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wwJd? What would a Jewish president do about Israel and Palestine?


Jeremy Sher
Bernie IMAGINE ico

WWJD .. what would a Jew do?

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I’ve been concerned this whole cycle that Hillary would run rightward on Israel, either because she really is pro-settlement, or, more likely, because as a New York politician she’s been led to believe that Jewish voters are pro-settlement. But AIPAC’s losing streak in 2015 — first the embarrassment of Bibi’s undiplomatic speech to Congress in March, then AIPAC’s unprecedented political impotence against the Iran deal — has suggested that AIPAC might not actually be representative of Jewish votes anymore. For the first time since 1988, when Hedrick Smith marveled at AIPAC’s political power in his classic The Power Game, AIPAC doesn’t seem so powerful anymore. After AIPAC failed to punish Democrats who skipped Bibi’s speech and who supported Obama on the Iran deal, Democrats no longer believe Jewish votes are where AIPAC says they are.

So where are those Jewish votes? If Israel becomes an issue in the 2016 campaign, we may finally find out whether the hawks or the doves have the more accurate claim to speak for the Jewish community.

My prediction? New York and New Jersey veer rightward in this metric. The rest of American Jews veer left. An optimistic prediction would have Hillary stop running to the right of Obama on Israel as she realizes she’s not going to lose NY or NJ anyway, and Jewish Democrats elsewhere in the country find Netanyahu and the settlements horrifying. Assuming Clinton is the nominee, she obviously will need Sanders votes, and she will start noticing that right-wing stances on settlements don’t perform with American Jewish voters.

In any case, we will now have direct measurement of American Jewish sentiment on Israel and the peace process, so nobody needs to take either AIPAC’s or J Street’s word for it where American Jews stand. This might be the year we find out directly from the data.


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