Members of the Democratic party have been sliding away from Israel for years, but the latest findings by pollster Frank Luntz indicate that bipartisan support for Israel is in grave jeopardy.
According to Luntz’s poll, 47% of Democrats believe Israel is a racist country and only 48% believe that Israel wants peace. Only 51% of Democrats said the US should support Israel (compared to 90% of Republicans), and only 46% described themselves as “pro-Israel.”
The poll, which surveyed 802 “opinion elites” in both political parties, also found that only 18% of Democrats were more likely to vote for a pro-Israel political candidate while 32% were less likely to vote for the candidate.
“Israel has won the hearts and minds of Republicans in America, while at the same time it is losing the Democrats,” Luntz told The Times of Israel this week. “I didn’t expect it to become this blatant and this deep.”
Luntz offered a range of messages to win over Democrats, including promoting the equal rights of women in Israel in contrast to its neighbors, and the ongoing humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.
[sc:graybox ]Join the Fighting BDS Facebook page and follow @FightingBDS on Twitter and stand up against the delegitimization of Israel.
Looking at the same study, Shmuel Rosner, writing for the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, suggested that it’s not Israel that is losing the Democrats, but the Democrats who are losing Israel. He noted that policy changes will not, necessarily, turn the tide because much of the sentiment against Israel is based on little substance.
Most of the 47% of elite American Democrats who say that Israel is “racist” have not truly investigated Israel’s policies and cannot really back their claim with facts and figures (they cannot, among other things, because Israel is not racist – surely no more than most other countries). So why are they saying Israel is racist? Mostly because of a certain zeitgeist among their peer group that makes it fashionable to see Israel as this or that.
And what is this “certain zeitgeist”? Rosner doesn’t give a definitive explanation. But an obvious candidate is the ongoing assault on Israel’s legitimacy from the BDS movement. While Luntz’s poll found that only a small percentage of the opinion elite is aware of the BDS movement, the odds are much higher that most of them have been exposed to the attacks on Israel without full awareness of the movement behind it.
It’s the drip-drip effect that seeps in from press coverage of every BDS attack on a celebrity who comes to Israel, or the effort to ban Israeli athletes from sports competitions, Israeli academics from major conferences, or Israeli products from the shelves of Co-ops or university dining halls.
It seeps in from articles that focus on targets of the boycotts, with references to the BDS movement in the background. And it seeps in with every news story about students at a college singling out Israel for criticism. It’s in the repeated references to “apartheid Israel” in comments sections of any mainstream article that’s deemed too positive towards Israel.
It seeps in from the barrage of information that has one conclusion – that Israel does not deserve a place among the nations.
“Israel is already having trouble with BDS, and Americans don’t even know what it means. Can you imagine how bad it will get?” Luntz told The Times of Israel. It’s an insidious campaign that targets Israel’s legitimacy, and increasingly, it has the ear of the members of the Democratic party.
Featured image: CC BY Alex via flickr with additions by HonestReporting
