Three Democratic presidents—Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson—laid the foundations of the U.S.-Israel alliance; even as late as the Clinton years, the Democratic party seemed the natural address for many supporters of Israel. Now the alliance appears to be broken, or at least in serious jeopardy. In explaining how so much has changed, Jonathan Tobin looks back to two major turning points:
The first serious indication of trouble between Israel and the Democrats arose during the Jimmy Carter administration (1977–1981). . . . Carter’s four years in office featured near-constant strife with Israel and the Likud government led by Menachem Begin, who took office in 1977. . . . Though Begin’s supposed intransigence was blamed for the trouble—an intransigence belied by the [Camp David] accords that were Carter’s only foreign-policy success—the real issue was Carter’s sub-rosa hostility toward Israel, a factor that would not be fully understood until [after] he left office. . . .
[A few years] later came what appears in retrospect to have been a watershed moment for Israel and American liberals. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon was designed to remove the PLO state-within-a-state on Israel’s northern border—but the effort led to a sea change in the American media’s coverage of Israel. It was no longer portrayed as a lone democratic nation victimized by a plethora of hostile states but as an invading aggressor. This change had an enormous impact on the way American liberals, including many liberal Jews, viewed Israel.
Many Americans had fallen in love with a pioneer Israel governed by the socialist Labor party and represented by the romance of the agricultural and social collective known as the kibbutz. For liberal Democrats, the full-throated nationalism of Begin’s Likud party proved disquieting, as Likud’s voting base was made up not of Jews of European origin like them but of Sephardi Jews to whom they felt little connection. . . . Begin was demonized in the press and disdained by Jewish liberals following the lead of disgusted Ashkenazi Israelis astonished to find themselves out of power for the first time.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/democratic-divorce-israel/