There are reasons why there are so few Jewish Republicans

Although McCain is civilized, educated and a real friend of Israel, his camp is ignorant and biased.

By MARTY PERETZ
us special 2 224 (photo credit: )
us special 2 224
(photo credit: )
A JPost.com exclusive blog Let's face it: Peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not at the top of the agenda of either of the two nominees for president of the United States. A columnist in what is the other Israeli newspaper for Americans wrote recently that, according to advisers to each of the candidates, a solution to the century-old dispute between Jews and Arabs is far down any of their litanies of urgent matters. For John McCain there are 30 global crises ahead of yours...and mine. For Barack Obama there are 42. Not to worry. This is good. As many folk, including me (right here in The Jerusalem Post) have pointed out, the only high American official who is still motivated to cajole Israel and plead with disingenuous Palestinians is Condoleeza Rice. She is desperate. One reason for this is that she is without achievements: the rest of her foreign policy is a mess. The relationship with Russia, for example: the only substantial cooperation between the two countries right now is in the matter of Arab piracy of a ship filled with tanks and other weapons that the buccaneers intended to sell to Somalian terrorists. Then there is North Korea, which would rather flay its people than feed them and which insists on providing nuclear arms capacity to states that want to agitate their neighbors. And, yes, Venezuela, for which she and everybody else in the Bush administration have had zero time, despite the ambitions of Hugo Chavez to foment troubles in the southern salient of the western hemisphere, Monroe Doctrine territory, as it happens. I don't mean to leave out Iran, which has scarcely been impressed by the sanctions regime. As for the United Nations, well, the less said the better. I've just watched the circus in New York where the president of the General Assembly made abundantly clear his view of both Israel and America, which still pays a giant part of the organization's bills. The State Department might have kept Mohammad Ahmadinejad out of American territory just by putting him on a watch list as it did Kurt Waldheim and as Irwin Cotler, Alan Dershowitz and I have proposed, many times. I'd like to know what John McCain thinks about the Rice-Scowcroft foreign policy on the Middle East, which is what Bush foreign policy has become. In any case, I don't think that he is going to win. Jews should not be dissenters when America is about to start a new chapter in the long and painful book of group relations. The new chapter will be both liberating and illuminating, and Jews played a significant role in the prologue and in every installment along the way. Sociologically, Jews are not in the camp of ignorance or of bias. The sad fact is that although McCain is a civilized and educated man and a real friend of Israel, his camp is the camp of ignorance and bias. It is against science; it is against tolerance; it is against egalitarian law; it is against the tradition of the prophets; it is against religious and intellectual liberty; it is hypocritical. There are reasons why there are so few Jewish Republicans. Die-hard Republicans (which no longer include true free marketeers) are mostly not of our rational kin and their thinking is not in our spiritual ken. These are people, after all, who don't believe in evolution or in genetics. For Jews, however, evolution and genetics tell at least half the story of our survival. The Democratic Party is not perfect, far from it. It also has its fantasists, people who believe that the United Nations is the path to Eden. People who recognize no enemies of America except our best friends. The truth is that the Democratic Party was once held captive by these people: George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Jesse Jackson being their tribunes. Bill Clinton and Al Gore put an end to this captivity. And Barack Obama and Joseph Biden have made this end permanent. Remember that the racial question was one of the main factors that animated the reign of unreason among the Democrats. There are still racial questions in America. But they can now be faced truthfully and openly, without intimidation or fear by anyone. There are reasons why the Republican Party is so lily-white. These reasons are not pleasant ones. Of course, American Jews vote as individuals. But they also vote both as Americans and as Jews, as American Catholics vote and as Cuban Americans vote and as every citizen with a double-barreled identity votes. This is only natural. The American electorate is so pro-Israel that it would not let any administration betray the people's devotion to and identification with the Jewish state. The Republicans are still tied to their failures of the last eight years that are based on the assumption that the Palestinians actually want a livable peace with Israel. But do they? Commenting on Secretary Rice's single-minded pursuit of discarded formulas, Dennis Ross has observed that the only individuals he knows who are in synch with her are Olmert and Abbas... to whom I add a few columnists from Ha'aretz. Have any of these individuals an answer to the following question: what happens when rockets are aimed at Jerusalem from Ramallah? So what one has to trust in the candidate of one's choice is not whether he or she has fidelity to peace-making. The real test is whether one's candidate has fidelity to Israel if peace-making turns out to fail as it has now for decades. And not because Israel has been chintzy in its negotiating but because the Palestinians won't settle for anything less than everything. Senator Biden said in his debate with Governor Palin last week that "no one in the United States Senate has been a better friend to Israel than" himself. I'm a careful observer of these matters, and this is the truth. He went on: "I would never, ever have joined this ticket were I not absolutely sure Barack Obama shared my passion." That goes for me, too. And I'm a stickler on this, even a bit fanatical. The writer is Editor-In-Chief of The New Republic