The Arab_Israeli Conflict
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The Clinton Parameters were an attempt to bridge the positions between the two sides undertaken with the support of both parties. They would have given the Palestinians 100 percent of the Gaza Strip and 97 percent of the West Bank including territorial swaps, plus the addition of safe passage across Israeli territory from the West Bank to Gaza. The parameters called for the creation of a nonmilitarized Palestinian state with a permanent international force in the Jordan Valley to replace the Israeli military presence there. While allowing for three Israeli early warning stations in the West Bank, it gave the Palestinians sovereignty over their airspace. On Jerusalem, it divided the city along ethnic lines, with Jewish areas coming under Israeli control and Arab areas under Palestinian control; it also gave the Palestinians sovereignty over the holiest site in Judaism: the Temple Mount. On refugees, the parameters spoke about Israel being the homeland of the Jewish people while rejecting a specific right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants to Israel that would stand in contradiction to Israel’s sovereign rights and threaten its Jewish character. The guiding principle was that a Palestinian state would be the focal point for refugees, without ruling out that Israel would accept some of them.193 Overall, then, the parameters gave the Palestinians the viable territorially contiguous state that they had claimed had been their objective since the beginning of the peace process. Consequently, when Yasir Arafat rejected those parameters, which Israel accepted, Dennis Ross and many others laid the blame for the failure of the peace process at Arafat’s door. On the other hand, both Ross and Martin Indyk194 felt that tactical errors by Ehud Barak played a significant role in the failure to achieve an Israeli-Syrian peace deal.195
The First Obama Administration
The Obama administration came into office with a dovish grand strategy, which, it was hoped, would allow the president to devote more time and resources to domestic issues. Obama sought to improve America’s standing through direct engagement of the Arab-Muslim public and radical states that Bush had shunned, like Iran. As a result, he made a series of public speeches in the Middle East. The most important of these was in Cairo in June 2009 where he adopted the evenhanded approach favored by dovish Democrats. On the one hand, Obama asserted that denial of the Holocaust and other anti-Semitic slurs prevalent in the region were unacceptable. He also reaffirmed that America’s bond with Israel was “unbreakable” and stated that America’s historical support for “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland [was] rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.”196 On the other hand, this was balanced by a reference to Palestinian suffering.197 In addition, Obama failed to mention the Jewish people’s deep historical ties to the land of Israel, which lies at the heart of Zionism. The speech did not stand alone. The administration’s initial strategy was to create distance between the U.S. and Israel. Consequently, Obama pointedly did not visit Israel, and when the head of a major pro-Israel organization told the president that he should not allow there to be any daylight between Israeli and U.S. positions on the peace process, Obama disagreed, arguing that under Bush there had been “no daylight, and no progress.”198
Again, in line with the dovish approach Obama put the onus for peacemaking on Israel. One of his first acts after taking office was to appoint the former senator George Mitchell as special envoy for the peace process.199 This demonstrated that the administration intended to make the peace process a priority. Mitchell was also known to support an evenhanded approach.200 To begin with, the administration demanded that the new Likud-led government endorse the establishment of a Palestinian state and freeze settlements. Subsequently, Netanyahu publicly endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state, while also implementing a ten-month settlement freeze and agreeing to immediate unconditional negotiations.
Within the administration this approach was promoted by four key staffers: Dan Shapiro, director of Middle East and North Africa at the National Security Council; Mara Rudman, Mitchell’s chief of staff; Ben Rhodes, the chief foreign policy speech writer; and Denis McDonough, the chief of staff at the National Security Council. All four had previously worked for the former Democratic senator Lee Hamilton. Hamilton advocated opening a U.S. dialogue with Hamas, and he cochaired the Iraq Study Group, whose report urged an aggressive U.S. push for Arab-Israeli peace. He also claimed that Israel’s war against Hezbollah in 2006 increased hostility to U.S. troops in Iraq.201
However, the administration’s approach began to change as it began to realize that the Israeli government was not the sole significant block to peace, and that a peace agreement was much harder to obtain that it initially thought.202 Abbas refused to enter into negotiations with Netanyahu until the last month of the settlement freeze and then demanded an extension, including in Jerusalem, before he would continue to negotiate; Syria did not break with Iran, as Obama had hoped, nor did it stop assisting Hamas and Hezbollah. In addition, Saudi Arabia refused to enact the confidence-building measures that Obama had requested, such as providing overflight rights for Israeli airlines.
Against this background, the approach of robust liberal internationalists began to gain traction. The first sign of this came when the administration switched its approach toward Israel from sticks to carrots, as Dennis Ross began to play a larger role in policy making.203 The administration offered Israel a large military aid package if it would agree to extend the freeze by a further three months; the Israeli government did not formally respond, and eventually the administration removed the offer from the table. When indirect talks resumed, the U.S. made a gesture to Israel by granting it an additional $205 million in military aid to help it expand its antimissile defense system.204
The second sign of the switch came when the president decided that he would not present an American peace plan, as per the dovish approach. While Obama restated his commitment to engaging with the peace process, he declared, “No matter how much pressure the United States brings to bear … the United States can’t impose solutions unless the participants in these conflicts are willing to break out of old patterns of antagonism … We can’t want it more than they do.”205 The third sign came when the administration moved toward David Makovsky’s plan for dealing with the conflict by dealing with borders and security issues first, while leaving the more difficult issues of Jerusalem and refugees to later. Subsequently, Obama endorsed a permanent status peace agreement based on the 1967 borders, which annoyed the Israeli government, while also stating that “a lasting peace will involve two states for two peoples: and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people, each state enjoying self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace” – which annoyed the Palestinians, who oppose recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.206 Obama also came out against involving Hamas in the peace process until they recognized Israel’s right to exist, while firmly opposing the Palestinian attempt to get UN recognition of a Palestinian state on the 1967 border outside of the negotiating framework.207 These positions were closer to the approach of robust liberal internationalism, than that of the dovish Democrats.
Congress
Congressional Democrats have traditionally been very pro-Israel. From the 1970s until the end of the century, Democrats and liberals in Congress were marginally more supportive of Israel than Republicans and conservatives. However, by the 107th Congress (2001–2003), conservative and Republican support for Israel in the House outweighed that of liberals and Democrats.208 This reflected trends in public opinion and elite discourse among Democrats and liberals, as presented above.
During the Obama administration, Democrats in Congress were willing to back the administration in its demand for a settlement freeze from the Likud-led Israeli government in 2009. Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY), the pro-Israel chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee panel on the Middle East, equated “terrorism and the march of settlements” as part of a pattern of “shallow calculation and venal self-interest” through which “the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is finally rendered
impossible.” Another strong advocate of Israel, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL), declared: “The notion that Israel can continue to expand settlements, whether it be through natural growth or otherwise, without diminishing the capacity of a two-state solution is both unrealistic, and, I would respectfully suggest, hypocritical.”209
In addition, the small minority of congressmen who were not supportive of Israel came mainly from Democratic Party ranks. Thus, during Operation Cast Lead, the House of Representatives passed a Resolution siding with Israel against Hamas. The resolution received 390 yea votes, 5 nay votes, and 37 abstentions. Democrats cast 4 of the nay votes and 29 of the abstentions. In November 2009, Congress passed House Resolution 867 condemning the Goldstone Report; 344 congressmen voted for the resolution, 36 voted against it, and 52 abstained. Among those voting against, 33 were Democrats; 44 Democrats abstained.210
Nonetheless, after the Israeli government accepted the establishment of a Palestinian state and agreed to a settlement freeze, and the Palestinians proved extremely reluctant to enter direct negotiations with Israel, while the Arabs states refused to offer any confidence-building measures, Democrats in Congress began to take Israel’s side. Another factor here was concerns regarding the impending midterm elections. In this vein, the majority of Democrats, led by US House majority leader Steny Hoyer, put the onus on the Palestinians and the Arab side to make concessions, and they put the blame for the failure of the peace talks squarely on the Arab side rather than Israel.211 When differences arose between Israel and the administration over settlements in Jerusalem, leading Democrats backed Israel.212 Subsequently, bipartisan letters from both houses of Congress urged the administration to only express their disagreements with Israel in private, because progress toward peace required that there be no space between the U.S. and Israeli positions.213 Indeed, bipartisan support for Israel in Congress was so strong that dovish pro-Israel groups like J Street criticized such congressional declarations for being too one-sided.214
Congressional Democrats’ support for Israel was more conditional on the policies pursued by the parties to the conflict than their Republican counterparts’ approach. At the same time, congressional Democrats’ support for Israel was stronger and less conditional than both public opinion and elite liberal approaches. Part of the reason might be that those Democrats with the lowest levels of support for Israel, the religiously unaffiliated, are not represented in Congress; in 2011 not a single member of Congress declared themselves to be religiously unaffiliated.215 Another important reason for this gap is likely to be the influence of AIPAC. This is the reason why the dovish J Street lobby was established. Yet while J Street had some influence, it was dwarfed by that of AIPAC.
Nonetheless, there are signs that attitudes among liberals and Democrats may be shifting. One of these sign came during the 2012 election campaign, when the initial version of the Democratic Party platform did not refer to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital or to Israel as “America’s strongest ally in the region.” The party convention eventually amended the platform, but the change was not popular with the floor of the convention, with some doubt as to whether it really received the required majority.216
Democrats, Liberals, and Israel: Opinion Trends and their Implications
Hispanic Catholics and the Religiously Unaffiliated
In 2003, Hispanics surpassed African-Americans as the largest minority group in the United States. In 2010 they comprised about 15 percent of the total US population and this figure is projected to double by 2050.217 Hispanic Catholics, who make up more than two-thirds of all Hispanics in the US, were an especially strong source of support for the Democrats from 2000 to 2010.218 The secular and the religiously unaffiliated also constitute a growing segment of the American population that heavily identifies with the Democrats.219 Between 2000 and 2010 the percentage of Democrats who professed no religion rose from a quarter to more than a third, double the national average.220 Among all the major ethnoreligious groups in the U.S., sympathy for Israel was lowest among Catholic Hispanics and the religiously unaffiliated (see Table 3.6). On the other hand, sympathy for the Palestinians was also lowest among Catholic Hispanics. Moreover, sympathy for Israel has actually increased among the religiously unaffiliated while at least holding steady for Hispanic Catholics.221 Consequently, while the growth of the religiously unaffiliated and Hispanics might lower the level of pro-Israel support among Democrats, it is unlikely to reverse the pro-Israel orientation. A more significant challenge is posed by attitudes among young liberals.
Table 3.6. Catholic Hispanics and the Religiously Unaffiliated Sympathy for Israel over the Palestinians, 2006 (%)
* * *
IsraelPalestiniansPro-Israel Margin
All Americans 44 9 +36
Democrats 40 13 +27
Catholic Hispanics 24 4 +20
Religiously Unaffiliated 26 10 +16
* * *
Data from Pew Research Center222
The Generation Gap
Young Liberal Bloggers and Israel
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, young Americans were more likely than older people to identify with the Democrats and to have liberal attitudes.223 This generational gap was also apparent over the Arab-Israeli conflict.224 The gap was particularly pronounced on the question of whether helping to protect Israel should be a very important goal of American foreign policy. In 2001, about a third of Americans aged 18–50 agreed with this statement, compared to about 50 percent of those aged 50 and over.225
Among liberal commentators, a generational divide was also present. The leading robust liberal internationalists like Richard Cohen, Thomas Friedman, and Michael Walzer were born between 1935 and 1953; only Jeffrey Goldberg, born in 1965, was significantly younger. In contrast, leading liberal bloggers born between 1969 and 1984 – Josh Marshall, Peter Beinart,226 Matthew Yglesias, Spencer Ackerman, and Ezra Klein – were closer to the evenhanded approach of dovish liberalism. Most of these bloggers identified personally with Israel and liberal Zionism.227 But unlike robust liberal internationalists, their criticism of Israel lacked the counterbalancing effect of the former’s extensive criticism of Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian extremism. In fact, they tend to downplay the seriousness of threats to Israel’s physical security.228 They remained convinced that the Arab side was willing and able to deliver peace.229 Tellingly, for Marshall, the key negative turning point in the peace process was the assassination of Rabin in 1995 and his replacement by Netanyahu, and not Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton Parameters and the second intifada.230 In other words, for these bloggers the blame for the conflict and the onus in peacemaking lay on Israel’s shoulders.231 Spencer Ackerman went so far as to refer to the Gaza War as “disgusting,”232 while Ezra Klien referred to Israel's actions as “disproportionate”233 and “vengeance.”234 The bloggers also argued that America’s association with Israel was damaging American interests during the Gaza War by fomenting an increasing hatred of America.235 In addition, Yglesias argued that the U.S. should bring Hamas into the diplomatic process, without requiring the organization to first recognize Israel.236 Klein argued that the U.S. should pressure Israel to freeze settlements by withdrawing aid.237
University Students
American university students are more likely to be liberal and Democrats than the statistical average among Americans.238 Until the mid-1980s more educated Americans sympathized with Israel by more than average.239 However, in the twenty-first century, college students are less likely to sympathize with Israel than the statistical average.240 In a focus group study of top graduate schools for business, law, government and journalism conducted in 2005,241 most of the students had started from a pro-Israel position that has eroded toward neutrality or hostility, with this tendency strongest among more liberal students. In addition, a 2011 survey by The Israel Project (TIP) revealed that a quarter of American students thought Israel an apartheid state; a further 50 percent were unsure.242 But it is important to bear in m
ind that the 2005 focus group consisted of only 150 students, while wider surveys indicate that most students are not anti-Israel. Indeed, a plurality favors Israel over the Palestinians.243 Moreover, that same 2011 TIP survey indicated that among the minority of student who took sides, Israel supporters outnumbered supporters of the Palestinians by extremely large margins. For example, while 32 percent thought that Israelis share American values, only 1 percent thought the Palestinian Authority did so; 17 percent thought the Israelis are “morally right” compared to 4 percent for the Palestinians.244
The Significance of Generational Differences: From Kibbutz to Kibush [occupation]