Jonathan Rynhold is the director of the Argov Center for the Study of the Jewish People and the State of Israel in the Political Studies Department at Bar-Ilan University, where he is also a senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. Dr Rynhold's research focuses on Israeli and American approaches toward the Middle East peace process. His work has been published in numerous academic journals, including Political Science Quarterly, Survival, and the Review of International Studies. He has also co-edited two volumes on Israeli elections in the Israel at the Polls series and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Fathom. Additionally, Dr. Rynhold is a member of our Israel Factor panel.
This exchange focuses on Dr. Rynhold’s new book, The Arab-Israeli Conflict in American Political Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015). You can find part one of the exchange right here.
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Dear Jonathan,
In your previous answer you refer to a problem Israel has with “Democrats, especially younger Democrats”. In the book your discuss in detail a more specific group of Democratic voters – that is, the majority of American Jews.
You write: “White evangelicals are more supportive of Israel than any other group in America, except for American Jews.”
Are they still as supportive as you say? Are they still more supportive than evangelical voters? In a well-argued article a couple of weeks ago, Jeff Ballabon claimed that “For years, Israel’s largest and most powerful support base in America, the Christian Right, has submitted, typically with some head-scratching, on the premise that the Jews must know something they don’t. But for years polls have shown that Israel is far higher on their political priority list than it is on most Jews’ priority lists”. This might imply that perhaps Israel should not rely on the support of Jews.
Is it possible that we prefer platitudes and conventional wisdom – Jews are the core group supporting Israel – over American realities?
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
The key issue here is to define what we mean by ‘more supportive’.
In terms of emotional attachment, American Jews remain more supportive of Israel than evangelicals; and the way questions are worded in polls reflects this. American Jews are asked how attached they are to Israel, while non-Jewish Americans are asked how much they sympathize with Israel. Even allowing for this qualitative difference in the nature of the question – a higher percentage of American Jews are attached to Israel than the percentage of evangelicals who sympathize with Israel.
Even when we redefine support to mean political support, American Jews come out ahead. In the 1990s over 80% of American Jews thought that the US should side with Israel in the conflict with the Palestinians – compared to 40% of evangelicals. In the last decade, the number of Jews holding this opinion fell slightly to around three-quarters, while the percentage of evangelicals rose to over 50%. So the gap has narrowed, but American Jews remain ahead.
True, many polls indicate that for most American Jews Israel is not a top priority. But this is a bit misleading, for Israel remains a ‘threshold issue’ for most American Jews. This means that so long as a candidate is viewed as crossing the threshold of friendship towards Israel, most American Jews are not that bothered by the degree of friendship. American politicians understand this, and therefore it is rarely an issue. Were a Presidential candidate to speak about Israel as the head of the British Labor Party, Ed Miliband, did during the Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza, support for Israel would rapidly move up the political priorities of many American Jews.
Finally, there are two reasons why evangelicals appear more supportive of Israel than American Jews, even though this is not strictly the case.
The first reason is obvious. Less than 2% of Americans are Jews, and over 25% are evangelicals. Because evangelicals form the largest part of the Republican Party base, this gives Israel support in an arena where the organized American Jewish community is not particularly influential. On the other hand, American Jews are very active in the Democratic Party, where because of their very high level of political activism and voting, as well as their generous donations, they ‘punch above their weight’. In other words, both groups' support is very important and neither can replace the other. Between them they help to preserve the ‘ozone layer’ of the special relationship that is bipartisan support for Israel.
The real difference between evangelicals and Americans Jews is not the level of political support, but its meaning. Evangelicals who are most actively supportive of Israel lean to the Right. Despite this, they tend to support any Israeli government — even the Sharon government that withdrew from Gaza — and they oppose US pressure on Israeli governments, which makes them a convenient partner, especially for Right-leaning Israeli governments.
In contrast, American Jews are far more divided in ideological terms about Israeli policies towards the peace process, and these divisions are increasingly finding institutional expression in organizations like J Street on the Left and the Zionist Organization of America on the Right, who lobby in the US against an Israeli government of whose policies they disapprove. AIPAC is still far and away the most powerful organization, but it no longer dominates pro-Israel messaging as it did in the past. Despite this, what holds political support for Israel together among American Jews is the strong widespread belief that the Palestinians are far more responsible for the continuation of the conflict than Israel.
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