The biggest media supporters of Israel are such right wing sources as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Worldnet Daily (run by an Arab!) The right wing invariably finds Israel to be morally right and Arafat morally wrong. OTOH the left in the US tend to be more in the middle. Apparently some European leftists are strongly pro-Arab, based on this story.
I don’t see anything particularly right wing or left wing about either Israel or the Palestinians (although Israel does have a socialistic government.) So, why should support be polarized this way?
My answer would be that Israel deserves support, and the Right Wing has made a more accurate assessment. What’s your answer?
Extra credit: Why do an overwhelming percentage of American Jews still support the Democrats? Will this change due to their lesser support for Israel? (I’d say not.)
I think you need to make a distinction between the ‘peace activists’ and the Democrats in the government. I don’t see a lot of support for the Palestinians amongst the Democrats right now. In fact, some of the most pro-Israel people in the government right now are in the ranks of Democrats. Diane Feinstein and Russ Feingold, both on the ‘liberal’ end of the Democratic party, are about to submit a resolution to congress that calls for even harsher treatment of Arafat. Joe Lieberman has been a critic of the Bush administration’s waffling on Israel.
In fact, I think you can make the case that it’s been the Bush administration that has been giving Arafat the most legitimacy. After all, the U.S. just signed the U.N. resolution that Israel’s military withdraw from Ramallah, and they also heavily criticised the last military incursion by Israel. I think this is was the Colin Powell/State department viewpoint which temporarily won the day, and not the opinion of Bush himself.
It’s interesting that the most pro-Israeli statements made so far by the administration came from Bush himself yesterday, and they were a surprise to the rest of the administration. The press had already been told that Bush would not be available to speak to them, when suddenly he appeared and led them to that trailer where he proceeded to attack Arafat.
The American and European left? I’d say it’s probably because the left tends to support anti-colonialization and national independence movements, and so there’s a sympathy with the Palestinians, who are trying to gain a national state, and fighting against Israel, which is a western, colonial power. There’s also the fact that a lot of the nonreligious Palestinian groups have defined themselves as socialist or communist. Fatah, for example, is a socialist movement, and there are some Palestinian terrorist groups that are Communist. Another reason is that, when the Soviet Union still existed, a number of European and American groups had an informal relationship with it, or at least a similarity of interest, and the Soviet Union tended to be pro-Arab, and by extension, pro-Palestinian.
I don’t think that there is any “leftist” versus “rightist” positions when it comes to Israel & Palestine. This is a conflict that defies any attempt to pigeonhole any particular position into a slot in the political continuum.
Case in point: President Clinton’s adminstration was a steadfast supporter of Israel, while President Richard Nixon’s noxious opinion of Jews is now widely known.
For one who likes to view every situation in a “left vs. right” light, december, it must be frustrating to have to deal with these gray areas…
You’re basing your description of "left wing " because that label was applied by the IsraelNationalNews.com? I would expect an Israeli source would describe anything less conservative than Ariel Sharon as “left wing.”
…why does december keep posting these troll messages to Great debates? :rolleyes:
Agreed with David Simmons; the fact that Sharon’s “nuke the Palestinians until they glow in the dark” policies are being supported by the Israeli populace reflects poorly on them, not on the folks who oppose it. I’m almost expecting Sharon to announce his “final solution” to “the Palestinian problem” any day now…
Captain Amazing, I think that much of your post was informative, but I gotta question you on this point:
“[W]hen the Soviet Union still existed, a number of European and American groups had an informal relationship with it, or at least a similarity of interest, and the Soviet Union tended to be pro-Arab, and by extension, pro-Palestinian.”
Now I don’t claim to have full knowledge of the European left; but I do think I know the American left pretty well. And I have to wonder what “groups” had an “informal relationship” with the Soviet Union? And what fraction of the American left you imagine these pro-Soviet Union groups to have represented? Or what you mean by “a similarity of interest”?
I mean, I’ve met many leftists who were eager to correct misunderstandings about the SU, and many were eager to distinguish between socialism and Marxist thought and the Soviet system. But I’ve never met anyone who described him/herself as an admirer, supporter, or advocate of the Soviet Union. Have you?
I have to imagine such people–at least after the Stalinist era–as having been an extremely tiny group of people, even within the left. I’m talking eeenie, weenie. And the idea that there is still a significant number of people in the US whose sympathy for the Palestinians derives from some former pro-Soviet allegiance… I dunno. It just strikes me as implausible.
FTR, I don’t characterize myself as either pro-Arab or pro-Israel. I am sympathetic with the plight of the Palestinian people and I believe their demands for statehood are legitimate. I don’t think Sharon’s policies make any sense, and I cannot support them. But that doesn’t mean that I am anti-Israel. There has been a growing peace movement within Israel (I’m not sure exactly how it has responded to the recent escalation of events.) I would describe myself as supporting it.
rjung, I just read yours. As I said, above, I have heard much of late about a peace movement within Israel. It’s possible we’re not hearing very much about it.
For politicians, there may not be much of a difference. For the media, the difference is huge.
E.g., on Fox News Sunday, Conservative Brit Hume lost his cool and kept saying that the US should just name Yasser Arafat as a terrorist; that the US and Israel should no more negotiate with Arafat than with Usama bin Laden. The panel’s liberals, Cici Connolly and Juan Williams, were moderate in their criticism of Arafat and more focused on negotiating with him.
The NY Times editorial page urges Israel to negotiate during terrorism and to do a land for peace deal. OTOH the WS Journal Opinion Journal mocks Arafat daily as an enemy of peace who shouldn’t have won a Nobel Peace Prize.
I could give lots more examples. There’s a sharp difference between the right wing and left wing media.
As I see it, Clinton was no supporter of Israel. He forced them into deal that was not in their interest. He ignored the hatred being taught by the Palestinian Authority. What did he do for them?
Nor was Bush 41 a supporter of Israel. The jury is still out on Bush 43. He’s made ambiguous comments on the subject. Incidentally, it’s believed that Rice, his right-wing foreign policy advisor, is more pro-Israel than Powell, his centrist foreign policy expert.
The last President who strongly supported Israel was Richard Nixon. Nixon took the lead in making various powerful weapons available to them. In fact, my father moved from the Democratic Party to the Republicans because of Nixon’s strog support for Israel.
I cannot explain why someone who clearly used anti-Semitism expressions in private was nonetheless a particularly big supporter of Israel, but that’s the way it was.
Well, I included that as an afterthought…really, the only leftist group that had an informal relation with the Soviet Union was the Communist Party USA, which was Stalinist for quite a while. Other leftist groups tended to be anti-Soviet.
Also, please note, when I, in my post, talked about the left, I didn’t mean the Democratic party. I was referring to various groups on the left of the Democrats, ranging from the Socialist Party, to the various communist and syndicalist parties. (all of which have had a greater influence in Europe than the US. The US tends to be hostile to the left.)
I thought the mainstream media was left wing. Or isn’t Fox News mainstream? And why should the US government pay any more attention to Brit Hume than they should to any of the other “talking heads” on the tube?
You argue from some many different directions that I get dizzy trying to follow.
It seems to me that if you want to support Israel, why then you should support Israel. Why do you seem to think you have to gin up some reported “left wingers” in Europe to make that point?
** Where do you live, David? Are you not aware that Fox News claims to be “fair and balanced” and that they have a number of conservative pundits, one of whom is Hume?
That’s a separate question. The point of the OP was to discuss why right wingers tend to support Israel more than left-wingers, not whether supporting Israel is the right policy.
One group on the American “right” that supports Israel is part of the “religious right”…people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell, and people who feel the way they do. One of the big reasons they support Israel is because of their understanding of Christian apocylptic prophecy, which they see as requiring a state of Israel for Jesus to come to earth again.
I’m not sure that I agree with the premise of the OP. But if there is any truth to it, could it be because the left tends to sympathize with what they see as the underdog?
Where in the hell is this liberal media I keep hearing about? It’s certainly not in NYC. Even the Black hosts here are getting more conservative. And don’t talk about 99.5 FM Pacifica, I think they are getting conservative too, looking at the bottom line and all that.
::sigh:: Traditionally, due to domestic political concerns, the Democratic Party has been the stronger supporter of Israel. What are those domestic political concerns? Simple - Jews in America, at least since WWII, strongly tend to vote Democrat.
Bush’s strong support for Sharon is actually an anomaly amongst Republican administrations. His father forced Israel to go to Madrid by threatening to cut-off Israel’s export credits, a type of hard-nose action no Democratic administration has ever done.