People often ask me what it would take for Jews to vote Republican. I usually respond with a bit of gallows humor. “Maybe if President Obama nuked Tel Aviv, he would only get 65 percent of the Jewish vote,” I joke. Luckily, it didn’t take such an apocalyptic event for at least some Jews to send a message to Obama.
On Tuesday, New York City’s heavily Jewish and reliably Democratic 9th congressional district went for Republican Bob Turner in the special election to replace disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner. Turner won by eight points in a district where Democrats have a 3-to-1 voting edge and Obama secured 55 percent of the vote in 2008. Silent Cal was in the White House the last time a Republican carried the district.
As with any election, there was no doubt many factors contributing to this result, such as the weak economy. But a survey by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling taken days before the final votes were cast suggested that Obama’s belligerent stance toward America’s traditional ally of Israel played an important role.
The PPP poll found that a 37 percent plurality of voters described Israel as “very important” in deciding their votes. Among those voters, Turner was leading 71 percent to 22 percent, and he was winning the Jewish vote by a 56 percent to 39 percent margin.
“This seems to be rooted in deep unhappiness with Obama on this issue,” the pollsters concluded. According to the survey, Obama’s approval rating on Israel was at 30 percent in the district overall and just 22 percent among Jewish voters.
Many liberals are baffled as to how anybody could view Obama’s policies as anything but pro-Israel, and think the complaints against him are being ginned up by opportunistic Republicans, or based on a simple misunderstanding of his comments about Israel returning to its indefensible pre-1967 borders. But the problem has been much deeper than one line in a speech.
From the get-go, Obama adopted a hostile posture toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was elected just weeks after Obama took the oath of office. At every chance, Obama sought to portray him as intransigent when it came to forging a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Obama decided that Jews building homes outside of Jerusalem was the biggest threat to Middle East peace – bigger than a nuclear Iran and certainly more significant than Palestinian terrorism – and demanded that Jews freeze construction there.
When Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced plans to form a unity government with Hamas earlier this year, Obama would not cut off aid. This even though Hamas has been designated a terrorist group by the State Department and Abbas’s outreach to a group dedicated to Israel’s destruction was a clear signal he had no interest in peace.
Next week, Abbas will further confirm this when he asks the United Nations General Assembly to allow Palestinians to unilaterally declare statehood without any peace deal with Israel.
“Obama says he’s against it, but he’s also against real consequences for the Palestinians if they go through with it,” said Noah Pollak, executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel, which took out ads in the NY-9 race highlighting Obama’s record. “I suspect that the coming UN debacle is going to deepen Obama’s problems with pro-Israel voters.”
No doubt, many Jewish voters in the 9th district, which spans across parts of Brooklyn and Queens, are Orthodox, and thus relatively politically conservative compared with the broader, more secular, Jewish population.
But that hasn’t stopped Democrats from consistently winning the district in the past. The intensity of the anger toward Obama’s Israel policies demonstrated in Tuesday’s results should be a wake up call for the White House.
Philip Klein is senior editorial writer for The Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
