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A Matter Of Priorities

For the fact is that Dicker, like Alan Dershowitz, and like most American Jews, is more committed to the liberal Democratic political agenda than she is to Israel. Unlike evangelicals, these Jews didn’t see Israel’s security trumping everything else [bold mine-DL]. They can’t bring themselves to make common cause with conservative Zionist Christians because they […]

For the fact is that Dicker, like Alan Dershowitz, and like most American Jews, is more committed to the liberal Democratic political agenda than she is to Israel. Unlike evangelicals, these Jews didn’t see Israel’s security trumping everything else [bold mine-DL]. They can’t bring themselves to make common cause with conservative Zionist Christians because they hate the conservative agenda more than they love Israel. ~Abby Wise Schachter, The Weekly Standard

And this is a surprise because…why exactly?  Wouldn’t you expect most people in any group to be more concerned with the politics in their own country as opposed to the national security of a different country, even if these people had strong personal or emotional ties to that country?  Indeed, isn’t it really, really weird that there would be any non-Jewish Americans who make the security of Israel such a top priority?  Even when you can give the reasons why some evangelicals are so concerned about it, it still seems quite strange.  It’s one thing to be concerned about the security of Israel and to take a strong pro-Israel stand, but quite another to make it one of your very top priorities. 

Yglesias gives his take, which exposes very nicely the double game being played by neocon, “pro-Israel” outfits such as the Standard:

The other thing to say is that we once again see conservative Jews berating their much more numerous liberal co-religionists on the grounds that we are failing to manifest dual loyalties, but just try suggesting in print that “pro-Israel” groups are trying to foster a sense of dual loyalties and see how The Weekly Standard reacts to that (the Standard, it seems to me, is actually loyal only to the cause of war and bloodshed rather than any particular nation; though they clearly do prefer Americans or Israelis to be either killing or dying).

That last bit is absolutely right.  For most folks at the Standard, America and Israel seem to me to be just springboards and vehicles for their ideological project.  They would rather keep those vehicles around as long as they can, and so appear at first glance to be interested in protecting both against external threats (though they exaggerate those threats and have horrible answers for how to cope with those threats), but the real security interests of both nations are ultimately pretty much expendable in pursuit of regional or global hegemony respectively. 

Anyway, the question shouldn’t be why Jewish liberals aren’t embracing their domestic political opponents because of a single foreign policy issue, but rather why anyone in his right mind would think that this is the normal or rational thing to do.  Any one issue, no matter how important it may be, is not enough to create the basis for a lasting alliance among normal people.  Ideologues or fanatics for whom there is one and only one issue view things differently, but there are fortunately not as many of these rather abnormal people. 

This is, incidentally, also why every proposed grand alliance of left and right on the Iraq war falls apart almost as soon as it begins, because everyone involved (with a very few exceptions) doesn’t really believe that the war is the single, most important issue that makes everything else irrelevant.  TAC and Antiwar try heroically to give progressive opponents of interventionism their due, but the attention and respect are not typically widely reciprocated, since most antiwar progressives regard antiwar conservatives as being in some ways even worse than the neocons because of our other beliefs not related to the war.  For more than a few antiwar conservatives, the feeling is usually mutual.  This is regrettable from the perspective of trying to upend interventionist foreign policy, but it is also eminently normal.

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