Israel is concerned with the changing face of America. It is concerned with minorities turning into a majority. And no, this is not a racist tendency, or an inherent problem with Asians or Hispanics. It is purely self-interest: Israel relies on the US for support, the US is changing, Israel would like to retain the support – so Israel needs to figure out if the new America is going to be as supportive as the current America.
There are reasons for concern that all Israeli experts, within and without government, have learned to flag.
Religion is one reason: American support for Israel has roots in a certain stripe of Protestantism. Most Hispanics are Catholic. In fact, we can now show the current numbers thanks to this week’s release of Pew’s “religious landscape” study: “Hispanics constitute a greater share of the Catholic population than of any other religious group; fully one-third of U.S. Catholic adults are Hispanics”.
Connection with American Jewry is another one – these two communities don’t quite mingle. “Jews and Latinos live parallel lives and do not mingle. They live in separate neighborhoods in major cities including Los Angeles and Chicago”, the Forward reported in 2012. Outreach efforts are many, and they have shown signs of success, but still, the results aren’t always what we’d like them to be.
This is evident in polls that ask questions about Israel.
When Israel fought in Gaza last summer, Hispanics were much less sympathetic to it than white Americans, as the Pew Research Center reported. “By about two-to-one (40% to 22%), more whites consider Israel’s response to the current conflict about right than say it has gone too far. By contrast, blacks and Hispanics are about as likely to say Israel’s response has gone too far as to say it has been appropriate (36%-27% and 35%-28%, respectively)”.
An earlier poll found that Hispanics were more likely than other Americans to think that the US is too supportive of Israel. And if that is not troubling enough, “the survey revealed that similar numbers of Jews and Latinos said they perceive anti-Semitism in the Latino community. According to the survey, 58% of Jews believe that the Hispanic American community holds some anti-Jewish prejudice, and 46% of Latinos agreed with this same statement”.
So the pro-Israel community in the US is somewhat worried, and Israeli officials are often worried. Organizations, communities, synagogues, all have outreach programs that aim to get closer to the Latino community, to better communicate with it and better understand it. Indeed, some of these efforts seem serious and worthy, and provide key Jewish leaders with access to key Hispanic leaders – not just to make them more “pro-Israel” but, more importantly, to have closer ties with a “sleeping” American giant.
Now two Israeli researches, a student at IDC Herzliya and her professor, released an analysis that might slightly calm concerned Israelis. “Attitudes of Hispanics Toward Israel” is a simple compilation of numbers from many polls – not a deep discussion of cultural trends and prejudices. In it, Shir Marom Melnik and Dr. Amnon Cavari present some simple conclusions: It is true that Hispanics support Israel less than non-Hispanic Americans. But the numbers also show that “Hispanics who were born in the US are more supportive of Israel than Hispanic immigrants”. This is good news from an Israeli standpoint, because what it means is that “as the balance of this group shifts from immigrants to natively born, support for Israel increases”.
In fact, this study points at two possible positive trends concerning Hispanic support for Israel. Cavari, in an interview, is cautious about these signs. There are many institutions which study the American Hispanic population, but few of them have much interest in Hispanics’ attitudes toward an issue as specific as Israel. So on the one hand, this new short paper fills a gap, but on the other hand, it has to rely on data that is somewhat sketchy.
So the first positive sign is the upward trend when we look at first generation Hispanic immigrants to the US compared to native born Hispanic Americans. But as I said, the study points to yet another nugget of possibly good news. The authors write: “Hispanic registered voters have been more supportive of Israel than Hispanics who are not registered to vote”. The authors of the study believe that “this finding indicates that the politically involved Hispanics are adjusting their support for Israel to levels that are similar to those of the broad American population thus becoming more supportive of Israel than those who are not involved”.
I asked Cavari, who runs the “American Public Opinion toward Israel” lab at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy in IDC Herzliya, if one can’t reach the opposite conclusion by assuming that Israel could suffer when the less-involved Hispanics, who seem to be less supportive of Israel, enter the politically-involved group. No, he said, this isn’t likely to happen. Something in the transition of Hispanics from uninvolved to involved makes them more likely to be supportive of Israel. What is it? The study doesn’t have a wide enough scope to give an answer to that question. Religion could be a key, Cavari says. Second generation Hispanics, and more involved Hispanics, might be less connected to the Catholic church – whether they officially move to other religions or just weaken their ties to strict Catholicism – he speculated. He then said that more study is needed. His students and him are working on it.
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