Life & Culture

The Jewish Vote, Reappraised

Comments (2)
  1. Great article! This question will be brought up again at J Street U at UCLA’s screening of “Between Two Worlds” on November 9th.

    Also, I do not view AIPAC and J Street as divided as you make them out to be. Over the last 40 years AIPAC has done (and is doing) very important work on behalf of the American-Israeli relationship and, even though I spend most of my energy supporting J Street, I wouldn’t discount AIPAC’s importance for a second. I view the two organizations as two different branches of the same pro-Israel tree.

  2. Tomer Elias says:

    “With the Obama Administration’s less than cozy relationship with Israel (compared to the Bush Administration’s de facto acceptance of all policy output from Israel), many are beginning to suggest fragmentation of the Jewish vote in 2012.”

    I find this very amusing as an Israeli. Bush was never as good as people make him seem towards Israeland there was never such a de facto acceptence of all policy output from Israel. If we remember it was the Bush administration that first introduced the “road map” and forced Israel to accept Hamas as one of the parties running for Palestinian elections in 2006. Not only that, it was also the Bush administration that forged the UN resolution 1701 after the Second Lebanon war in 2006. in which Israel was forced to rely on UN “peace keepers” to safeguard its northern border and Hezbollah was given free rang to do what ever they please. All these went against Israeli national interest and Israel was not given a “de facto acceptance” on these policy matters.

    I also don’t see the Jewish political devide between Jstreet, which is far left, and AIPAC that is dead center on all that is Israel. AIPAC works with both the Republican and Democratic Parties while Jstreet keeps its influence safe in the hands of the Democrats. Maybe the Jewish Republican movement should your pull from the right? Although I don’t believe they have anywhere near the influence or are as extreme as Jstreet is from the opposite end.

    Over all I think you can create a great debate over this issue and it will be very interesting to see what happens in 2012.