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by Jonathan Rosenblum
HaModia
November 15, 2002
[posted with permission of the author]
Like many of my former Jewish compatriots in America, my heart sank on Wednesday morning with news of the dramatic Republican electoral victory. But only briefly. When the first instinctive reaction of almost any Jew of a certain age had passed, I reminded myself: Yonoson, you’re a lot closer to being a Republican than a Democrat. Indeed with each passing day, it becomes harder and harder for me to see how anyone concerned with the fate of the world and the little sliver of it in which I happen to live could be anything else.
September 11 2001 made us a aware of threats to our existence that had until then seemed the stuff of action novels. It revealed that a new world had dawned that would require new approaches if we were not all to be permanent hostages to terror.
In response, President Bush announced last spring at West Point a new doctrine of preemption. America would not stand idle waiting for enemies to strike, and then respond; she would act first to prevent those who threaten the security of the world from acquiring the most dangerous weapons.
Preemption, as Henry Kissinger pointed out, represented a radical departure from traditional doctrines of international relations. Nevertheless, said Kissinger, the magnitude of threat posed by international terrorists and rogue regimes like Iraq required such a change in policy.
George Bush internalized the lessons of September 11 and changed direction. The Democrats remained moored firmly in place. More than a year after September 11, the Democrats have not come up with a single policy initiative in response to the terrorist threat. They could neither support the President’s planned attack on Iraq nor oppose it. They were left with only a series of silly quibbles, like claiming that Al Qaeda and its loose web of terrorist allies remains a bigger threat than Iraq. Even if that were true, it is meaningless. The two threats are not unrelated nor is the United States limited to fighting one or another.
In short, the gaze of the party of self-proclaimed deep thinkers and wise men remained fixed backwards. The Democrat’s major issue this year was prescription drugs, just as it was in 2000. Democratic campaigners tried to turn the election into a referendum on Bush v. Gore: Al Gore Jr.’s standard stump speech consisted of asking partisan crowds whether they had reconciled themselves to the 2000 election results, and Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe made defeating Governor Jeb Bush in Florida an Ahab-like obsession.
Republican decisiveness and Democratic wimpiness are the direct outgrowth of the two parties’ underlying ideological differences. Democrats are uncomfortable in a world in which the United States is the only superpower. Multilateral action is not for them a practical desideratum – something that makes life easier where attainable – but a moral imperative. That commitment to multilateralism derives from a strain of latent anti-Americanism among many sectors of the Democratic party – a legacy of Vietnam – and the multiculturalists’recoil from anything that smacks of the belief in the superiority of American values.
Republicans, by contrast, reject constraints on America’s ability to act by multinational bodies like the U.N. They prefer a world in which America serves as policeman to one policed by Kofi Annan and the minions of the U.N. bureaucracy. And they unabashedly see the triumph of American democratic values as a positive development throughout the world.
With eminent common sense, Republicans wonder why the United States’ ability to protect itself and the rest of the world should be subjected to the economic interests of the French, who would not only sell their mothers for a bit of oil, but look with cynical disdain on anyone who would not. In their naivete, Republicans cannot understand why the U.N. Security Council, chaired by a nation like Syria, which slaughtered up to 40,000 of its own citizens in a few bloody days and is holding a neighboring state captive, is perceived as possessing any moral authority to dictate to America.
Democrats may not believe that all people are capable of democratic institutions democratic institutions are for everyone
So much for the reasons why as an American citizen and resident of planet earth, I’m delighted by the Republican triumph. But I’m also relieved as a citizen of Israel.
It has long been clear that the greatest threat today to Jews and Israel comes from the Left, and not from the Right, as was historically the case. The divestiture campaigns that treat Israel as a unique pariah state find their strongest support on elite college campuses. And, as Harvard President Lawrence Summers has warned, those divestiture campaigns are at root anti-Semitic because they subject the Jewish state to a standard by which no other nation is judged.
The Democratic party is structured as an association of groups of victims and their sympathizers, and the Palestinians have a much easier time fitting themselves to the victimhood model. Not by accident, then, do 54% of Democrats describe themselves as equally or more sympathetic to Palestinians, while two-thirds of Republicans are more sympathetic to Israel. And the most strident anti-Israel voices in Congress in recent years have tended to be black Democrats.
Those who confidently assert America’s right and duty to defend itself and the free world are likely to be much more sympathetic to Israel’s need to defend herself. Again, not by accident are the most articulate defenders of Israel among American pundits also the strongest boosters of American action against Iraq. And of these, only The New Republic’s Martin Peretz is identified with the Democratic Party.
Despite the almost comical attempt of Secretary of State Colin Powell and his spokesman Richard Boucher to try to distinguish between the United States’ remote control killing of Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen and Israel’s targeted assassinations of leading terrorists – the Al Qaeda men, you see, wanted to kill Americans; the Palestinian terrorists only wanted to play pattycake – the two actions are indistinguishable.
President Bush’s supporters will not easily let him forget that fact.
As Defense Department analyst David Wurmser has astutely noted, much of the widespread popular support for Israel derives from the perception of Israelis as doughty defenders of commonly-held values against some nasty neighbors. Confidence in those values and the willingness to defend them are much more typical of the Republican than Democratic party.
ONE final irony of the just concluded campaign will resonate especially with Orthodox Jews. According to many commentators, one of the turning points in the campaign’s last week was a ``memorial rally’’ for Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone. Wellstone, who was Jewish, was by the testimony of both political friends and foes an uncommonly fine person. He and his wife and daughter were killed on their way to the funeral of the father of a friend when their small private plane crashed in a freezing rain in rural northern Minnesota. It was apparently typical of Wellstone that he took the time from the final weeks of a neck-and-neck race to attend the funeral of a friend’s father.
The memorial for Wellstone and his family, however, turned into a highly partisan affair, in which Republicans who came to pay their respects were hissed and told that the only way to honor the fallen Senator was to vote for his Democratic replacement. The Senator’s son, who should have been home sitting shiva, thrust his clenched fist in the air and shouted into the microphone repeatedly, ``We will win, we will win.’’
Voters across America were repulsed though they could not have placed exactly what was wrong: a Jewish son’s failure to mourn his parents and sister in private. In place of the ``religious Right,’’ wrote Mark Steyn, ``the Minnesota memorial gave us the religious Left; they don’t believe in G-d, they believe in politics; the Democratic party is their church,
Wellstone their last martyr, and the campaign a crusade.’’
(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of Tzemach Dovid)
If you would like to read other columns by Jonathan Rosenblum, please visit www.jewishmediaresources.org.
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Because of the large volume of letters, Jonathan Rosenblum cannot answer each letter personally. He does, however, read each one.
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