As Jews Worldwide Become More Conservative, How Long Will U.S. Jews Buck the Trend?

A number of commentators have noted that Jews in Western countries are increasingly voting for conservative parties and candidates; American Jews, however, have maintained their overwhelming preference for liberals. Evelyn Gordon argues that this is not because American Jews are different from other Jews, but because America is different from other liberal democracies:

[N]on-Jewish Americans are overwhelmingly pro-Israel. That certainly isn’t the case in Europe. And as an annual BBC poll shows, it isn’t even true in Canada and Australia, whose current conservative governments are staunchly pro-Israel. Consequently, Democratic politicians [in the U.S.] are rarely as anti-Israel as their counterparts overseas, because being anti-Israel is still bad politics in America . . . Nor does the American left’s animus toward Israel spill over into blatant anti-Semitism as often as it does in, say, Europe. So, for now, liberal American Jews still feel as if they can support the left without having to repudiate their Zionism or their Judaism—something that’s increasingly no longer possible overseas.

But even in America, that may not be true for long. . . . Thus, if American Jewish liberals don’t want to go the way of their counterparts overseas, . . . they need to mount an urgent campaign to convince their own political camp that any good liberal should also be pro-Israel. That’s far from an impossible case to make, since it has the advantage of being true. . . . But conservatives can’t do the job for them.

Read more at Evelyn Gordon

More about: American politics, European Jewry, Israel & Zionism, Jewish conservatives, Jewish politics, US-Israel relations

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF