GOP’s Israel Plank Challenges the Democrats

Pro-Israel and anti-Israel activists within the Democratic Party are fighting over the language to be included in this year’s platform. There was a similar struggle eighty years ago—and a man named Netanyahu was in the middle of that debate, too.

As the presidential election of 1944 approached, most Republican Party leaders thought there was no point in trying to woo Jewish voters, since they had voted overwhelmingly for Franklin D. Roosevelt in the three previous elections.

Benzion Netanyahu thought otherwise. The historian and Zionist activist—and father of Israel’s current prime minister—traveled to the GOP convention in Chicago that summer to press for adoption of a pro-Zionist plank. Neither party had ever previously included such a plank in their platform.

Netanyahu had already developed relationships with former president Herbert Hoover, the dynamic Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce, and other important Republican figures. American Zionist leader Abba Hillel Silver, who delivered the invocation at that year’s convention, was close to Sen. Robert Taft, chair of the resolutions committee.

Lobbying by Netanyahu and Silver convinced the Republicans to include an unprecedented plank urging “refuge for millions of distressed Jewish men, women, and children driven from their homes by tyranny,” and the establishment of a “free and democratic” Jewish state in Palestine.

The GOP’s platform not only endorsed Jewish statehood, but also criticized President Roosevelt. It declared: “We condemn the failure of the President to insist that the [British authorities in] Palestine carry out the provisions of the Balfour Declaration and of the mandate, while he pretends to support them.”

The Republican plank alarmed Rabbi Stephen Wise, the era’s most prominent American Jewish leader. Wise was deeply loyal to President Roosevelt and the Democratic Party; in his private correspondence, he referred to the president as “the All Highest” and “the Great Man.”

Rabbi Wise had not been planning to attend that year’s Democratic Party convention, but the Republicans’ plank threatened to undermine Jewish electoral support for the president. “I now think I shall go there,” he told a colleague, “in order to be certain that the Resolution on Palestine which must now be adopted shall more than neutralize the damage done by the [Republican platform].”

In his conversations with delegates at the convention, Wise warned that without a pro-Zionist plank, hundreds of thousands of Jews in New York might vote for GOP nominee Thomas Dewey, who was the state’s popular governor. That could swing New York, with its 47 electoral votes—the most of any state—to the Republicans.

Congressman Emanuel Celler, Democrat of Brooklyn, warned White House aides that “the Jews in New York and other areas like Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco [and] Cleveland are greatly exercised over the failure of our Administration” regarding Palestine and Jewish refugees. If the Democrats did not support Zionism, then “as far as the race of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is concerned [Dewey] would steal the show right from under our noses…”

Rabbi Wise had no trouble securing permission to address the Democrats’ committee on resolutions–only to discover, to his dismay, that Rabbi Morris Lazaron, leader of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, would also testify. The Council was the 1940s equivalent of Jewish Voice for Peace—few in number, but loud and amply covered by sympathetic newspapers.

Ultimately, Wise’s position prevailed—mostly. The Democrats’ plank did not mention the plight of European Jewry, but it did call for “unrestricted Jewish immigration and colonization” of Palestine and “the establishment there of a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth.”

For Netanyahu and Silver, this bipartisan endorsement of Jewish statehood was a significant achievement. It enshrined support for Zionism, and later for Israel, as part of American political culture for decades to follow.

Today, however, there are elements within the Democratic Party who would like to reverse that tradition. They want the platform to call on Israel to cease firing at Hamas; they also want it to oppose U.S. weapons for Israel, beyond the shipments that the Biden administration recently suspended.

As they did in 1944, the Republicans today have thrown down the gauntlet. This year’s GOP platform states, “We will stand with Israel, and seek peace in the Middle East.” It also condemns antisemitism, pledges to “hold accountable those who perpetrate violence against Jewish people,” and promises to deport foreigners in the United States who support “terrorism and jihadism.”

Can the Democrats match that, given the sentiment toward Israel among some segments of their party? On the other hand, can they afford not to? With significant numbers of pro-Israel voters in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona, this year’s platforms could be more important than ever before.