April 15, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Interceept" - A
new poll from Bloomberg Politics contains a finding that, if you really
think about it, is quite remarkable:
Almost
half of all Americans want to support Israel even if its interests
diverge from the interests of their own country. Only a minority of
Americans (47 percent) say that their country should pursue their own
interests over supporting Israel’s when the two choices collide. It’s the
ultimate violation of
George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address warning that “nothing is more
essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular
nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.
… The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a
habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”
It is inconceivable that a substantial portion of
Americans would want to support any other foreign country even where doing
so was contrary to U.S. interests. Only Israel commands anything near
that level of devoted, self-sacrificing fervor on the part of Americans. So
it’s certainly worth asking what accounts for this bizarre aspect of
American public opinion.
The answer should make everyone quite uncomfortable: it’s
religious fanaticism. The U.S. media loves to mock adversary nations,
especially Muslim ones, for being driven by religious extremism, but that is
undeniably a major factor, arguably the most significant one, in explaining
fervent support for Israel among the American populace. In reporting its
poll findings, Bloomberg observed:
Religion appears to play an important role in shaping
the numbers. Born-again Christians are more likely than overall poll
respondents, 58 percent to 35 percent, to back Israel regardless of U.S.
interests. Americans with no religious affiliation were the least likely
to feel this way, at 26 percent.
The primary reason evangelical Christians in the U.S. are
so devoted to Israel is simple: their radical religious dogma teaches them
that God demands this. In 2004, Pat Robertson
delivered a
speech entitled “Why Evangelical Christians Support Israel” and said:
“evangelical Christians support Israel because we believe that the words of
Moses and the ancient prophets of Israel were inspired by God,” and “we
believe that the emergence of a Jewish state in the land promised by God to
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was ordained by God.” He added that “God’s chosen
people” — Jews — have an obligation to God to fight against “Muslim vandals”
so that Israel remains united in their hands:
If God’s chosen people turn over to Allah control of
their most sacred sites-if they surrender to Muslim vandals the tombs of
Rachel, of Joseph, of the Patriarchs, of the ancient prophets-if they
believe their claim to the Holy Land comes only from Lord Balfour of
England and the ever fickle United Nations rather than the promises of
Almighty God-then in that event, Islam will have won the battle.
Throughout the Muslim world the message will go forth-“Allah is greater
than Jehovah.” The promises of Jehovah to the Jews are meaningless.
That is the ugly religious extremism about Israel heard
over and over in America’s largest evangelical churches. The wildly popular
“dispensationalist” sect is driven
by the dogmatic belief that a unified Israel in the hands of the Jews is
a prerequisite for Armageddon or the Rapture and the return of Jesus: a
belief shared not by thousands but
millions of Americans. As the evangelical Robert Nicholson put it in a
nuanced and thoughtful 2013 essay examining doctrinal differences among
this group: “Evangelicals believe that God chose the biblical people of
Israel as His vehicle for world redemption, an earthly agent through whom He
would accomplish his grand plan for history.” The popular and influential
pastor John Hagee
put it simply: “We support Israel because all other nations were created
by an act of men, but Israel was created by an act of God!”
It goes without saying that religious belief also plays a
role in the support for Israel among American Jews. Indeed, neocons
frequently link American Jewishness to support for Israel by arguing that
no good American Jew should be a Democrat
on the ground of the party’s
supposed insufficient support for Israel (even as they
accuse Israel critics of “anti-Semitism” for suggesting the exact same
linkage as the one they themselves exploit). As a 2013 Pew poll found:
Most American Jews feel at least some emotional
attachment to Israel, and many have visited the Jewish state.
Four-in-ten believe Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, a
belief that is held by roughly eight-in-ten Orthodox Jews.
Jewish religious extremism is directly linked to support
for Israel, as The Forward
noted: “Among Jews, AIPAC’s support also seems to be strongest among
Orthodox Jews.” The New York Times
recently reported the link between Jewish activism and Israel
support: “Republicans … are more fervently pro-Israel than ever” partially
due to “a surge in donations” from what J Street calls “a small group of
very wealthy Jewish-Americans” such as Sheldon Adelson.
But Jews compose only 1.4 percent of the American population,
which still serves as a limit on that factor. (By contrast, 82 percent of
Americans identify as
Christian and “Thirty-seven percent of all Christians describe
themselves as born-again or evangelical”). Moreover, American Jews have long
been divided on the importance of Israel to their political perspective, and
there is
erosion of this support particularly among younger American Jews.
Indeed, evangelical Christians are far more steadfast in their support for
Israel than American Jews, as Bloomberg found: “For many Democrats, even
Jewish ones, the issue doesn’t have the same purchase.” The religious-driven
support of evangelicals — and the
cynical alliance between
the two religious factions — is crucial for sustaining this support.
It’s important not to oversimplify the role religious
fanaticism plays. There are, to be sure, other factors accounting for this
bizarre American support for Israel even when it’s
at the expense of their own country. Sustained antipathy toward Muslims
in the post-9/11 era has been effectively exploited to generate this
support. Americans have been taught for decades to view Israel as
a “democracy” — an
increasingly unsustainable proposition — and thus a natural political
ally. Americans tend not to question or even debate policies that command
bipartisan support, and unstinting devotion to Israel has been the
ultimate
bipartisan viewpoint for years. And, as David Mizner recently
argued in Jacobin, Israel has long been a useful “proxy state”
for the U.S. government’s desire to dominate the Middle East.
But there is no denying that religious extremism plays a
very significant role in American attitudes toward Israel. Given its
importance, this is a remarkably under-discussed phenomenon, mostly because
American media figures are very comfortable maligning other countries as
being driven by religious fanaticism while ignoring how much their own
country is. To underscore how rarely this issue is discussed, consider that
NPR’s political reporter Domenico Montanaro
seemed
shocked that support for Israel provoked wild crowd support during Ted
Cruz’s presidential announcement speech to Liberty University:
As Dave Weigel asked after seeing that tweet, how can
someone who covers politics for a living find this surprising? It’s because
this phenomenon is so rarely discussed. It’s fun, easy and self-satisfying
to think of the countries we dislike as being plagued and shaped in their
foreign affairs by religious fanaticism. It’s much less fun and comforting
to think of ourselves that way. But there’s no question that religious
extremism is
prevalent among Americans, and the pervasive and bizarrely absolute
support for Israel is driven in significant part by extremist religious
dogma about God’s will.
Photo: Sebastian Scheiner/AP
