping to avoid conflict by holding Israel responsible for the aggression against it. Consequently, Jews can be found among those Americans who believe that their weakness—and that of Israel—would advance world peace.
Jews don’t necessarily vote with Israel in mind, but for those who do, the choice has never seemed clearer. President Obama’s call last year for Israel to return to its 1967 borders—the roughly nine-mile diameter that invited combined attacks from Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization—horrified Susan Crown of Chicago, who had been an Obama bundler in 2008: “Telling all the people who have lost loved ones in the 1967 war, that we were going to have a ‘do-over,’ really made me mad,” she told an Illinois “Women in Leadership” forum this month.
Earlier, in a speech in Cairo entitled “A New Beginning,” Mr. Obama courted Arab favor as mediator between Islam and Christianity. His speech extolled the “religious tolerance and racial equality” practiced by the two societies, and he ascribed equal responsibility to Israelis and Arabs for regional hostility.
The clearest argument for choosing Republican over Democratic leadership in the coming election was made inadvertently by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who wrote recently that the GOP was returning to “the moral, muscular foreign policy” that Mr. Obama scuttled. When Ms. Dowd called Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan the “puppets” of Dan Senor (a former Bush administration official who has co-authored a book on Israeli entrepreneurship), she meant they, unlike the president, are enthusiastic and unapologetic supporters of Israel. When she said that neoconservatives are “slithering back,” Ms. Dowd merely confirmed, albeit in slimy language, the obvious choice for voters who want America to take leadership of a free and safer world. You just have to know how to read.
Yet most Jews and leaders of Jewish organizations urge their coreligionists to keep voting for the president whose party has adopted the most tepid position on Israel in recent times. Edgar Bronfman, the former president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote recently that, “Not long ago, while sitting in the Oval Office, Obama looked me in the eye and said, ‘My commitment to Israel’s security is bone deep.’ ” Or, as my Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz wrote: “Several months ago, President Obama invited me to the Oval Office to discuss his Iran strategy. He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I don’t bluff.’ “
A president prepared to hypnotize so many Jews into promoting his campaign might have done better to invite back to the Oval Office the prime minister of the country they claim to be looking out for.
Every day brings fresh anxieties. The fate of America’s ambassador to Libya and the subsequent White House handling of the attack might give pause to those who trust that President Obama “has Israel’s back.” And Jews aren’t the only Americans looking for resolute policies of deterrence in the Middle East.
Ms. Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of “Jews and Power” (Schocken, 2007).
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